tinyapps.org / blog / 2004

The Auditor security collection is a Knoppix distro focused on network security tools, covering: footprinting, scanning, analyzing, spoofing, wireless, bruteforcing, and cracking. Review and brief tutorial

Browser Security Test checks for a wide variety of browser vulnerabilities. (via SecuLog)

Jem Berkes (author of JBMail and a host of tiny freeware apps) has launched CleanSoftware.org, dedicated to clean (i.e., no adware or spyware) apps. User comments can be added, and there are already a goodly number thanks in part to yesterday's Slashdotting.

Less is More (More or Less): Uncommon Sense and the Design of Computers

JUMPERS by Tad Friend appeared in the October 13, 2003 issue of the New Yorker. Two quotes:

• Survivors often regret their decision in midair, if not before. Ken Baldwin and Kevin Hines both say they hurdled over the railing, afraid that if they stood on the chord they might lose their courage. Baldwin was twenty-eight and severely depressed on the August day in 1985 when he told his wife not to expect him home till late. "I wanted to disappear," he said. "So the Golden Gate was the spot. I'd heard that the water just sweeps you under." On the bridge, Baldwin counted to ten and stayed frozen. He counted to ten again, then vaulted over. "I still see my hands coming off the railing," he said. As he crossed the chord in flight, Baldwin recalls, "I instantly realized that everything in my life that I'd thought was unfixable was totally fixable - except for having just jumped."
• Motto had a patient who committed suicide from the Golden Gate in 1963, but the jump that affected him most occurred in the seventies. "I went to this guy's apartment afterward with the assistant medical examiner," he told me. "The guy was in his thirties, lived alone, pretty bare apartment. He'd written a note and left it on his bureau. It said, 'I'm going to walk to the bridge. If one person smiles at me on the way, I will not jump.'"

Anonymous man Gives $35K to homeless

Residents of Samaritan House didn't know what to expect when the bearded, middle-aged man parked his sport utility vehicle in front of the downtown homeless shelter Christmas Eve.

The man walked into the building, pulled out a thick roll of $100 bills and began passing them out to each of the approximately 300 residents.

When he was finished, he had given out $35,000.

"It was like seeing Santa Claus and God all at once," said William Chengelis, who has lived at the shelter since November.

Paul English offers some tips on improving the range of your 802.11 wireless network, including a step-by-step guide to using dual Linksys routers for wider coverage. See also Paul's thoughts on small code. (via David Weinberger)

Jonathan Aquino has kindly extracted and sorted the program ratings from FreewarePalm.com. (via Iain)

Mark T. A. W.'s favorite smallware (via Studying E-Business)

The Nikon Small World Gallery gives you a glimpse into a world that most have never seen. It is a window into a universe that can only be seen through the lens of a microscope.

The African Institute for Mathematical Sciences has loads of handy tutorials for the computer enthusiast.

Manually Configuring Windows Firewall in Windows XP Service Pack 2

Copying files between Windows, OS X, and Mac OS 9 onto a 1GB USB Flash Drive ($74 at NewEgg), a large (250MB) email mailbox got corrupted and all 3 operating systems refused to copy or move it. Thankfully, the file was salvaged, completely intact, by Roadkil's Unstoppable Copier [45k]. The mailbox was restored and Typo fixed the type/creator codes for OS 9.

Dropload - Drop your files off (up to 100MB each) and have them picked up by someone else at a later time. (via Mike Mills)

UPDATE: Peter Nicholls kindly suggested YouSendIt as an alternative; it requires no registration and file sizes up to 1GB are supported.

Iain points us to the following tiny freeware authors: AM Productions and Dr Hoiby.

David Zammit kindly wrote in to suggest searching Google for inurl:freeware.htm to uncover a goldmine of freeware. You may also want to try replacing freeware.htm with freeware.html, win32.htm, etc. More suggestions from Richard Allsebrook: freeware.php, freeware.jsp, freeware.asp, freeware.shtml, and freeware.pl .

Solstice Assembly has an excellent collection of free MP3s available at Amazon, including the must-hear Vegan Fight Song.

EssentialPIM [952k] + Personal Information Manager with Calendar, Contacts, Notes, and To Do. Import from Outlook, Outlook Express and CSV; export to HTML, RTF, CSV, and TXT.

The Portable Virtual Privacy Machine

• Carry your entire Internet communication system on a tiny USB drive
• No installation needed
• The VPM's network connection will auto configure and run seamlessly on any machine with a working internet connection.
• All Internet session data (cookies, history, downloads, etc.) are stored on the VPM, not the host computer
• This PR1 release runs on Windows and Linux - final release version will also run on OS X
• Includes Mozilla Firefox browser, Mozilla Thunderbird News/Email client (with Enigmail plugins for PGP email encryption), persistent Home directory, a demo version of the MetroPipe Tunneler.
• Created from 100% Open Source GPL code and binaries.

Slashdot article

Iain kindly sent in a link to this thread on alt.comp.freeware about stand-alone freeware apps.

Many thanks to Matt for sending in the following:

With the recent post to the TinyApps blog on tunneling via SSH, I thought you might be interested in knowing about a free and easy to configure SSH server for Windows:

http://tikkasow.notlong.com

It's much easier to install and configure than a full installation of Cygwin. I've been using it in conjunction with Ultr@VNC for about six months now and have been very happy with it.

Also, the following page is a bit out of date, but has a lot of links to various free and payware ssh/scp/sftp clients and servers:

http://freessh.org/

- Matt Vance
http://www.minezone.org/

• Tunneling Tight-VNC over ssh using PuTTY
• Making VNC more secure using SSH
• Encrypted VNC on Windows
• HOW-TO: VNC secure tunneling using Windows PuttY ssh client (PDF)
• VNC Enterprise Edition (by the original inventors of VNC) includes 128-bit encryption and costs $50 for a single license.

• Confidentiality and MetaData in Word Documents
• Protecting Personal Data in Your Microsoft Word Documents
• Strip Personal Information from Word Documents
• How to Minimize Metadata in Microsoft Word Documents
• Office 2003/XP Add-in: Remove Hidden Data

UPDATE: Demetris kindly sent in a link to Doc Scrubber 1.1 [820k], which can display and remove metadata from Microsoft Word documents. Free for personal and educational use.

Windows 2000 services that can be disabled - "One of the most effective ways to secure a server is to turn off unnecessary services. This reference sheet lists the Windows 2000 services you can disable and describes the ramifications of turning off each one." (requires free registration)

UPDATE: Thanks to Harry for sending in a direct download link.

From the mail bin: HotKicks - Hotkey app under 100k which "requires no installation and does not tamper with the registry."

Knowing Knoppix - Free, open source guide to Knoppix for the complete beginner.

iPod - restore and maximize battery life (via kottke)

Attitude by Charles Swindoll

The longer I live, the more I realize the impact of attitude on life. Attitude, to me, is more important than facts. It is more important than the past, than education, than money, than circumstances, than failure, than successes, than what other people think or say or do.

It is more important than appearance, giftedness or skill. It will make or break a company, a church, a home. The remarkable thing is we have a choice everyday regarding the attitude we will embrace for that day. We cannot change our past, we cannot change the inevitable. The only thing we can do is play on one string we have, and that is our attitude...

I am convinced that life is 10% what happens to me and 90% how I react to it. And so it is with you... we are in charge of our attitudes.

Armin Hanisch kindly informs us of his new ColorCat, which is self-contained, requires no setup, and does not modify the registry/system files:

ColorCat is a filter that searches the input stream for a list of regular expressions defined in a small text file. If an expression machtes, the line is colored according to the color attribute specified for that expression or can be deleted from the output stream... Of course freeware, even for commercial use and bundling.

Programs By Brian Apps

The time has come to say goodbye, our plates empty except for our greasy napkins. Comrades, you on my left, balding, middle-aged guy with a ponytail, and you, Lefty, there on my right, though we barely spoke I feel our kinship. You were steadfast in passing the ketchup, the salt and pepper, no man could ask for better companions. Lunch is over, the cheese-burger and fries, the Denver sandwich, the counter nearly empty. Now we must go our separate ways. Not a fond embrace, but perhaps a hearty handshake. No? Well then, farewell. It is unlikely I'll pass this way again. Unlikely we will all meet again on this earth, to sit together beneath the neon and fluorescent calmly sipping our coffee, like the sages sipping their tea underneath the willow, sitting quietly, saying nothing.

Diner by Louis Jenkins, from Sea Smoke (c) Holy Cow! Press, 2004. Reprinted with the kind permission of Mr. Jenkins. First heard on the November 11, 2004 episode of Garrison Keillor's The Writer's Almanac, an excerpt of which has been archived here.

Rareware - Last versions of freeware before they went shareware or simply disappeared.

one-minute vacation. Especially enjoyed this one.

Webnote - Web-based memopad. (via Mike Mills)

Microsoft: Do as I say, not as I do.

Automated Refreshing Page Builder - Automatically refresh up to four web pages at a customizable rate.

FlashlightReviews.com - One of the few actually useful and original review sites left on the web.

Seagate's 5GB USB 2.0 Pocket Hard Drive sounds great. But for an extra $50, why not get an iPod mini?

HOW-TO: Get music OFF your iPod

unpkg 1.2 [44k] {S} Unpacks the contents of pkg files. 📺  (via anonymous email)

Shifting Baselines

Security Configuration Guides from the NSA covering:

• Applications
• Database Servers
• Operating Systems
• Routers
• Supporting Documents
• Switches
• Web Servers and Browsers

Firefox LiveCD - Custom Morphix distro perfect for kiosks. Instead of screenshots, check out the Flash movie.

Hardware hacking tools

TechNet Virtual Lab - "Ever wanted to test Microsoft's newest software in a sandbox environment? Wouldn't it be great to be able to test new servers immediately, without formatting hard drives or dedicating one or more computers to the project? Now you can, with the TechNet Virtual Lab."

Arco Data Protection Systems offers unique RAID products which will appeal to the "less is more" crowd. Among the many reasons:

• DupliDisk works on virtually all operating systems and processor architectures.
• There is no need for utility software to run in the background.
• There are no drivers!
• DupliDisk will work with multiple operating systems on the same drive.
• DupliDisk can be used with a new drive or an existing drive with data already on it.
• DupliDisk does not require system resources.
• DupliDisk is invisible to the operating system.
• DupliDisk does not take up an IRQ.

Format144 - Tiny open source app that formats demagnetized floppies in Windows XP. (via Mike Mills)

Carbon Copy Cloner 2.3 [880k] Backup, synch, and clone utility for OS X. Includes scheduling function. 📺

The average American watches 4.5 hours of television every day.

You sleep for eight hours. You get up and work for eight hours. Come home, eat some dinner and turn on the television. A few hours later you're getting sleepy. Time for bed.

WHAT ARE YOU DOING??

We're not kidding. All those things you wanted to have in your life: passion, romance, love, childhood, parenthood, adventure - when are you going to do all that?

You're staring at a piece of furniture!

People on TV are not your friends. They're not in the room with you. You are alone in the dark, staring at a plastic box. Think about it. This is like a science fiction horror story; but it's really happening. People have stopped living as humans and connected themselves to machines instead.

- excerpt from White Dot's message found at TV-B-Gone.

Mario in 56k

XMPlay 3.1 [299k] + Audio player with support for: OGG, MP3, MP2, MP1, WMA, WAV, MO3, IT, XM, S3M, MTM, MOD, UMX audio formats, and PLS, M3U, ASX playlists. Many more formats are supported via Winamp plugins.

Free Antennas - Make your own wifi antenna.

CMSimple - Open source simple content management system in less than 50k. WYSIWYG editor supports Internet Explorer under Windows and Mozilla under Windows and MacOS. The entire site is stored in a single HTML-file - there is no need for databases. While it is open source, be sure to read the license terms, which copyleft your page design unless a commercial license is purchased. (via CG Conner)

Mark Twain quotations is a gold mine of thought-provoking statements, including:

In religion and politics people's beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination.

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.

I believe I am not interested to know whether Vivisection produces results that are profitable to the human race or doesn't. To know that the results are profitable to the race would not remove my hostility to it. The pains which it inflicts upon unconsenting animals is the basis of my enmity towards it, and it is to me sufficient justification of the enmity without looking further.

TxtPrint 1.0 [75k] {S}+ Text file printer. Save trees by tweaking columns, rows, font size, etc (requires MFC runtime DLL).

rcFTP - Similar to SendTo FTP. Installer-free 82k archive, but VB runtime required. (via Allen Day)

Perhaps in response to the charge that their original GDI Scanning Tool was worse than useless, Microsoft has released a new scanning tool (download here). They have also provided a detailed overview that includes advice to use Process Explorer for determining which version of gdiplus.dll is in use by a given application.

Be sure to check out GDI Scan and this tutorial as well.

Google has finally released its local search app for Windows 2000 SP3+ and XP. O'Reilly has a review. (via Slashdot)

Microsoft Online Seminars - "Streaming media seminars presented by the experts. Presentations are designed to meet the needs of developers, IT professionals, and business decision makers."

lucidCMS - Small yet powerful open source content management system. (via Pete)

Snap.com - Yet another search engine. Sort results by: Popularity, Satisfaction, Web Popularity, Web Satisfaction, or Domain (an explanation of these terms is available here).

Zebedee - Open source secure IP tunnel. Versions available for Windows, UNIX/Linux, Java, and Ruby. (via Jean-Marc)

HydraIRC [740k] {S}+ Open source IRC client with support for: DCC chat and file transfers, connecting to multiple servers, dockable floating tabbed windows, channel monitoring, message logs, event viewer, reg-exp highlighting, and much more. 📺

GMail Drive "creates a virtual filesystem on top of your Google GMail account and enables you to save and retrieve files stored on your GMail account directly from inside Windows Explorer. GMail Drive literally adds a new drive to your computer under the My Computer folder, where you can create new folders, copy and drag'n'drop files to." (via Slashdot)

PCStats.com has loads of great beginner guides, including:

• Remote access
• Printer sharing
• Wireless security
• Annual PC checkup
• Setting up an FTP server

SATs (Stand-Alone-Tools) - Floppy (or bootable CD) based tools that do not require installation and run on 386-SX or greater:

• HDClone - Copy contents of hard disks to other hard disks on physical level.
• HDShredder - Complete irreversible hard disk drive deletion.
• DiskSpy - Display, search and edit the hard disk drive on physical sector level.
• DiskCheck - Checks if IDE and SCSI harddisks are supported by the SATs and measures their troughput.
• PCISniffer - Search the PCI bus for devices and show its names, functions and configurations.
• NetSniffer - Montitor network traffic for a variety of network adapters.

SiteSucker [208k] Save entire websites to a local directory. (For Mac OS 9 and X) 📺

Text|Generator - "Tired of using Lorem Ipsum for dummy text in your latest masterpiece? This text generator has been developed based on years of careful research and is guaranteed to improve even the most lacklustre of designs."

Windows-Tools on CD-ROM (or USB stick) - Listing of freeware tools suitable for inclusion on a bootable CD. See also Win32 SAPPS (Stand Alone Apps).

MS Windows history with screenshots and feature lists. (via ritilan)

"The Chinese Outpost is pleased to offer its inaugural Gallery Exhibition: select images from a series of 143 engraving by the British Architect and Illustrator Thomas Allom. Accompanying the engravings are original commentaries published with them by G.H. Wright, a Protestant missionary who had spent some considerable time in China."

How to save ASF Files is a handy little guide, though it can't help you with files served via MMS (Microsoft Media Server). For those, you'll need SDP, which saves the stream to your hard drive.

Demetris has set up an excellent freeware directory in Greek. He writes, "If you feel your Greek is not up to the mark ;-) you can still take a look at the two indices, one alphabetical and the other thematic, and at my Top 11 (sic). You can also browse through my favourite web sites. Take a look and tell me what you think."

UPDATE: Demetris has added an English welcome page.

The VIA Eden-N is the world's smallest (about the size of a penny) and lowest power (7 watts at 1GHz) native x86 processor. It is featured on the upcoming Nano-ITX motherboard:



Nanode (designed by the folks at hoojum) is slated to be the first PC based on the Nano-ITX motherboard:



(via Kent at Maui Light)

Dual booting Windows 2000 and XP is simple if you install Windows 2000 first. But what if you need to install Windows 2000 after Windows XP?

Knoppix Hacks is due out next month. In the meantime, you can check out the following PDF sample chapters:

• Hack 5: Free Your CD to Make Knoppix Run Faster
• Hack 33: Install Knoppix as a Single-Boot System
• Hack 46: Check for Root Kits
• Hack 61: Migrate to a New Hard Drive
• Hack 78: Scan for Viruses

Synergy and SynergyOSX are open source projects that allow you to "easily share a single mouse and keyboard between multiple computers with different operating systems." Setup instructions for Windows and Mac.

OldOs.org - "Technical support and downloads to users of old computers and operating systems."

🌱 Abykus 1.02 [573k] + Object-oriented spreadsheet. Matrixes, tables, coordinates, polygons, profiles, cross-sections and the like can be stored in individual cells, which makes the spreadsheet especially well suited for scientific applications that require complex data types.

🌱 Regcmd 0.88a [25k] Command line based Registry editor. 📺 💾

TaskSwitchXP - Tiny, open source task switcher for Windows XP/2003. (via Michael Leddy)

RegShot is a Green Award app that tracks registry changes. While it's homepage disappeared some time ago, the last version released, 1.7.2, includes full source code. Direct download.

UPDATE: Manuel kindly wrote in with RegShot's latest homepage: http://the7thlab.shyper.com/bbs/tianwei/

Portable Firefox - Firefox for removable drives. Leaves the host system's hard drive untouched. (via Ritilan)

TACKtech has detailed guides on creating a bootable Windows 2000/XP/2003 CD using:

• Nero 6.0
• Nero 5.5
• UltraISO 6.5
• UltraISO 6.5
• Easy CD and DVD Creator 6.0
• Easy CD Creator 5.0
• WinISO 5.3

A9.com "is a powerful search engine, using web search and image search results enhanced by Google, Search Inside the Book™ results from Amazon.com, reference results from GuruNet, movies results from IMDb, and more."

fixyourownprinter.com is an excellent site with plenty of helpful information. They also offer resonably priced printer repair kits. After purchasing ($30) and installing (about an hour) their HP LaserJet 5L/6L Multiple-Sheet/No Feed Repair Kit, I no longer have to feed sheets one at a time.

For printing problems under Windows 2000 or XP, check out Bruce Sanderson's web site. The section on How to clean up printer drivers is especially helpful.

NASLite "is a single floppy disk based Network Attached Storage (NAS) Server Operating System designed to transform a basic computer into a dedicated file server." (via LangaList)

Steal These Buttons (mentioned last year) inspired Bill Zeller to automate 80x15 button creation. Soon after, Adam Kalsey offered a web-based GUI for Bill's PHP script.

Adam's interface was used to create the new Atom Feed link at left. The previous icon (formerly at the bottom of the blog) was apparently not sufficiently conspicuous, judging by emails and search logs.

If you haven't settled on a feed reader, check out Sage for Firefox. FeedDemon is also worth trying. It's the only app I've found that can display all of your feeds on a single page (great for printing).

SoftPerfect Personal Firewall 1.2 [900k] "Does not change your Windows system files and does not require any additional libraries" (via Shell Extension City)

Knoppix 3.6 includes FreeNX Server, a remote access program similar to VNC, Citrix, etc, but with significantly greater speed. Brief tutorial.

BeOS: A Retrospective

Tao Te Ching

install2win - Install Knoppix as an application under Windows 2000/XP. Be sure to read the disclaimer.

Why RSS Will Kill E-mail Publishing

NTLast 3.0 - CLI security audit tool for Windows NT family of operating systems.

How to make your DVD-ROM region freeOne World, One Region - Firmware for flashing DVD drives to RPC1 (region free).

Unixish and CUI Tools on Win32/DOS

4DOS is now freeware. It can be downloaded here. (via Robert Bull)

• What is 4DOS?
• 4DOS: Flashback to Command Mode
• 4DOS Documents

The Matrix Screensaver - 107k download, source available.

Beautifully filmed and choreographed, Hero has one major flaw: the underlying philosophy which is revealed in the last 15 minutes. It is perhaps best summed up in these words spoken by a well-known 20th century politician:

"It is thus necessary that the individual should come to realize that his own ego is of no importance in comparison with the existence of his nation; that the position of the individual ego is conditioned solely by the interests of the nation as a whole... that above all the unity of a nation's spirit and will are worth far more than the freedom of the spirit and will of an individual."

When Adolf Hitler spoke these words, he could not possibly have forseen a Chinese filmmaker glorifying them seventy years later. While Hero's visual effects may be entertaining, the ending will leave freedom-loving people sick to their stomachs.

A new OS X tiny apps page has been added. It will appear in the navigation menu within a few days. Suggestions and comments most appreciated.

Armin Hanisch kindly sent word of his command line apps, including: JpgList (image metadata info), DispChg (change display settings), and XEcho (eXtended Echo), among others.

Slogger - Firefox extension that "creates a complete log of your browsing history... It can save a copy of each page you visit to your hard drive, stampted with the data and time. Also, it allows you to create a plain text history containing custom information and in a customizable format (for example HTML, so you can view the logs in Firefox)."

Alarm clocks for meditation/gradual awakening:

• Citrus Alarm Clock 1.0.5 - Unlimited alarms, fade in audio, mute audio before alarm, more.
• Mindful Clock - Rings either a bell of mindfulness or Westminster chimes. The bell can be set to go off on the hour, the quarter hour, or randomly. Includes meditation timer and invitation of bells.
• Sleepy Sound - Gradually fade audio out and back in after a set interval. (Now shareware, find the archived freeware version here.)

TrueCrypt is an open-source on-the-fly encryption program with the following features:

• It can create a virtual encrypted disk within a file and mount it as a real disk.
• It can encrypt an entire hard disk partition or a device, such as USB memory stick, floppy disk, etc.
• It is the only free open-source on-the-fly encryption software that fully supports Windows XP.
• It is also the only free open-source OTFE software for Windows XP that provides plausible deniability.
• Encryption algorithms: AES (256-bit key), Blowfish (448-bit key), CAST, IDEA, Triple DES

Total Hardware 1999 - Jumper settings for 18655 devices

Eye Exercises and Resources to Improve Vision | Vision Improvement Site

If you need a new optical drive, check out Plextor's PX-708A 8-in-1 Combo drive: 8X DVD+R, 4X DVD-R, 4X DVD+RW, 2X DVD-RW, 12X DVD-ROM, 40X CD-R, 24X CD-RW AND 40X CD-ROM. High marks from Maximum PC, Tom's, TechFreaks, and Digit Life. $84.99 after rebate at Buy.com (includes free ground shipping).

Use NTFS? You need to know about ADS (Alternate Data Streams):

• FAQ: Alternate Data Streams in NTFS
• LADS - List Alternate Data Streams (freeware)
• Streams (open source stream viewer from Sysinternals)
• Hidden Threat: Alternate Data Streams
• The DiamondCS Archive - NTFS Alternate Data Streams
• What Forensic Analysts should know about NT ALTERNATE DATA STREAMS (ADS)
• Info on ADS from Lavasoft (makers of AdAware)
• The Dark Side of NTFS (Microsoft's Scarlet Letter)

Drive SnapShot 1.3 (mentioned in April) has received the first ever review with screenshots on TinyApps.Org.

Knoppix Tutorial for "people that meet Knoppix/Linux/Unix for the first time". Distributed under the GNU Free Documentation License and available for offline viewing.

CopyWriter - Freeware text editor with support for *.txt, *.rtf, *.doc, and binary files.

While Google works on Puffin (hard drive search tool), Microsoft has bought Lookout, a local search app that integrates with Outlook. It is available for free download. This usenet post certainly sounds enthusiastic, though the requirement of both Outlook and .NET Framework version 1.1 is rather unfortunate.

The Liberation of Iraq

StopListening claims to "raise the security of a fresh Windows 2000/XP installation to a Unix-like level" by closing down all non-essential TCP/IP services, including: SMB, NBT, DCOM, SSDP, IPSEC, and Task Scheduler. For advanced users only. ZIP file contains virtually no documentation, two EXEs and one DLL - be sure to dissect/inspect all three thoroughly before use. (via anonymous email)

Recover Windows logon passwords online:

• Ophcrack "is a Windows password cracker based on a time-memory trade-off using rainbow tables." Online version returns alphanumeric passwords from LM hashes within seconds.
• Sarca rainbow tables offers online cracking of LM hashes also. Results sent via email. Will crack Windows passwords with the following charset: A-z, 0-9, !@#$%^&*()- +=

Or offline:

• RainbowCrack "precomputes all possible plaintext - ciphertext pairs in advance and stores them". Source and Windows binaries available.
• Winrtgen is a graphical Rainbow Tables generator for Windows.

• Battlefield:Vietnam | Timeline
• 19
• "The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." -- H. L. Mencken (via Antiwar.com)

APTM (About This Particular Macintosh) is a quality online magazine available in several formats, with archives stretching back to 1995. OS 9 users may appreciate this networking guide which is also freely available for download.

Beginners Guides: Forgotten Passwords & Recovery Methods

Antiword and catdoc are both open source Microsoft Word document readers, but they render plain text results slightly differently:

Lists: MS Word | Antiword | catdoc | Original .DOC

Tables and footnotes: MS Word | Antiword | catdoc | Original .DOC

Macshift by Nathan True is an open source MAC address changing utility for Windows XP.

Cratchit.org TimeTool for Windows is an open source time tracker that fits on a floppy. (via Ziad)

"The open source utility AutoHotkey has a new feature: Hot-strings. They are abbreviations that expand as you type them (auto-replace). AutoHotkey also allows you to script your own hotkeys and macros; it can make virtually any key or mouse/joystick button into a hotkey, and it can automate virtually any repetitive task." (Submitted by Chris Mallett)

Voice of the Voiceless by Ella Wheeler Wilcox

I am the voice of the voiceless:
  Through me, the dumb shall speak;
Till the deaf world's ear be made to hear
  The cry of the wordless weak.
From street, from cage, and from kennel,
  From jungle and stall, the wail
Of my tortured kin proclaims the sin
  Of the mighty against the frail.

For love is the true religion,
  And love is the law sublime;
And all that is wrought, where love is not,
  Will die at the touch of time.
And Science, the great Revealer,
  Must flame his torch at the Source;
And keep it bright, with that holy light
  Or his feet shall fail on the course.

For he who would trample kindness
  And mercy into the dust--
He has missed the trail, and his quest will fail:
  He is not the guide to trust.
Oh shame on the mothers of mortals
  Who have not stopped to teach
Of the sorrow that lies in dear, dumb eyes,
  The sorrow that has no speech.

Oh, never a brute in the forest,
  And never a snake in the fen,
Or ravening bird, starvation stirred,
  Has hunted his prey like men.
For hunger, and fear, and passion
  Alone drive beasts to slay,
But wonderful man, the crown of the Plan,
  Tortures, and kills, FOR PLAY.

He goes well fed from his table;
  He kisses his child and wife;
Then he haunts a wood, till he orphans a brood,
  Or robs a deer of its life.
He aims at a speck in the azure;
  Winged love, that has flown at a call;
It reels down to die, and he lets it lie;
  His pleasure was seeing it fall.

The same force formed the sparrow
  That fashioned Man, the King;
The God of the Whole gave a spark of soul
  To each furred and feathered thing.
And I am my brother's keeper,
  And I will fight his fight,
And speak the word for beast and bird,
  Till the world shall set things right.

Christ On Disk "is a freeware application for viewing the King James Version of the Bible. It is a stand-alone application that is able to fit onto and run from a single floppy disk that has been specially formatted... Considering the plain Bible text alone is over 4.5Mb, adding a viewing application and getting it to all fit onto a single floppy disk was far from simple. Read the story behind Christ On Disk here while you're waiting for your download to complete." (via Everett Lane)

MediaCollege "is a free resource website providing educational and reference material in the field of electronic media." Articles include:

• How to Solder
• Linux / Shell Commands
• Redhat 9.0 Server for Newbies - "The following is a guide to installing a Redhat 9 server to be used on a private network for the purpose of experimenting and learning how to administer a Redhat server... There will be no GUI (Graphical User Interface) installed, as I believe the best way to learn linux server administration is to learn the command prompt."

Remove all directories named FOOBAR below the current directory:

find -type d -name FOOBAR -exec rm -rf {} \;

Windows users can use the self-contained Unix Tools... just launch it from the directory you wish to start in. (This tip was exceedingly useful in removing many "Thumbs" directories and their contents from an imported iPhoto collection. Use at your own risk and joy.)

UPDATE: Thanks to the anonymous readers who sent in the following tips:

• Another way to do it in Windows is to search for FOOBAR in the current directory (right click -> Search) and be sure that Search Subfolders is selected under Advanced Options. Once you get the results, order by type, select all of the directories and delete.
• for /r /d %i in (foobar) do rd /s /q "%i"

Fatbits [32k] + Screen magnifier 📺

🌱 CD2ISO 1.02 [194k] + CD to ISO creator. 📺

Merging directories:

Merge Directories - Combine two directories into one. If a file with the same name, date/time and size exists in the destination directory, the file being moved will be renamed with a numeric suffix. A text file can also be created in the destination directory detailing exactly what files were moved/renamed.

File Sieve - Copy or move files from a directory to a new folder, while creating subfolders from A-Z and sorting the files into them based on their name. (Requires VB runtimes.)

ThirdDir - Files in dir1 not in dir2 copied to dir3. (Requires MFC runtimes)

My favorite: XXCopy includes a very powerful directory flattening feature that can process multiple directories and offers many file renaming options.

(Via this thread on alt.comp.freeware. Special thanks to Omega and Bjorn.)

UnixKit for Windows "is a toolkit of Unixlike programs for Microsoft Windows. Unlike CygWin, it does not require installation. In fact, it leaves absolutely no traces on the host machine when you're done using it... The -tiny branch presently includes: arc arj bash bunzip2 bzip2 bzip2recover cat chmod cksum cp csplit cut dd df diff du file find fmt fold funzip grep gunzip gzip head join less ln ls md5sum mkdir more mv nano nl paste patch pico pr rm rmdir sed sort split stat tac tail tar touch tr tsort uniq unrar unzip uudecode uuencode vi wc wget zip zsh." (via ritilan.com)

Don't forget Unix Tools, which includes 17 utilities, weighs just over 1MB, and executes from a single EXE without ever extracting to disk.

Delete Doctor v1.1 - "Delete files that are difficult to delete, such as some files left by viruses and trojans, or files with corrupted file names. This program can also delete files like the 'index.dat' files, which store Internet history, by scheduling them for deletion upon system restart." (via Shell Extension City)

• OS X Routine Maintenance and Generic Troubleshooting
• How To Deal With Common OS X 10.2 Jaguar Problems
• How To Deal With Common OS X 10.3 Panther Problems

WORLD SCRIPTURE - A Comparative Anthology of Sacred Texts has some real gems, including these quotes from Jesus:

• You have heard that it was said, "You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy." But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what reward have you? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you salute only your brethren, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? You, therefore, must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect. - Matthew 5.43-48
• Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good. - Romans 12.21
• You have heard that it was said, "An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth." But I say to you, Do not resist one who is evil. But if any one strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also; and if any one would sue you and take your coat, let him have your cloak as well; and if any one forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles. - Matthew 5.38-41
• Then they came up and laid hands upon Jesus and seized him. And behold, one of those who were with Jesus stretched out his hand, and drew his sword, and struck the slave of the high priest, and cut off his ear. Then Jesus said to him, "Put your sword back into its place; for all who take the sword will perish by the sword." - Matthew 26.51-52

Mac OS X vs. Windows XP compares features between these two OSes, and makes a handy reference for folks transitioning from one to the other. The entire site is available as a PDF.

Healing Our World: The Other Piece of the Puzzle should be required reading for everyone on the planet, and especially for Americans. Read it free online or buy the print version.

YouSendIt - "Free service that allows you to send a file up to 1GB to another PC or person. Just type in the recipient's email address and upload the file. The recipient is then notified by email and can download the file anytime within 7 days before it is deleted from the server. 'No passwords to share, no software to install, no accounts to create, and no full mailboxes. Start sending now!'" (Quoted from Hypercognition)

Switch Off is a tiny tray-based app that provides scheduled and immediate options for:

• Shutdown / Restart
• Log off user
• Lock Workstation
• Disconnect dialup connection
• Standby / Hibernate
• Fast restart (Windows 95/98)

Web interface (with WAP support) allows remote operation from any web browser or mobile phone. User Opinions (via Matt Bentley)

Under1mb.com: "Freeware that Fits on a Floppy"

🌱 HFS - HTTP File Server 1.6a [409k] {S}+ Simple HTTP server with drag & drop interface. 📺

Advanced Process Manipulation (APM) "performs advanced tasks that Task Manager (and all other process viewers) aren't capable of... such as loading/unloading other modules, closing handles (including file and mutex handles), mapping ports-to-processes, reducing memory usage, gracefully terminating the process (even when other methods such as TerminateProcess fail), and so on." Works under Windows NT, 2000, and XP.

BurnCDCC - Burn ISO images to CD/DVD. (via Kenny )

BootIt NG - Partition, image, and multi-boot manager which fits on a floppy. (via Paul)

Zeniko has a number of small freeware apps, including: QuickPad (simple notepad with auto save), NoSleep! (temporarily disable screen saver/standby features), and Break-O-Mat (break reminder), among others.

Win32 SAPPS (Stand Alone Apps) is a collection of installer-free software, all of which is freeware or open source. The 75MB Zip file is distributed via BitTorrent.

Many thanks to Mike over at The Technology Center in Rapid City, S.D. for going above and beyond the call of duty. If you need computer help out that way, give him a call.

🌱 Gsar for Windows [34k] {S}+ Search/replace strings (even control characters and extended ASCII) in text and binary files. Incredibly fast. 📺

Whisper is "an open source content management system that weighs in under at under 20kb" according to Pete over at Googarra.

As part of his Building a Silent PC: My Quest for Quiet series, Terry Gray has created a guide to run Knoppix off of a CF-IDE (or hard) drive without installing it.

The Oldskool PC is "dedicated to old PC gaming-related nostalgia and resources." Includes Tand-Em, a Tandy 1000 and IBM PCjr emulator for 80386 (or higher)-based PCs, as well as a shrine to those computers.

The Quest for Silence : An attempt at eliminating computer generated noise. Handy apps in the software section.

Meta-Efficient "provides an in-depth look at what products really work. We independently review products that are meta-efficient. For something to be considered meta-efficient it must be:

• Energy & Resource Efficient
• Affordable
• Reliable
• Non-polluting
• Portable (where possible)"

(via Vegan Porn)

Tinfoil Hat Linux - "A secure, single floppy, bootable Linux distribution for storing PGP keys and then encrypting, signing and wiping files." (via Richard Karnesky)

Now that e-mail service providers have the right to read your messages, you may want to consider a tiny encryption app, or perhaps PGP.

Libertarian Quotes is a must read, especially for Americans during this Independence Day holiday. A few selections:

• That measures of this nature [the draft] should be debated at all in the councils of a free government is cause of dismay. The question is nothing less than whether the most essential rights of personal liberty shall be surrendered and despotism embraced in its worst form. - Daniel Webster
• A government which robs Peter to pay Paul, can always count on the support of Paul. - George Bernard Shaw
• They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety. - Benjamin Franklin
• One of the greatest delusions in the world is the hope that the evils in this world are to be cured by legislation. - Thomas B. Reed (1886)
• Government is not reason; it is not eloquence; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master. - George Washington
• A wise and frugal government which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government. - Thomas Jefferson (1801)
• The evils of tyranny are rarely seen but by him who resists it. - John Hay (1872)
• The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule. - H.L. Mencken
• If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel, nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you. May your chains set lightly upon you; and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen. - Samuel Adams

Process Explorer [230k] + Process viewer/killer. Displays process icon, command-line, full image path, memory statistics, user account, security attributes, DLLs. Also includes search function. 📺

Jem Berkes (author of JBMail and many other excellent freeware and shareware apps) kindly sent word of his new popURL 1.0. For a given HTTP URL it displays: site name, server software, MIME type, file size, and the complete server response.

According to Jem, popURL is "very useful for debugging, but also in the context of these recent IIS/IE viruses spreading from major sites -- it can help you know that you're not visiting a potentially dangerous site running IIS."

The following application has been removed by the author's request:

🌱 Screen Calipers v1.0 [136k] + Measure screen objects in pixels using a calipers

It was the last version to support Windows 95 (also works under 98, Me, 2000 and XP). The current version is shareware.

CAcert: Digital certificates become free - "Registering for a CAcert certification requires no money; the cost comes in time and trouble. You are asked to register online, perform some tasks by email, and then bring two forms of picture identification to a site where CAcert staff can determine whether you're legit."

🌱 7-Zip 3.12 (command line version) [291k] {S}+ Supports ZIP, 7z, GZIP, BZIP2 and TAR. AES-256 encryption in 7z format. GUI version also available.

Is there anyone reading this who still uses Internet Explorer? It really is beyond comprehension, but just in case: BHO scanning tool and New Scam Targets Bank Customers - "This particular BHO watches for HTTPS (secure) access to URLs of several dozen banking and financial sites in multiple countries. When an outbound HTTPS connection is made to such a URL, the BHO then grabs any outbound POST/GET data from within IE before it is encrypted by SSL. When it captures data, it creates an outbound HTTP connection to http://www.refestltd.com/cgi-bin/yes.pl and feeds the captured data to the script found at that location." (via Slashdot)

Why I Don't Participate in Link Exchanges - "When I link to another site, it is because I believe that site has value for my visitors. Whether or not the other site links back to me is of no consideration in my decision."

Why LinkNOt? - "Links established for the sole purpose of increasing PR are useless to the users."

'Fahrenheit 9/11' a No. 1 Hit Across America - "According to exit surveys in about 15 cities, 91 percent of respondents gave the film an 'excellent' rating, while 93 percent said they would 'definitely recommend' the film -- tallies that Ortenberg said were the best he had ever seen." (emphasis mine)

'Fahrenheit 9/11' pulls in record documentary haul of $21.8 million - "Michael Moore's 'Fahrenheit 9/11' took in a whopping $21.8 million in its first three days, becoming the first documentary ever to debut as Hollywood's top weekend film." (emphasis mine)

🌱 Simple File Shredder v1.0 [282k] + Secure file deletion with GUI. 📺 (via ShellCity)

Review of 4 freeware CD burning apps

You really can't get any more American than Bruce Springsteen and apple pie. According to Bruce: "A few weeks ago at N.Y.U. Al Gore gave one of the most important speeches I've heard in a long time. The issues it raises need to be considered by every American concerned with the direction our country is headed in. It's my pleasure to reprint it here for my fans." (via Kenny)

11 Port Enumerators is an excellent review of port-to-process mappers for Windows (some of which have been mentioned in this space before).

Google PageRank Calculator Value Report without Toolbar

XPCREATE - Automated slipstreaming tool. Create your own custom Windows XP CD, complete with the latest updates and hotfixes. (via TPS Report)

CSS Box Model in faux-3D

At last! A useful and accurate ATX Power Tester. Review 1 | Review 2 | Buy for $8 with free shipping.

Your software firewall is not providing adequate outbound protection:

Personal Firewalls vs. Leak Tests Part II
Firewall Leak Tester
Leak Tests

What to do about it.

If PearPC isn't quite fast enough for you yet, check out Turn your PC into a Mac. This step-by-step guide by Kurt Williams explains how to mimic the OS X interface on Windows boxes. (via Bjorn Larsen)

Archos ARCDisk: Tiny (smaller than a floppy at 76 mm x 77 mm x 8.8 mm and 75g) USB 2.0 20GB hard drive that is bus-powered. Review by MaximumPC | Amazon

The Fast-Food Syndrome: The Linux Platform is Getting Fat

Pop Goes the Gmail: Gmail > POP3 and SMTP > Gmail converter. Requires .NET runtimes. (via ritilan)

Netgear's MR814 wireless router is quite a bargain at Amazon: $16.04 after rebate.

If you don't need a router, you can use also use the MR814 as a simple wireless access point:

Turn off NAT on a NETGEAR MR814 Wireless AP

Can a NetGear MR814 be used as a simple access point?

Earth and Moon Viewer

Simplicity and non-violence are obviously closely related. The optimal pattern of consumption, producing a high degree of human satisfaction by means of a relatively low rate of consumption, allows people to live without great pressure and strain and to fulfil the primary injunction of Buddhist teaching: 'Cease to do evil; try to do good.' As physical resources are everywhere limited, people satisfying their needs by means of a modest use of resources are obviously less likely to be at each other's throats than people depending upon a high rate of use. Equally, people who live in highly self-sufficient local communities are less likely to get involved in large-scale violence than people whose existence depends on world-wide systems of trade.

from Small Is Beautiful: Economics as If People Mattered by E.F. Schumacher

"The Contiki operating system is a highly portable, minimalistic operating system for a variety of constrained systems ranging from modern 8-bit microcontrollers for embedded systems to old 8-bit homecomputers. Contiki provides a simple event driven kernel with optional preemptive multithreading, interprocess communication using message passing signals, a dynamic process structure and support for loading and unloading programs, native TCP/IP support using the uIP TCP/IP stack, and a graphical subsystem with either direct graphic support for directly connected terminals or networked virtual display with VNC or Telnet."

If you want squeeze every ounce of computing power out of your Windows XP box (and have lots of time), check out 99 Performance Tips for Windows XP. (via Mike Mills)

Ariya Hidayat kindly wrote in to suggest Musik "an open-source, cross-platform multimedia player and library." Supports mp3, ogg, icecast, and shoutcast; embedded SQL database makes searches fast and easy.

PgmText v.2.00 [36k] + Edit text parts of program files, including wide character text (text in menu items, buttons, etc). Free for non-commercial use. (via ShellCity)

Introduction to Reverse Engineering Software - online book which covers reverse engineering software under Linux and Microsoft Windows.

If you still haven't tried PearPC (mentioned in this space a few weeks ago), perhaps this screenshot will interest you:



The entire setup and install process from start to finish was surprisingly fast and easy, requiring only several hours on a 1.2GHz Athlon with 384MB RAM. OS 10.2 under PearPC is slow but usable.

Detailed Guides:

PearPC: Installation Guides, Tips and Links

Installing OS X (10.2) on a PC

"LNX-BBC is a miniature Linux-based GNU distribution, small enough to fit on a CD-ROM that has been cut, pressed, or molded to the size and shape of a business card. It provides a portable rescue system or temporary workstation OS for any system with a CD-ROM drive." | Review

didtheyreadit claims to invisibly track email and report the following information:

• When, exactly, the email was opened.
• How long the email remained opened.
• Where, geographically, the email was viewed.

This "tracking" is incredibly easy to circumvent: use plain text email. Reminds one of last year's Shift key breaks CD copy locks.

DVD Decrypter 3.2.2.0 [770k] Freeware DVD Ripper. Screenshots | Review

"The purpose of hymn is to allow you to exercise your fair-use rights under copyright law. It allows you to free your iTunes Music Store purchases from their DRM restrictions with no sound quality loss. These songs can then be played outside of the iTunes environment, even on operating systems not supported by iTunes. It works on Mac OS X, many unix(-ish) variants and on Windows." Note to potential pirates: unlike its predecessor PlayFair (which was shut down by Apple), hymn does not strip your Apple ID from "liberated" files. (via Slashdot)

"Whenever, in the course of the daily hunt, the (Native American) comes upon a scene that is strikingly beautiful and sublime -- a black thunder-cloud with the rainbow's glowing arch above the mountain; a white waterfall in the heart of a green gorge; a vast prairie tinged with the blood-red of sunset -- he pauses for an instant in the attitude of worship. He sees no need for setting apart one day in seven as a holy day, since to him all days are God's." - The Soul of the Indian

In addition to Furl (mentioned last month), there are several other personal Web archiving services:

Del.icio.us
MemeStreams
Stumble Upon
Spurl

(via Information Pollution)

🌱 A43 File Management Utility version 2.30 [713k] + File manager with integrated text editor, zip/unzip, file search, quick launch, more. 📺 (via anonymous email)

Map24 provides fast-loading, detailed maps of North America and Europe.

OpenBSD may very well be the most secure PC operating system. If you thought it was only for servers, or lacks a decent GUI, check out the screenshots.

PearPC - Open source PowerPC emulator for x86 machines. (via OSNews)

HTML email considered harmful is another thorough look at why plain text email rules. The primary reasons (which are explored in detail):

1. HTML email is large and wastes your Internet connection
2. HTML email is a spammer's dream
3. HTML email is a privacy risk
4. HTML email is useless on handheld devices

Want a Segway but think $4500 a tad on the steep side? Build your own like Trevor Blackwell did for less than half the price.

🌱 Simple Socket File Transfer 1.0 [9k] + Transfer a file between two computers using the TCP port of your choosing. Partially completed transfers can be resumed, and files are automatically checked with MD5 to ensure they were received error-free. Supports very large files (up to about 4 petabytes). 📺

PC-Pipeline is like Slashdot for Windows admins and users. (via Ordinary-Life.net)

🌱 miniaim [45k] + Tiny AOL instant messaging client.  📺

Please sign this petition calling for an immediate, full, and impartial investigation into the allegations of torture in Iraq. Tech posts to resume tomorrow.

"True patriotism is not blind patriotism, as true love is not blind love. We have not only rights but responsibilities as citizens in a democracy. Those responsibilities include remaining informed about what is being done in our name, and speaking truth to power when conscience demands. To ignore these responsibilities is to sell our country down the wide and muddy river of history's failed experiments." - Anita Doyle

• U.S. troops, guards stop using hoods to blindfold Iraqi prisoners
• President orders tough punishment
• U.S. to Stop Certain Interrogation Practices
• Prisoner abuse may be more widespread
• Civilians ID'd in abuse may face no charges

The Christian Science Monitor reports:

"The scandal over the treatment of Iraqi inmates at Abu Ghraib prison continues to grow. The Guardian newspaper reported Monday that US prison guards and interrogators attempted to hide the systematic abuse of Iraqi inmates from the International Red Cross."

"The allegation by Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, the former head of US military prisons in Iraq, is the first hint that the 'patterns of abuse' (as she described it) could go farther than originally expected. Brigadier General Karpinski was relieved of her command earlier this year during the investigation into abuse at the prison."

"A fifty-three-page report, obtained by The New Yorker, written by Major General Antonio M. Taguba and not meant for public release, was completed in late February. Its conclusions about the institutional failures of the Army prison system were devastating. Specifically, Taguba found that between October and December of 2003 there were numerous instances of 'sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses' at Abu Ghraib. This systematic and illegal abuse of detainees, Taguba reported, was perpetrated by soldiers of the 372nd Military Police Company, and also by members of the American intelligence community. (The 372nd was attached to the 320th M.P. Battalion, which reported to Karpinski's brigade headquarters.) Taguba's report listed some of the wrongdoing:

'Breaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees; pouring cold water on naked detainees; beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair; threatening male detainees with rape; allowing a military police guard to stitch the wound of a detainee who was injured after being slammed against the wall in his cell; sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick, and using military working dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees with threats of attack, and in one instance actually biting a detainee.'"

Full article

🌱 PMGlobe 3.25 [479k] + A beautiful, programmable world globe for Windows 2000/XP.

Liberators, with sexual abuse, torture for good measure - "The charges have been documented by photographs taken by guards inside the prison, which were broadcast Wednesday night by the CBS News program 60 Minutes II and have now been verified by U.S. military officials."

U.S. soldiers abuse Iraqi prisoners - "One photo shows a pyramid of naked prisoners with insults in English written on their bodies, and with soldiers standing on top of them. Several other photos showed prisoners forced to pose as though they were sodomizing each other or having oral sex with each other."

Abuse Of Iraqi POWs By GIs Probed - "In some, the male prisoners are positioned to simulate sex with each other. And in most of the pictures, the Americans are laughing, posing, pointing, or giving the camera a thumbs-up."

CBS would have sat on this story forever, at the government's bidding, if given the chance. From the bottom of this page:

"Two weeks ago, 60 Minutes II received an appeal from the Defense Department, and eventually from the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Richard Myers, to delay this broadcast -- given the danger and tension on the ground in Iraq."

"60 Minutes II decided to honor that request, while pressing for the Defense Department to add its perspective to the incidents at Abu Ghraib prison. This week, with the photos beginning to circulate elsewhere, and with other journalists about to publish their versions of the story, the Defense Department agreed to cooperate in our report."

IsoBuster 1.6 (in freeware mode) rescued all of the data off a deeply scratched CD for a client yesterday. Nothing else had worked, including the SkipDoctor. If IsoBuster has worked miracles for you too, consider making a donation or registering - help keep this awesome project alive!

Recycling tech trash - Matthew McGlynn helps save the planet. You can too!

🌱 RmEmpty v1.2 [36k] + Delete empty folders recursively. 📺 💾 🌎

OneLook Reverse Dictionary - "Describe a concept and get back a list of words and phrases related to that concept. Your description can be a few words, a sentence, a question, or even just a single word."

Furl sounds like a neat idea. It "helps you save, share, and recall anything you find online," essentially acting as your personal database of saved webpages. Features include:

• Save articles, pages, and receipts with a single click.
• Never lose a page due to memory, paid archives, or "link rot" again.
• Nothing to install. Access your archive from any computer, anywhere.
• Automatically share what you find through email, RSS and site integration.
• Search across all the data in your archive in an instant.
• It's free and quick to sign up.

But who knows how long Furl will be around? What happens to your data if they disappear? Fortunately, these guys have the answer: strong export support. Be sure to check out the entire FAQ, as it is particularly well-written and informative.

Extracts from Seneca's Epistolas:

How long shall we weary heaven with petitions for superfluous luxuries, as though we had not at hand wherewithal to feed ourselves? How long shall we fill our plains with huge cities? How long shall the people slave for us unnecessarily? How long shall countless numbers of ships from every sea bring us provisions for the consumption of a single mouth? An ox is satisfied with the pasture of an acre or two; one wood suffices for several elephants. Man alone supports himself by the pillage of the whole earth and sea. What! Has Nature indeed given us so insatiable a stomach, while she has given us such insignificant bodies? No, it is not the hunger of our stomachs, but insatiable covetousness which costs so much. - Epistola, 1x

In the simpler times there was no need of so large a supernumerary force of medical men, nor of so many surgical instruments or of so many boxes of drugs. Health was simple for a simple reason. Many dishes have induced many diseases. Note how vast a quantity of lives one stomach absorbs ... Insatiable, unfathomable, gluttony searches every land and every sea. Some animals it persecutes with snares and traps, with hunting nets, with hooks, sparing no sort of toil to obtain them . . . There is no peace allowed to any species of being . . . No wonder that with so discordant diet disease is ever varying. . . Count the cooks you will no longer wonder at the innumerable number of human maladies. - Epistola, xcv

If these maxims are true, the Pythagorean principles as to abstaining from flesh foster innocence; if ill-founded they at least teach us frugality, and what loss have you in losing your cruelty? I merely deprive you of the food of lions and vultures ... We shall recover our sound reason only if we shall separate ourselves from the herd - the very fact of the approbation of the multitude is a proof of the unsoundness of the opinion or practice. Let us ask what is best, not what is customary. Let us love temperance - let us be just - let us refrain from bloodshed. None is so near the gods as he who shows kindness. - Epistola, cviii

An anonymous reader kindly sent in a link to Corel InfoCentral 7 for Windows NT/2K/XP (direct download link). There are also loads of great iBase Templates and utilities. Be sure to check out the manual in PDF format. Thanks to Michael A. Koenecke for putting it all together.

BareGrep [140k] + Grep with GUI. Works with both plain text and binary files. Would prefer no splash screen. 📺 (submitted around the same time by Mike Mills, Terry Brown, and Toni Eisner)

🌱 PCISniffer 1.2 [675k] + Bootable floppy that detects and displays all PCI busses and devices. Database includes approx. 4000 devices and 1500 vendors. 📺

Dialup is still the rule - "(T)ens of millions of Americans (are) seemingly immune to the lure of more speed and satisfied with dial-up services. A majority of Americans who surf the Internet still do so by dialing in on regular telephone lines..."

Corel InfoCentral (freeware for Windows 9x, approx 4MB) is unique among PIMs. Its object-oriented data store allows complex relationships to be tracked with ease. Check out these Usenet posts:

1. "Unlike anything you've seen"
2. "Entity Relationship Mapping"
3. "Manage relationships between various pieces of information"

Running out of PCI slots? How about adding 13 more? Need to use PCI cards with your laptop? No problem. (via James Broder at Skunkware)

Compendium of iPod software for Windows

Vernon kindly sent in a link to .kkrieger, perhaps the world's smallest game (96k) which sports graphics like this. It requires some pretty serious hardware (by TinyApps standards, anyway) to run:

• A 1.5GHz Pentium3/Athlon or faster.
• 512MB of RAM (or more)
• A Geforce4Ti (or higher) or ATI Radeon8500 (or higher) graphics card supporting pixel shaders 1.3, preferably with 128MB or more of VRAM.
• Some kind of sound hardware
• DirectX 9.0b

Unbeknownst to most users, Windows ships with some serious music making software. (via ritilan.com)

Drive SnapShot 1.3 is simply the most amazing drive imaging software for Windows:

• Create disk image backups while running Windows. There is no restart (to DOS) necessary.
• Continue your work, while the backup is in progress. There are no difficulties with opened files. This enables a very fast and easy way to backup servers and other computers that must run 24 hours a day.
• Creates a virtual drive, containing all of your drive's data. You may use, compare, or restore these files directly from the Disk Image file. This works with any program of your choice, including (of course) the Windows Explorer.
• Complete restore of a disk in case of disaster. If a disk is restored to its original state, it will be exactly the same as at the time of backup - byte for byte. Restoring a system partition will require DOS; other drives can be restored from within Windows.
• Compatible with all Windows file systems (FAT16, FAT32, NTFS)
• Compatible with all Windows RAID methods
• Very easy and comprehensive command line interface
• Drive Snapshot does not require installation.
• Program size under 1.44MB
• Will NOT copy anything into your Windows or system directory, nor will it change anything in your system configuration.

(via Detlef Loeffelholz)

Dillo is a tiny (350k) web browser for Linux. Written completely in C and based on GTK+ (GNOME not required), Dillo is very fast. Similar in feel to OffByOne, the sleek and simple browser for Windows. (via anonymous email)

LogMeIn.com - Remote access service similar to GoToMyPC. No credit card is required for the free fully-functional preview. Just now tested it over a cable modem and am very impressed with the speed (virtually instant), extensive features and ease of use (though the browser-based client seems to require IE). LogMeIn might be useful in situations where setting up VNC is not practical.

GoVeg.com

🌱 HD Tune [131k] + Hard disk utility which reports drive info, health, and benchmarks. (via Langa List)

🌱 Netcat 1.1 [58k] {S}+ Network swiss army knife. Among its many uses, Netcat can be used to retrieve full HTTP headers (four other methods were covered last year). Review

Gmail from Google is a free webmail service offering 1GB of storage. Though currently in testing, Kevin Fox offers some screenshots, and Slashdot examines the privacy concerns. As one poster points out, Spymac offers a free 1GB webmail service too.

Does life imitate art? (via This Modern World)

"The Telnet BBS Guide is the largest active listing of Telnet accessible Bulletin Board Systems on the Internet." Aspiring sysops may enjoy How to Set Up a Telnet BBS. (via Jim's Inchoate Weblog)

US Expands Fingerprint and Mugshot Program for Visitors

KeyNote 0.999 [703k] {S}+ Treepad-like app with RichText support, encryption (Blowfish or IDEA), import/export TXT, RTF, HJT (Treepad), n_text (DartNotes), HTML (import only), and much more. 📺 (via Jeff Jewell)

🌱 KeePass [309k] {S}+ Encrypted password safe with groups, drag-n-drop, search, password generator, export to TXT, HTML, XML & CSV. 📺 (via ShellCity)

Mozilla Backup - Easily backup and restore Mozilla, Firefox, Thunderbird and Netscape profiles, including: email, bookmarks, addresses, settings, etc. (via ShellCity)

Just saw Molly's Revenge Celtic Music Band at St. John's yesterday. You must hear or see them now!

Gigablast is a Google-like search engine with some handy features, including the ability to quickly view cached (via Gigablast) and older (via The Wayback Machine) copies of web pages. Review | Interview

DiamondCS's excellent Console Tools were covered last year. Since then, they have added more great freeware apps including OpenPorts, a CLI port to process mapper for Windows NT/2000/XP. (See 2003.10. 1 and 4 blog entries for similar apps.)

Formatting an External Hard Drive addresses the question: "How to partition an external HDD that is connected via USB? Or to be more precise: How to partition the drive from within Windows 2000 (not DOS) without having to purchase Partition Magic?"

A Breathing Exercise: "How simple attention to breath enhances our awareness and enjoyment of the present moment."

FindHack 4.0.6 [137k] $ Improved find function for Palm OS 3.3 through 5.x. Limit search to current, built-in or custom-defined apps; support for wildcards; save favorite searches; much more. (This new version no longer requires a system extension manager like Hackmaster.)

Essential DOS Utilities

T-Utils is a small collection of utilities for DOS, including: TDel (powerful DEL replacement), T-Secure (simple file encryption), KeyWord (searches files and directories by keyword), and several more.

🌱 UnRAR for DOS [115k] {S}+ Command line DOS32 UnRAR. 📺

Big List of Blog Search Engines

DirSize.DLL [6k] {S}+ Adds a "Folder Size" column in Windows Explorer. Free registration required to download. 📺 (via Will Stevenson)

🌱 WinAudit v1.2.2 [112k] + System info tool that lists: installed software, license information, peripherals, memory usage, processor model, network settings and more. Reports can be saved in several file formats. 📺 (via Mike Mills)

Richard kindly sent word of Mike's MSDOS Internet Page, which is a tremendous resource for those running any version of DOS. On a related note, Steve Nickolas has put together a one-disk FreeDOS distribution named ODIN 0.6.

Nir Sofer has crafted a number of apps (some of which offer source code), among them:

• StartupRun v1.20 [27k] + A better msconfig.
• FoldersReport v1.10 [22k] + Dislays disk/directory space usage.
• A host of password recovery apps for: Windows, password text boxes, Dial-Up Networking, Internet Explorer, Outlook, Outlook Express, IncrediMail, Eudora, Group Mail Free, Netscape, PCAnywhere, Access, Jet Database Engine, and SQL Server Enterprise Manager.

The greatest hits of the cosmos from MSNBC offers a collection of awe-inspiring space slideshows.

"The Rocketinfo RSS Reader is a free personal news and information tool that allows you to search, subscribe, read and track content from thousands of RSS and Weblog sources." Supports RSS 0.91, 1.0, 2.0 and Atom.

Guy Kirkwood has put together an excellent guide entitled Setting up a Fast, Stable and Tweaked PC. It's focus is on lean, well-made apps. The advice on using XClone for emergency recovery should not be missed.

"The Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth hosts the best and most complete online collection of astronaut photographs of the Earth." Especially enjoyed Mt. Fuji.

Four chat/IM clients
Name	Size	Supports	Notes
Easy Message	252k	AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo	Reviews
Miranda	649k	AIM, ICQ, MSN, Jabber, IRC	Source available, Installer-free.
Trillian	2533k	AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo, IRC	Reviews
Centericq	3194k	AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber, IRC	Source available, Multi-platform

The Starman has a number of wonderful resources, including: Free Hex Editors, An Introduction to Learning Linux Console Commands using "tomsrtbt" Boot Disk, Learning about Boot Records, FATs and Directories and How to use DISKEDIT.EXE, and much more.

Optimizing Windows 9x/Me is a must-read for those eager to reduce their bootup times. It covers optimizing the BIOS, startup files, TSRs, etc. The test system's boot time (from power on to GUI fully loaded) dropped from 84 seconds to 56.

Comparator 2.20 [508k] File/folder comparison, copy and update utility with easy-to-use GUI. Also functions as a Microsoft Briefcase replacement. 📺

A little over a year ago, Booting Windows From CD-ROM was covered in the ezine. A new, more detailed guide (Windows 98 on CD) is now available, and it has some unique objectives. Quoting from the website:

This tutorial, and the underlying project, has had numerous objectives, but a few are of prime importance.

1. Produce a system which RUNS Windows98 from a cd. This is not the same as merely booting it. It has to be functional, and without abnormal error messages.
2. A 50MB limit for the CD image. I have aimed to produce a system which, like the KNOPPIX Linux Distro, can be placed on a credit card sized CD. This naturally means that many good tools or other things cannot be added or used, such as Mozilla or Word97. All of my recommended programs are based on size conceerns.
3. It must run on a 128MB machine. The installed files cannot therefore exceed around 110MB.
4. The most freeware/GNU software possible. Why recommend Miranda instead of Trillian? Simple, Miranda is GNU. Size, though, is usually more important than License agreements.
5. As many tools as possible, on a decent looking system. One of my unspoken objectives is a functionality similar to that of Damn Small Linux, but on a system which isn't as ugly as Blackbox with those horrendous Linux fonts. Linux geeks have a good tool in that system; (despite the underlying monopoly) I like Windows and I want a pretty, kewl os cd too!

As Czeslaw Czapla points out in his Confessions of a Latter-Day BeOS Convert (great discussion of it here), BeOS is still an attractive option for older hardware.

A few days ago I installed BeOS Pro 5.0.3 on an old Compaq Presario 1080 laptop (Pentium 166, 48MB RAM) and it worked beautifully, especially after installing Martijn Coenen's Xircom Realport RE-10 driver. The laptop will make a great FTP server, email client, web browser (Firefox 0.8 has been ported!), etc.

For programmers, both Programming the Be Operating System and The Be Book 4.5 are available free online. Others may enjoy these BeOS links.

One of my favorite stories about BeOS comes from dr-dank in this Slashdot post:

BeOS was demonstrated to me during my senior year of college. The guy giving the talk played upwards of two dozen mp3s, a dozen or so movie trailers, the GL teapot thing, etc. simultaneously. None of the apps skipped a beat. Then, he pulled out the showstopper.

He yanked the plug on the box.

Within 20 seconds or so of restarting, the machine was chugging away with all of its media files in the place they were when they were halted, as if nothing had happened.

Damn.

Kephyr.com has a number of useful tools, including: Bazooka Adware and Spyware Scanner, SystemSherlock Lite (great little command line app that analyzes changes made to the registry and file system), and The File Database (user-created database of Windows startup items, similar to Paul Collins' list, but currently not as comprehensive).

LSP-Fix "repairs Winsock 2 settings, caused by buggy or improperly-removed Internet software, that result in loss of Internet access." Such problems often occur after removing certain types of spyware/adware.

Every Windows user should have a copy of IrfanView for quick and easy graphics viewing/editing. Even long-time users may find some new ideas in this tutorial. (via Mike Mills)

"If you have a spare PC, Red Hat Linux, and a few odds-and-ends, the book Linux Toys can help you build some cool and useful projects":

* Music Jukebox
* Home Video Archive
* TV Recorder/Player
* Arcade Game Player
* Home Network Server
* Home Broadcast Center
* Temperature Monitor
* Digital Receptionist
* Mini ISP
* Web Hosting Service
* Doghouse Linux/BSD Games
* Toy Car Controller
* Digital Picture Frame

See also the book reviews at ComputerUser and Amazon.

Programmer's File Editor (PFE) [607k] + Programming-oriented text editor capable of opening HUGE files (limited only by the total amount of virtual memory available). Guide | Reviews 📺

🌱 Calendar 1.34 [13k] + Standard calendar window with several functions including: copy date to clipboard, Always on top, custom formats, more. 📺

Chris Mallett kindly informs us of his open source AutoHotkey project, "a hotkey (shortcut key) scripting language for Windows, supporting both keyboard and mouse."

Chris writes: "It does write to the registry to associate .ahk script files with the program. On the plus side, it's open source and I believe some of its capabilities are unique both among freeware and payware. The program with its installer, script-to-EXE maker, and help file is only around 550 KB. In addition, its main features are:

- its backward compatibility with AutoIt v2
- its many new features above and beyond v2
- The advanced hotkey features mentioned here, some of which I believe to be unique and possibly very useful to hotkey and/or gaming enthusiasts."

Cows with Guns (via ritilan.com)

Mike kindly sent in this text editor round-up posted to alt.comp.freeware by omega. Three long-time favorites: TheGUN (open HUGE text files), NoteTab Light (Swiss Army knife of text editors - there is also a non-installing version available), and Metapad (great Notepad replacement).

Papers, please.

"One balmy May evening back in 2000, Dudley was standing around minding his own business when all of a sudden, a policeman pulled-up and demanded that Dudley produce his ID. Dudley, having done nothing wrong, declined. He was arrested and charged with 'failure to cooperate' for refusing to show ID on demand. And it's all on video.

"On the 22nd of March 2004, the U.S. Supreme Court will decide whether Dudley and the rest of us live in a free society, or in a country where we must show 'the papers' whenever a cop demands them." (via Slashdot)

NanoBlogger "is a small weblog engine written in Bash, that uses common unix tools, such as cat, grep and sed. It's free to use and modify under the GNU General Public License." Features include: archiving, category support, permalinks, RSS syndication, no dependency on any javascript, server-side scripting, or server-side includes, no dependency on any external database (uses flat-file), more.

FreeConference.com - "A great dial-in teleconferencing solution for free. You just set up your call as little as 90 minutes in advance and distribute the call-in number to the folks calling. The organizer pays nothing, and participants pay only their usual long distance..." (Quoted from this entry on Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools site, which attibutes it to Thomas Petzinger)

The Knoppix 3.4 c't edition can write to NTFS partitions (thanks to Captive) and boot from external USB/Firewire devices. For those who cannot purchase the magazine, the ISO can be found on Overnet/eMule/eDonkey:

ed2k://|file|KNOPPIX_V3.4-2004-01-22-DE.iso|719181824|658f08cb71b760b18bae86d6011d481c|

This post was made from an IBM Thinkpad X30 running Knoppix 3.4 c't edition; wireless networking, USB boot, and all the rest work flawlessly. For those who prefer English, type knoppix lang=us at the boot: prompt (you will need to press Shift and 0 to get an equal sign). Much more information can be found in this Slashdot article.

If you are still using Internet Explorer, 13 Reasons To Use Firefox Over IE is a must read. Also, the RSS Reader Panel for Firebird/Firefox mentioned last month now supports Atom feeds!

There have been requests to add RSS feeds in addition to Atom. As if in answer, a kind reader from the Netherlands sent in this link: Atom 0.3 to RSS 1.0 "A simple Web service to convert Atom 0.3 XML feeds into RSS 1.0 ones... With the recent decision of Google/Blogger and LiveJournal to support the Atom project implementing Atom 0.3 feeds for all their users, there has been a sudden increment in XML data available for aggregators. Unfortunately, aggregators are still lagging behind when it comes to Atom support as the spec is currently a work in progress. This service provides people with an easy way to use these new feeds, now. As aggregator support for Atom feeds becomes widespread this service will eventually be made obsolete, so ? please ? don?t rely on it too much as I may take it down without notice."

Firebird has changed its name to Firefox with the release of 0.8. The primary Windows download comes as an installer, but an installer-free ZIP file is also available. (Via Hendikins)

How to Tweak Windows XP for Optimal Performance is especially helpful for folks running this OS on older hardware. The test system in this article is a 350MHz Pentium II with 128MB RAM and a 2GB Hard Drive. Before tweaking, the system used 60MB at startup; that number shrank to 42MB after tweaking. XP users may also appreciate LitePC's XPlite: "The latest developments in XPLite now see clean installations of Windows XP in under 350MB and Windows 2000 approaching less than 200 MB (excluding paging file). These sizes are obtained simply by running XPLite/2000Lite on a fresh install of windows. Enterprising developers should easily be able to strip out additional log files, INF files and unused drivers to reduce the footprint by another 50MB or so."

• DOS USB Drivers
• ReactOS - "Open source effort to develop a quality operating system compatible with Windows NT applications and drivers." - GUI is now up and running! (Via JH)
• Miniclip - Loads of tiny Flash games. Wasted/enjoyed a good thiry minutes on Save the Sheriff.

FreeGrid v0.5b [30k] Light spreadsheet for Palm.

Programming from the Ground Up by Jonathan Bartlett teaches programming and computer science through assembly language (this approach was also the basis for Jeff Duntemann's Assembly Language Step-by-step). Slashdot has an active thread going on the book, and it can be downloaded free online or purchased in print.

EBCD (Emergency Boot CD) can come in handy when faced with a non-booting/damaged/misconfigured machine. Copy/move files, image drives, recover MBR, change admin password on Windows NT/2000/XP, unerase deleted files, unformat, much more. It is one of the featured solutions in: How can I gain access to a Windows 2000/XP/NT computer if I forgot the administrator's password? UPDATE: The EBCD link seems to be down, here are some mirrors.

Back in September, we mentioned the Radified Guide to Norton Ghost. Folks using or considering Norton Ghost will also want to check out the Guide To Ghost System Recovery which includes loads of great info found nowhere else, and great tips like Don't Install Ghost!. The author offers a clean, minimalist approach, demonstrating that the floppy version of Ghost is all you want or need to make the most of this fine app.

The History of BIOS and IDE Limits covers the following limits:

• ATA Specification (for IDE disks) - the 137 GB limit
• BIOS Int 13 - the 8.5 GB limit
• 528 MB limit
• 2.1 GB limit (April 1996)
• 3.2 GB limit
• 4.2 GB limit (Feb 1997)
• 7.9 GB limit
• 8.4 GB limit
• 33.8 GB limit (August 1999)
• 137 GB limit (Sept 2001)
• 2 TiB limit

Looks like MyDoom's reported Denial of Service attack against SCO does not actually work. (Via Slashdot) UPDATE: Guess that was wrong.

Jakob Neilsen on Information Pollution: "Excessive word count and worthless details are making it harder for people to extract useful information. The more you say, the more people tune out your message."

David Miller kindly sends word of HydraIRC, "an open-source IRC client with an attractive and easy to use interface. It supports DCC Chat and File transfers, Connecting to multiple servers, Dockable Floating Tabbed Windows, Autohiding Windows, DLL Plugins, Channel Monitoring, Message Logs, Event Viewer, Themes, Color schemes, Buddy groups, Audible and Visual Notifications, Reg-Exp Highlighting, Favorites and much more."

Thanks to Blogger, TinyApps now features syndication powered by Atom. More info on Blogger's decision to go with Atom.On a related note, skyzyx.com has a handy online RSS/Atom Reader.

Yet another handy extension for Firebird users: User Agent Switcher "adds a menu to switch the user agent of the browser. It is designed to provide functionality similar to the 'Browser Identification' feature of Opera and allows configuration of the list of user agents to display in the menu." Released under the GPL. (Found via BlueJAMC's posting on grc.techtalk)

FileZilla is slightly too large to be listed on TinyApps, but it is a powerful (and open source) FTP client with many great features, including: Resume uploads/downloads, SFTP support, Site Manager with folders, firewall support, and much more.

For those using Mozilla Firebird and wondering how to "Work Offline" (i.e., browse cached webpages), check out Pike's Work Offline extension.

Kamelion kindly informs us of 0irc, a small IRC client for Windows. Download size is about 120k and the source code is available under the GPL. Screenshot.

Fixing Unknown Devices (those with yellow question marks) in Device Manager:

• 🌱 Unknown Devices [392k] {S}+ Determine the identity of unknown devices in Device Manager.
• How to Use Registry Editor to Identify an Unknown PCI Device
• PCI Vendor and Device Lists
• Plasma Online
• ID HW
• Driver Magic - 30 day free trial, $24/yr. "Instantly identifies all of the required device drivers in your computer and enables you to download them quickly, without spending hours trawling the internet hunting for them."
• See also System Info & Diagnostics.
• UPDATE: Identifying unknown devices in Windows

Time to clean out the ol' Inbox... here's one (couple hundred more to go!) from June 2002:

"World smallest audio/video conferencing tool, freeware and customizable. EWrama is a small conferencing application you can use alone, or feel free to embed in your own messenger program, as long as you follow the license terms."

Many thanks to Sture for sending in a link to Steffen's Calculator 1.4, a scientific calculator with tape display. The download size is 241k, and once extracted, the program weighs 447k. While not requiring installation, it does create three new registry keys. Please keep the suggestions coming... still looking for a truly tiny calculator with tape. The built-in Windows 2000 calculator is only 89k.

A.H. kindly found Euromat, a smaller (225k) freeware calculator with tape, more features, and completely install/registry-free. The only issue is that it requires MSVBVM50.DLL, which is 1.29mb, and not always found on older Windows versions. At the moment, this disqualifies Euromat from TinyApps... is it time to change this policy?

The creator of Euromat, Detlev Schaefer, has authored a host of freeware apps. According to his site, each and every app:

1. is FREEWARE
2. needs no installation (...simply start the exe-file for instant use)
3. writes nothing into your system (...that makes your system slow)
4. can be simply removed (...by deleting the program folder only)
5. has a small download size (no libs, fonts etc.)
6. comes with its own folder (not required to generate manually)
7. requires the msvbvm50.dll (normally present on each system)

Slogan: download -> unzip -> run -> enjoy

A.H. Banen wrote in to recommend SteelBytes, a site "dedicated to the fine art of hand crafting software." He also offered that, "The utilities spotted in your weblog aren't always that tiny :) Otherwise TinyApps is great!" True, apps like Moffsoft FreeCalc (featured on Jan 4) could hardly be called tiny, but I have yet to find a smaller freeware app that does the same job (virtual tape which can be copied, saved, and printed). If you know of one, please send it in.

A.H. is an admin for Dialect, which he describes as "a tiny development system (script based, but can produce stand alone executables) for the Win32/WinCE platforms.)"

Moffsoft FreeCalc [787k] Windows Calculator replacement with virtual tape (copy/save/print), sizeable display, "always on top" setting, double & triple zero keys, international support for thousand separators, and more. 📺

For those browsing with Mozilla Firebird, there is a tiny, RSS reader panel available. Requests to provide RSS feeds for TinyApps prompted an email to Blogger, which replied, "We'll be releasing a syndication feature very soon, for all Blogger users." If this doesn't happen within the next month or so, RSS feeds will be offered through The Feedster Builder.

Convert JPG images to ASCII images online

blo.gs "lets you keep an eye on your favorite weblogs via the web, email, and instant messenger. you can even put the list on your site: a blogroll that knows what is new!"