Celestia: Shoot for the stars!

Celestia is an amazing little program for anyone who’s into astronomy, star-gazing or just curious about the universe. Its a simulation of the entire universe! Sounds impressive huh? Well, for a freeware program it is! It includes beautifully rendered planets, moons, asteroids, comets, and some smaller orbital bodies such as ‘MIR’ and the International Space Station.

In addition to all this, you can also download add-ons from the website of more stuff, including some fictional stuff for all you science fiction nerds! Celestia is not limited to our solar system; you can visit other stars, or even travel outside the galaxy. The controls take a little getting used to, but to fully appreciate just some of Celestia’s full capabilities, run it and press D to view a demo.

Warp on over to here to download it.

Ultramon: Double vision

Nowadays most video cards support dual monitors and the prices of LCD displays have come down considerably so more people are using dual monitors than before. Some people find them useful if they do a lot of graphic or design work, as it allows more workspace without having to constantly maximise and minimise windows,etc. Ultramon is software to help you get the most out of a multi-monitor set-up.

It adds additional window buttons, so you can quickly move windows or stretch a window across the desktop.

It also uses a “Smart Taskbar” to manage more applications, so that you have a taskbar on each monitor and each taskbar only showing the tasks from the monitor it’s on.
Shortcut extensions make it easy to position applications on the desired monitor. The UltraMon screen saver and wallpaper manager make it possible to use a different wallpaper and screen saver on each monitor too. It also includes a flexible mirroring feature with support for mirroring one or more monitors, and use different resolutions for each monitor.Its also pretty cool to be able to move windows from one screen to the other!

RSIGuard: Avoid Repetitive Strain Injury

If you spend long periods of time at your computer, you have a pretty good chance of developing a repetitive strain injury over time.This can show in ways such as a backpain, sore fingers or eyestrain. So whats the way to avoid all this or help yourself out if you’re already affected? Spend less time at your computer! Too much to ask for? Then at least take regular breaks!

Try out RSIGuard to help you achieve this, it schedules regular reminders for you to take a break. It can show exercises and stretches, which can optionally be disabled. In fact everything about this program is very configurable.It also has tracking and reporting of statistics to help you know how you’re doing. If you find yourself ignoring the breaks you can make them harder or even impossible to ignore.

I highly recommend this program as i think its designed well and does what it does well. Although being reminded to take a break can be a little irritating at times, but isn’t that the whole point? (but not as irritating as developing aches and pains, so it’s worth it in the long run).

Check it out here for more info and a trial

The Font Thing: A thing for fonts

If you work in web design or graphics either professionally or personally, you’re probably used to dealing with fonts a lot from time to time. Well now things just got a whole lot easier thanks to The Font Thing!

You can type in a word and it’ll show you that word in all your different fonts. Also shows you that word in other fonts that you don’t have installed yet, and gives you the option to install them. It allows you to fully browse installed and even uninstalled fonts and view sample text in any color you want,so you can easily choose the ideal one you’ve been searching for from your collection. Also you can install or uninstall any number of fonts at once.

As a totally free program, you can’t go wrong in taking this for a test drive if you work with fonts a lot!

Check out the homepage here for the full list of features and to download it.

Spam Motel: Stop spam before it starts

Spam! What more can i say? We all get it, we all hate it! Spam Motel allows to create disposable email addresses, that way the mail gets forwarded to you from your spam motel account, the spammers never get their hands on your real email address! All you gotta do is sign up, totally free, and it generates disposable email addresses for you to use from now on when you sign up to anything online or use forums, etc. You can use the same account for multiple places and your account on the Spam Motel site will keep track of it all. You can even download a tiny program that you can use from a desktop shortcut, for instantly making new addresses.

I highly recommend this for anyone sick of recieving spam, it won’t help your current email account if it’s already getting spam, but if you’re making a new email account, be sure to use this instead of giving out your real address to things you dont trust!

You can sign up here and read more info In the faq

Audio Record Wizard: Get it on tape!

Get it on tape! Well, the modern digital version! Here’s a useful program that can record almost all sound from your sound card with good quality. It can also record from the microphone, line-in, and just about any programs such as your media player of choice.

For example you might wanna record an internet radio show. You can easily do that with this, and what’s more, it can record straight to mp3 format,saving you valuable disc space! To get an even small file size, mp3 modes are fully configurable.

Additional features include voice activation, file length limitation (so that it can’t make overly huge files) and schedule (how about recording your favorite internet radio show while you’re asleep or at work?) and it can even stop recording automatically.

Sounds like it could be the perfect solution for almost any situation where you might wanna record and save audio from your computer? You can download a demo (limited to recording 3 minutes) and more find out more info right here.

The Journal: Not just a Journal!

Okay, so “The Journal” is journaling/diary software. The idea of keeping a journal or diary always sounded kinda boring to me, unless you’re into that kinda thing or have an important or interesting time period in your life you’d like to document. So if that isn’t your thing, its also a very useful program for having a private place to store your research,thoughts, ideas, poetry, work notes, etc.

What i like about it is that it’s password protected and encrypted, so not just anyone who used your computer can read your stuff! The Journal also provides important options like a hot-key for rapidly “locking” The Journal and a Lock on Minimize feature. In this new version you can also set reminders, so if you have something to do on time or an appointment to keep, you won’t forget about it due to being too involved in typing your life story or your plans to take over the world!

Lots more info and the 45 day trial are available by going here.