Software Links & Mini Reviews

Some of my favorite (and not so favorite) software, shareware and freeware programs. Some descriptions take the form of mini-reviews.

Display #
1	Giveaway of the Day Free software given away on a daily basis. Pretty good stuff most of the time too.
2	Electric Sheep A free, open source screen saver created by Scott Draves. It's run by thousands of people all over the world, and can be installed on any ordinary PC or Mac. When these computers "sleep", the screen saver comes on and the computers communicate with each other by the internet to share the work of creating morphing abstract animations known as "sheep". The result is a collective "android dream", an homage to Philip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
3	AVS4YOU Audio-Visual Software
4	Daz 3D 3D modeling software - models and accessories for Daz and Poser.
5	Firefox Add-Ons
6	InstantStorm InstantStorm is a Windows freeware tool for creating Flash based screensavers with many advanced features. All you have to do is to choose a SWF file, set screensaver parameters and compile an executable installer.
7	Inkscape An Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, or Xara X, using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format.
8	Renamer Powerful renaming program
9	TrueCrypt Free Open-Source Disk Encryption Software that allows you to hide the data even if forced to open the file.
10	FileZilla Nifty Freeware FPT Program
11	Spam/Spyware: AdAware
12	Security: ZoneAlarm I love ZoneAlarm, it's got some nice security features and is easy to use, but unfortunately it's a quirky program that doesn't always love every computer it is on. I had one laptop I could not reboot until I removed ZoneAlarm. If you are looking for a good firewall that will block both incoming and outgoing threats, it's a great program, but make sure you are backed up and that you set a restore point before you install it.
13	AntiVirus: AGV I love AGV, it's easy to use and install, doesn't eat up a ton of system resources and best of all there is a free version available to single end-users.
14	PDF to Word Converts PDF documents to Word formats through a simple web interface. After you upload the file, they convert it an email it back to you. It's a slower process than having a conversion program on your desktop, but it's free.