Fresh Chat

I do love using internet forums. The amount of things I have learned while browsing them is amazing, and at the same time, the amount of useless things I have learned is embarrassing - thankfully a recent post at a popular forum that I frequent filled me with glee. Cheers Futureshock!

Normally I wouldn’t use such a word, but I feel that I have to. One of the regular posters popped up with some great pieces of free software that is available for people to use. I decided to grab some of it and try it on my machine and now I have become a freeware addict!

I’ll post some of the great pieces of freeware and cheapware here for you to check out. I should also mention that some are for PCs, some for Macs, and some for most operating systems:

http://www.piclens.com

It’s a really very impressive browser plugin (Firefox, Safari and IE only. No Opera yet) that’ll take something like a flickr account, or Google Images page and convert it instantly in to a lovely, 3D space. Do one search and get thousands of images in return.

Go on. Install it. You know you want to.

http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/volumouse.html

Volumouse lets you change the volume of your PC with your mouse wheel. I don’t know what I’d do without it because I’m far too lazy to reach for the volume knob on my amp and sometimes you just need things to be changed instantly, y’know? (I can’t stand the tiny volume button on XP. Too fiddly.) Having it set up to change volumes when the mouse hovers over the taskbar is pretty cool. If you ask me.

http://www.codesector.com/teracopy.php

Teracopy replaces the Windows Transfer system. Basically, it’ll allow you to copy files without having to wait around for other copying to be done. Oh, and it’ll allow you to retry and edit lists of stuff that’s getting transfered.

That’s probably more complicated than it needs to be. Install it and forget about it. It’s good.

http://www.codesector.com/directfolders.php

From the same guys that made Teracopy is Direct Folders. It’ll allow you to double click your mouse and up pops a menu of folder destinations you can go straight to. Marvellous!

http://tokyodownstairs.blogspot.com/2007/11/winflip.html

WinFlip is a 3D task-switcher for XP that just works. Set it up, click on a part of the screen and instantly scroll through your open apps.

It’s tiny, too.

http://www.launchy.net - launch whatever you want without having to leave the keyboard. Once it’s learnt which programs you open most often, nothing is more than a few keystrokes away.

Autostitch, as mentioned in the Creative Design folder. Takes a large pile of photos and sticks them together into a single large image. Great for horizontal panos, and assuming the subject’s not too close, you can take giant pictures as though you’ve got an incredibly wide-angle lens on a 40Mpixel camera

http://www.salling.com/Clicker/mac/

Salling clicker is epic goodness. It fully control iTunes including browsing the library, vlc, the mouse, presentation etc from your phone. Also when set up incoming or outgoing phone calls, it automatically pause iTunes.