Articles about Free Software

Gamers of yore will remember the delight that could come from playing a text-based computer game. Forget pushing polygons around the screen as fast as a GPU's legs can pump, these were games where words were king. Back in 1984, the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy game took the gaming world by storm and now, thirty years later the BBC has resurrected the classic title in an exclusive online version that's free for anyone to play.

This accessible and hilarious sci-fi classic translated well into a game, and whether you missed it the first time around or you like the idea of reliving the mid-80s, warm up your keyboard and prepare to type your way to victory -- and immense frustration. This is not the first time the game has been revived, but this time around there is an HTML5 version to enjoy and there are some comedic touches right from the start. The game developers decided to replace the $, % and ^ symbols with symbols for the Altarian Dollar, Flanian Pobble Bead and the Triganic Pu, "not because they are needed in the game, but just because we felt like it."

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Microsoft has unveiled an update to its Windows chat app with the release of Skype for Windows 8 v2.6. Version 2.6 unveils one major update, support for syncing read chats and picked-up calls across multiple devices.

The new feature means that users can switch from their Windows 8 device to another platform and be sure that any chat updates or picked-up calls made on the secondary platform are now acknowledged by the Windows 8 app too.

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Download a program called "CopyCD" and you're probably not going to expect very much. Copying discs is a very basic task, after all, and limiting itself to CDs makes the program seem even worse.

CopyCD's extremely basic interface -- like something written on day 2 of a "Learn Visual Studio" course -- doesn't help. You're able to choose your "master" drive (the source), and your "copy" (the destination); an "OK" button launches the copy process, while an "Exit" button closes CopyCD down. Can that really be it?

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The larger your movie and media collection, the harder it can be to manage. What happens if your carefully crafted naming convention proves incompatible with the new media server you’ve switched to? Or you’re missing artwork for a selection of movies? And is it too much to ask about obtaining subtitles without too much fuss?

The solution to all of these woes can be found with one incredibly clever, and completely free, tool for Windows, Mac and Linux. That tool is FileBot 4.0.

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Most capable video editors provide at least some kind of subtitling ability, and this is usually very straightforward: position the video, type some text, it appears on the screen and is saved as a part of the clip.

Simple? Yes, but this approach has problems: the video must be re-encoded, reducing image quality; the subtitles will probably become a little blurred, and the file size is likely to increase.

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These days, most people find themselves browsing on a variety of devices: computers, smartphones and tablets. It’s why most browsers have developed tools for automatically keeping everything in sync across all your tech, but the downside is you normally have to tie yourself into one service or browser.

If you’re a Mac user, that usually means tying yourself into Apple’s Safari web browser for iCloud Tab syncing, but you can access the pages you’ve got open on your iOS device on any browser you like with a free app called CloudyTabs 1.0.

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Preme for Windows is a clever free tool which extends your windows desktop with a host of time-saving tricks.

There are new ways to open files and applications, for example. You get special mouse actions to arrange, dock, maximize or minimize program windows. And there are functions to adjust volume, close windows, remap hotkeys, and more. A Settings screen helps you decide which of Preme’s features you’d like to use. Check "Scroll any windows", perhaps, and you’re able to scroll any window, even if it’s not active. Just move the mouse cursor over it, and spin the mouse wheel.

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Independent testing group AV-Comparatives has released its 2014 Internet Security Survey.

The survey asked 5,845 users from around the world their views on security and reveals that when it comes to antivirus protection Americans like to get it for free whilst Europeans prefer to pay.

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Kaspersky Lab has announced the first public betas of Kaspersky Anti-Virus 2015 and Kaspersky Internet Security 2015.

There are no details on new features, as we write, but the most obvious change so far is the simplified, subdued interface. Plain buttons highlight four key task areas -- "Scan", "Updater", "Reports" and "Virtual Keyboard", for Anti-Virus 2015 -- and clicking any of these causes a new task pane to fade into view.

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Team XBMC has unveiled the first public beta of XBMC 13.0, its open-source, cross-platform media server and center. Version 13.0, codenamed "Gotham", ships after more than a year of development, and is packed full of new and improved features.

Chief among these are limited support for stereoscopic 3D rendering, improved touchscreen and UPnP capabilities, Android hardware decoding and what Team XBMC terms "dramatic" audio engine enhancements.

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Evernote Corporation has released Evernote 5.2 for Windows Desktop, the latest build of its cloud-based note-taking tool that’s also available on Mac and other platforms.

There are two improvements of note in version 5.2: image annotation, whereby users can now annotate images from within Evernote itself, while Evernote for Business users show now enjoy vastly improved sync performance.

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Backing up the contents of a USB key is simple enough: plug it in, open Explorer, select any important files and copy them wherever you like.

The process can become a little tedious, especially if you’re doing it all the time. But there could be a very easy solution. Just get the free-for-personal-use USBFlashCopy to automatically run any backups for you.

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The image viewer market is a tough and competitive place, and it’s extremely difficult for newcomers to stand out from the crowd. You might try to pack in the features, for instance -- but it probably won’t make any difference. A big-name contender like IrfanView has been around for almost 18 years, and creating something even a fraction as powerful would take a very long time.

Fortunately, Fragment Image Viewer took another route. It’s not crammed with functions, there are no editing or batch processing tools: compared to many viewers, it’s really quite basic. But the program does have a few interesting and unusual tricks, which might, perhaps, persuade you to give it a try.

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FastStone Software has released FastStone Image Viewer 5.0 and FastStone Image Viewer Portable 5.0 for Windows PCs. The free-for-personal-use tool provides image browsing, converting and editing capabilities.

Version 5.0 adds a number of minor new features, tweaks some existing settings and comes with various minor bug fixes and improvements.

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NirSoft has announced the availability of ImageCacheViewer, a simple tool which scans your web browser caches (IE, Firefox and Chrome are supported), and lists any images it finds.

The program's report is presented in the usual NirSoft table, and includes the URL of each image, the browser used to access it, the image type, the date and time of the image file, the date and time it was viewed, and the file size.

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