Hmm... The freebie post seems to be coming out later everyday. :) At least, I had an excuse since I was addicted to the six-word stories. Very addictive, do not start reading. :)
DriverMax
It's fairly common to hear of users reinstalling Windows every couple of months. One of the headaches associated with the tradition is the installation of device drivers. With DriverMax, driver installation nightmares will hopefully be a thing of the past. With just a couple of clicks, you can export and restore your drivers. Available for Windows XP and Vista, you can get a free registration code for DriverMax after signing up at their website (free).[via Export Hardware Drivers with DriverMax @ LifeHacker via Copy Windows Drivers From One Machine to Another @ HowtoGeek]
FasterPlan
Need a quick way to plan or organize a meeting with friends? Plan it with FasterPlan! Click to add/edit your desired widgets and simply send your friends the page URL to share it with them. With the link you just sent them, they can join in the fun as well. Just remember not to post anything private since everything you post is made public.Jiglu
Tags, tags, tags. Jiglu is all about tags. But what is Jiglu really all about? Here's what Jiglu says about itself:Jiglu plugs into your site to automatically create intelligent tags and links for your web content. This means that people can dive straight in and read what they want - your most popular blog entries or even stuff buried deep within your site.
And that's all you really need to know. At least that's all I read when I signed up. :)
I signed up for Jiglu today and boy was the process simple (as stated on their website). Enter your blog address, sign up for an account, install the Jiglu widget and you're done. Just sit back and relax while their spider crawls your site (a bit busy today since they just launched). Once it's done, well I haven't reached that part yet, so I guess we'll find out. :)
Edit: Now it's done and looks like it does exactly what it says - it finds tags from your posts. It also makes these tags into clickable links (similar to the advertisements that insert double underlines into your text).
However, Jiglu inserted links are actually useful as they link up your posts automatically. This allows your posts to be connected in ways that even you may not have thought of. When a reader clicks on any such link, a Jiglu page containing related posts will open up in an overlay iframe in the same window, so your reader doesn't ever leave your site. If the reader finds anything of interest in the Jiglu page and clicks on it, the link that was clicked on (another page from your site) will load in the same window.
As you can see, Jiglu handles things very elegantly while keeping visitors at your site. There are some hiccups though. As Jiglu scans through your writing to find keywords, some slightly awkward tags may pop up. For example, some of my posts are tagged with "rainbows" instead of "in rainbows". If I were to write a new post about rainbows (the ones with 7 colors), I'm guessing that Radiohead's new album will be listed as a related post on my Jiglu page.
Another thing I've noticed is that Jiglu links only appear after the page has loaded. This is quite normal for javascript-based widgets such as Jiglu. However, readers may miss a couple of Jiglu links if they start scanning through your post as it loads.
Jiglu is a wonderful widget that increases your site's stickiness. If you're lazy, you can just install it and forget all about it (like I did). But despite my inaction, some readers of this blog are already using my Jiglu widget and its tags and discovering my other posts with it. :)
Pictomio
Have an expensive 3D graphics card? Don't let it go to waste, make use of it while viewing photos with Pictomio! Pictomio is a software application for managing, categorizing, searching, and archiving photos and other media files, and allows you to generate animated 2D and 3D slideshows. The extensive capabilities of the latest programmable 3D graphic cards are utilized for image decoding and displaying slideshows. The Pictomio software is composed of three parts:
a photo browser and slideshow editor, a slideshow viewer, and a slideshow screensaver.
With minimum requirements of a Shader Model 2.0 graphics card with 128 MB of Video RAM and 1GB of system RAM, you know they aren't kidding around. Pictomio is still very new (version 0.2) and in alpha, so keep a lookout for it when it hits a stable release (scheduled for end of 2007).
Cruciforum
Cruciforum is an incredibly simple PHP web forum. It's so simple that there's no database, user account, administrator or spam blocker. Unfortunately spam happens to be the current downside of using Cruciforum. But if you're looking for a quick and dirty forum setup, Cruciforum is the right candidate for you.I've run out of freebies. Don't worry, there's always tomorrow! How about some stale freebies?