Free Download A Day

We've all been there: the only copy you have of some critical file is all messed up. The diskette is munched, the CD is scratched, the hard drive has crashed. You know that there is bound to be some lost data, but you also know that there's a lot of data that is just fine, thank you. Your trusty operating system, however, thinks it knows better. Problems with that track? Can't read that cluster? No need to bail out here.

Unstoppable Copier is a utility for Windows and Linux that will do its dead-level best to read whatever you throw at it. It takes whatever pieces of a file it can get its hands on and try to knit them back together, You can control just how deep you want to go here, from a "take forever and get me everything you can" approach, or dial it back and just skip the unreadable files, with all levels in between.

While half of a binary file may not be of much use to you—depending, of course, on what it is—certainly half a text file is better than nothing.

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muCommander is a cross-platform file manager. With an interface reminiscent of Norton Commander, you can easily browse not only local volumes, but also remote files via FTP, NFS, Samba, and more. You can copy and move files, rename them, create directories—basically everything you would expect a file manager app to do.

You can save time and effort by also being able to create and manipulate files of several popular archive formats, including ZIP, TAR, Gzip, and more.

You can configure the UI to make it work the way you do—sort by file- or directory name, extension, size, date, or permissions. Show or hide hidden files; mix folders in with files (like a Mac), or separate them out, like Windows.

muCommander is built in Java, so it runs on any platform that supports Java, including Windows, OS X, Linux, and more.

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The Portable Document Format (pdf) is the cross-platform standard for document distribution. Allowing the combining of formatted text and images, it's the perfect package to get the word out to whoever you need to communicate with. Unfortunately, the official tool to manipulate files in this proprietary format, Adobe Acrobat, isn't cheap. It would be nice to be able to tweak your pdf files without emptying your wallet.

Pdftk is a Swiss army knife for manipulating pdf files, and best of all, it's free. It's a command line utility, so it's not the prettiest thing in the world, but if you're comfortable opening a terminal window/DOS box, you can accomplish a lot with only a couple of keystrokes. You can, for example, merge multiple documents into one file, break a single pdf document into multiple documents, rotate a page, or even add a password.

Pdftk is available with installers for Windows, OS X, Linux, and other UNIX and UNIX-like systems.

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Computers have added a whole new dimension to teaching. The abilities to drill for mastery of content, provide instant feedback, and work interactively between students are just a few of the opportunities available with computers. There is a potential downside as well.

Assuming that "no good deed will go unpunished", having students working on computers adds a whole layer of administrative attention that must be brought to bear. You don't need much tech support with a paper and pencil, but computer systems aren't so easy.

iTALC, the tool that provides Intelligent Teaching and Learning with Computers, can help make this part easier. Its ability to control machines remotely means that teacher can "look over the shoulders" of students, to examine their work and help coach their efforts. iTALC can also flip that around, putting the teacher's screen in front of each student at their remote workstations, making it an ideal platform for demonstrations. This functionality is not limited to a shared subnet, so remote systems can be included as well, great for students who are at home rather than school.

It can also lock workstations, so that students are paying attention to instruction, rather than being distracted by their systems. And at the end of the day, teachers can power-off an entire lab full of computers, saving lots of time.

iTALC is a free download, and runs under both Linux and Windows (Win2k or better).

Download iTALC

No matter where you wander on the Internet, you leave footprints. Each time your browser requests a web page, it also tells that server a lot about you. Multiply that by the number of websites you visit in a day or week, and that's a lot about you spread all over the place. Is there any way to help keep that from happening?

One way to leave fewer footprints–or at least footprints that nobody knows belong to you–is to use proxy servers. These get between you and the other servers, and as far as the web server is concerned, it's the proxy, and not you, that made that page request. The down side there is that the proxy knows who you are. How about making it so that nobody knows who you are?

Tor–The Onion Router–is just such a tool. Actually, it's a confluence of three different pieces that come together to make you as invisible as possible on the Web. Tor is the actual application that woks on your behalf behind the scenes. Vidalia (notice the nice onion metaphor continues) is a GUI for the
Tor app, And finally Privoxy, a web proxy that works in conjunction with the other two. All together, these pieces running across a network of widely dispersed proxy servers makes it nearly impossible for anyone to figure out who you are or to tie your activity back to you. It's probably as close as you can come to anonymity on the Web.

Tor is a free download, and is available for Linux (and other Unices), Mac, and Windows.

Download Tor – The Onion Router

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.

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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

Apps that live on a thumb drive are handy. You can carry your stuff around with you and run it wherever you find a suitable machine, without having to tote your laptop or (shudder!) a desktop machine around with you. What about a whole system on a thumb drive?

DSL ("Damn Small Linux") is a full Linux system that will fit onto a CD, thumb drive, or can be loaded onto the hard drive of your computer. Only 50MB in size, this distro will run on as little as a '486 with 16MB of RAM; or it functions as a full system with only 128MB of memory. You can even run it inside of Windows if you are so inclined.

While it's not got all the bells and whistles, DSL comes with a respectable cohort of software, including a desktop GUI, a media player, web browsers(including Firefox), word processor and text editors, and oodles of other stuff.

Linux has always been an interesting way to make use of some of the older machines you've got lying around, since there are many versions that don't require the horsepower of an XP or Vista. DSL takes this to the extreme.

DSL runs on x86 machines.

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Progress is a good thing. It generally makes things better–bigger, faster, stronger. Sometimes, though, things get left in the dust. When was the last time you bought a tape for your Betamax? (Kids, go ask your parents.)

Nowhere does the steady march into the future move more relentlessly than in the computer biz. You can hardly buy a machine or application where it isn't obsolete before you get the shrinkwrap off of it. One of the latest places where this has happened in Apple's change from PowerPC to Intel chips.

Along with all great new capabilities of the x86 architecture comes a great loss–you can't run Classic Mac apps any more. With PPC machines, you always had the option of running the great pre-OS X apps out there (a particular favorite of ours is Symantec's MORE, an outliner from way way back).

SheepShaver is a PowerPC emulator that allows you to run Classic apps on your MacIntel machine. Along with the application itself, you'll need a copy of MacOS and an appropriate ROM image (info on how to get a ROM image is included in the FAQs on the application's website). Once you load it all up, you will be able to run all your favorite Classic apps on your shiny new Intel box.

SheepShaver is a Mac application, but it also has Windows and Linux flavors as well.

Download SheepShaver

Computers are such a visual medium that your experience can be severely limited if you can't see what's on the screen. Whether because of limitations in your vision, or design choices made by a site’s webmaster, if you can’t see it, you can’t fully understand it.

Virtual Magnifying Glass does exactly what it sounds like: you can magnify sections of your screen to see just what is going on there. The magnifying lens follows your mouse around the display, so to zoom in on an area, you just point with your mouse and you’re there.

Users can adjust Virtual Magnifying Glass to work the way then need it to: the lens height and width can be adjusted, zoom can be set anywhere from 1x up to 20x, and the mouse scroll wheel can be used to zoom. Multiple displays are supported on several versions of Windows.

Virtual Magnifying Glass is available for Windows, Linux, and even FreeBSD.

Download Virtual Magnifying Glass