Totem Destroyer is a fun little Flash-based physics game that is one part Indiana Jones, and one part Jenga.
The game play is simple; click on blocks to destroy them, while ensuring that the golden idol never touches the ground. There are three types of blocks: brown, green, and black. The brown ones are regular blocks and can be destroyed. The green ones are both bouncier than the brown ones, and have less friction, and they too can be destroyed. The black ones cannot be destroyed.
Each level starts with the idol balanced precariously on a stack of blocks, and your goal is to destroy the prescribed number of blocks without breaking the idol. There are 25 levels of mostly increasing difficulty, so this time waster should last you through your coffee break and part of your lunch break.
Sleipnir is a web browser that's popular in Japan and pretty much unheard of in the rest of the world. The Windows-only browser lets users choose between the rendering engines used by market leaders Internet Explorer and Firefox. But Sleipnir is more than just a pretty front end for either browser. It's a standalone tool that provides users with a huge number of customization options.
Fenrir, the company behind the free browser, has been making an English language version for a while now, but Computer World reports that the company is stepping up its efforts to promote the browser outside of Japan.
Here are a few of the things that make Sleipnir worth checking out:
If you install the optional Gecko plugin, you can switch between the Firefox and Internet Explorer rendering engines with the click of a button. You can do something similar with the IETab add-on for Firefox, but Sleipnir includes this functionality out of the box.
When you select text, a box shows up on screen letting you search for that text on the web or translate the text from English to Japanese and vice versa. You can even plot a highlighted address on a map.
Widgets are cool, especially when they do something useful - and even cooler when they look quasi-military.
Xirrus Wifi Monitor is available as a Yahoo Widget (for Mac, too) and a Vista Sidebar Gadget. It sits at the side of your screen scanning at your specified interval and updating its tiny radar screen with new hits. In our testing, it did a very good job at plotting the physical location of nearby APs. To our dismay the widget doesn't actually animate sweeps - too bad, because that would be pretty sweet.
Don't think it's just eye-candy. Wifi Monitor also provides you a ton of statistcal data about your access point's capabilities, your wireless connection, even a glossary of wireless terms. The details screen also allows you to disable your wireless adapter and to connect/disconnect (forwards you to your OS's wireless connection manager).
Well worth the download - if not for functionality, at least for its good looks!
Home Inventory is a free program for Windows or Mac that lets you create a home inventory complete with product photo and receipt scan. A home inventory is an important protective measure for any home owner, renter, or insurance-policy holder as it can be invaluable in times of disaster to help prove to a claims adjuster that you really did have a 50" wall-mounted plasma TV.
The program is easy to use: create rooms to organize your stuff and then add items to each room. For items, you can add information like purchase price/location, serial number, make, and model. You should also add a picture of the item in your house (not just from the manufacturer website), and a scanned receipt proving you paid for the item.
You can print your entire inventory room by room, export to .csv, or save to the Vault24 service (a secure, offiste backup service offered by the makers of Home Inventory). If, for instance, a fire takes your home (and you've been good and backed up your Home Inventory files offsite), you can make life easy for yourself and the insurance people by providing them a complete, organized inventory of all of your significant belongings.
Adobe just added new video content to its AIR-based Media Player, but it all pretty much sucks in one form or another. The Adobe Media Player is a slick media browser that can play and subscribe to videos from the web, and it also provides somewhat high-resolution content from Adobe's media partners such as MTVN and Comedy Central.
Despite the fact that the player is very visually appealing and easy to navigate, it's just not that useful. It's possible to use any regular, free browser such as Firefox to watch online video content, allowing web-travelers to avoid the installation of an extra app. As a result, the main reason for installing the app (unless you really, really like the subscription feature) is to watch the 25,000+ videos provided by Adobe.
And that's exactly what's wrong here. Adobe's video library is still weak, and most good of the good TV shows aren't full episodes but rather short clips. Furthermore, the full videos Adobe is adding aren't current TV hits like Lost or Battlestar Galactica. Instead, Adobe partnered with CBS and Sony to add tons of clips and a few movies/episodes from old stuff like Men in Black, Jerry Maguire, The Love Boat, Beverly Hilly 90210, Family Ties, and even The Price is Right. They might as well call the app something to the tune of Adobe Senior TV On Demand.
Sure, Adobe has the money to keep it up and running, but why bother if the company isn't bringing its best to the table? Why not partner with Hulu and create an official, fully functional Hulu AIR app instead?
Orca Browser is a web browser based on Firefox 3 which offers a bunch of features that you'd only get in Firefox by adding plugins and tweaking your browser settings. Orca is made by the same folks who develop the Avant Browser, which is based on Internet Explorer.
So what does Orca offer that you won't find in the standard version of Firefox 3? First up, it's fast. Like ridiculously fast. Like, if you thought Firefox 3 rendered web pages more quickly than Firefox 2, you an't seen nothing yet fast. If that's not enough for you, there's also a service that lets you save your passwords, bookmarks, RSS feeds and other configuration settings online. That way you can sync your settings between Orca browsers installed on multiple machines.
Orca is also extremely customizable. You can adjust the toolbars and other elements of the browser with just a few clicks. And Orca comes with about 20 skins preloaded, making it easy to change the color scheme. The only major problems we see is that Orca des not support Firefox 3 add-ons, and that the browser is Windows only.
SMP Seesaw is a small, simple application that gives you full control over your dual-core processor Windows system. Select a running process, click the move button, and you can quickly divide your active tasks between your cores any way you see fit. Sure, Windows is supposed to do this manually, but some of us would rather make it happen ourselves, thanks.
A pro version (still free) is available and offers support for up to 32 cores. If you're only running a dual-core, don't bother with it. You can't select multiple tasks and move them all at once as in the basic version. If you do have a plethora of cores, though, get it - you can move a task to a specific core or as many cores as you care to check off.
One of our beefs with Windows is that there are some pretty obvious customization options missing. Little things, but things we'd use if they were there. Fortunately, NuonSoft's Shell Enhancer packs a bunch of these features into a single 2.5MB installer.
What can it do? For starters, it allows you to "roll-up" windows (display only the title bar), make any window transparent, minimize applications to the system tray, lock them in position, and even force them remain on top.
It doesn't stop there, however. Also included is a wicked hotkey manager; we particularly like the prepacked "Google selected words." Highlight some text in any window, press ctrl + alt +g, and Internet Explorer will open with your results (you can easily rework it to use Firefox, of course). There's also a thumbnail-enhanced task switcher and a taskbar button mover (it's not click and drag, but it works).
Who doesn't want a little more functionality with a dash of eye candy for their Windows shell?
Want to watch your DVD collection on your iPod, iPhone, PSP, Smartphone, PDA, or Zune? DVD Catalyst is a simple Windows application that can rip a 2 hour movie from your DVD and apply video compression so that the file fits on your portable device's storage card and still looks halfway decent on your mobile screen.
DVD Catalyst offers one-click DVD ripping and encoding. Just launch the program, select your portable device, slide a DVD into your disc drive, and click the little green button. The program will choose the best resolution, bit rate, and other settings for you.
Up until recently, only a commercial version of DVD Catalyst was available. But now there's a free version with a limited feature set. If you want advanced features like the ability to set 2-pass conversions, split videos into multiple parts, or adjust the volume and framerates, you might want to shell out $15 to $20 for a full version. But if you're looking for a quick and easy way to cram a few dozen DVD movies on your iPod, DVD Catalyst Free might be all you need.
Knowing what's going on inside your OS is critical to keeping it running smoothly. Sure, task manager and msconfig are built-in to Windows, but they're pretty minimalistic. For something with a little more punch, give Winpatrol a shot - we first looked at it in 2005, and it's bigger and better than ever.
Winpatrol offers a software "Swiss-army knife" of features for protecting and tuning your Windows system. Scotty (the app's mascot) keeps a watchful eye on process, services, startup programs, IE helpers, lmhosts, and a slew of others. It'll even lock your file associations and alert you to attempted changes to your hosts file. If you're interested in paying for the plus version, you'll get more detailed information on processes and tasks via a connection to an online database.
You can also use Winpatrol to help speed your Windows boot time a la msconfig - but not just by enabling and removing unwated startups. You can move and startup item to a delayed group, which allows apps that you want to give priority a little more elbow room when you boot your rig.
Anyone who's looking for tighter control over Windows performance or who wants a little extra virus or malware protection would do well to download Winpatrol. Scotty's definitely a nice addition to any Windows (32 and 64-bit) perimeter defense.
If your computer is running slowly or a program has stopped responding, you can fire up the Windows Task Manager, identify the runaway process, and kill it. That works fine when the process is clearly labeled with a name like firefox.exe or digsby.exe. But what do you do with rapimgr.exe or hpqste08.exe?
ProcessQuicklink is a free add-on for Windows Task manage that helps you figure out which program a process is associated with. Because the last thing you want to do is kill the wrong process and reboot your PC when all you wanted to do was stop your media player from blasting music at you.
Once ProcessQuicklink is installed, you'll notice little information icons next to each process int he Task Manager. Click on any icon and you'll be taken to a Uniblue Process Library web site where you can read more about the process in question. It'd be nice if the information was instantly available without opening a new web page, but we'll take what we can get. ProcessQuicklink does save you the few seconds you'd otherwise spend typing a process name into Google.
Few things are as frustrating as having to repeat yourself over, and over, and over - like typing the same thing all the time. It's a pain in the butt. Fortunately, KA Type In is the hemorrhoid relief you've been looking for!
Here's what we like about it: 1) it's under 1MB to download 2) it has a portable mode 3) it's free 4) it's easy to use...and last, but certainly not least, 5) it's a massive time-and-effort saver.
Install it, move your mouse to the side of your screen, and the Type In windows slides in to view. Single click on one of your snippets and it's sent to the active application. But wait, it gets better! You can code fill-in fields and be prompted for values to input on-the-fly. This is an awesome way to make all your code snippets portable - take Type In with you on your flash drive and use them in any editor, even a browser-based HTML editor like FCK.
And get this: it does auto-completion with a single keystroke. Set up a snip, type the first few letters, and hit ctrl+; and Type In does the rest. Take that, inefficiency!
It's a 6MB process that uses almost no CPU, and it has so many possible applications that anyone can benefit from using it. Windows only, which makes us a little sad - this app is so sweet, everyone should be able to use it!
Windows Explorer keeps getting a tiny bit better with each new Windows release. But for some reason Microsoft refuses to offer one thing that many other file managers have had for years: a two-pane window. If you want to copy files from one folder to another, you need to open two separate Explorer windows.
There are a whole slew of free replacements for Windows Explorer. But one of the new kids on the freeware block is AccelMan, a utility that you used to have to pay for, but which was recently set free. Make sure to download and install the registry key from the download page or you'll just get a 30 day free trial.
In addition to a two-pane window, AccelMan has a ton of powerful features, including:
A built in media player with a playlist manager
A file viewer that will show images, PDF, Office, and other documents
The image viewer includes basic editing capabilities
Install TrueType Fonts without using the Control Panel
Compress and extract files in 15 formats including ZIP, RAR, TAR, ACE, and GZIP
Built-in file splitter
Hexadecimal editor
AccelMan is also extraordinarily customizable. There are about a dozen different schemes to choose from, or you can tweak the interface yourself and save a new scheme.
Flock has released a second public beta of Flock 2, a web browser based on Firefox 3. What sets Flock apart from Firefox is the integration with a ton of social networking services including Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, Digg, del.icio.us, YouTube, PhotoBucket, and more. There's a blog editor for updating your web site from the browser, and a media bar for viewing images and videos shared by your friends without navigating away from your current web page.
Flock has always been based on Firefox, but what sets Flock 2 beta apart from Flock 1.x is that the beta version is built on Firefox 3. That means you get a redesigned location bar, a new bookmark manager, and a new rendering engine that helps most web pages load faster.
The Flock team has addressed over 175 bugs that were found in the first beta of Flock 2. Aside from bug fixes, there aren't many new features in Flock 2 beta 2. But the browser is based on Firefox 3.01, which means it also includes some important security updates. So if you're using Flock 2 beta 1, we'd recommend upgrading.
Everybody knows the big names in the battle against malware - Adaware, Spybot, HijackThis. Today we're going indie, focusing on lesser known ways to avoid and remove all that bothersome software that your "friend" crapped up your rig with!
First things first. Try not to get infected in the first place.
It's common sense that if you can keep malware from getting its nasty little claws on your OS you won't have to bother with fancy removal tools anyway. But how to do it? Sure, real-time scanning will catch a lot of garbage, but why not give your PC a little extra help? Here are two really simple methods.
Outfox malicious sites using a hosts file. By making use of the lmhosts file win Windows, you can trick your computer into never seeing sites where a lot of malware originates. Our favorite is MVPS.org's; it's one of the most complete, frequently updated files you'll find on the net. All the nefarious domains are redirected to 127.0.0.1 - good ol' localhost - so any links to their evil apps just won't work because chances are pretty good that your PC isn't serving up WinSuperSpyRemover 2008. Gold.
Totem Destroyer is a fun little Flash-based physics game that is one part Indiana Jones, and one part Jenga. 
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