I recently stumbled upon FastStone Capture, which really made my head explode.

It's the screen capture program that does anything you can think of, including capturing a scroll page. You have the option to edit your capture right away, bluring some sensitive parts, adding comments, arrows, highlights, and then directly attach to a new mail, or send to the printer, etc... It is incredibly handy.

Bad news is that the last two versions are no longer free. The last free version is 5.3, but if you look at the change log you'll see that you don't lose a lot of awesomeness by sticking to this version. That said, I'm seriously considering buying the stuff (it's a lifetime cross version licence), for 20$ it's more than worth it.

Here's their website : http://www.faststone.org/

To download the last free version, here's some links. Or try googling "FastStone Capture 5.3" :
http://www.portablefreeware.com/?id=775
(I don't know this website, so be cautious. I downloaded my copy from a french website)

You might also like their image viewer, the accurately named Fastone Image Viewer, which is free.

'm a big fan of the Safari 3.1.2 browser by Apple.  Free. 

http://www.apple.com/safari/download/

Would anyone happen to know of a good FREE Registry Cleaner? It seems that every one I download will make me purchase the full program before it will actually fix all of my errors.

a.viary.com has a bunch of free web-based applications. At least it will, it's still in beta, so the only available tools right now are Phoenix, which is an image editor, Toucan, which is a color swatch/palette generator, Raven, a vector editor, and Peacock, which is a "visual laboratory". You can try to get a beta invite if you're interested. If you don't get it but are still interested, PM me for an invite. I've only got 5 invites though.

There are also tools like music generators and editors, known as Roc and Myna, and Rookery, which is kind of an online marketplace. When everything is finally released, you will in effect be able to make your own music, create album art for it, and sell the music on Rookery, all for free.




http://kayin.pyoko.org/iwbtg/ is host to a freeware game called I Wanna Be The Guy, which could easily be considered the hardest videogame in all of history. Ever. I'll let the game's explanation speak for itself:




If you can write Russian but lack a keyboard to do so, then you can use rusklaviatura.com. It takes what you type in English and transliterates it into Cyrillic characters.

A link on Digg directed me to a web browser called Minefield.  The primary draw for this browser, for me, was speed because I'm on a connection that slows way down once in a while.  Minefield is by Mozilla and is based on beta code that's going to be used in Firefox in the future.  It's billed as the fastest browser in the world, testing up to 10% faster than Google Chrome.  I can vouch for the fact that switching from Firefox 2 to Minefield I noticed a huge drop in loading times for web pages.

Obviously with any software still in testing there's some drawbacks.  When I installed it it installed over top of my Firefox 2 despite saying specifically that it would not, so now when I try to open Firefox it opens Minefield instead.  Another con is that very few of the add-ons I used with Firefox work with Minefield, despite it supporting a good percentage of them.  The add-ons I use that work are Download Accelerator Plus Integration and Download Statusbar.  That's 2 out of 10 add-ons that work, even after Minefield checked for add-on updates, and they're fairly non-essential.  Also Minefield uses the Firefox 3 theme which I wasn't a huge fan of.  When I tried to download the Firefox 2 theme to it I got a message saying it was incompatible.  So far those are the only concerns I've had, though.

Here's the add-ons I have that DON'T work, in case you're using one of them but want to try Minefield.

- Cooliris
- Download Embedded
- Flashblock
- Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer
- Greasemonkey
- IE Tab
- SwiftTabs
- UnPlug

There may be other add-ons out there that will give you similar functionality, but I haven't tested them out so I couldn't tell you for sure what works and what doesn't.

I'm in that boat as well.  Looking for a free converter from avi to dvd.  any suggestions?

thanks.  i'm gonna try that

honestly, i ended up using a torrent program and got a full copy of Convert X to DVD 3.0.  Doesn't have all the options i won't but it doesn't watermark my porn...er... files.