K-Lite Mega Codec Pack is a collection of audio and video codecs, necessary to play (decode) and encode different audio and video formats. It is being updated frequently and it includes the means to play almost any audio and video format I have encountered.
The pack includes Media Player Classic and several tools for diagnostics and video usage. It can also detect problematic codecs and filters already on your system and helps you to remove them. It is very easy to install and I believe would suit anyone’s media playing needs.
FastStone Image Viewer is a fast image viewing and browsing application, supporting most major image file formats as well as excellent RAW support. It has a very nice cropping and resizing interface, including jpeg lossless operations. The full screen view has various options and operations, which show up when you bump the mouse onto an edge of the screen (the different edges give different options).
Here are the feature highlights I like the most:
- Fast and responsive image browsing and viewing.
- Very nice cropping interface, which supports standard cropping formats, 4×6, 8×10, etc…
- JPEG lossless operations including crop – most editors would only do lossy operations, which degrade the quality of the image.
- Support for RAW formats.
- Dual monitor support – if you have two monitors it can show the browser on one and full screen view on the other.
- Support for batch operations to convert, resize, crop, watermark, etc. multiple images at once.
- Contact sheet builder
Overall an extremely useful program with many other features I did not mention.
TrueCrypt helps you to create and operate an encrypted file, which you can mount as a volume (data storage device) on your computer. In other words you can create the encrypted file and mount it as a drive letter and it behaves as yet another hard drive on your computer. The beauty of it is that you can copy files to and from it like between normal drives on your computer.
Here are some feature highlights:
- Files are automatically encrypted and decrypted on the fly;
- The entire filesystem is encrypted (file allocation table, files, directories, etc.);
- Never saves any unencrypted data to a disk;
- Support for “hidden” volumes. It is a encrypted volume inside an encrypted volume, but you need to know the volume name and the password before you can access it. It is not visible otherwise.
- Support for multiple encryption algorithms (AES, Serpent, Twofish) and even a cascading combination of them;
- It can prepare for you a CD/DVD volume, so you can use it as a read-only encrypted medium;
- Format, encrypt and use a normal hard drive partition as well as a file as a TrueCrypt encrypted volume. It can even encrypt an entire USB drive. Sweet!
Overall an extremely useful program.
YPOPs! is a free application, that provides free POP3 and SMTP access to Yahoo! e-mail. It provides a gateway, which converts the POP3 requests from your e-mail client to requests to Yahoo! web-mail. In other words you can use Mozilla Thunderbird, Outlook, Eudora, or any other POP3 e-mail client to get and send your e-mails.
You can also set it to empty the Bulk and Trash folders on exit. It can also put your sent e-mails to your Yahoo! web-mail sent folder. It is very easy to configure and work straight after the installation.
PAFreshney’s Periodic Table is an interactive periodic table of the chemical elements. It contains detailed information about each element, along with images. It can filter by physical state (i.e. solid, liquid, gas or synthetic),. Really cool feature is a temperature slider and you can see how the element’s state changes with temperature.
The periodic table can also be colored by melting point, boiling point, atomic radius and many others. It also contains animations of the atomic structure and many images of the elements. Periodic Table also implements an interesting search feature, where you can search for example for elements with melting point < 250K and boiling point >= 500K…
Even though I am not an expert I think the program is a very useful tool for students or anyone else at least as a handy and convenient information source.
