Free Download A Day

You can think of Partimage as kind of like Ghost for Linux. Like the Norton tool, Partimage can save an image of a hard disk partition from most Linux (ext2 and ext3) and many Windows (FAT16 and 32) systems. Saving Macintosh HFS systems, or NTFS from later Windows setups is not fully supported.

Rather than creating an image of the whole partition, Partimage skips free blocks, so aren't saving big chunks of nothing and taking up valuable disk space with that. You can gzip the resulting images, saving tons of space in the process.

You can run Partimage locally, or you can go across your network using Samba. Create a bootable CD of Partimage, and you can resurrect a system that won't even boot.

Use Partimage to restore a good image onto your machine after some nasty virus hoses your system. You can also use it to deploy an identical configuration across a department or enterprise; far preferable to installing from scratch on dozens of machines.

Partimage is a free Linux app, licensed under GPL 2. It is compatible with machines built around Intel x86 and PowerPC architectures.

Download Partimage

KeyNote is a flexible notebook that allows you to both jot quick notes and to build complex hierarchical documents. Based on the Windows RichEdit control, KeyNote will keep track of information the way it makes sense to you, so that you can enter and retrieve it in a way that enhances what you're doing, rather than adding yet another layer of complication into your already hectic life.

In its simplest form, KeyNote lets you jot away like in a Notepad document. Add to that the fact that you're working with RTF text, and now you can add formatting–bold, colors, paragraph styles, and so on.

When you take it to the next level, you can build complex documents that used to require multiple files to construct. Within a given document, each note has a separate tab. A tree navigation system allows you to move easily through your document, and to reorder sections as needed.

To incorporate extensive documents that already live elsewhere, you can define "virtual nodes" that are dynamically linked to external files.

Minimize KeyNote to the system tray and a hotkey will bring the app up when you need it. It just might replace that legal pad that's always at your elbow.

KeyNote runs under any 32-bit Windows system, from '95 on up. For earlier systems, you may need to add riched20.dll, although it's probably already on your system.

Download KeyNote

So you've built the killer website. You've got cool graphics, the latest content, the most intuitive navigation. Just one question: do you have any visitors?

A website without visitors is just a bunch of files. To see what kind of traffic you're getting, you need to look at the logs your web server uses to record what's going on in your little slice of cyberspace. The challenge to server access logs is they're easier for your web server to understand than for you. With all the timestamps and status codes and referrers, there's a lot of stuff to have to dig through to answer the question "Is anybody home?".

There are lots of tools available to help you sift through your access logs, but some of it is almost as complicated as those logs themselves. What you need is something that will help you understand who's come to visit, rather than to teach you how to configure the tool.

WebLog Expert Lite is a free application that helps you to see who came to visit, where they went on your site, and what they did while they were there. It understands the log files from both Apache and Microsoft (IIS) servers, automatically recognizing log formats. Many hosting providers compress their archived log files, and WebLog Expert Lite can read both .gz and .zip compressed files.

A large number of reports will help you to understand which of your pages have been visited, and where people came from. You can even find out which keywords or phrases were used in search engines to find you.

WebLog Expert Lite is a Windows app and runs on anything from Win95 up through Vista.

Download WebLog Expert Lite

Juice Receiver is all about podcasts. Those little media-rich RSS feeds are a way of like for many of us. Juice plays the part of the aggregator of content.

You can set Juice to receive podcasts the way you want to collect them. Whether it's once or twice a day, or even every 30 minutes, you get to call the shots. You can also configure it to grab all back-episodes that you might have missed along the way.

Juice doesn't incorporate a media player, so you can use it in conjunction with your favorite player. It interfaces automatically with iTunes, Windows Media Player, and Winamp, or you can choose "No player" and have it use your default media player, or you can even handle the details yourself. Either way you will know that you have the latest and greatest and that you will get to listen and view the latest podcasts on your own terms.

Power users can even set Juice to run a command, batch file, or shell script after each download, making Juice even more useful as you get your fix.

Juice Receiver is available for Linux, Mac (OS X 10.3+) and Windows (Windows 2000+).

Download Juice Receiver

I don't have any problem seeing colors–it's naming them that is the issue. Maybe it's a guy thing, or maybe it's a lazy thing, I don't know. Show me mauve, violet, and lavender, and I'll call them "purple". That isn't always good enough.

Name That Color is a fun little online tool that can help the color-naming impaired to put voice to their experience. By dragging a pointer over a color wheel, you can view colors and get a name for them. Compiled from a number of different sources, these color names aren't something you will want to give to your printer to put together your next four-color catalog, but it can at least give you a clue what that color is called.

On the more serious side, you can also preview colors based on their hex RGB values, handy when putting web pages together, Type the values directly into a textbox, or drag the pointer around, and you'll see onscreen just what that color looks like. It gives you the decimal equivalents also, which can be helpful in Photoshop.

Name That Color is an online app and should be compatible with most modern browsers.

Check-out Name That Color

Orbit Downloader is a tool you can use to download files off the Web. Along with plain-old garden variety text and application files, Orbit downloader excels at grabbing "social" content: music and videos.

Found an exciting new video on YouTube that you've just got to have? Orbit makes it easy to save that movie off to your local machine, without having to go through a bunch of extra gyrations. Hover your mouse over the movie, click on the pop-up "GetIt" button, and away you go. In most cases, Orbit can handle interrupted downloads, in case things go awry.

Orbit works for music downloads as well. Interfacing with Pandora, MySpace, and other music sites, you can grab audio as easily as you can video. In fact, just about any streaming content is fair game for Orbit Downloader.

Orbit Downloader work with IE, Firefox, Opera, and other browsers. It requires Windows NT/2000 or later.

Download Orbit Downloader

You can tell when your desktop machine has crashed, or at least when it's feeling grumpy. But what about other machines on your network, or servers you're supposed to be keeping an eye on? You could keep checking, regularly and often, to see if they're still up and running. But why?

One of the things that computers do best is to deal with mindless, repetitive tasks. What could be more brain numbing than constantly checking to see if your servers are still up?

With IPCheck Server Monitor, you can leave the tedium to the machine. Rather than just depending on a simple ping response, you can check various ports and services to see if you get an expected response–a POP3 mail server is useless to you if you can ping it, but Port 110 isn't awake and doing its thing, for example.

As it checks your servers, it'll let you know if there is a problem via email, ICQ message, pager, or SMS (text message) on your cell phone. Now you can sleep at night, knowing that no news is good news.

IPCheck Server Monitor freeware edition is free for personal and commercial use. It's a Windows application.

Download IPCheck Server Monitor

What if you could use a free operating system that used your current hardware and software, and didn't require you to learn a whole new way of looking at the world? If you're a Windows user and aren't familiar with Mac (new hardware) or Linux (new software), you may be out of luck–until now.

ReactOS is a from-the-ground-up implementation of an XP-compatible O/S. the goal is to be able to use all of your NT/XP class software and drivers, but with Windows nowhere to be seen. Based solely on GNU GPL-licensed and compatible code, ReactOS wants to provide all the functionality of Windows, but in an open-source environment.

ReactOS is still Alpha-level software, which means that it is susceptible to unexpected crashes, and will likely eat your data at some point, so you don't want to rely on it for your only system, or certainly not for irreplaceable data. With that in mind, if you have the hardware and the interest, you can see how things could have been (or still can be) with the folks from Redmond out of the picture.

ReactOS runs on x86 machines (a PowerPC version is in the works).

Download ReactOS

What would you get if you took iTunes and made it better? It might look something like musikCube. Built on top of a sqlite database engine, musikCube is fast as well as flexible. Featuring "dynamic playlists", musikCube actually learns what you listen to, and then gives you more of it.

You can import your music collection by telling musikCube where to look–give it a list of directories or other locations where you usually keep your music–or you can add tracks manually by either browsing to files or using drag-and-drop. Of course, you can also rip from audio CDs to get music in there too. You can easily transfer your music between home and work computers using thumb drives or MP3 players, which sure beats carrying a pile of CDs on the bus.

When you want to expand your horizons beyond your own music collection, musikCube allows you to listen to streaming audio as well.

musikCube runs on Windows systems.

Download musikCube

As a kid, did you ever do those "find five things that are different" puzzles with two pictures? There was always a flower that had a different number of petals, or the clown had curly hair in one but not the other.

AptDiff is a tool that might have helped to solve those puzzles, if they had been computer files instead of images. With AptDiff, you can compare two text or binary files side-by-side and see what the differences are between them. Not only can it spot the differences and report on them, but you can also merge the differences, or even delete them. Using a smart algorithm, you can choose to ignore various whitespace characters and lines, so that you don't see entire files out-of-sync when there is simply one or two extra spaces in one of them. Non case-specific comparisons allow you to filter out differences in character case when that's appropriate.

It's easy to get around in looking at your files, since you can synchronize scrolling between the two file windows. Adjustable panes let you see what you need to see to get the job done.

AptDiff requires Windows and will run on any system from Win2k through Vista.

Download AptDiff