Archive for the ‘downloads’ Category

Forty-Three of The Best Free Windows Enhancements That You Should Know About

Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009

This post on Freewaregenius lists a number of useful Windows utilities that will make your Windows desktop even better. Check out the rest of their site for other useful freeware programs.

When I first thought of this post, I more or less knew what programs I wanted to list here. The common theme that brought these together was that they were all really cool Windows “enhancements”: i.e. apps that tweak or change the way we work with files, folders, applications, or the system environment itself (or, apps that brings functionality to the Windows environment that could or should have been a built-in option in Windows ;) ).

Downloads: DejaVu fonts

Thursday, November 8th, 2007

The DejaVu fonts are based on the Bitstream Vera fonts, and are a set of nicely designed fonts that are released and being improved upon under an open source license. Of particular interest for programmers is the monospaced font, which makes code editor listings much more readable, especially when compared to the ancient Courier New. Among other advantages, it has the important characteristic that lowercase ‘L’, capital ‘I’, and numeral ‘1′ characters are visually distinct, as well as capital ‘O’ versus numeral ‘0′. Bitstream Vera was one of the first things I installed when setting up a new development environment, but from now on I will be using DejaVu.

The DejaVu fonts are a font family based on the Vera Fonts release 1.10. Its purpose is to provide a wider range of characters (see Current status page for more information) while maintaining the original look and feel through the process of collaborative development (see Authors). The family is available as TrueType fonts and also as third-party packages.

Downloads: Secure Login (Firefox Extension)

Monday, July 30th, 2007

This Firefox extension makes the saved passwords feature of Firefox safer by forcing you to click on the Secure Login button in order to fill in your login name and password on forms. This helps prevent cross-site scripting attacks on malicious sites that try to steal your passwords.

Secure Login provides you with a number of Security enhancements and helps protecting you from phishing:

Disabling the prefilling of login forms prevents malicious JavaScript code to automatically steal your login data.
This is due to the fact that no login data is inserted in form fields before the user clicks on the login button or logs in using the keyboard shortcut.
To make sure you login to the right website, the second level domain of the login url is compared to the second level domain of the current page.
If they do not match a dialog prompt is displayed before login.

Secure Login provides you with an optional setting to protect you from all JavaScript code during login.
This can prevent cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks without having to deactivate JavaScript completely.
If you enable this option, your login data will never be inserted in any form fields nor will the login form be submitted.
Instead your credentials will be sent to the login page using internal Firefox methods.
Not all login forms will work this way, e.g. not those using JavaScript routines. Therefore, you can add such websites to an exception list.

Downloads: Qtpfsgui (Linux, Windows, Mac OS X)

Saturday, June 2nd, 2007

If you are interested in HDR imaging, give this open source tool a try. It helps you create and tone map HDR images from bracketed exposures of a scene.

  • Link
  • There is also a Qtpfsgui Flickr group where you can find example images and the tone mapping parameters that were used.

Related:

Downloads: PhotoWipe (Windows)

Wednesday, May 2nd, 2007

This free program makes it easy to remove objects from photos.

PhotoWipe is a revolutionary image processing tool that magically removes unwanted objects from your photos. Just paint over them in black, and click go! Uncovers hidden details in your photos. Sit back and watch as cage bars disappear from the zoo, and your old girlfriend or boyfriend fades away. It removes wrinkles, or it can remove entire facial features.

Downloads: Thunderbird 2

Thursday, April 19th, 2007

Thunderbird 2.0.0.0 was released with an improved UI and some new features like Saved Searches and Vista support:

Downloads: Roadkil’s Unstoppable Copier (Windows, Linux)

Sunday, April 15th, 2007

Use this useful utility to recover files from damaged disks.

Recovers files from disks with physical damage. Allows you to copy files from disks with problems such as bad sectors, scratches or that just give errors when reading data. The program will attempt to recover every readable piece of a file and put the pieces together. Using this method most types of files can be made useable even if some parts were not recoverable in the end.

Freewaregenius

Sunday, March 25th, 2007

This is an invaluable site that reviews numerous freeware apps.

My mission: To replace as many retail/shareware software as I can with first rate FREEWARE alternatives, such that one day every installed program that I use will be FREE.

But this site will not list every single free program on the planet. Sometimes less is more!

I assume that for every category there are one or two programs that anybody would want to use. This site will present you with these handful of options, filtered and picked out.

If you have better things to do than scour the web for cracks, serials, and hacked copies of the software you use, then this site is for you, because the free software that is presented here is in most cases BETTER than anything you could pay for.

Downloads: TrueCrypt 4.3 (Windows, Linux)

Tuesday, March 20th, 2007

The latest update to the TrueCrypt encryption utility is now available.

We are pleased to announce that TrueCrypt 4.3 has been released. Among the new features is full compatibility with 32-bit and 64-bit Windows Vista, support for devices and file systems that use a sector size other than 512 bytes (such as new hard drives, USB flash drives, DVD-RAM, MP3 players, etc.), auto-dismount when a host device (e.g., a USB flash drive) is inadvertently removed, and many more. In addition to new features, there are many significant improvements. Some portions of the TrueCrypt device driver have been completely redesigned and several bugs have been fixed. For a comprehensive list of changes, please see http://www.truecrypt.org/docs/?s=version-history

Downloads: Sysinternals Suite (Windows)

Wednesday, February 14th, 2007

You can now download all of the Sysinternals utilities as a single package.

The Sysinternals Troubleshooting Utilities have been rolled up into a single Suite of tools. This file contains the individual troubleshooting tools and help files. It does not contain non-troubleshooting tools like the BSOD Screen Saver or NotMyFault.

Downloads: RocketDock (Windows)

Wednesday, February 7th, 2007

This is a pretty slick Windows version of the Mac OS X application dock. Freeware.

RocketDock

Downloads: Window Clippings (Windows)

Friday, February 2nd, 2007

This looks like an impressive screenshot utility. It appears to support some advanced features if used in Vista.

Downloads: DVD Flick (Windows)

Tuesday, January 30th, 2007

This little open source application for Windows allows you to author a video DVD from nearly any video file. See the Lifehacker link below for a step-by-step guide on using the application.

Supported file container formats are, amongst others, AVI, MPG, MOV, WMV, ASF, FLV, Matroska and MP4. Supported codecs are amongst others, MPEG-1\2\4 (XVid, DivX, etc.), Windows Media Audio\Video. MP3, OGG Vorbis, H264, and On2 VP5\6. For a full list of supported container, audio and video formats, see http://ffmpeg.mplayerhq.hu/ffmpeg-doc.html#SEC20

Downloads: VMware Converter (Windows)

Tuesday, January 30th, 2007

Use VMware Converter to create a VMware image from your physical machine. They have a free version (VMware Converter Starter) as well as a licensed version.

Use the intuitive wizard-driven interface of VMware Converter to convert your physical machines to virtual machines. VMware Converter quickly converts Microsoft Windows based physical machines and third party image formats to VMware virtual machines. It also converts virtual machines between VMware platforms. Automate and simplify physical to virtual machine conversions as well as conversions between virtual machine formats with VMware Converter.

Downloads: PuTTY 0.59 (Windows, Unix)

Tuesday, January 30th, 2007

Grab the latest version of the PuTTY SSH client and associated utilities.

Downloads: Paint.NET v3.0 (Windows)

Saturday, January 27th, 2007

The latest update of this free paint program was just released yesterday. Check it out.

Paint.NET is free image editing and photo manipulation software designed to be used on computers that run Windows. It supports layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools.

It started development as an undergraduate college senior design project mentored by Microsoft, and is currently being maintained by some of the alumni that originally worked on it. Originally intended as a free replacement for the MS Paint software that comes with Windows, it has grown into a powerful yet simple tool for photo and image editing.

Downloads: Microsoft Photo Info (Windows)

Thursday, January 25th, 2007

Microsoft has released a small Windows Explorer add-in that allows you to view and edit the IPTC/EXIF metadata of your photos.

Note: you need to pass a Genuine Windows Validation check to access the download.

Microsoft Photo Info

Downloads: PC Repair System (Windows)

Tuesday, January 16th, 2007

Daily Cup of Tech has put together a small set of utilities that might be useful for repairing and maintaining PCs. You just throw them onto a 32MB or larger USB key and you can carry them with you wherever you go.

PortableApps Suite 1.0

Tuesday, November 21st, 2006

The PortableApps Suite has just reached 1.0. This is a useful collection of open source programs for Windows that you can run directly off of a USB flash drive.

PortableApps

PortableApps Suiteâ„¢ is a collection of portable apps including a web browser, email client, office suite, calendar/scheduler, instant messaging client, antivirus, sudoku game, backup utility and integrated menu, all preconfigured to work portably. Just drop it on your portable device and you’re ready to go.

Open Source Applications for Windows blog

Thursday, November 16th, 2006

Here’s a great site that highlights some really useful open source applications for windows with short, concise write ups.