Free Download A Day

Here’s a handy little thingy to add life and art to your iTunes collection: AlbumArtFinder. It goes out into the cyberworld for you and locates images associated with the albums that you’ve saved and allows you to attach them to the albums, to be displayed as you play them.

The program first retrieves all the tunes you’ve saved and sorts them into the albums they came from originally (you can choose ALL albums or just those that don’t have images already associated with them). The generated list is displayed, giving you the chance to pick the albums you want to manage today. It then goes to Amazon and finds relevant images; the largest one is displayed but others that have been found are listed so you can look at them and decide which one you want to tag the album with. That’s all!

AlbumArtFinder requires the Microsoft .Net framework: a link to download it is provided on the page. Also you need iTunes: 4.7 or later although it may work with version 4.6.

Get AlbumArtFinder

Linux users — the ones who want total control of their desktop — will want to try the XFCE desktop environment. It’s a fast, lightweight environment for Unix and similar systems, visually appealing and easy to use.

Well, there’s easy and there’s easy. This is not for the casual user, or even for the power user: this is for people who like to operate at the system component level. It consists of a number of components, packaged separately, that the user can pick and choose to create the best personal working environment. The list includes: a settings manager, a window manager, a desktop manager and a control panel; a file manager, a printing helper, and an application finder; a session manager, a notification area, and at least three libraries of various functions and widgets. A sound mixer, a calendar/notification application, “toys” (less serious applications and add—ins), themes and an icon box come with the package.

The system runs on top of the operating system. Linux, NetBSD, FreeBSD, Solaris, Cygwin, and MacOS X are OSes that it’s known to compile and run on. If you don't have the time or know-how to compile it from the source code, ready-to-run binaries are available for Redhat/Fedora, Suse, and Mandrake, among other flavors of Linux.

Download XFCE

This unique shooting game has been described by its developers as "part Asteroids, part Robotron, and part Paint Shop Pro." Rightly so, since the player’s objective is to change the color of the entire screen from black to white (or white to black) by shooting blobs of red, green and blue at other larger blobs that appear on the screen. Once you hit a blob, it splits into smaller particles, and the part of the screen the blob hit is painted the same color. It looks senseless at first, but after a few games you will eventually experience a relaxing yet exciting feeling as swirling colors combine with funky dance music to create an LSD-inspired trip (but much more legal). Though this freeware will push your graphics card and CPU to the limit, Mono is one addicting game that shouldn’t be missed.

Download Mono