Inverse Karma » Freeware

Easily search and download music with Songr

GP — Sat, 21 Aug 2010 10:31:06 +0000

For many years until now, LimeWire had been my (and for many others, their) tool of choice for downloading and sharing music. However, this May, the RIAA won a lawsuit filed against the P2P company, effectively making LimeWire unusable. Though BitTorrent is the de-facto standard for downloading content on the Internet now, somehow for me, it lacked the simplicity of LimeWire when it comes to single tracks. After having used LW for so long, I couldn’t really switch to any other P2P client – most of them just suck. And then along came Songr.

Songr is an extremely clean and simple piece of free software. Download the 4 MB installation file and install it. One of the many nice things about Songr is that it makes use of Windows 7 features like task lists on the start menu and download progress on the taskbar icon. Another neat feature is searching for a song with its lyrics. Also bundled is a YouTube downloader, with which you can download the audio track from any YouTube video. Keep in mind though – the audio quality on YouTube is pretty awful.

Check out a few screenshots of Songr in action. And go ahead and download it – the download link is below the screenshots.

Songr
Requires the .NET Framework 3.5

How To – Tidy up your Explorer right-click menu

GP — Fri, 08 May 2009 10:21:06 +0000

Ever got frustrated with the annoyingly long right-click menu on your computer? (It could even make your PC slower). Well, I have! Googling a solution to knock a couple of items off the context menu, you’d most likely end up with a lotta websites asking you to manually edit your registry, which I would not recommend to anyone unless they really know what they’re doing. I came upon 2 awesome utilities (both by the same developer) to do just this.

The first utility (I call it a utility because its just a small Zip file and needs no installation!) is ShellExView. Of the two utilities that we’re discussing here, this one is the more expansive one with a lotta items that you don’t have to bother about. It basically lets you view, disable and enable context menu items, IE addons, property pages, and the like. The interface is quite straightforward and all you have to do is select all the items you wish to disable and hit the red button. The changes are effected immediately – you can just open Windows Explorer and right-click and see it for yourself. To enable a disbaled item, click on the green button.

The second is ShellMenuView. This one is different from ShellExView in that it shows all the static context-menu items. Chances are, those items that annoyed you are displayed here! The process of enabling and disabling menu items is just the same as explained above. Grab them both today from the download links at the end of the post

ShellExView and ShellMenuView
Check out the developer’s utilities page for more downloads.

Tip: Check Your USB Drive Speeds

GP — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 04:57:20 +0000

Ever wanted to check the actual speed of your trusted little USB drive? Well here’s a small utility (available as both free and paid versions) that lets you benchmark your USB device. I ran a sample test on a friend’s Transcend 2GB JetFlash device and came up with the screenshot below! Looks like its a USB 1.1 device. With USB 2.0 you might expect transfer rates of around 30-40 MB/sec. Run your test today and share the results with me!

HD Tune
Download HD Tune 2.55 (628KB)

Fences – A Desktop Icon Organizer from Stardock

GP — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 10:58:04 +0000

Fences is an amazing desktop organizing software to maintain a clean and tidy desktop. It works on Windows XP, Vista and even Windows 7! Post installation, it presents a wizard that lets you choose between using their built-in container layouts and also it tries to detect and group icons on its own (of course, you can change it and customize it to your heart’s content).

The containers, called ‘fences’, can be resized and dragged anywhere on the screen and can also be locked. It has also got a neat options dialog where you can further tweak the settings for each and all fences. Fences also lets you hide your grouped icons altogether. Check out the official screenshots†. Link to official download page below.

Fences™
Download Fences 0.96 (roughly 6MB)

† Sorry for not posting screenshots this time. I’ve just finished building my computer and its only a barebone machine for now. So I’ve linked to the original page for people who wanna check it out. Thanks to Lifehacker for the original post.

KMPlayer – The Best Media Player

GP — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 10:13:03 +0000

Media players are almost an indispensable piece of software that everyone uses on a routine basis. But with a plethora of formats cropping up now and then, it kinda becomes annoying to track down codecs and install them. Of course, you’ve got popular codec packs like KLite and Storm Codec. But popular players like VLC and GOM can play a lot of formats using internal codecs. But then, VLC has trouble playing Real media (or does it play them at all?) and GOM crashes with DVDs. For a while, MPC (Media Player Classic) seemed like the best option. But, like I’ve said before, I’m a sucker for eye-candy, and MPC isn’t the prettiest ones out there. And then there was KMPlayer

Some of KMPlayer’s best features are:

Very lightweight. (thats something I always look for!)
Extreme (with a capital ‘E’ customizability.
A really nice default skin. (the interface changes color everytime you launch it, a nice touch I would say)
Nice icons for all possible formats (video, audio and even for subtitles)
Internal codecs (and also choice of using external ones) for almost all formats on the planet.

The setup file is around 12MB and setup is simple. After setup completes, it takes you through a wizard (users of GOM would be surprised at the similarity) that helps you set up basic settings like performance and associations. After the wizard completes, you can start using KMP right away! I have a huge movie collection in a variety of formats like DivX, MKV, XViD and the likes, and KMP plays them all without any issues. I’ve been using it for around a month and yet to encounter a freeze or a crash! Go ahead and download this amazing player

I’ve attached a few screenshots of the player (though not one while playing a movie). I’va actually missed out on a lot of screenshots (like that of KMP’s CoverArt) but do get this player (Download link at the bottom of the article).

KMPlayer (Latest Stable Version)
Software Homepage (English)

Using KMPlayer? Or got your own suggestion? Feel free to comment below.

Best Free Alternative To Nero

GP — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 09:41:09 +0000

Everyone uses Ahead’s burning software Nero. I got my first taste of it in 2004 when Nero 5 was pretty much the standard application that all OEMs bundled with their products. It included a host of other utilities like a WAV file editor, a cover designer, a VCD/SVCD menu editor. And with every successive version folowed more add-on utilities like InCD, Showtime (a video player), Recode (for DVD-ripping), Scout (file-indexer) and so on. Consequently, Nero achieved the infamous bloatware status. The installation file for the latest version of the software, Nero 9, weighs close to 400 MB and I was really annoyed with the amazing amount of trash Nero had (considering the average user wouldn’t need all that). So I started looking out for alternatives to Nero and boy, was I amazed to find so many good ones!

My top 3 choices would be CDBurnerXP, InfraRecorder and BurnAware.

Being a sucker for neat interfaces, I decided to try out the free version of BurnAware. Sure it looked good; but it is just slow and often annoyingly non-responsive. I might try it out sometime later and update this article with a review (as development is very active). Then I jumped to InfraRecorder. It looked gorgeous and had the simplest interface which just gets the job done. But for some reason, it simply stopped working after I added a second hard-disk to my machine

So that left with me with my last choice – CDBurnerXP. Though it doesn’t look as good as my two earlier choices, it works and well! Its got all the standard features that would satisfy both the average home user as well as power users (burning all types of CDs/DVDs and even HD-DVD & BluRay support, BIN>ISO converter, LightScribe support). Check out some screenshots and don’t forget to uninstall Nero and get one of these great freeware

Find and visualize your BSNL bandwidth usage

GP — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 01:23:40 +0000

According to a TRAI survey, public sector telecom giant BSNL enjoys the dominant position among internet service providers (ISP) in India with roughly 40-50 per cent of the market share. I’ve always been a DataOne (the broadband service offered by BSNL) user here in Chennai and its been extremely satisfactory. And lets face it, no matter how much speed its competitors (Airtel, Reilance, Tata Indicom or Hathway) advertise, BSNL is the fastest available connection yet.

But as all BSNL users would know, the portal that it offers to check our bandwidth usage is simply one of the worst websites EVER

A long time ago, I was searching for some sort of utility to keep continuous track of my bandwidth usage. I had come across a Firefox extension called DataFox which I used for some time with FF 2, but then I switched over to Opera and never looked back. So my hunt continued, and reached its befitting end at ShaPlus. I found a greatly useful piece of software called DataOne Bandwidth Usage Finder. Find the download link at the end of this article.

The utility is pretty self-explanatory. Open up the application, fill in your DataOne portal username and password and click on the ‘Check Usage’ button. 90% of the time, you wouldn’t really need to change any of the other settings. The application logs you in and parses the records and shows you a nice tabulated report. Use the unlimited plan options on the bottom of the window to colour-code your usage statistics. Next, move on to the ‘Chart’ tab, where you can see a bar-graph of your usage stats. The last tab is the ‘Summary’, which shows you your exact billing rates (including the tax ). This is a must-have for DataOne broadband users. Check it out, and let me know your experiences with it in the comments section.

DataOne-Bandwidth-2.8.1.exe
Download BSNL DataOne Usage Finder 2.8.1 – 484 KB | Software’s Homepage