Home  My Programs  Freeware  Game Maker  Articles  Links  Misc  Contact

Freeware Menu >> Internet Tools Page.


Photo resizing software -- Shrink Pic

I'm on a dialup connection and often find myself waiting ages for my emails to download, only to find that one of them contains an enormous picture (usually something funny), that a friend has sent.
While I enjoy receiving emails, the prolonged wait for the unknown, can be infuriating and tedious.

Shrink Pic helps to alleviate the problem, by automatically detecting images, before they are sent over the internet and shrinking the images to reduce the file size. Shrink Pic works with most popular internet browsers, email clients and instant messenger software (a list is on the web site).
I successfully used Shrink Pic with Outlook Express, Thunderbird (portable), Internet Explorer and Opera. It also worked well with Hotmail, by using the file attachment feature, rather than Hotmails sluggish ActiveX resizer.

There is choice of three compression levels, or you can set a custom size. By default only jpg images are resized, but Shrink Pic can also handle bmp, png, tiff and gif files. However it refused to resize gif images when I tried (might just be my computer).
Shrink Pic includes a very good help file along with a nifty animated tutorial and is well worth trying, if you regularly send photos over the internet, particularly if you send them to me!

Freeware -- Download size 1.1MB -- Win 2000, XP

http://www.onthegosoft.com/shrink_pic.htm

Internet Explorer Tool -- TurnFlash v2.10 by Nir Sofer.

An increasing amount of web sites use Macromedia Flash to display adverts on their pages, these are often highly animated and can be rather annoying if they continually repeat. The file size of Flash adverts can also be fairly large, making them a slow loading annoyance for people on 56k dial-up.
If using an alternative browser such as Firefox, or Opera, Flash is easy to disable in the options, but if you use Internet Explorer there is no simple on/off switch and if you choose not to have Flash installed, you will get a install reminder every time you visit a page that contains a Flash component.

TurnFlash allows you to easily turn Flash on and off, by simply clicking on the Taskbar icon, if the "F" is showing Flash is on, if there is just a blue circle, Flash is off.
You need to restart Internet Explorer for the change to take effect.
Note: TurnFlash does not need to run constantly, you can just turn Flash off (or on) and then exit the program.

Freeware -- Download size 7k -- No Install -- Requires IE v5 or greater -- Win(all)

http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/tflash2.html

WackGet v1.2.2 download manager.

Although my browser of choice Opera has a pretty good built in download manager, it does have a few problems common to most browsers. It will try to download all chosen files simultaneously and even if downloading just one file, it will tie up so much bandwidth on my 56k connection that surfing becomes almost impossible.

WackGet avoids these problems, it can be set to download files in a queue, one at a time and it is also more sharing with bandwidth, allowing you to continue to surf, albeit more slowly.

For uninterrupted browsing you can enter your download links, pause the first one in the queue and then restart the downloads after you have finished browsing the internet.
Should you need to disconnect from the internet before WackGet has finished all the downloads, you can simply save your queue to a file and reload it later.

WackGet is a standalone program, that requires no installation and can even be run from a Usb drive, but it can also be integrated with Internet Explorer.
WackGet is designed to be simple with no frills, it does just one job and it does it very well.

Free under the GNU licence -- Download size 180k -- No Install.

http://www.millweed.com/projects/wackget/

Voice Mail Compressor (now called JDVoiceMail).

If you don't like typing emails and your internet connection isn't good enough to support an internet phone call (VOIP), the Voice Mail Compressor gives you a third option, record your voice using the program, the file is then compressed and attached to an email.
The recipient can then listen to the .wav file using Windows media player, or any other media player they like for that matter.

You can choose between two levels of compression for your messages, at the highest level a one minute message produces a file of just 64k.
The program inserts a text message in the subject and body of the email, but both of these can be customised by the user.
You can also choose to save your .wav file to your drive, which could be useful to Game Makers, who could insert very compact sound effect files in their games.

Voice Mail Compressor should work with all types of Windows, but you will of course need a microphone and a sound card with a microphone socket to record your messages. (A modern computer should have a microphone socket as standard.)

Freeware -- Download size 1.38Mb -- Win 9x/ME/NT/2K/XP

http://www.lagolento.com

Internet Explorer add-on -- Flash and Pics Control.

If you still use IE to browse the internet, Flash and Pics Control is an add-on that will enable you to easily turn certain web page elements on and off.
You can increase surfing speed, by turning off Flash animations, which are almost always adverts, you can also turn off pictures, which can be useful on sites that use a lot of large, slow loading, eye candy images.
You can increase your security, by turning off Cookies, ActiveX, Java Script and Java Applets.
Note: Some sites may not function correctly when you turn off some of these elements.

Although it is possible to alter all these settings in the IE tools, Flash and Pics Control makes it much easier and quicker, with a button added to the toolbar. You can simply alter settings from the drop down menu, or use the configuration panel.
You can use Flash and Pics Control with other IE based browsers, but the button is only added to the IE toolbar.
There is no help file, but all the options are clearly labeled and there is an FAQ page on the web site.

Freeware -- Download size 480k -- Win 98, Me, NT, XP, 2000, 2003

http://www.browsertools.net/Flash-and-Pics-Control/index.html

My Popup Killer.

Although most modern browsers come with their own built in popup killers, a few do not, in which case, this little program could come in handy, it has a wide range of options, it can close popups automatically or just notify you, it can also close windows by the adverts contained in them, you can easily overide it for sites that use popups as information windows.
It works with all the popular browsers and can also turn off flash effects.

The program does not install, just unzip it and click on the exe to run, it does not integrate with your browser at all, so you don't need to worry about your settings being altered and it comes with an excellent help file.

Freeware -- Download size 50k -- Win 95/98/ME/NT/2000/XP.

http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/mpk.html

Home