This month eight of us looked at a raft of cool finds brought to the SIG by Steve. There were web sites, an updated solitaire collection, a program to find and eliminate adware/spyware, a couple of backup utilities, a units converter, a screen utility, a text-to-speech utility, a novelty noise maker, an image printer, a shortcut manager, a clock setting tool, a tray utility, a screen saver, some tools to manage installed applications and discover DLL dependencies and a simple calendar. And, if that weren't enough, we also tracked down some download utilities by request. 

Movieweb.com
Looking for movie reviews, trailers, etc.? Stop by Movieweb.com. There are even some fun movie trivia games. The site is extra special 'cause the sone one of our regular SIG members, Herb, is a key contributor to the site. 

Aquatica Waterworlds Virtual Fish Tank 
Remember when the aquarium screen saver (along with flying toasters :-) from After Dark was all the rage? Well, fear not! Just sign up at Aquatica Waterworlds, and you can get a new saver with tons of beautiful scenes with new ones added regularly. 

SpamRadio.com
Spam. Don't you hate it? Well, SpamRadio is an enterprising site that's turned the most outrageous spam into entertainment (well, sort of ;-). Click on the listen now link and hear a continuous stream of spam converted to voice. But you never know what you get that way, so the site has collected some doozies into an archive. We briefly listened to one that told us how we could become ordained ministers and start marrying everyone in sight. We all started furiously taking notes on this one (just kidding). But it did get a few laughs.

123FREESolitaire
Moving on to something more serious (on a relative scale, that is), we next looked at the latest free solitaire collection from Tree Card Games. These free games feature great graphics, a selection of interesting solitaires, good help and a nice "autoplay" feature to facilitate play. If you are really into solitaire, you can order an immense collection of games with an enhanced player (e.g., with a "take back last move" button). 

Ad-aware
Anymore, surfing on the Web means advertisements. Lots of advertisements. Some of these are relatively innocuous, but some are not. The less nice ones leave stuff on your system and try to spy on your surfing habits or discover things about you to make you the target for even more ads or unsolicited email (spam). Ad-aware is a freeware tool for you to fight back. It works much like an anti-virus utility, scanning your system (registry and files) and identifying adware/spyware you may have. You then have the option of deleting these (with a backup first, just in case) or marking some items to be skipped in the future. (Not all adware is bad. Some "free" programs are supported by unobtrusive ads. One way to find out is to examine the ad supported program or the adware at a site like Spychecker.com) 

The topic addressed here also brought up the inevitable discussion about cookies and other internet tracking stuff. Steve pointed us to a couple of other useful places on this. One was Panicware Online Services. This site has an on-line application that will clean the cache, cookies, history lists, recently viewed documents and temporary internet files. There is also a discussion on personal and internet privacy. The other site was Cookie Jar at jasons-toolbox.com. Cookie Jar is a cookie manager that lets you sort cookies into allowed (e.g., cookies originating from the site visited) and banned (e.g., cookies from third party sites) groups.

Cobain Backup
Cobain Backup is a freeware utility that runs in the background (as a tray application) to backup folders or files. The backups can, optionally, be ZIP compressed and can be located on another folder/drive on the same computer or on another computer on a network. Backup sets can be created and saved for reuse. Backups can be timed to occur at various intervals (e.g., every few minutes, hours, daily, weekly, monthly). The program runs in the background so you can be working on other applications at the same time. Cobain backup can do incremental backups (i.e., only copy files that have changed), make copies that overwrite older ones or make copies that do not overwrite the older files. One use we discussed for this last feature was to keep a set of "undo" files. For example, imagine you are working in a word processor which is set to auto-save every few minutes. At the same time you have Cobain Backup set to backup the file you are working on at regular, short intervals and not overwrite previous backup copies. Not only that, you have exited and restarted the word processing software a bunch of times (you no longer have an "undo" history in the word processor). After a period you discover that a whole bunch of edits you have made are not really what you wanted and you would like to revert back to an earlier point in time. No sweat. Just go to your backup files and find the one Cobain Backup has made that still has all your original prose before the edits. Very handy! 

Converter
Converter is a little freeware application just converts one set of units to another. Select the unit type (e.g., weight, velocity, volume, etc.), then the unit from and to, and then enter the from value and the conversion instantly appears. A couple of clicks and this result is in the clipboard for pasting into another program. Don't see your special conversions? Just add them yourself.  

Floppy to CD Archiver
Got stuff on floppy sets (i.e., Disk 1, Disk 2, etc.) and want something to facilitate getting the floppy content onto a CD while still maintaining the organization as individual floppies? The Floppy to CD Archiver is freeware you want to check out. Tell it how may floppies in the set, how to label the folders that the content of each floppy is going to (i.e., "Disk1" or "Disk 1" or "Disk_1"), an overall name for the folder that each of these floppy folders will be put in and fire away. You can optionally add a text note to explain the set further. OK, I know you wondering, "What floppy sets?" How about those old programs that came on floppies that you might someday, for some obscure reason, need? Like to get at an old file format. Or to dig through an old operating system (can we say DOS or Win3x?). It would be aggravating, to say the least, to discover that a floppy in the set was bad or lost. 'Nuff said.

One item on using this software. The install program will 1st update a set of system .DLLs. Just to be safe you probably want to back those up. The list is:

asycfilt.dll
comcat.dll
mscomct2.ocx
msvbvm60.dll
msvcrt.dll
oleaut32.dll
olepro32.dll
scrrun.dll
vb6stkit.dll

Also, if this update is done, the installation program does not automatically complete (at least it didn't when we tried it). You have to run it again.

FreeShade
FreeShade is a simple utility to let you "roll up" a window into a single bar a la a Mac just by double clicking the title bar. (Normally double clicking the title bar will toggle maximizing and restoring the window size.) This is handy if you want to temporarily get a window out of the way to get at, e.g., the desktop or another window underneath but don't really want to toggle it back and forth to the task bar. The utility also has some other functions: maximize the window in the vertical or horizontal direction only, "dock" the window to a corner of the screen, and set the window to always be on top. There are a few quirks - occasionally a window no longer rolls up or does not respond to mouse clicks. This can usually be fixed by switching to another window and then back. If all else fails, the program can be easily stopped and restarted.

IESpeaker
Sometimes it is better to hear than to read. Take for example some readme files. These can be cures for insomnia! But text-to-speech, you can hear the information and, surprisingly, this can make the information more compelling to follow. IESpeaker is a special text-to-speech application that works specifically with Internet Explorer via the Microsoft text-to-speech engine. After installation, a new feature is added to IE such that, after selecting some text on a page, the right click menu now has a "Speak" selection. Click Speak and a dialog box pops up that reads the selection. A highlighted bar moves across the words as they are spoken. To demo this we pulled up a special "PC Poetry" page Steve put together and had IESpeaker read it back to us. Although the speech is still that mechanical, computer sound, the meter is well done and the result is quite "listen-able".

Speaking of installations, this application comes in an installation format that uses the new MS Installer. You can identify these new setup/installation formats by the .MSI extension. To install these you may have to update you system with the MS Installer (Microsoft Installer for Windows 98/ME/XP or Microsoft Installer for Windows 2000/NT). 

Installed Program Printer
Ever wanted an inventory of the programs installed on your computer? Ever thought about what would happen if you had to re-format your drive - would you like some way to make sure you don't forget to reinstall something? If yes, then take a look at Installed Program Printer. This utility "reads" all the installed programs, lets you select from the displayed set (there is a "Select All" button) and then print the list. A nice touch in the printed list is a set of brackets after each program name for use as a checklist. (P.s. on Installed Program Printer's install program - don't bother trying to tell it to install in another location. It goes to C:\Program Files no matter what. Just accept the defaults or be prepared to manually move the executable files yourself.)

Iomega Photo Printer
Iomega Photo Printer is a nice, simple freeware image viewer/printer. The special feature of this one is the image print feature makes it a snap to fit a bunch of images (either the same one repeated or different ones on the same page) onto one page of paper - very handy with expensive photo paper. In use, one just navigates to the folder with the images and they are rendered as thumbnails in frames looking like photo slides. On  the viewer tab, one just double clicks to enlarge and display without any other screen clutter. Navigation forward and backwards as well as a slide show function is provided. A simple rotate button makes it a snap to reorient images. Also, since this is from Iomega, there is an Eject button on the View tab to eject ZIP or Click disks. 

At the print tab, the images can be simply dragged over to the paper area on the screen and positioned as desired, including overlapping the images. In this mode, the image are limited to a few stock sizes (i.e., resizing to custom dimensions is not supported). The rotate function works here, too (indeed, it is needed to fit the 8x10 size onto the page for most images). Finally there is a thumbnail tab that has three size selections and an option for fast printing or slower, high quality thumbnails. Although simple to make a contact sheet, the smaller sizes do not allow enough space to fully print long image filenames. Also, while the thumbnail printout lists the folder name for the images, it does not list the full path. Overall, however, this is a good program to add to your image utility collection. 

Nullsoft Beep
This is a total novelty program. When Nullsoft Beep is running, your speakers will output Hollywood style computer noises as you type and scroll around. If (when?) you get tired of it, just close the icon in the tray. April 1st, anyone?

Shortcut Manager
If you have been to one of these SIG meetings, you have first hand knowledge of a computer desktop run amok with shortcuts. Shortcut Manager is a tray application that lets you put your shortcuts onto a small menu off to the side (optionally it can "autohide" to further reduce clutter). Shortcuts can be added via the dialog box provided or, more simply, just by dragging and dropping the shortcut onto the menu. There are no icons on this menu - just the shortcut names. To activate the shortcut, just point at the name in the menu and double click. (p.s., yes, the icon for this program looks like the "Mac" man.)

Web Time
Web Time is the 1st of a series of Software by Design applications that we finished up the meeting with. Double clicking the clock icon for this program brings up a dialog with an Internet Time server selected. Prefer to use a different time server? Just go to the corresponding tab and select a different one. By default, the freshly installed program points to the one in Boulder, CO. To reset your computer's clock, just click the button. The steps will be initiated to connect to the internet, connet to the time server and reset the clock. The nice feature of this program is that it does it's duty at your request, not, like many other similar utilities, at system startup, insisting on making a connection to the internet. (You can, at your option, set the program to start automatically when the system starts, however, you still still have to push the button to update the clock.) Freeware.

Calendar 2000
Calendar 2000 reproduces a "checkbook" style calendar. Just a list of dates by month. A set of common US Holidays are marked on the calendar. You can also add monthly reoccurring events - on the same day number each month or on the same day of the week for either the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th or 5th week of the month. As is similar to many of the Software by Design programs, options are available to have the program place into the Startup folder and for a desktop icon to be created. Freeware.

Phantom Desktop Screen Saver
This freeware saver from Software by Design simply displays the desktop wallpaper and slowly "dissolves" it into a black background (or the dissolve can be turned off and the wallpaper statically displayed). Optionally, a graphic other than the wallpaper can be displayed. Source code to the Phantom Desktop SS is also available to those who would like to know how to roll their own.

DLL Show
DLL show is a shareware ($25) application that lists all the processes running on the system (the top part of the display) and, for each that is highlighted, all the .DLL, .OCX, etc dependencies the program has (the bottom part of the display). It can be quite revealing to discover just how many processes are actually running (many more, typically, then are reported in the Windows task manager). In addition to listing the running processes and dependency programs, each one listed includes the version number, company information, a description and the path to the file. Alternatively, an item can be double clicked to reveal the same information for the specific file in a dialog box.

AppPaths
AppPaths is a Control Panel applet that shows all the programs listed on the Add/Remove Control Panel applet. The program name and path are listed. Separate tabs separate out items that load at system startup. A limitation of this program is that it doesn't find programs that don't show up on the Add/Remove page. An alternative might be the Belarc Advisor - we took a peek at it at the meeting, but will say more next time. 

TrayTool
Our last Software by Design is TrayTool. With this application you can place up to 24 program icons in the tray. Once there, the application represented by the icon can be started by just a single click on the icon. In many ways, this is similar to the now common, Quick Launch Toolbar and, perhaps, has been made obsolete by the toolbar. None-the-less, TrayTool is an alternative to other toolbars and, by locating everything to the system tray, could serve as an organizing tool to reduce screen clutter.

One of the purposes of the SIG is to help people find solutions to problems or better ways to get tasks done. One such issue raised at this meeting was a problem with an individual's favorite download utility, Download Accelerator (it stopped working suddenly). We got a new copy of the free Download Accelerator version (ad supported but checked at Spychecker.com as OK) and a copy of Download Express as an alternative. Since we had a high speed connection, we also got a copy of the free version of ZoneAlarm as well. 

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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May 26, 2002
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