Free Software

Not everyone needs to go and buy Photoshop to edit their images and photos. There is a great free image editor called Paint.NET which can do pretty much everything most people need. It has many of the great tools and features like clone tool and image layers that Photoshop has, but it's totally free!

As most people know, MSN Messenger is a popular IM client. But it's also very buggy and it's common to get problems and errors which crash MSN, or fail to connect.

aMSN is a free open source MSN Messenger clone, which actually works really well. It's customizable, by default looking very similar to the new MSN client. It has smileys, supports webcam video chat, and virtually all of the useful and popular features of MSN Messenger. It's also quick to download, very easy to install, and intuitive to start using.

http://www.amsn-project.net/

We all know that every time we encode (or re-encode) an MP3 file, we lose some quality, as it is a lossy format.

But sometimes we'd like to be able to trim or crop an MP3 file, to get a segment of a speech or song for example, without losing further quality in the audio file.

This is a great little Firefox addon, which lets you quickly and easily grab either a specific portion of a webpage, or an entire webpage, and turn it into an image.

Codecs can get in the way quite often when we're working with various formats of video files, but here is a method which can be used to open mp4 files using Virtualdub.

If you're like me, you'll have hundreds of gigabytes of harddrive storage, and about 100mb of actual free space.

Where on earth do all those gigs go?

While currently most of the video playing software available such as Video Lan Client (VLC) and Windows Media Player Classic cannot play HD-DVD .evo files, there is one which does work.

You can play .evo files successfully using the new version of MPlayer, which is another of the free open source video programs available.

There are a lot of different programs around these days which claim to be able to turn your webcam or other video source into a cutting edge PC based security system on the cheap.

Most are terrible.

If its not a time limited trial, then its severely buggy, or just plain useless. Motion detection is one of the big issues here - on some of the software its very poorly coded, so will constantly give you false positives, from sunlight glare etc.

Thankfully I've finally found a totally freeware solution which although still in Beta, seems to work really well.

I tuned in to the world of podcasts a little late as far as aggregators go I'm ashamed to admit.

Space Invaders OpenGL is a 2D / 3D modern version of the old classic game.