Ashed's Weekly Freeware Thread

[Bill]

Thanks, but we'll have to see what Ashed thinks

[Ashed]

Figure it out

Microsoft gives a free copy of Calc, the occasionally helpful calculator, with every version of Windows. This is sort of like getting a free Barry Mannilow track with every Rolling Stones album.

Luckily, calculators are a category of software that developers seem to love to write and donate to the public domain, lucky us. We can get rid of Barry Mannilow and put in some hard-driving rock, country, love ballads or house techno according to our taste.

CyberCalc is a very attractive – because it has many skins you can use to change its appearance – and more importantly a very functional calculator that does standard mathematics, plus.

Plus it does some scientific maths – not a lot, though. It plays and records a "paper trail" in a small, attached window where you can follow your calculations, and then edit and print if you wish.

The program also has a large variety of conversions – the likes of feet to kilometers, pounds to kilos, Pascals to atmospheres and so on.

The currency converter in CyberCalc is likely to be useful to many. It connects via the Internet with one of the top live, currency sites, xe.com, and handles pretty well every currency in the world, certainly including baht.

CyberCalc has everything I need in a calculator, and pretty well everything I need in its add-ons and converters. The only thing I could see missing was that the program does not handle the time between two dates – the number of days old you are, for example, or the number of weeks until New Year’s Eve.

I rush to state I am not a nuclear scientist, and I am far more likely to put a notation on a Polish language document than employ a mathematical Polish notation. CyberCalc is not a calculator for advanced scientific operations, nor is it programmable. There is a number system converter only a programmer could love that has four base numbers.

It is a far more talented and thus potentially more useful program than Microsoft Calc.

The kind folks who run CyberMetrics Corp make CyberCalc for free and you can find it at their web page: www.cybermetrics.com.

[Ashed]

Fast weather maps

Everyone talks about the weather but no one does anything about showing the informative maps and images that explain and predict it.

Marek Jablonski, who lives in Poland, got tired of surfing from site to website looking for illustrative weather maps, so he wrote a program that gathers and shows them.

Webmizzle does that, and nothing else. But it does it well, and anyone who has more than a passing interest in weather developments will want to have a look at this program. It is not small – just over two megabytes to download – but it is intuitive to use and fairly fast, even on a dialup Internet connection.

Once installed, Webmizzle shows its only face, a fairly small window with clickable options down the side. Basically, you order the program to show a certain kind of weather map, from a certain part of the world, and off goes Webmizzle to obtain it and show it to you.

The program has some nice touches, too. You can ask it to give you the latest enhanced satellite images showing cloud cover, or order it to get the last six available images so you can click through the developing clouds, a good way to see what is approaching your area.

The images Webmizzle shows are from a couple of weather services, and cover whatever portion of the world you are interested in. Many are downloaded from the Weather Channel, a common source of weather news, but other references are included.

There is nothing exclusive about them, and you have no control over the source of the maps. Marek is not Burger King – you get it his way or you don't get it.

There are no adverts on the program or with the weather images. Webmizzle is totally focused, non-intrusive and single-minded about its purpose – to show the current and forecast weather in the part of the world you care about.

The program has almost no explanation at the home page: www.webmizzle2.republika.pl.

[Ashed]

I have been away on vacation so I haven't been able to post the articles. I just did anyway. I will be post this week's article by tonight, hopefully.

[Bill]

Nice work Ashed. I'm not sure I'll find a use for CyberCalc, MS Calc suits me just fine, but it's good to know about it.

[Ashed]

Yeah, Calculator suits me fine but CyberCalc has that currency converter thing and I love it.

[linasgricius]

The best email checking software: Poptray. It checks email and have multi acount support. Check it at www.poptray.org

[Ashed]

linasgricius, this is my thread! :mad:

Only kidding.

[Ashed]

Making sense of your fonts

Everyone has far too many fonts. A professional graphic artist with more than 30 active accounts may try to convince me she has just enough fonts installed, but I won't believe her.

Windows comes these days with more installed fonts than anyone can remember. Add the Thai-speaking Windows XP module and you get a dozen or two more.

It's a blessing and a penalty, and for the past decade software writers have been giving us dandy little utilities designed to view, sort, install, uninstall and generally try to make it possible for us to organise fonts - at least so we have a vague idea of what is on the computer.

The generous Alberto Martinez of Spain, mentioned here last year for his jim-cracker calendar, now gives us Amp Font Viewer, a budget-sized downloaded with a large number of features to help us categorise and manage our fonts, some of the unique.

When you start Amp Font Viewer, the program finds, loads and displays all installed fonts on the Windows machine. It shows you the first in the list in huge detail, and then adds the nice touch of showing all fonts in a browser window behind the main screen.

The most common reason for looking at fonts is you want to know what a font looks like in a certain shape and size, for a certain task. Amp Font Viewer is brilliant at this. Type in any phrase, headline, paragraph, then add the colours, attributes - like bold or italic - and the program shows you how your headline or story looks in every available font, in any available size.

Mr. Martinez' software will give you a list of uninstalled fonts if you point it to the correct folder, and then install one, some or all of them if you want. It will uninstall and delete fonts you hate. For fonts you love, the program allows you to group them as you like - Thai fonts, display fonts, text body fonts, sans-serif fonts, or whatever your criteria.

The Microsoft tools for looking at fonts are primitive, to be polite, and you should have a font viewer in your utility kit. You may like this one.

Amp Font Viewer and quite an impressive list of free software is on Mr. Martinez' web site at www.ampsoft.net.

[Ashed]

I love this program. It's so easy to view all the fonts I have downloaded but haven't installed.

[linasgricius]

Originally Posted by Ashed

linasgricius, this is my thread! :mad:

Only kidding.

Go ahead! Write the review of PopTray!

[reedfloren]

Not to go off topic but how does pop tray work? I thought POP email downloaded and deleted, where as IMAP allowed you to download headers and then select what you wanted to get.

[Ashed]

Rip it, rip it - even in Thai

Audiograbber has to be the best failed program ever to be given to consumers. Author Jackie Frank was unable to sell the program as shareware and has decided to give it away.

Anyone who needs to "rip" songs from a CD to her computer is the winner here.

Audiograbber has everything thought out perfectly, and if there is something missing from the program I didn't see it.

A CD ripper is basically a simple concept. It reads music tracks from a CD, lifts them off the compact disk, converts the format - typically to the space-saving MP3, and writes them to a computer hard drive.

From there, what you do with them is your business (apart from selling them). Usually you will take songs and rewrite them to another CD as part of a compilation for your car or portable player.

Audiograbber runs, but is not installed, on your Windows computer. That means there is nothing to uninstall, and nothing goes into your registry.

It picks the song up bit by bit from the CD, assuring a perfect transfer - although the conversion to MP3 will lose a bit of quality, not the program's fault.

A lot of little things went into Audiograbber. Here is one that impressed me.

I tried it out on an album by Mai Charoenpura, thinking about how small the chance was it could handle a Thai album.

Not only did it perform flawlessly, Audiograbber, at a mouse click went on the Internet and found all the details of the album and each of its songs, in Thai, and wrote them to the hard drive along with the actual songs.

The program is well documented, but also simple to understand.

If you use it fruitfully, thank the author for donating this lovely software as freeware. You can find it and some details at www.audiograbber.com-us.net.

[Ashed]

I didn't know Audiograbber is a freeware now... I still prefer CDex, though.

[reedfloren]

Now what is the difference between using something like that and using Windows Media Player?