Since its last
* appearance in the blue,
yWriter has been updated to version 5. Designed specifically for
novels, this freeware "contains no adverts, unwanted web toolbars, desktop search programs or other cruft".
posted by Trurl
on Feb 11, 2012 -
47 comments
Gizmo's Freeware is a non-commercial community website staffed entirely by volunteers. Our primary function is to help you select the best freeware product for your particular needs.
posted by Trurl
on Jan 21, 2012 -
8 comments
Leisure Suit Larry is a series of adventure games written by Al Lowe and published by Sierra from 1987 to 2009. The main character, whose full name is Larry Laffer, is a balding, dorky, double entendre-speaking, leisure suit-wearing (but still somewhat lovable) "loser" in his 40s. The games follow him as he spends much of his life trying (usually unsuccessfully) to seduce attractive women. [more inside]
posted by Trurl
on Dec 7, 2011 -
68 comments
LiberKey is a system for installing and keeping updated over 300 free programs (both open and closed source) on a Windows machine. All of the programs are portable meaning that they can run directly off a USB key without installing anything additional on the computer (this is very useful if you’re working on a computer where you don’t have administrative rights). The programs are organized into the following categories: audio, CD/DVD, education, file management, games, graphics, internet, networking, office, security, system utilities, and video. One great feature Liberkey has is the ability to
temporarily change file associations. Here is the
full list of programs available.
posted by Jasper Friendly Bear
on Jun 4, 2011 -
14 comments
Microsoft Mathematics is a free
Computer Algebra System (CAS) available from Microsoft. A
CAS is a program that can solve purely symbolic mathematical equations. For example, the program can tell you that the derivative of 6x^2 + 12x is 12x + 12. The program has functions for calculus, statistics, linear algebra, and graphing. One interesting feature of the program is that in some cases it can show and describe the intermediate steps involved in solving an equation. Here’s a
16 page tutorial (in MS Word docx format) showing how to use the program. The program can be downloaded from the
Microsoft download page. Thirty-two and sixty-four bit versions are available. The program only works on XP/Vista/Windows 7.
posted by Jasper Friendly Bear
on May 23, 2011 -
56 comments
Trash cans, landfills, and incinerators. Erasure, deletion, and obsolescence. These words could describe what has happened to the various building blocks of the video game industry in countries around the world. These building blocks consist of video game source code, the actual computer hardware used to create a particular video game, level layout diagrams, character designs, production documents, marketing material, and more.
These are just some elements of game creation that are gone -- never to be seen again. These elements make up the home console, handheld, PC and arcade games we've played. The only remnant of a particular game may be its name, or its final published version, since the possibility exists that no other physical copy of its creation remains.
As a community of video game developers, publishers, and players, we must begin asking ourselves some difficult but inevitable questions. Some believe there is no point in preserving a video game, arguing that games are short-term entertainment, while others disagree with this statement entirely, believing the industry is in a preservation crisis.
Where Games Go To Sleep: The Game Preservation Crisis [more inside]
posted by timshel
on Feb 9, 2011 -
44 comments
Chasing Pirates: Inside Microsoft’s War Room - From the special thread that Chinese factories counterfeit in mile-long spools that adorns software authenticity stickers, to near-perfect bootleg discs leaving microscopic evidence of their factory origins, to Mexican and Russian gangsters who are dealt with very carefully, the NYT covers Microsoft's multi-pronged, international war on piracy.
posted by Blazecock Pileon
on Nov 7, 2010 -
30 comments
Software, and Instant Real-Time 1-Click Commissar Removal: In the
old days, photographic purges were laborious and time-consuming. Modern software has of course made this process much faster, and now this important task can be applied to video, and in
real-time. Of course, if you don't want to actually remove someone or something, but instead simply want to turn ordinary men into Heroes of the Revolution and vixens into forgettable faces in the crowd, well, that too is an
option.
posted by darth_tedious
on Oct 12, 2010 -
18 comments
Do you like manuals? Do you like Wikis? Do you like open source software? Check out
FLOSS Manuals for wiki-fied manuals for popular and fun open source software, including
PureData,
Inkscape,
Blender,
Ardour, among others. Taking a page from programmers, the group endorses "
book sprints", where creative writers, editors and artists work closely together to complete an online book in a short, intense burst of effort.
posted by Blazecock Pileon
on Oct 1, 2010 -
6 comments
The OpenOffice.org Project has unveiled a major restructuring that separates itself from Oracle and that takes responsibility for OpenOffice away from a single company. ... Driving home the changes, OpenOffice.org project is now The Document Foundation while the OpenOffice.org suite has been given the temporary name of LibreOffice.
posted by Joe Beese
on Sep 28, 2010 -
45 comments
Music Hack Day heads back to Boston October 16 and 17. Music Hack Day is a free-to-attend 24-hour convergence over two calendar days designed to throw together programmers, musicians, artists, conceptualizers, and, of course, marketers and promoters. "Music + software + hardware + art + the web. Anything goes as long as it's music related."
Music Hack Day London just ended (September 4, 5). My favorite (and the MHD-London winner!) was
Speakatron, which is WebCam + Software = Goofy Fun! (
related, previously)
[more inside]
posted by beelzbubba
on Sep 21, 2010 -
4 comments
Russia Uses Microsoft to Suppress Dissent - Adding to its
long-running series on corruption and abuse in post-Communist Russia, the New York Times has reported on Russian authorities using the pretext of software piracy to seize computers from journalists and political dissidents critical of current policies. In a surprising twist, lawyers representing Microsoft have been found working with Russian police, despite reporters and NGOs providing evidence of legitimate software purchases. An
official response to the NYT piece suggests impostors claim to represent Microsoft in Russia, and notes the company's offer of free software licenses to these and similar groups.
posted by Blazecock Pileon
on Sep 12, 2010 -
25 comments
Fifteen years ago this week, programmer
Ron Britvich launched version 1.0 of
Active Worlds. Started as an autonomous project of
Worlds, Inc. (a spinoff of educational gamesmaker
Knowledge Adventure), Active Worlds was one of the first and most ambitious attempts to create a 3D virtual community on the web.
Built on the architecture of Britvich's
Worlds Chat beta, Active Worlds
debuted in the form of
Alphaworld, a sunny green infinite plane open to
public building. In its opening years Alphaworld experienced
a land rush of construction, resulting in
an anarchic starfish sprawl larger than the state of California. A sister company, Circle of Fire, was soon founded to craft
additional themed hubs, and once individual ownership of worlds became possible the AW community spawned a veritable universe of
hundreds of worlds.
Although
the company has seen its
ups and downs since those heady times and its fortunes have slowly dwindled, the
Active Worlds platform survives to
this day. Look inside for a simple guide on how to log in to the (free) service, rundowns of the best worlds, links to essays analyzing the program's legacy, and other content summing up
its venerable community.
[more inside]
posted by Rhaomi
on Jul 4, 2010 -
18 comments
They were one of history’s greatest teams. But by the late 2000s, Pro Vercelli were entrenched in the lower leagues, their glorious past forgotten. Until one day, a man bought a video game. Read the uplifting saga of a small-town Italian club, an unknown American manager, triumph, betrayal, passion, and several extremely good recipes, from start to finish [more inside]
posted by Joe Beese
on Jul 3, 2010 -
26 comments
Mendeley is a cross-platform research management tool which features article databasing, PDF annotation, online backup, private, shared and public collections, metadata lookup on Google Scholar, direct exporting of multiple citation styles to Word, OpenOffice and BibTex, the ability to add documents directly from a web browser, and social networking with other members in your field of study. Like
Zotero (
previously), but out of the browser and with note-taking abilities. For Windows, Mac and Linux.
posted by l33tpolicywonk
on Jun 11, 2010 -
27 comments
AlternativeTo finds substitutes to expensive and/or crappy desktop and mobile software. "Tell us what application you want to replace and we give you great alternatives, based on user recommendations."
posted by gman
on May 4, 2010 -
15 comments
"
Ommwriter is a humble attempt to recapture what technology has snatched away from us today: our capacity to concentrate." It is a full screen text-editing application for Macintosh that plays calming music and little clicking noises as you write. It is both kind of cool and in many ways ridiculous.
[more inside]
posted by The Devil Tesla
on Apr 4, 2010 -
65 comments
As Scott Jerome-Parks lay dying, he clung to this wish: that his fatal radiation overdose — which left him deaf, struggling to see, unable to swallow, burned, with his teeth falling out, with ulcers in his mouth and throat, nauseated, in severe pain and finally unable to breathe — be studied and talked about publicly so that others might not have to live his nightmare.
From the
first of a series of articles by the New York
Times, putting the spotlight on what happens when radiation therapy goes wrong.
[more inside]
posted by Bukvoed
on Jan 30, 2010 -
49 comments
