This latest edition of the All in One Secretmaker combines several features that will make it a valuable addition for users seeking to maintain their privacy online. Secretmaker's features include a built-in spam fighter, a pop-up ad blocker, a banner blocker, a cookie eraser, and a worm hunter, which helps aid in the fight against email viruses. Along with these features, the Secretmaker Web site...

With more and more individuals creating personal home pages, there is an increased interest in installing a chat server online so that interested parties can feel free to correspond with each other. This handy application allows users to do just that, with a maximum of ease and usability. With Conquer Chat, users can customize the appearance of their chat window, along with giving chatters the...

Despite its curious name, Fast Fourier Transform in the West (FFTW) is a powerful, free "C subroutine library for computing the discrete Fourier transform (DFT) in one or more dimensions, of both real and complex data, and of arbitrary input size." Developed by researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, FFTW purportedly has outstanding performance when compared with other DFT...

The Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC) is a method of compressing audio data. Whereas the widely known MP3 format sacrifices sound quality for a smaller compressed size, FLAC does not lose information in the encoding process. FLAC is an open source software project, and its homepage contains downloadable encoding utilities for most common operating systems. An excellent overview of the FLAC format...

This handy program allows users to listen to emails, text selections, and other written materials via a number of voices included with the software. With this free edition, users can change the speed of reading, the voice of reading, the volume of reading, and can also read the text and have it saved to a .wav file. From the program's Web site, users can read a FAQ section, and view several...

InstantGet 1.41 is a helpful and efficient download manager and accelerator that splits downloading files into multiple sections, essentially downloading each section simultaneously in order to increase downloading speed. InstantGet also has several rich management features, such as the ability to search for downloaded files by filename or comment, along with support for both the ftp and http...

The open source software movement has been gaining momentum over the past few years, as was affirmed by a fairly major announcement from the local government of Munich, Germany in May 2003. The city's decision to switch all of its 14,000 computers to run open source applications and operating systems is described in a news article from Computer World.

Network Probe 0.5 is a free network monitor and protocol analyzer that offers users an immediate picture of the current traffic situation on their network. Network Probe 0.5 also gives users the option to identify and isolate traffic problems and congestion throughout their entire network. Adding breadth and depth to the available features is the fact that users may also filter out selected...

"The Persistence of Vision Raytracer is a high-quality, totally free tool for creating stunning three-dimensional graphics." At this site, users can download the POV-Ray software for Windows, Macintosh, and Linux platforms. Source code is also available. Extensive documentation is provided online, but unfortunately there is not yet a downloadable version for offline viewing. Even people who are...

This handy application allows users to convert a multitude of images at one time, utilizing a command line utility so that users may process images in console mode. Users have the capability to convert images to a number of formats and may also resize, crop, rotate and mirror images. Equally interesting is the fact that users may also modify images using a sharpen tool, along with effects such as...