As any parent would agree, introducing computers to young children can be quite frustrating. Since most of the systems are not designed with kids on their mind, it's not wise to leave the kids unattended. There are several useful utilities here at Donationcoder that can attest to this fact, such as Skrommel's ToddlerTrap and CrazyLittleFingers by Kwacky.

This is where alternate shells come into the picture. They let the children to explore and launch programs while allowing the parent to retain certain amount of control. One such program that recently caught my eye is KidsMenu by Byron Jones and as it turned out Byron wrote this program for his kids to use and I feel that is an important criteria.

As he explains on the KidsMenu website.

I've really gotten on board with the Digital Game Distribution concept (though the flap at GOG shook my confidence a bit), and figured that I'd post a review of the sites that I've used.  I'll post them a little at a time, and if someone has something to add, feel free to add to the thread, and I'll update this 'table of contents' post with a link to the review.

What would be the one program you would like to have most that is already possible but doesn't quite seem to exist yet? A Program Whose Time Has Come? For me, it would be a powerful sidekick to file managers: a program to manage virtual folders, a.k.a file collections, a.k.a file baskets/organizers... Hope someone comes up with a catchier name!

The time when the simple folder hierarchy ceased to suffice is long gone, isn't it? I've seen plenty of requests for such functionality on various forums, but strangely no real takers yet. I'll describe my experience with the existing solutions, pretty immature all, but first, here's what the program would do:

A virtual folder is a folder that doesn't exist physically on disk. It is merely a name for a collection of files selected by the user for whatever purpose or gathered automatically according to some criteria. The "whatever" is pretty darn big - I come up with new potential uses for such a program every day. Here are the three main uses of file collections I can see. (Please add others if my three don't exhaust the range of possibilities). Each of these uses requires slightly different behaviors, but it seems possible to accommodate them all in a single application.

I'm not sure if any of you guys use Google Chrome and would like to experiment with its Dev version, that's why I haven't posted about my extension for Google Reader here, but on another forum, dedicated to Chrome extensions: Chrome Plugins. But now I thought that maybe some of you would like to check it out, so let me write a mini-review.

TPGoogleReader is an extension for Google Chrome that makes working with feeds, and particularily with Google Reader, much easier. There is already a lot of Google Reader extensions for Chrome but this one has more features than most of them. Probably the most important feature (and difference) is the ability to automatically open new items from feeds in the browser, in background tabs. Just check the checkbox on the toolstrip:

Trout is an audio player that DC member Skwire started writing as an entry to our NANY (New Apps for the New Year) Challenge on DonationCoder.  For those of us who aren't into fancy skins and prefer a more compact, clean, standard listview user interface, Trout is a breath of fresh air.

http://skwire.dcmembers.c.../pages/software/trout.php

Trout has tons of features that one might expect in a serious audio player (lyrics, album art, etc.).  But truthfully I don't care about or use such features.  What I wanted to write about was how uniquely useful Trout is for listening to Audiobooks.


Why is Trout good for listening to Audiobooks?

Trout makes it really simple to load up a directory of tracks and sort by filename or track name, and makes it really easily to save and load playlists.  Ok nothing special there -- but it's done well and no weirdness like the Microsoft Media Player where its hard to work with the song list or sort by different fields.

It has an option that will announce, using text-to-speech (or a simple tone), the audio file tracks as they are played.  This can be incredibly useful in two situations when listening to audio books.  First, it helps you remember which tracks you were last listening to when you went to sleep.  And second, it helps you navigate tracks using the keyboard (media keys are supported) even when the monitor is off.

It has a very nice big track progress display that you can click on to easily jump around.

While these may seem like minor features -- they do make Trout the best audio player for audio books that i have found.

Well, I missed the set ~48 hour (I've read 75k download limit) download window from Microsoft, however I did still manage to obtain a copy and have it running on my machine now (alongside Spyware Terminator and Threatfire, no problems).

Figured I would give my opinion/experience thus far and maybe PM a link to the installer to those that may be inclined to give it a test of their own...

My experience:

The setup is straightforward and fast. It takes a whole 60 seconds from launch (of Setup) to launch (of MSE) - Windows Validation is tested before installation, and since mine has already passed it took ~1 second to see that and pass me on through. Once finished, it prompted me to start MSE and download updates + run a quick scan.

...

My opinion:

While it isn't great, it isn't as disappointing as I was expecting - false positives aren't automatically removed (ONLY because I changed the option before it found them, OTHERWISE it would have removed them permanently, so take note of that! ) and it gives you a nice little window when it finds something. The GUI, while basic, keeps it just right for always-on protection and the occasional scan.

Anyone else have MSE? Have an opinion? If you would like the installer, send a PM my way and I'll get you a link (or some googling may work, but Microsoft may be tearing it down from 3rd party download sites already).

NoteZilla takes the concept of sticky note software to a fine art.  

The first thing to see is that NoteZilla was very stable in my use.  And consistently esthetically pleasing.  You can navigate menus and right-clicks at leisure and find the features, the author will try to answer any puzzles you hit by email and the color and shape and utility of the notes are very flexible.

Basic Info

App Name	Objconv
App URL	http://www.agner.org/optimize/
App Version Reviewed	2.08 (May 27th 2009)
Supported OSes	Windows, Linux
Support Methods	Forum, e-mail
Pricing Scheme	Open Source
Relationship btwn. Reviewer and Product	REVIEWER: Regular user

Intro:

First of all let me warn you that this is a tool for programmers, and probably only a small subset of those will ever need a tool like this.

Objconv is a command line tool that can convert object and library files between a number of formats, and also perform certain changes in the process.

Objconv at the moment supports COFF, ELF, OMF and MACHO formats, with both 32-bit and 64-bit support where possible.

It can be used as a simple library manager because it supports adding and extracting members.

Objconv also includes a disassembler supporting the SSE4, AVX, FMA and XOP instruction sets.

The author, Agner Fog, is well known for his work on documenting low level optimization techniques, and the pdf files available from his homepage are a great resource.

App Name	AntispamSniper For The Bat!
App URL	http://www.antispamsniper.com
App Version Reviewed	3.2.0.6
Test System Specs	Windows 7
Supported OSes	Windows NT/2000/XP/Vista x86/x64
Support Methods	Forum, Email
Upgrade Policy	Free Lifetime Upgrades
Trial Version Available?	Commercial Version: 30-Day Trial
Pricing Scheme	$19.95 Per License
Relationship btwn. Reviewer and Product	None, other than being a customer

...

Many on this forum swear by the powerful email program known as The Bat!. It can keep track of literally tens of thousands of emails with nary a slow-down in performance while sorting and displaying your messages in almost any way possible. One may argue, though, that its true glaring weakness in email management is its utter lack of any practical way to deal with spam out of the box. Fortunately, there are many different choices for spam management available both as stand-alone programs and more specialized applications that make use of The Bat!'s plugin system. This review is is an analysis of one tool that can help stem the tide of useless crap into one's inbox.

Today I am going to be reviewing one of those specialized plugins called AntispamSniper for The Bat! by Good Vein Software. The author also offers versions of AntispamSniper for Outlook, Outlook Express, and Windows Mail, but this review will be focused on the version for The Bat! The flavor of AntispamSniper written for The Bat! differs from the versions for the other email clients in that it is the only one to offer both commercial and free versions of the plugin. The other email clients only have commercial versions.

While this review is going to be discussing the commercial version of the plugin most features discussed are available in the free version. I'll outline the differences later.

...

Okay, so I know how this is going to end: DonationCoder resident AutoHotkey wizards are going to demonstrate how instead of paying $49.95 for a piece of shareware, you can have all its features for free in under an hour. Tip of my hat to them! AHK saves me a lot of time every day, so this remark is not meant to be flippant. However, if - like me - you happen to be a sucker for beautiful interfaces and convenient configuration screens, check out Actual Window Manager.

AWM seems to have received only a handful of mentions at DC so far, yet it falls in the one of the most discussed categories: the programs that arrange, move, resize and do all sort of neat tricks with windows. Actual Window Manager may well be the most feature-packed of all, and its capabilities extend beyond managing windows: it also supports virtual desktops and multiple monitors with replicated taskbars, Start menus and a dual Alt+Tab app switcher.

The following was inspired by the recent DC thread Windows editors - do they have to be so bad?, and by the new (to me) HippoEdit text editor, which is surprisingly inventive for an editor this young. Rather then reviewing a single application here, I thought of pinpointing the features I find best in the several text editors I use daily. Then I though of listing some of the worst features as well, so this thread should be properly called The Best (And The Worst) Of (Some) Windows Text Editors (With Screenshots), For Your Entertainment.

I've only listed some of the stand-out features - those that are unique to an editor, are particularly impressive or useful, or those I cannot live without. I did not list features that are too common to mention these days (word wrap, auto indent), unless a specific implementation of a common feature seemed particularly inspired (or particularly not so).

I should also note that there is a lot I don't do with text editors. I almost never use them to write executable code. I never use persistent blocks or any implementation of text clips (I use AHK for text expansion and configuring the same set of clips separately in each editor sounds too much like work). Apart from writing short notes to self, I use text editors to search, replace, tweak or extract text and tags, often in xml files, from small to quite large (tens of megabytes). I thus pay much attention to speed and efficiency of editing large files and to the display capabilities that help visualize and navigate the thicket of tags and entities. I use regular expressions heavily and love incremental search. Finally, correct handling of Unicode is a must in my line of work, so editors that do well there score points with me (and TextPad, which does not, serves mostly as a scratchpad).

Since it's a long post, I might as well reveal right away that the moral of the story is nothing groundbreaking - there is no optimal editor, even given my limited range of uses. I have registered copies of all the editors listed here, and use them all interchangeably, since none does it all. Of course the other moral of the story is that all authors of the editors mentioned herewith should bow before this post daily and start implementing the missing best-of features posthaste, to one-up the competition. Or better still, five-up them.

After more than eighteen weeks of private beta testing and eight months since previous version, Total Commander 7.50 public beta 1 is finally available.

Official announcement: http://www.ghisler.ch/board/viewtopic.php?t=21820

The newest version brings out almost 600 fixes (mostly related to new functionality) and many new features. In this mini-review I will try to focus on the biggest changes only because I want to avoid copy&paste of help file. I recommend to take a look on Help or HISTORY.TXT files (some additions will be listed at the end of my post though).

Cropper is a screen-capture application written in C# that leverages the image processing functions from the System.Drawing and System.Drawing.Drawing2D namespaces of the .NET Framework.  It was written by Brian Scott as a programming exercise in C#, but has gained a fair degree of popularity through a succession of versions.  It is particularly well-suited to taking a series of captures of the same size.  

One of the things I loved about Vista was the desktop gadgets, especially the photo frame one.  I really missed it when working on Windows XP, and so was very happy to find myPhotoFrame on Bits Du Jour.  myPhotoFrame is a very small application that does one thing, and does it well in a small memory footprint- displaying photos in an overlay on the desktop.  The frame can be changed, and the size of the window and photo scaled, along with mouse over transparency changes to allow you to see your desktop through the window.

Who is this app designed for:
In this digital age with small cubicle sizes, sometimes it's not feasible to have photos plastered around your workspace.  myPhotoFrame can display a folder of family photos on your desktop discretely to always keep those memories with you.

SharePod is an application to allow you to circumvent the use of iCrap (iTunes, for those of you still attached to the demon that have yet to realize it). I utilized this, along with the temporary assistance of SongBird, to prepare my iPod and skip iTunes altogether.

Check it out.  I've included a funny little story about mouser related to this.
http://aram.dcmembers.com/software/quick-shutdown/

GTAIV is a sandbox/action/roleplaying game where you take on the roll of Niko Bellic. You come to Liberty City, America on a promise from your relative and a string of lies ensues. He lets you live at his apartment, and the game drops you into its massive world. Usual GTA storyline start since GTA3.

I know this was already done here more extensively than my review, but it's my preferred program.  Check it out: http://aram.dcmembers.com/software/direct-folders/

All of these programs appear in my wannabe Zaine list:
http://aram.dcmembers.com/superior-software-list/

It's been a long time coming, but I finally put up my first DC software review.  I implemented some new features for the first time in this article, to make it look more professional, like something you read in a magazine.  Please check it out: http://aram.dcmembers.com/software/findrun-robot

Defense Grid: The Awakening is a high quality Tower Defense game created by Hidden Path Entertainment. The story is that hundreds of years previously, a bunch of aliens attacked. After the aliens were (barely) defeated, the General who commanded the armies (or whatever) had his brain downloaded into a Defense Grid in case they ever attacked again. Well, now they are attacking again, and the Defense Grid awakens. That is, the Defense Grid is the AI that controls all aspects of the towers. Aiming, firing, building, upgrading, etc. You're just the guy who tells the Grid where to put stuff. The power cores provide electricity to the grid and that's why if they're all stolen, it's game over--because when they're gone, all the defenses power down.

The objective of the game, like all TD games, is to build defense towers along a path to prevent the aliens from reaching your base. Your "base" in this game is really the location of the power cores. It differs from most TD games I've played in that when the aliens actually reach the power cores and take them, they don't just disappear and the power core is not immediately lost forever^*. Instead, the aliens have to make their escape with the power cores. This gives you a chance to recover them if you kill them before they escape. When an alien carrying a power core is killed, the power core slowly makes its way back to the base. But if any other aliens are nearby, they can pick it up wherever it is when they reach it and start running toward the exit.

Introduction

Now this time, some of you may know what Cortex Command is, due to the extremely generous act by Scancode a few weeks ago. But i take it that not everyone knows what it is, or that you may just want a rating before you try it.

See, Cortex Command is a retro-style platformer-like shooter game, which is still under development. Right now there's only a minimal part of the campaign available, but Data, the creator, has said that there will be a full and extensive campaign once it's done. Although it's a WIP game, Data has been charging for licenses since Test Build 19. The current price is 18 US dollars, but should be expected to rise as the game nears completion. The current test build is 21.

In game, everything is based on the pixels you see. There are basically three types of pixels: Active pixels, which are moving and have physics applied to them, passive pixels, which are frozen and act like terrain, and background pixels, which can't be affected by the player at all, and are generally behind everything. This might be misleading though, as one might get the sense that you just control a pixel or something, which is entirely wrong. Your (standard) avatar would basically be a brain in a jug, sort of. This brain can control clones, robots, rockets and so on, and you can freely switch between all your units.

But there are two things that really makes Cortex Command shine: The physics, which applies to anything that is active, and even to terrain to a certain degree, and the near-absolute modding freedom. Everything except the very core of the game can be modified, and you can also create your own content.

Intro:
Helicon Filter is a complete image editing solution for the digital photographer.
Pro Version used in review, but there is only minor difference for most users.

Who is this app designed for:
Originally I thought this was a fantastic easy to use program for the average photo taker that wants to perform some improvements to their photo's.
But after using for a while you will find that there are some unique and Power user options, tools that Photoshop find difficult if not impossible are a breeze in Helicon Filter.

The Good
Fast, Fast, Fast.  If you need to improve some photos quickly, turn out some work that is presentable, this is it. Make some adjustments, save the adjustments and apply them to other images or batch process a whole folder.

Simple, even your mother could use this. (my mum could not use Photoshop)

Powerful, there are some features that are unique, but you have to poke around to find them (especially in Pro)
Easy frame tool, reduce noise by colour, side by side comparisons, noise and sharpening maps, blur/sharpen brush, eyedropper white balance, Image stacking HDR, etc.

The needs improvement section
Programmers probably take for granted what a new user does not understand, the tutorial/help section is good, but you need to read it over and over.
Some buttons and sliders are available, and you will need to dig to learn what they perform. No layers or masks.

Right now, what you're probably thinking is something along the lines of "What the heck is Toribash?"

Well, it's actually pretty hard to explain, but i shall try. Toribash is a turn-based fighting game, where you control a ragdolls joints and set them to do whatever when you press space, or in case of on-line play, when the time runs out.

One thing that really makes Toribash stand out among others isn't only that it's an indie game, but that it's also entirely physics based, with no pre-rendered moves or anything. Everything is rendered real-time. One should think that this would be enormously taxing for ones CPU, right? But this isn't true. While the early versions of Toribash was very unoptimized, the new versions run incredibly smooth, considering the amount of calculations done.

And you know how people say that the best things in the world are free, right? Well, guess what? Toribash is free! Ever since version 3.0, Nabi Studios, the creators of the game, has removed the 20$ price tag from the game, and now they earn their money by charging for many kinds of optional services.

Toribash even features its own little economy system, using a virtual currency called ToriCredits. These ToriCredits (Or TC as they're usually called) can be used to buy many different things in the ToriShop, like colors for your ragdoll (Or Tori), custom textures, colored trails and so on.

First impressions of the AerO₂bic Vertical Mouse

It's a "vertical" mouse aimed mainly at people who are having trouble with wrist/arm/shoulder related to using regular mouse.

well, I dont think anyone, excluding gamers(!), would pay this much for a mouse unless they're having trouble in some way related to the use of regular mouse. I should probably state at this stage that I do have problems with my left shoulder (I'm left handed). In the past I've had problems with my wrist, arm, elbow as well but not at the moment.

With this mouse, the hand actually rests completely on the mouse, thumb to top. You can move the mouse and leave the hand completely relaxed. I personally at this stage cant really say how good this is - I like it a lot but it reminds me of the first time I drove a car with 5 gears (as opposed to just 4) - I found it so incredibly difficult to do this little extra movement that I wasnt used to doing. Likewise now, I'm aware of muscles in my shoulder & down my back that probably have never made these specific movements ..

http://aerobicmouse.com

LineByter is a utility designed to find and extract patterns from text files.

It's a brand new (free) program coded by DonationCoder member Carl Danley (CodeByter) and released today.

It includes some unique features like duplicate removal, the ability to specify multiple match and reject patterns, and the ability to save and load profiles, that make it ideal for doing repeated things like extracting emails or urls from text files.

Motivation for the program

When we send out the DonationCoder mailing list, a certain number of the newsletter emails bounce back each month as undeliverable.  I use phplist to manage the web mailing list but lately what I've been doing is exporting these bounced emails from my email program and running an email extraction utility on the exported email to get a list of email addresses from these emails, and then feeding them into a script that turns off email notification for those users on the forum whose emails can be found.

In the past i've been using a now-discontinued utility designed specifically to extract emails.  But it's less than ideal.  It's a big clunky, it sometimes finds things that aren't emails, and sometimes misses real emails.  It also has a bad user interface and doesn't remove duplicates.  After i would run this utility i would bring the output file into a text editor, sort and remove duplicates, and then go through and remove certain emails, like those that are really donationcoder.com addresses and a a few known fake email address patterns that seem to show up regularly.

SO that's why I have been wanting for a while a little utility that is better at extracting emails and doing some of the things automatically that i have been doing manually.  Of course I could have written a little perl or python script for it, but i am a big fan of custom gui tools for such things.

LineByter is the program that emerged from my discussions with Carl about this idea.  It's actually a much more general purpose program that can extract and reject all kinds of regular expression patterns, BUT it's also designed to be really easy to use and is focused specifically enough on the general workflow that i described above so that it's a real joy to use for this kind of stuff.


Features

Some key features of the program:

• You can drag and drop as many files to scan as you want.
• Nice progress bar so you can see how much more time it's going to take.
• Supports preset library of regular expressions so you can easily just select common patterns and add your own presets -- this is super important for letting you quickly reuse patterns and makes it suitable even for those who don't understand regular expression syntax.
• Lets you specify a list of multiple patterns that are being searched for and how to extract the data you want from these patterns.
• Lets you specify a list of additional patterns which should be rejected even if they match the first list (ideal if you want to find and extract all email patterns except those with certain properties).
• Shows a nice complete report of why each pattern was found and/or rejected.
• Automatically removes duplicates.
• Produces a final list of results in text form that can be copied to clipboard or saved to file.
• Can save and load profiles so you can reuse configuration settings for common jobs you perform.

A few days ago i was in need to implement a file upload capability in one of my web applications. It should work on clientside without any special programs like a FTPClient or sth. like that. Only with the pure, available on every PC, webbrowser.

The ugly side of the story was, that uploads with browsers sucks. You have no real progress tracking. But i like to have this feature. So i researched a bit and learned that is isn't possible with only PHP right out of the box, if you haven't installed PHP V 5.2 or higher on your server or use some patched unofficial PHP corefiles. In the 5.2+ versions of PHP there are hook functions built in to monitor http uploads. But i was stuck with PHP 5.1.2, so no hooks for poor JoTo and i reject to use unofficial hacked core files.

So i accepted to have a hybrid solution with a combination of PHP and Perl/CGI that can do the trick. I searched a bit further and found a wonderful component named XUpload from Sibsoft. I downloaded the thingy and it worked for me, right out of the box, after a short and easy install. So i decided to share this information with you all, in the case someone is in need also in the future.

Features i liked:

• A continuous realtime progress bar and information about uploaded amount in percent and KB, upload speed, used as well as remaining time


• Handles big files also (i tested it up to 600MB yet)


• The upload page and the embedded form, as well as the upload status window, are very customizable using a template system and CSS


• The upload form is extensible with as many user defined fields as you wish


• The upload CGI is fully transparent and you can redirect all form data, after the upload finishes, to any URI you want (to process the uploaddata yourself - e.g. like me to my PHP script again to send a notify email about the upload

The older version 2.6 of XUpload is free. There is also a PRO Version 3.0 of XUpload with many more features (, page inline progressbar, ...) for purchase at $37 per domain. But even the free version is very usable for most cases and can be used for as many domains as you wish.

http://www.sibsoft.net/xupload.html

DeVeDe is a(nother) video converter, but with the sole purpose of producing DVD's viewable on a TV using a standalone DVD player

Features (from the site)


I'll start by saying that I have (until recently) had no interest in or requirement for anything like this, hence my knowledge of all things relating to video editing, conversion, production, etc is practically nil, and as such, I have absolutely no qualifications for writing this review...

Recently though my inlaws purchased a shiny new HDD camcorder...

how is that relevant?  well, for a start they are techonogically challenged.  They really shouldn't have any tech whatsoever, period.  They didn't seek any advice regarding their purchase, just what the salesmen told them on the day (I think you can see where I'm going with this....)

...

DeVeDe on the other hand was something of a revelation.  Not only was it dead simple to use, but I understood what it was doing, and I got good results (choose the output format (DVD, VCD, SVCD, CVD or DivX), add my files, answer the prompts, and I'm done!!)

The interfaces are logical, clean, and simple, with all the common functions ready to hand, and the lesser only a click away.  

mouser and I have been using redmine lately for various projects, and I must say it really helps productivity.
I find this kind of the ultimate `getting-things-done` tool, even if you don't need a bugtracker for what you're doing per se. It's a bit hard to explain everything so I'll just break down the features below:

I just got my copy of "The Best of 2600: A Hacker Odyssey" and thought I would post a little about it.

For those of you not familiar with the magazine "2600", it's a small magazine about hacking phones and computers, that was stared in the mid-80s as a few printed sheets stapled together and mailed out by a couple of college students. It's always been a kind of loosely put together collection of musings and pictures of odd phones, and the occasional cool hack.  It's always had a very distinctively underground feel, bordering on illegal, and has developed a kind of cult following.  I've always been a fan of the magazine though i don't understand most of it and only read it occasionally.

With the release of this new big anthology, the best writing of 2600 is about to become a lot more well known.

The book is edited and contains chapter introductions (sometimes substantial) by Emmanual Goldstein, one of the original founders of 2600 and still the driving force behind the magazine.

I expected the book to have the eccentric/indie feel of the magazine and be similar in organization to anthologies like "The Best of Creative Computing" -- that is, filled with pictures and organized into randomly themed areas.

Instead, the book is organized chronologically, and separated into 3 main sections for the decades of the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, and subchapters in each section.

It's a big hardcover book, 871 pages.  And there are no pictures or photos(!).  This is actually a little strange given how many photos and illustrations are in the magazine normally.. I wonder in fact if this wasn't a decision made out of legal concerns.. No explanation is given.

The lack of images and the minimal discussion about the history of the magazine is going to be a little disappointing to anyone who gets the book hoping for a visceral immediate feeling of nostalgia the way one gets from reading the Creative Computing anthologies for example, nothing looks or feels like the original magazine, and the articles are all professionally laid out and typeset uniformly.

It's a great collection of essays that reflect the hacker mindset and the amateur hobbyist perspective on hacking -- a collection that anyone interesting in the history of hacking would be thrilled to own.

If you're expecting to get a collection of the best hacker writing in the last 3 decades, suitable for a general audience, you're likely to be dissapointed.  2600 was always hackers writing for other hackers, and these are not professional writers.  And if you're expecting a visual walk down memory lane through the history of 2600 you'll also be disappointed.

But if you are looking for a collection of the best essays from three decades of the magazine and the hacker community, providing a representative and thorough look at the emerging issues in hacking over time, you've got yourself a new bible.  It's a fascinating book and a great way to jump into the raw source literature if you like that kind of thing and are curious about the hacking community.  And if you're a fan of the magazine it's impossible not to be a fan of this book.

When I read about Direcscape I had to give it a try, because I simply could not understand what it was about! I downloaded the file, 680 KB, and double-clicked it. It is a WinZip SelfInstaller that will unpack to the silly folder name, "Install Direcscape". Would you go looking under the letter "I" to find Direcscape? I wouldn't, so I unpacked the container again to see what had happened. I found it and installed it in a folder named extSoftware. I tell you these minor details because the Direcscape installer will not create any shortcuts for you, so...

...

Now came the big question. What the heck was I to do with this program? At first I found it to be extremely strange if it was supposed to be some kind of a file manager that would navigate. But it isn't. All it will do if you click inside the program is to open Explorer. Hmm...!?? It certainly took me more than a moment to understand what was happening. And studying the readme.txt didn't do much ("This is a sample file." End of story!). Well, the program actually comes with a chm help file and a link to on-line tutorials, so eventually I started to figure out what it all is about. And because of the tutorials you really don't need me to tell much. But I will say that as I kept on trying the program, it became clear to me how smart it is that the author has left it to Explorer to do what Explorer is meant to do, instead of trying to make Direcscape replace Explorer.

But what is it then, Direscape? No matter what intentions the author may have for this program, I will say that Direcscape is a VERY fine tool to prevent you (me) from getting lost in a project - I would say Direcscape is a project viewer, if ever there was one. I would also call it a Project Organizer, but in the sense that I will organize the view of the project's folders and files, not the project itself, if you know what I mean.

Well, it seems that CamSpace, http://www.camspace.com, is in Beta3 mode and they sent out invites to the people that signed up (I never got mine, though. Anyone got theirs?).  Here's three videos of someone trying to use CamSpace to emulate a mouse: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0AYnNzr_uO4, http://www.youtube.com/wa...2hT-ejlrA&feature=related, http://www.youtube.com/wa...uIKe4HUEI&feature=related and here is a video of someone using it on Google Earth type application: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xoSS5QiyX4. Note that these videos appear to be from people who have actually gotten copies of the program and are not promotional videos.

Some of you may remember the WebCam Signature program I submitted for the DC Programming Contest that contained an experimental webcam mouse mode (http://webcamsignature.wikidot.com). From coding that program and watching these videos, I feel that I can provide some useful information for people that haven't gotten an invite yet.

Espresso is a powerful permissions-based email client designed to completely eliminate spam as you define it from your Inbox.

Espresso's unique email filtering system is based on common sense. Everyone knows from whom they want to receive email. Anyone else who sends you messages is sending you junk, otherwise known as spam. Espresso does not filter junk. It only looks for messages you want to receive based on simple, yet powerful rules. Using a number of options available, you decide how to handle messages from unknown senders.

A while back, I wrote a review of TaskPaper over on MacSpark.net (http://www.macspark.net/2...paper-win-a-free-license/).  The truth is that since then I've fallen once again into my old habit of tweaking the tool and not doing the necessary.  I played for a few months with RTM, again, and then settled to paper and my trusty, familiar old Moleskine pocket notebook (the same one I've carried everywhere for the past three years).  But now and then I have opened TaskPaper, updated my lists, downloaded the latest development version, and every time I've done this I've breathed a sigh of pleasure and relief.  There's something about plain text that I find so appealing.

But since I work on a Mac at home and on PCs during the day, I've searched for the best way to carry my lists.  What I've done in the past is to use the portable version of Notepad++, which is a fine solution and does the job perfectly well, but really only to a minimum of usability when you compare with what's possible in TaskPaper.

And then along came TodoPaper ($29.99, http://widefido.com/products/todopaper/), which bills itself as inspired by TaskPaper.  The two programs are, in fact very similar, especially when you compare TodoPaper to the recent development versions of TaskPaper.

Both are really sophisticated envelopes for plain text files.

This is an update to my 2005 review that is titled "Casual User Review" and located at the following link:
Initial 2005 Review

I am still proud to say that I still use the program on a casual basis.  What I mean by this is that the program has a lot of features and options and can do very specific things, but I don't use them all.  MLO is essentially a fancy To-Do list.  That is the simplest way to describe it.  However, it takes the idea of a todo list and packs in a feature set that will allow you to really break free from the traditional checkbox task list.  So, I'll let other users comment more on the intricate features of MLO and I will stick to explaining, on a general macro level, why this program is so useful even for the casual user.

Obulis is an outstanding physics based puzzle game for the PC.  It began as a pair of excellent PocketPC games (Obulis and Obulis: The Second Epoch), which recently were named in a list of "All-Time Top 10 Games" by Smartphone and PocketPC Magazine (April/May 2008).  Now that the game has made the transition to the desktop, there is no reason not to install the demo and take a look.  You won't be disappointed.

John's Background Switcher

I am personally surprised that I didn't find more about this gem when I searched the DC forums!  This background switcher is probably the best I have ever used.  

It provides not only the ability to use pictures you select, or entire folders and sub-folder you select, but also allows for random Flickr and Yahoo photos/pictures!  You read correctly, you can configure John's Background Switcher to grab the top 100 or whatever user specified number of photos/pictures off Flickr and Yahoo for endless random backgrounds.  You can also specify tag/text keywords for Flickr, and search terms for Yahoo.  

There are other services that unfortunately I don't subscribe to or use, specifically Phanfare, Smugmug, and Picasa.

Now get this, new to the version released this weekend, you can also get your friend's and your own FACEBOOK photos!

Jungle Disk (from now on JD) is an application that lets you store files and backup data securely to Amazon.com's S3 ™ Storage Service. Unlike other services, with Amazon S3 ™ there is no minimum and no maximum amount of data you can store.  You pay only for the actual amount of storage you are using. It supports 256-AES encryption if desired.

In practice it's possible to access the JD drive as a mapped network drive in explorer, over WebDav or via the local http server (JD Plus). JD keeps a local cache of 1GB by default which allows most operations to be instantaneous with any changes being made transparently in the background. There's an inbuilt backup utility included which works well and previous versions are kept if desired. This approach makes JD suitable for backup purposes as well as temporary file storage or as an remote filesystem as it will work with native copy tools such as robocopy, sync tools such as SyncToy and SFFS etc.

Version 2 (in development and tested here) includes some excellent refinements, partly based on user feedback, these include but are not limited to (see release notes):

• New User Interface
• Support for new Jungle Disk 2.0 buckets as well as Compatibility buckets, which can be shared with other S3 tools
• Support for connecting to multiple buckets at the same time
• Support for multiple backup jobs with independent scheduling
• Expanded bandwidth limiting feature
• New Previous Versions features
• Verify MD5 hash on downloads (as well as upload)

App Name	GCstar
App URL	http://www.gcstar.org/

After looking at the mess created by all the items sitting in my shelves, drawers, and other unspecified places (room corners, for example), I decided that it was impossible to remember what I have and where it is, so it was time to put my ass to work and catalog these things to prevent future losses and be able to accumulate more crap have quick access to my precious belongings.

So I searched around for the software to let me accomplish such thing. The main option was (and continue to be, despite this post) MediaMan, a very polished piece of software that lets you catalog music, films, books and other media pulling data from the Internet, but shareware. A quick search in DC also unearthed Libra, very much like MediaMan, not as good, but freeware, and Listal, a web service that looks like a nice option to have your data up in the cloud, while having a social component in it, it seems you can even backup that data locally.

Then I remembered that an OSS movie cataloging software called GCfilm stopped development a while ago to be fully rewritten and contain every kind of collectible thing created by humankind. So, I googled it, and came upon GCstar. GCstar is a cross platform app, that uses the GTK toolkit and several external libraries to do its job.