Articles about Free Software

Emulating old computers, consoles and even entire arcade machines on your computer is nothing new. Back in the early 90s it was possible to emulate 8-bit computers on your Atari ST or Amiga, and these days you can emulate all kinds of computers, gaming consoles and even arcade machines.

But what if you have a hankering for playing old favorites from more than one console platform on your Mac? The answer lies in the recently released OpenEmu 1.0.1.

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The Windows Club has released Ultimate Windows Tweaker 3.0 for Windows 8 and 8.1 users. The lightweight, portable freeware tool makes it easy to tweak various aspects of Windows that usually hidden away or require access to Registry editor or Group Policy Editor.

The new release sits alongside the previous version, Ultimate Windows Tweaker 2.2, which requires Windows Vista or 7.

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You’ve spent ages building the ultimate digital movie and TV collection, and now you’re ready to introduce it to a media server, so it’s easily accessible from a range of devices. The only problem is, you’ve named and organized your files in such a way as your media server can’t match them to the correct TV show and movie, leaving ugly filenames in their place.

One option is to painstakingly start renaming all your files to suit your media server. The other is to enlist the help of a dedicated tool, such as Collbee 1.0 or FileBot 3.8.

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Firefox OS may have been with us since last year, but it's yet to make any sort of headway into the market. At CES, a new batch of partners has been unveiled which it is hoped will propel Firefox OS to mass popularity. Just as Android is not limited to use in phones and tablets, so Firefox OS has applications in other areas, and this is something demonstrated by the latest partnership with Panasonic. Working with Mozilla, the company will produce Firefox OS-powered smart TVs.

But of course there is great scope for Firefox OS to be used as a mobile platform, and this has already been explored to some extent. ZTE has produced a phone running Mozilla's operating system and in the coming year the company will be developing a "new Firefox OS line to give users more choice". But the success of an operating system is not just about getting customers on board -- developers are also vital.

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Cloud backup and sync provider Dropbox has released a major new stable build for desktop with the launch of Dropbox 2.6.2 FINAL for Windows, Mac and Linux. Version 2.6’s headline new feature is brand new, redesigned installers for Windows and Mac platforms, but there are some useful functional improvements too.

The redesigned installer aims to make the process as simple as possible, automatically downloading and installing the new version with significantly less user interaction than previously.

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If all the regular high-profile website hacks have persuaded you that using "password" as your password is a bad idea, then you could use a password generator to produce something more cryptic. There’s a problem, though. Most generators create random passwords like "dml&$s2j" or "lBH6-aa5", which are secure, but also very difficult to remember.

Pafwert is a password generator with a difference. Instead of churning out random text strings, it uses a far more intelligent algorithm to produce passwords which are both secure and memorable.

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Unchecky, the clever tool which adjusts setup programs so they don’t install adware by default, has been upgraded to version 0.2.

Core improvements start with support for many more installers. There have also been more than 20 issues resolved, some significant, which means this release is far more stable.

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Last November we took a look at Sound Valley, a fun program which plays the sounds of nature -- birdsong, rain, wind in the trees and more -- in the background, while you just sit back and relax.

We suggested at the time that it really needed a way to customize the existing scenes, perhaps create new ones, and it appears that the developer was listening: an update has just appeared with the beta of a new Scene Composer tool.

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If your PC is very unstable -- perhaps with blue-screen crashes or regular file corruption -- and all your usual troubleshooting tricks have failed, then it’s often a good idea to check for RAM issues. The Windows Memory Diagnostic tool does a reasonable job of identifying these, but you’ll probably get better results from a specialist third-party tool, like the open source MemTest86+.

Now almost ten years old, this fork of Chris Brady’s original MemTest86 has been regularly updated to support new hardware, and the most recent version saw some major additions (handles up to 2TB RAM, SMT support for up to 32 cores). It’s still ridiculously small, though, arriving as a 58KB download which unpacks a tiny 1.75MB ISO file.

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Kingsoft Software has seen in the New Year with major updates to its range of free and paid-for office suites for Windows. Despite minor version number changes, Kingsoft Office Suite Free 2013 users gain the ability to save documents in the later Word (.docx) and Excel (.xlsx) formats, a feature previously restricted to Kingsoft Office Suite Pro 2013 users.

Other new features across both builds include improved encryption options, a slew of new and improved features for Writer and Spreadsheet components and better stability.

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While they were originally designed for extremely dull automotive applications, QR codes have gone very mainstream in the past few years, and now appear just about everywhere. It’s easy to see why, as they’re just so convenient: scan one with your smartphone and you can immediately head off to whatever link they contain.

Creating QR codes for your own purposes is also very straightforward. Websites such as goQR.me will do it for free, or you could use Alternate QR Code Generator to create codes on your PC.

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Team MediaPortal has released a major update of its open-source media center for Windows. MediaPortal 1.6.0 FINAL comes with the promise of increased stability thanks to a MySQL update, better TV performance on selected live streams and support for a range of new plugins.

A number of improvements in MediaPortal 1.6 can be found within its Music section. There’s a rework of the Last.FM component for compatibility reasons, while the AllMusic scraper has also been updated to restore album and artist scraping functionality.

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You'll have noticed by now that my colleagues here are all busy promising to clean up their tech acts for the coming year. But I'm not going to do that.

I don't generally make resolutions anyhow -- it saves having to come up with excuses later -- so instead here's what I won’t be changing in 2014.

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After almost two years in the planning, alpha and beta stages, open source 2D drawing tool LibreCAD 2.0 has just been formally released.

The official LibreCAD blog details some of the additions and improvements that have been made along the way: an extended DXF library, new circle drawing methods, the ability to filters layers with regular expressions, hatching of ellipses, a quadratic form engine for intersections, SVG export, and more.

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While in theory there are many ways to control your PC, in practice most applications assume you’ll be using a mouse. And that’s just fine, unless your mouse is broken, the battery is flat, or maybe you can’t use one at all. And suddenly "point and click" doesn’t seem quite so easy any more.

NeatMouse can help to restore (almost) normal operations, though, by allowing you to emulate a mouse with your keyboard. You’ll be able to move it around, spin the scroll wheel, then left, right or middle-click, all with a keypress. It’s great for replacing a faulty mouse, but can also be used just occasionally, whenever you need to position your mouse cursor with pixel precision.

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