Free Download A Day

The squirrels at Free Download A Day are thrilled to announce a new site: www.FreeForYourSite.com is just like Free Download A Day, only different! Free For Your Site is devoted to discovering great, free software for webmasters. Whether you're just dabbling with a personal web site or run dozens of them, the squirrels are sure to find software that's useful for you. CSS editors! Form field validators! Scripting tools! Traffic analyzers! And more.

Check it out at http://www.FreeForYourSite.com! (FFYS has its own newsletter and RSS feed, too. Subscribe!)

How long did that job take? Do you really know, or do you have to guess? Whether you're on your own time, working for wages, or even working with billable hours, it's important to know how long it takes you to get the job done. If you don't remember when you started, how long you took for lunch, or even that couple of hours in the evening, you're not going to have an accurate number at the end of your project.

TimeTracker is a simple app based on a simple principle: when you're working, you're doing things on your computer. Running in your system tray,TimeTracker watches your activity, and when it sees no keyboard or mouse input for a set period of time, it assumes you're not working. Keeping a log of times of activity and inactivity allows you to get a better handle on just how much work you've done during the day.

You can generate reports for a set period of time, which allows you to look at elapsed time, whether for a single session, a day, or even multiple days. You can edit entries, so that you can back-out the time you spend surfing the web instead of actually working.

TimeTracker has a very small footprint and requires no installer. It runs on most Windows systems.

Download TimeTracker

Comodo Free Firewall is another weapon to add to your arsenal in trying to keep the Bad Guys from compromising your system, your data, and your life. Like all software firewalls, it works in two ways: it keeps bad things from coming into your system, and it keeps your system from sending bad things back out.

As with any firewall, you can configure which ports are open for incoming traffic. By keeping open only those ports you absolutely need, you limit your exposure to potential problems. As with software firewalls, it also keeps an eye on apps running on your system, and makes sure only those programs who have business talking to your network or the Internet are given permission to do so. By watching which apps talk to which ports, it can help keep spyware from "phoning home" with your credit card info and other such nastiness.

Comodo claims it can recognize over ten thousand applications that could be running on your system, and knows what types of potential vulnerabilities each of them can expose you to. This, coupled with its ability to serve up Smart Alerts, asking you in clear terms which apps should be allowed to send data beyond your machine, makes it an ideal tool to use as part of your overall security regimen, along with your regular antivirus and anti-spyware programs.

Comodo Free Firewall is a Windows app and is compatible with Win2k and later systems.

Download Comodo

Everybody's got a blog. Your mom has a blog; your kids have a blog. Some people even talk about free software on a blog. Do you have a blog?

Setting up a blog has always been an ordeal. You can use one of the free hosting services, but then you're locked into their designs, and often their ads. You can use some of the free blog systems, but you still have to get down in the guts of the server to configure them, make sure you're using–or even have access to–the right database. It's one headache after another. Isn't there something easy to set up and use?

Jaxed is a super simple blogging system. It boasts zero configuration, and doesn't even use a database, relying on XML files instead for its data. With an appreciation for the content in your blog, Jaxed is built in a SEO (search engine optimization) friendly way, to maximize your blogs visibility in the search engines.

A free download, Jaxed runs on modern Windows servers.

Download Jaxed

Windows is a complex beast. A lot of things happen behind the scenes to keep the system running. By extension, that means that there are a lot of things that can go wrong–or at least that could go better. Windows comes with a passel of tools to help take care of all this, but sometimes finding the right tool can be as obnoxious as the problem you're trying to fix or the setting you're trying to tweak.

Glary Utilities is a collection of soup-to-nuts utilities for Windows systems. With tools to clean up your hard drive and registry, identify and get rid of duplicate files and wasted space, and optimize system settings, you can give your machine a long-awaited tune-up. Also included are tools for file encryption and decryption, as well as a secure deletion tool, to keep your private data private, as well as a tracks eraser app, to clean up browser caches, cookies, and all.

With a clean, easy-to-understand interface, Glary Utilities makes it easy to make Windows bend to your will, and to keep your computer the lean, mean machine it was meant to be.

Glary Utilities runs on any 32-bit Windows system from Win98 forward.

Download Glary Utilities

In spite of the fact that people and programs work better when they speak a common language, that shared communication may be an unreachable dream. Document formats, image formats, music formats, video formats–it seems like everybody speaks a different language out there.

Let's say you have a .pdf document, but you need to edit it. You don't have a full-blown copy of Acrobat, so you can't edit that document. What if you could open it in Word and go from there?

Zamzar is a free online file conversion service. Supporting a huge number of file formats, you can make any file into just about any other type of file. Select your file, choose the type of file you would like it converted to, and pull the trigger. The source file is uploaded, and within several minutes, or an hour at most, you will get an email with a link to download the resulting file from Zamzar's server. The service also works with URLs, so you can convert a web page to .pdf, or grab a video from YouTube and convert it into a QuickTime file.

You can upload up to five files and URLs at once, with a maximum of 100MB combined size. Converted files are available for download for up to 24 hours, so you'll have adequate time to go collect your files. Since your files are traveling across the 'Net and living on somebody else's server, you'll want to choose carefully which files you want to work with; your list of your credit card numbers and banking passwords might not be a good candidate for conversion.

Zamzar is compatible with just everybody's system, as long as there's a web browser.

Try Zamzar

It started as a Monty Python sketch. It ended as the scourge of the Internet. Everybody hates spam, but it's a fact of life. Anything that helps to cut down on the amount of junk clogging out inboxes is a good thing.

Junkanoo runs on your desktop and keeps the spam away, while allowing the important stuff to pass through. Using a combination of filters, content recognition (most spam has a link to a website, for example), and other techniques, the publisher claims they can keep 98% of all junk mail out of your inbox and can kill it on the server before you ever download it. You can create your own filters, as well as maintaining a whitelist, to make sure that your mom's messages always get through.

You can check any number of POP3 email accounts, so you can keep things tidy both at home and at work.

Junkanoo is a Windows application and runs on any 32-bit Windows system, from Win95 up through XP.

Download Junkanoo

Okay, the truth is out: we all love Legos! There's always been something very satisfying about the look and feel of those little plastic blocks. From the simplest construction–look, I made a cube!–to complex animated beasts, everything just kinda' looks cool when it's made out of Legos.

In fact, the only real drawback with these little Danish blocks is when you step on them in the middle of the night. There is nothing in the world as sharp as those little plastic corners at 4:30 in the morning when you've just GOT to go.

Logo Digital Designer protects you from that danger, while giving you much of the fun of the Lego experience. Whether using a pre-built model as a starting point, or just starting with a blank screen, you can build just about whatever you want. The Camera Control lets you rotate your virtual model, and to zoom in and out, getting a better view of your handiwork from all angles. You have an unlimited number of bricks, so you'll never run out. Once you're done, you can check the Price Window to see how much your project would cost if constructed with real Lego bricks. Heck, you can even click through to the online store to buy them right now.

Lego Digital Designer is available for Windows (XP) or Mac (OS X 10.3+).

Download Lego Digital Designer

We've all heard the stories: system crash, catastrophic data loss, no backups. I always intended to back that stuff up, I just never got around to it.

Get around to it.

Areca is a backup program that may help to give you the push you need to get started. Along with an easy-to-understand GUI for manual backup sessions, Areca also has a command line interface, so you can automate your backups with shell scripts and batch files.

Backing up to .zip files, Areca lets you store your data to your local drive, to network drives, thumb drives, or even FTP servers. You can build filters to grab just the files you want, and perform either full or incremental backups, all of which really puts you in the driver's seat as far as your backups go.

Don't become a statistic (cue dramatic music) by losing your important data. resolve to start systematically backing up your system today.

Areca Backup is a Java application, so it should run on anything that supports the Java virtual machine. The publishers specifically reference Windows and Linux systems.

Download Areca Backup

You've seen the ads where the Mac and the PC are talking to each other. The Mac can do this stuff and the PC can do that stuff. It's that way in the real world, too, where the partisans of each system argue with those on the "other" side about what great things their machine can do, while that other system is just not quite so good. Here's a way to take away one of the differences between those two systems.

One of the slick things that Macs have in their UI is the Dock. Kind of like the windows Taskbar on steroids, the Dock serves as a quick launch tool, as well as a monitor of currently running apps. Drag icons onto it to include them, drag them off to clean it up. It's simple to use and pretty successful.

Windows users have their own Dock now, in the form of RocketDock. RocketDock calls itself unashamedly "The single greatest piece of software. Ever." While it may not in fact be the greatest thing since sliced bread, it is a worthy addition to your Windows system. You can drag shortcuts onto it for easy access to the corresponding apps. Minimized windows can appear on the Dock, allowing you quicker access to your running programs, without having to [Alt]+[Tab] through all the stuff you don't want to restore.

RocketDock supports multiple displays, and to use screen space more efficiently it can auto-hide, and pop-up when you mouseover.

RocketDock is a Windows app and requires Win2k or better.

Download RocketDock