Nine people again. Great! This month we looked at some screen savers, display "themes", some sound effects, a music simulator, audio tools for the play-by-ear musician, a tool to help pack CD-Rs full, a digital timer, an engineering calculator, a utility to control file associations, another to create picture thumbnails, a simple HTML generator for displaying pictures and photos in a web browser, and a web site dedicated to research notebooks of the famous scientist, Linus Pauling.  But before we got started with the software, we had some hardware show 'n tell: Ben brought his brand new laptop, purchased at a bargain price. XP, DVD/CD-RW, buckets of RAM. Pretty amazing what you can get these days.  'Course, our little SIG is a good place to find stuff for that hardware to work with :-)

3D Flying Easter Eggs
This nice freeware screen saver from Acez Software features brightly colored and shaded eggs sliding across the screen at various "heights" such that some passed below others giving a 3D effect. As an interesting variation, the eggs could be set to fly over the currently displayed screen. 

Absolute Nordic Churches and Absolute Sunsets and Dusks 
Fookes Software offers a variety of screen savers built around high resolution photographs. These savers can be configured with a variety of transitions, caption locations, and how or if the mouse controls the saver. Most of the savers offered are shareware, but a few are freeware to showcase the group: the Nordic Churches, a collection of beautiful northern European architecture and a nice set of sunset pictures from the same area (some of these were "midnight" sunsets!). At the web site there is also a collection of photos to view for those who don't need another screen saver.

Freddy Screen Saver
Our last saver is one based on the cute Chevron Cars. In this edition, Freddy, the bike totting, mud splattered SUV races around the screen, hitting puddles and splashing mud over the screen. When the screen has been filled in, a big windshield wiper, "swoosh", wipes the screen clean. Cute. You can find the Freddy screen saver in the free section of the Chevron Cars web site.

Chevron Cars Theme and Desktop Themes
Windows "themes" were introduced with the Win95 Plus package. Installing the themes package placed an icon in the Control Panel that allowed one to switch between various display themes, customizing the screen look - fonts, window colors, wallpaper, cursors, system event sounds, etc. The Chevron Cars' folks came out with one of their own built around the cute cartoon autos seen on TV ads. Besides enjoying the theme, itself, we also looked at the shareware ($15) theme manager, Desktop Themes from Left Side Software, a substitute for the Microsoft theme applet. This theme manager was available at the Chevron Cars site. Desktop Themes has some nice features. On installation, the program takes a snapshot of the systems current settings. That way, you can try out a new theme, confident that you will be able to get back to your original settings without a major amount of effort. (You will have to manually undo the wallpaper setting, but that is minor.) New themes can be installed using Desktop Themes, giving you easy install/uninstall options for the theme. The utility also lets you directly edit a theme and, in effect, allows you to create your own, new theme. Finally, Desktop Themes includes support for changing the starting and ending Windows logos. For those interested in themes, the Desktop Themes readme has links to theme collections out on the web.

SimTune Demo
SimTunes was another intriguing find on the Chevron Cars web site. Sim Tunes is a music simulator from the king of PC simulation games, Maxis. The program is geared toward children, but anyone with an interest in music can learn some theory about scales and, in the process, have fun creating all sorts of sounds - some noise and even some music. The basic idea is to create paths of notes from a selected scale by laying down little squares for each note. There are also control squares (stops, turns, etc.) that can be inserted. Then four little instrument icons, each with its own unique sounds (although there are only 4 at a time, there are lots of choices for each icon's sound). Set the speed and directions and start them moving. As the icons pass over the note markers, the corresponding sounds emerge. To demo the program, we looked a some of the pre-define patters and then explored some of the pattern tools, like the music "spray can". The demo is time limited (it runs 10 minutes, then you have to restart the program), but is more than enough to get a flavor of the program and it's possibilities. 

Noisy Keyboard and 
Noisy Mouse
Continuing the sound theme, we tried out a couple of specialized "system event" sound programs. The first, Noisy Keyboard, adds back the old fashioned typewritter clickity-clack along with swooshes for the return key and other sounds for F-keys, arrow keys, etc. Noisy Mouse does similar tricks for the right and left mouse clicks. Each program runs as in the tray, can be turned on and off easily, and, as a side benefit, can connect you directly to the system event sounds instead of going through the Control Panel. We all agreed that the most likely use of these programs would be to annoy your neighbor or play a prank on them. Hmmm. April 1st was just around the corner when we tried these out... :-)  

Burn to the Brim
Next, we opted to take a break from the noise and look at something a little more practical. Burn to the Brim is freeware that calculates an optimum grouping of folders so as to fill a CD to the maximum amount possible, leaving the least wasted space. Calculations for 75 or 80 min CD-Rs are built right into the program. Other media (e.g., Zip disks) can, in principal, be computed for as well, but to do so requires arcane knowledge of the media's cluster size basically making it impractical to use for other than CDs. In use, we found the user interface is a bit confusing at first, but with a little experimentation program usage became clear enough. Basically one selects a folder and then the program scans the contents including all sub-folders and figures out how to optimally order these onto the CD-Rs. If the intent is to archive the folder onto CD and remove them from the hard drive, there is a "move" option that stages the files for such. Otherwise, the program just lists which folder goes where. An odd quirk of this listing process is the lack of a way to save the result, copy it to the clipboard or print it out - you have to manually copy the results yourself if you are going to use them. 

Amazing Slowdowner
Audio Companion
Musician's CD Player
These next set of shareware programs come via Roni Music and are specialized sound applications aimed at musicians who play by ear. Amazing Slowdowner works directly with a music CD or with a wave or MP3 file to either slow down the playback up to 400% or, alternatively, speed up the playback up to 2x - all without changing the pitch of the notes. Pitch control is, however, also independently available as well. Processing is done in real time, so the more cpu horsepower, the better. Musician's CD Player works similarly, but doesn't process in real time - a less powerful computer works OK. With Musician's CD Player, one selects a CD track, sets the process parameters (e.g., how much to slow the selection), process the track and saves the result. The saved file can be played on this player or other media players. Audio Companion is a combination CD ripper and sound recorder (e.g., from a microphone or stereo input into the sound card). With a MP3 encoder specified, it will also MP3 encode the incoming sound stream. Amazing Slowdowner is $40, Musician's CD Player is $35 and Audio Companion is $30.

AddaWav
AddaWav is a straight forward program to stitch wave files together.  The interface is simple and straight forward. The only possible gotcha is the that the first .wav file specified becomes the composite result. Thus you want to work with a copy of that first file if you don't want to loose the original. My interest in this program was in conjunction with the HTML photo slide show program I use. That program relies on the default browser music player to provide sound. The drawback to that approach is that only one file can be played. By stitching together a bunch of wave files, I can have some music variety and also something long enough to run the entire length of the photo show without repeating itself (and becoming boring to the viewer). AddWav is $25 shareware. (As an aside, Steve mentioned that he thought the current version of the Windows Sound Recorder applet could do the same task and, because systems typically have a lot of memory in them these days, is not so limited by memory constraints as in the past. And, on checking, I found Steve, as usual, to be right! There is a trick - to add subsequent files with Sound Recorder, choose "Mix File..." rather than "Insert File...". Not only can you string the wave files together, but Sound Recorder now gives you some other file format options including a moderate fidelity MP3 (56 kBits/s) and high quality Windows Media Audio (.wma) formats. Amazing what you learn at the Shareware SIG!)

Total Recorder
One of the web innovations is streaming music. Thus one can connect to a virtual radio anywhere in the world and listen in. One drawback of this, however, is that the stream is often not recordable. (If you try it with Windows Media Player, for example, you will usually just get a link to the Internet site rather than the sound file.) With Total Recorder that is a thing of the past. This program consists of a special driver that sits between the sound producing source (e.g., Media Player) and the sound card driver. This driver, via an interface program supplied, can record the stream to the hard drive (e.g., as a .wav file) as well as pass it along to the sound card for playback. It works well and, when not in use, is transparent to the normal sound card operations.  Total Recorder is $12 shareware. 

TC-2001 Digital Timer
Our next program was a freeware timer application from DazyWeb Laboratories. Nothing fancy to install - just one .exe file that you can copy anywhere and run just by double clicking it (but you do need Visual Basic runtime files on your system). The timer can be used as a count down device or a elapsed time stopwatch (12 hrs max in either mode). As a timer, it can be minimized to the tray and, when time's up, it will automatically pop up on the screen. The real bonus is that VB source code is available as well so you can see how it works or customize it as you wish.

MA-2002 Mathematical Assistant
Another interesting freeware application we looked at from DazyWeb Laboratories was the MA-2002 Mathematical Assistant. This scientific calculator does the usual range of math you would expect as well as some unit conversions. Also included are a hex calculator, a set of drill and resistor tables and, uniquely, a low and high pass RC filter calculator complete with a cutoff plot. Again, the complete VB source code is provided. 

Association Manager
Don't you just hate it when some program you load to try out takes over file associations without asking. This is a very common irritation particularly with media and image files. Association Manager gives you back control. With it you can record your file associations with one click of a button and, after some rouge program steals these, click another button and restore everything back the way it was. Since the associations are stored in a file, you can even create different sets of associations if desired. The program does not touch crucial associations such as .exe or .lnk. In use, the program displays the file extension, the association type, the internal Windows association name and the command that is executed when the associated file is double clicked, etc. Associations can be deleted and, by double clicking a displayed association, edited to, for example, change the program the particular file is associated with. Using Association Manager is much easier than trying to fix associations with Windows Explorer. Association Manager works by reading and writing to the Registry. For those who want to understand how this is done programmatically, there are VB source files available. Best of all, this little gem is freeware!

Easy Thumbnails
Returning to Fookes Software, we took a look at Easy Thumbnails, a really nice little freeware program to create image thumbnails. This program is a snap to use. First, navigate to where your images are, select the ones to create thumbnails for, specify the folder where to save the thumbnails, adjust the settings (size in pixels, algorithm to use to resize the picture, the filename prefix to add, if any, JPEG quality, brightness, contrast, sharpness and any rotation needed), preview the images and then click the "Make" (or "Make all") to create the thumbnails. As an added bonus, right click the selected image area and you will discover an option to create a simple HTML web page of the thumbnails. This page is based on a supplied template file and the built in help explains how the template works so you can customize it for your own needs. Easy Thumbnails can even be run from a command line to batch process images into thumbnails without going through the GUI. (Steve also mentioned another thumbnail making program as worthy of a look, Mihov Image Resizer. We took a quick look at the web site and perhaps next month we can explore this program as well as some of the other Mihov utilities listed.)

HTML Imager
Another Fookes Software freeware gem, HTML Imager creates a simple web page of all the images in a folder that you select. On the web page, each picture is shown with its file name in alphabetical order along with the file size. Background colors or a background pattern can be specified. Some uses for HTML Imager are to create photo albums or image catalogues. Although you don't need to understand HTML to use the program, it is helpful if you do if you want to customize the output - particularly changing or removing the embedded references to Fookes Software that the program creates by default. 

Linus Pauling Notebooks
This web site offers a unique and personal look at the research notebooks of one of the most famous scientists of the 20th century, Linus Pauling. Fascinating for the historian and the science buff.

Handwriting True Type Fonts
Steve took us to this site, http://pro.wanadoo.fr/dephitro/telechf1.htm, since one of our regulars, Herb, had been looking for some nice cursive fonts. The selection was very nice, indeed.

goBCL
Our last item was another stop on the web shared by Steve. goBCL is an on-line publishing site that features free conversion of Word documents to .PDF format. After creating an account with the service, you submit your Word document from your web browser (500 Mb file size limit) and the service emails back the .PDF file. Pretty slick.

Thanks to everyone who joined our meeting and to those who also chipped into the kitty for the goodies. Thanks, as always, to Bernie Stepan, too, for the meeting room, Internet connection and coffee supplies at RE/MAX Marina, Petaluma. Click on the RE/MAX balloon icon below for more information about the real estate services available from RE/MAX Marina in Petaluma!

RE/MAX Marina
775 Baywood Dr. #100
Petaluma, CA
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