Bluelight Filter is a free Android app which aims to reduce the harmful effects of the blue light emitted by smartphones and tablets.

This could reduce eye strain, help you sleep better, and generally make the screen easier to read.

NirSoft has released ShadowCopyView and PreviousFilesRecovery, free tools designed to help you browse Windows’ volume shadow copies and restore whatever files you need.

ShadowCopyView lists all volume shadow copies on your PC, the hard drive snapshots created by Windows Vista and later.

IObit has unveiled the first public beta of IObit Advanced SystemCare 10, its hugely comprehensive do-everything PC maintenance suite.

The latest release has a new ad-blocker in IObit’s redesigned and extended Surfing Protection add-on.

Vector graphics editors are often bulky desktop applications, aimed very much at design experts, but Inker is very different. The package is a simple Chrome app, easy enough for almost anyone to use, and ideal for creating quick vector designs on a tablet which you can then reuse elsewhere.

The drawing tools cover the basics only, with a freehand pen, rectangles, ellipses, and text.

Choosing the right font for a document or graphic project can make a huge difference to the results, but the poor viewers in Windows and many applications make it difficult to find the font you need.

PrintMyFonts can help by displaying any or all of your fonts, enabling at-a-glance comparisons, and exporting the results as images or documents.

We’ve revisited a few veteran applications recently, but nothing that quite competes with Euler Math Toolbox, which began life in 1988 as a program for the Atari ST. These days, and still being regularly updated, the package has become a versatile suite of tools for exploring real and complex numbers, vectors, matrices and symbolic algebra.

This is all powered from a Matlab-like matrix language, and can integrate with Povray, LaTEx, even custom Python and C code for the most efficient scripts.

Just about every memory optimizer around claims that freeing up RAM will speed up your PC, but this isn't necessarily true. It all depends on how your RAM is currently being used.

Memory History Tool logs the processes using your RAM and maintains a history of the main memory hogs, helping you understand where your resources are going.

SoftDigi Easy GIF is a $20.95 suite of tools for creating and editing animated GIFs. The program doesn’t require any artistic or design ability. Open an existing animation and you can resize it, remove frames, change colors, set transparency and more, all in a few clicks.

A comprehensive editor allows drawing lines and shapes, adding text, spraying or filling areas with color, applying special effects, and more.

All Browsers Memory Zip is a free memory optimizer designed to cut your browser’s RAM usage. The program doesn’t just work with Chrome, IE or Firefox -- it recognizes and supports almost 40 browsers, out of the box.

Once installed, All Browsers Memory Zip monitors your running processes, looking out for supported browsers and checking their RAM usage.

If you’re looking for a free image editor then you’ll probably start with the big names, the latest updates, whatever’s made the headlines recently. But there’s also a whole world of mature software out there which doesn’t make the news, and isn’t updated often, yet could still deliver everything you need.

LightZone started life more than 10 years ago as a commercial RAW and JPEG processor, for example, but since going open source in 2013 the project has very quiet. There is some activity, though -- the last release was at the end of June, more on the way -- and there’s plenty of functionality to explore.

Core Temp is a powerful CPU temperature monitor which has been helping users watch their hardware since 2006.

The project seemed to have faded away in the past few years, but a series of updates in recent months has seen it roar back to life.

Icaros is a free FFmpeg-powered tool which extends Windows Explorer’s thumbnail support to just about any video format. The package can produce cover art thumbnails for Mkv, Flac, Ape, and Mpc files, and provides extended Windows Explorer properties for Mkv, Flv, Ogm, Ogv, Ogg, Flac, Ape, and Mpc.

Icaros was updated last month with the addition of its own cache, speeding up thumbnail display and ensuring you won’t be affected if Explorer deletes its own cache.

Deskew is an open source package which can detect skewed text in scanned text documents, and output a straightened version. It’s a command line tool, which is, well, inconvenient, but don’t let that put you off entirely -- it’s still probably easier than you’d expect.

The program doesn’t force you to install Tesseract or any other bulky components, for instance. The single 4MB includes Windows, OS X and Linux binaries and you can run any of them right away.

Notepad! is a nicely balanced Notepad replacement, accessible to just about everyone but with plenty of bonus extra features when you need them.

The interface is an immediate plus, its Office-like ribbon organising the program’s main features across three tabs.

Open Visual Traceroute is a Java-based, cross-platform networking toolkit which displays the path of your web traffic on 3D world map.

Despite the "Traceroute" name, that's not all. Bonus features include a Whois tool, and a WinPcap-powered packet sniffer which shows exactly what your traffic contains.