Free Software

Once upon a time, you knew exactly what was connected to your home network: your desktop, a laptop maybe and perhaps even your mobile phone. These days, keeping track of networked devices -- from printers to smart TVs -- can be a painful task.

If you’re wondering what’s currently connected to your home network -- perhaps you’re worried about security, or surprised at how slow your internet speeds are -- then you need help. And if you’ve got an Android, iPhone or iPad, help is delivered in the form of Fing -- Network Scanner.

SecurityXPloded has announced the release of SX Antivirus Kit, a collection of its system checking and malware detection tools.

Despite the name, there’s no antivirus engine here, nothing to directly detect and remove threats. The 14 bundled programs are more focused on manual detection, helping you spot any signs of malware on your PC.

Christian Kaiser has released Lightscreen 2.0, a major new version of his open-source screen capture tool for Windows and -- as of version 2.0 -- Linux.

Also available in portable form, Lightscreen 2.0 debuts a number of major new features, including screenshot previews, support for uploading photos to imgur.com with full history of uploaded shots.

Prefetching is an excellent Windows technology which records the files loaded when an application starts, helping the system to optimise their launch times in future.

Normally this all happens entirely in the background. But if you’re having launch problems with a particular application, or you just want to better understand how your PC works, then NirSoft’s WinPrefetchView might be able to help. (As long as you’re not using an SSD, anyway – prefetching is unnecessary and, probably, disabled.)

JPEG compression is amazingly efficient, but while this is normally good news, it’s a little disappointing when you’re archiving. Store your JPEG library in a zip file and you’ll barely cut their size at all.

Choose a more specialist compression format, though, and the results can be very different. WxPackJPG is a graphical front end for the open-source PackJPG. It claims to compress JPEGs by up to 20 percent.

The software you run on a PC may be packaged in several different formats: EXE, DLL, CPL and so on.

These file types aren't just for executable code, though. They can also contain resources for the program can call on, as required: icons, bitmaps, cursors, videos and more.

Trend Micro has announced the availability of two free scanners for the Heartbleed bug, meant for Google Chrome and Android. The first, a browser add-on, allows users to enter and check any specific URL.

The second, an Android app, is a little more advanced. It checks whether your device or apps are directly affected by the bug, or whether any installed apps access a cloud service which is still vulnerable.

Team MediaPortal has released a major update of its open-source media center software for Windows. MediaPortal 1.7.0 FINAL comes with a number of under-the-hood changes that will impact the program going forward, including future plans for a home screen editor within the MediaPortal itself.

The new build also promises enhancements to the TV and video On Screen Displays, a new Wake On LAN feature and support for accessing information about video files automatically.

As you might guess from its name, Rain Alarm is a smart app which can warn you about imminent snow or rain. That doesn’t sound too special -- there are a host of tools promising to do the same thing -- but this one has what it takes to stand out from the crowd.

It’s about as cross-platform as you can get, for example: there are apps for Android, iOS, Windows Phone and Windows 8; add-ons for Firefox and Chrome, or you can just visit the Rain Alarm website from almost anything with a browser.

It seems that there have been few big names left unaffected by the Heartbleed bug in OpenSSL. Google may have rushed to patch the flaw, but the number of websites and services that fell foul of the discovery is staggering. It seems that even stalwarts of security are finding themselves in troubled waters, and this includes anonymizing service Tor.

Put very simply (very, very simply!), Tor works by not only encrypting data that is transferred online, but also bouncing it around a number of servers, making it all but impossible to trace to a particular user or computer. It transpires that some of the Tor nodes that are used in the process are running versions of OpenSSL that are vulnerable to Heartbleed, and this has led to calls for the affected nodes to be closed down. Writing to the Tor mailing list, developer Roger Dingledine suggests that up to 12 percent of the network's capacity may be lost if all of the vulnerable nodes are taken offline.

WordPress.org has announced the release of WordPress 3.9, a significant update which brings a host of worthwhile improvements.

Uploading your images is now as easy as dragging and dropping them into the editor. Once there, quicker access to crop and rotation tools, as well as the ability to resize them "in place", makes for a smoother editing experience.

Building the perfect ad-blocker is a complex business, not least because your users can have very different ideas on how it should work.

Some developers try to address this with layer after layer of features. You’ll be able to whitelist this, blacklist that, and add custom filters for just about everything else. Sounds great, until you have to spend an age learning how everything works, and start to notice how all these layers are slowing you down.

Astonsoft has released EssentialPIM Free 5.8 and EssentialPIM Pro 5.8, major new versions of its personal information manager tool for Windows.

Also available in portable form as well as on Android and iOS, version 5.8’s headline feature is integration with the new EPIM Cloud feature, allowing data to be synced using the cloud.

Deleting files from Windows Explorer is usually very easy. Select your target, tap "Del", click the "Yes, I really mean it" button and the object disappears forever. (Or is sent to the Recycle Bin, anyway.)

Sometimes you’ll get an "in use" error, though, usually because the file is locked by Windows or the system. It’s best to find out why -- the file could be important -- but if all else fails, a specialist tool like Unlocker can help you to delete it anyway.

Piriform has released Defraggler 2.18 and Defraggler Portable 2.18, minor updates to its Windows freeware defrag tool.

Version 2.18 builds on the previous release by adding additional functionality to the recently introduced Statistics tab as well as implementing a new Quick Optimize feature for sold-state storage drives.