Welcome to Clif Notes Newsletter
October 2, 2005
 | Hi everyone. It's been a very busy week for me. My only daughter just got married. I've been gone all weekend and just got back so the newsletter is running late. Everything went fine and I have a son-in-law now. This is my first! There's no telling how long until I'm a grandpa. I'll be ready whenever it happens. I hope you enjoy this week's letter. Be sure to email me for advice or to yell at me for messing up. |
REVIEWS
AM-DeadLink - bring out your dead bookmarks
Website - Freeware
reviewed by MartyK on 9/26/05
Review
AM-DeadLink is a small (825 kb) free download available from many download sites (SnapFiles, MajorGeeks, etc.) as well as from the author's site. This freeware analyzes your bookmarks/favorites and checks to see if they are still valid "live" links. It is easy to sort the errors and duplicates to bring them to the top of the list so you can delete them quickly. It also reports the error code (404, 401, etc.) to help you decide whether to delete or not. AM-DeadLink contains an internal preview panel to verify suspect bookmarks. It works with IE, Firefox, Mozilla, and Opera browsers and Seamlessly integrates with all Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2000/XP. This freeware has downloadable FavIcons for all your bookmarks. It's completely stable and has no spyware/adware. I've personally used it on three computers (Win98, Win98SE, and WinXP Media Edition) and it has performed exactly as described. It's very useful and highly recommended.
Screenshot
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Quote from the author's site
AM-DeadLink detects dead links and duplicates in your Browser Bookmarks. If a Bookmark has become unavailable you can verify it in the internal preview and delete it from your Browser. Additionally you can download FavIcons for all your Favorites and Bookmarks.
Fraud Eliminator - Anti-Phishing Software Protects Consumers from Fraud
Website - Freeware
reviewed by ClifNotes in Feb 2005, updated 9/30/05
Notes
Here's a glowing review from TechNewsWorld about a new toolbar for Internet Explorer and Firefox.
Update 9/30/05
The download links changed at the website so go through the homepage.
Screenshot
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Quote
A new company in the anti-phishing space is offering a free program that acts much like a firewall for Web sites to protect computer users from online fraud attacks. FraudEliminator, a security software startup, is offering the first product to provide comprehensive protection to home Internet users from online fraud schemes and phishing attacks. Phishing is a tactic criminals use to trick computer users to visit a fraudulent Web site or respond to phony e-mail messages and disclose person identification and financial account passwords ... Company officials said they have designed a security program so safe and easy to use that you can install it on your grandmother's machine.
read more
Pivot - Stickfigure animator
Website - Freeware
reviewed by ClifNotes on 5/30/2004
Notes
Pivot is a neat little program to help you unleash your beginning animation skills. I just couldn't resist trying it out. I fired it up and in about five minutes I had created my first stick figure animation. Here it is. I'm no artist as you may find out.
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Quote
Pivot makes it easy to create stick-figure animations. You can build your own stick figures and load your own backgrounds. The animations can be saved as animated gifs to be used on web pages. An example animation is included. An msn group for Pivot can be found here.
Wallpaper Master - hoard your wallpapers
Website - Freeware
reviewed by Nighted at DonationCoder on 9/26/05
Review
Awesome free wallpaper manager with excellent, clean GUI.
Great for people who hoard wallpapers in the thousands. Although it's the freeware version, it's still the best wallpaper changer on the web, trust me, I've wasted countless hours trying them all. After trudging through one sloppy app after another with mediocre features and atrocious user interfaces as well as questionable performance, I finally found this application, not quite believing it. It looks great, has tons of cool features, is backed up by a friendly developer and is constantly in update mode going though many version changes in the last few months. This doesn't mean the program is buggy, it's not, but this is obviously a labour of love for the author, who is consistently tweaking and tightening up the code.
- Store multiple wallpaper lists as different categories/libraries.
- The ability to rate wallpaper, so better wallpapers are chosen more often.
- Customizable Global Hotkeys - Quickly change/clear the wallpaper with any key combo.
- Very high quality resizing of images to fit the screen optimally and keep their aspect ratio.
- Auto change the wallpaper when windows starts, every x minutes, or use the ratings to choose an interval.
- Change wallpaper in order, in shuffle mode, or randomly according to rating.
- Analyse the wallpaper and automatically choose between Resize, Tile, Center or Stretch.
- Uses very little resources.
- Minimizes to tray area for easy access.
- Easy to use but powerful interface.
- Desktop Wallpaper Master is a free download (freeware)!
- And more!
see original review
Screenshot
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Quote from the authors site
Wallpaper Master is a powerful and highly customizable desktop wallpaper manager and cycler.
It will automatically change your background wallpaper with a huge range of options, and is great for indexing large collections of personal photos or any kind of image.
You can create your own categories using images on your computer, and it will cycle through your images automatically in whatever order you specify: in a shuffle mode, listed order, or based on your personal ratings. The program also has auto-size options to make sure your images are displayed with optimal size.
WinRet Lite - Backup and restore for Windows, Outlook, and IE.
Website - LiteWare
reviewed by ClifNotes on 7/26/04 updated 9/26/05
Notes
I had used a couple of other utilities to back up my email and IE favorites. I think they'll end up in the trash can. This one application does all that plus offers some Windows tweaks I've never seen before. For example, how would you like to turn Internet Explorer into a WYSIWYG webpage editor? You've just got to check this program out.
Update 9/26/05
This program used to be offered as a full version. They are now selling the full version and offer a "lite" version as freeware. Some of the features offered in the full version may not be available. I have not tried the full version so I can't tell you what it contains. The freeware version is a fine tool to help you keep your system backed up.
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Quote
WinRet is a program for tune up Windows and Internet Explorer, also this program backs up and restores system Registry, program Settings and Preferences, Shortcuts, Favorites, Drivers, Internet Explorer Settings, History, Cookies and typed Urls and much more. For your convenience the program supports automatic backup/restore mode.
WorldTime - What Time Is It In Coober Pedy?
Author's Website - Alternate Website- Article at Lockergnome - Freeware
reviewed by BillWebb on 9/29/05
Notes from Clif
Bill Webb has found a good way to keep track of time all over the world. He wrote this review for Lockergnome and has allowed it's printing here. The author's website, Pawprint.net, was not available at the time I printed this, so I included an alternate download site above. If anyone is curious where "Coober Pedy" is located, I found that it's in South Australia.
Review
If, like me, you’re frequently keeping track of events and correspondents in various parts of the world, a world clock application is just about a must. For the last year or so I’ve been using World Time, “The Ultimate Virtual Timepiece,” according to the Web page. I haven’t had occasion to test any others as complex (and don’t care to), so I can’t say they’re wrong. I like the price: free, free, free.
World Time 6 is the latest version. It offers "unlimited configurable clocks, each with its own time zone, configurable Daylight Saving Time, Lat Long, and description in a 12 or 24 hour analog/digital user configurable display, that minimizes to the system tray..." and a whole lot more besides. It takes a bit of fiddling to learn the interface, but it's not all that difficult to set up a nice array of clocks for different cities of the world, plus universal time. If you don't have a program that synchronizes your computer clock with the National Institute of Standards and Technology atomic clock, World Time will do that, too.
Minimized, World Clock takes up a hair more than one MB of RAM; about 10 MB when visible. If you need a multiple time zone application, this one is worth a good look.
Screenshot
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Quote from Author's site
The author's website was not available at the time of this printing.
TIPS
And the sign said - customize your own signs and other objects
a tip from ClifNotes on 7/24/05
Notes
Here are some cool places to make your own customized images. You can have a lot of fun with some of these.
Churchs Sign Generator
The ACME Label Maker
The ACME License Maker
Just for Valentine's Day: the ACME Heart Maker
Tombstone Generator
Button Generator
Logo Generator
3d Text Maker
Online Banner Makers
Error Message Generator
Email Icon Generator
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Optimize Guides - Guides for Windows 2000/XP
Website - Tip
reviewed by CyberGuide on 9/30/05
Review
WINDOWS XP: OPTIMIZE GUIDES
I first came accross Andrew's site when he had a fantastic yet simple guide to optimizing XP. Since then he has improved the site greatly and has included the following guides:
Optimize 2000
Secure XP
Diagnose XP
Driver XP
XP Media
XP Myths
XP Requirements
Once again what makes his site a cut above the rest is the layout and simple navigation...Highly recommended.
Quote
Optimize Guides are Free, Easy to Read, Comprehensive Guides for the Windows 2000/XP Operating Systems. Whether you want to Optimize Performance, Increase Speed, Tweak Settings, Improve Security, Diagnose a Problem, Update Drivers, Remove Viruses or Clean Spyware, you will find solutions in these Guides. Computers are supposed to be a useful tool that you use for work or leisure they are not supposed to be an expensively slow, unresponsive and crashing one.
COOL WEB SITES
Don't Click It - Innovative Website
Website - Cool Website
reviewed by BrettsReviews on 9/29/05
Review
Don't Click It is a very interesting website that offers a novel way of navigating. As the name implies, you can make your way around the site without clicking your mouse. There is a lot of innovative and thought provoking content on this site and it is well worth a visit.
By the way, if you accidentally click something on the site, you get told off, so to speak :).
Notes from Clif
Be sure to check out Brett's other reviews.
read more
reviewed by Brandon Watts at Lockergnome on 9/27/05
Review
It’s a little freaky if you haven’t heard of a wiki. These community-driven Web sites allow people from all over the world to descend upon a common place in which they can freely add and edit content for everyone else to see. The beautiful thing about these message boards on steroids is that they are so easy to work with and grow. Plain text is used to add information as opposed to complicated code, and further pages can be started and developed as the topics and conversations begin. If you appreciate the simplicity of making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, then you’re going to love how easy it is to make a wiki with PeanutButterWiki.
This site provides a no-nonsense approach to creating a wiki of your very own. All you need to do is type in the desired name of the wiki and your e-mail address to get started. From there, you'll be e-mailed a password that'll allow you to login to your page and get things rolling. You can maintain a tight leash on your wiki by keeping it private, or you can decide to open it up to the masses. Either way, it'll be interesting to see how the content evolves once you get your site out there.
Notes from Clif
I had written up a review of pbwiki for posting here and Brandon did such a good job that I thought you should see it first. Here is my review. Pbwiki is offering to give me more space if I am one of the top ten referrers here. So, do me a favor, click on this link to sign up and let them know that Clif sent you.
NEW NEWS
Pbwiki adds a little color
I think you all immediately noticed the difference when you came onboard this time. The guys running the show here at this free web host have started offering a few color templates for the people using the site. I personally liked this color scheme. There were two others to choose from. One of them was too drab and the other was too bright. I think this one is just right. Tell me what you think? EmailClif
FEEDBACK AND OTHER STUFF
Sorry folks, I haven't had time to add the feedback this week. I'll try to catch up next week.
To everyone: I like getting messages from you. Don't hesitate to EmailClif with your comments.
Have fun and surf safely.
Clif
http://clifnotes.net & http://freewarewiki.pbwiki.com
Devoted to promoting Freeware and Free Information
INDEX
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