Recently I’ve made a pleasant discovery: The KMPlayer. It’s not just another media player,but,in my opinion,very possibly the ONLY media player you will ever need.

How can I make such a bold claim?

The playback abilities are very impressive; It plays just about every video and audio format you’re likely to ever use (with its own internal codecs as standard, so no downloading messy codec packs!) and it’s very customizable. It can be skinned and a whole lot more (I tend to like the default skin anyway) with all key and mouse actions fully customizable.

It also has very good subtitle support, and a neat option to have the subtitles only show on the black bars, underneath your movie instead of over it. As far as audio goes, it has some features which are very directly infuenced by winamp such as the same kind of winamp options,playlist support and it’s even compatible with some winamp plug-ins! Audio streaming is supported too so you can listen to your favorite radio stations online.

It has a very extensive list of options which can be customized to your liking with just a little experimentation. I liked it so much, I uninstalled winamp and my dvd/media player. Maybe you will too? Let me know!

Check out the official forum where you can read more info and download the latest version.

Are you a music addict? Wouldn’t it be nice if you had instant access to listen to your own music collection, as small or big as it may be, from any internet connected computer?

The Anywhere.FM player is a Flash program that works in your browser. You’re able to upload and hear your own music, and it lets you listen to others peoples shared music too.

Thinking about the legality of all this? This is fully authorized by the respective performance rights authorities to stream this music, so you don’t have to be worried about attracting any bad karma from questionable legalites. And whenever you discover something you like, they’re linked into Amazon, so you’ll be able to purchase the song or album for yourself if you should decide on it.

Anywhere.FM is a free to use web service and at least at the time of writing, there’s no limitation on how much music you can upload to the service. www.anywhere.fm

Whenever you want to move files across the Net, you usually require FTP. FTP—File Transfer Protocol—is widely used as both the name of how you upload and download files to/from your local computer to/from a remote server, and as the application you utilize to carry out this, known as an FTP Client. (The FTP server is what is at the opposite end of the connection.)

Whenever you upload new pages or files to your website, you’re using FTP to send them there. When you’re downloading files from many places, you’re using FTP to get them to your computer too. There ends our crash course in FTP, but you probably already knew all that, so, on with the show!

Prompt FTP Client is a utility that helps make your FTP file transfers run more easily. It features an easy-to-use connection wizard, which is easy to configure, so you’ll be able to get on with managing your files, instead of being forced to expend a lot of time on figuring out the program. In addition to that, it includes an integrated editor that permits the editing of remote pages without being forced to download them and then upload them again. Worth a go if you’re looking for a plain and simple FTP client.

Download and more info at the homepage

Are you easily bored? Want some excitement in your life? This program might not offer all that, but it is interesting however, for those of you sick of the usual windows log-in screen and wanting a change.

Logon Loader is a small utility that allows you to modify your XP login screen. You can choose to pick a particular screen. Or be random and have Logon Loader select a random screen for you from one of your favorites. Whatever you decide, you won’t have to look at the same old boring screen at login again! You’ll even be able to preview your screens before using them.

If this sounds good to you, head on over to the homepage here to get it, its free!

Google has always been one to step into unexpected new directions and the new web browser, Google Chrome, is no exception.

According to the official Google Chrome site, they’ve aimed to rewrite the typical browser to be faster and a lot more crash proof. This is done by running each tab as a separate process which you can close via a task manager-like interface if that particular page should freeze or have issues. Therefore you can just close that particular page and not have to worry about your entire browser crashing or locking up. You can import data from IE and Firefox such as bookmarks.

The interface is very minimalistic with the address bar/search bar ( they call it the “omnibox”) being an all in one search area. A user can type anything here and instantly get suggestions on where to go, taken from the user’s own browsing history and Google’s rankings of popular sites. Other features include an “Incognito” mode, which lets you surf in a tab without leaving any browser history. This is the first beta of Google Chrome, but i think it’s worth watching as they have some interesting ideas happening that could possibly make this browser very popular in the future.

If you want further info or take it for a test drive yourself, check out the official Google Chrome website.

Fleace is a Flickr-based wallpaper switcher for people who’d like to change their desktop wallpaper on startup, but who dislike letting wallpaper changers linger around in their system tray consuming resources. The stand-alone app may be launched or given a shortcut, which lets the user preview a background before applying it to the desktop and closing Fleace down.

Alternately, you are able to add Fleace as a run-once app to your startup procedure, It works by pulling images from Fickr based on tags you define.

This little program is a good solution if you are sick of the same old boring background on your desktop and is also ideal for low-memory systems.

Fleace is Freeware. For more information and download check out the homepage.

IdentityPal Lost & Found is a free service to help reunite lost USB pen drives with their owners.

No installation is necessary. Just download the ZIP file,and copy the files to the root directory of your USB drive, and thats it! When it’s inserted into a computer, it will then display a main screen containing an address of the IdentityPal Service, ready for printing out. Whoever found your USB pen drive can then return it to you for free via IdentityPal’s Postage-Paid Return Mailing Service.

This service ships a lost USB drive back to its registered owner while keeping their personal information totally private.

Once your tracking ID is confirmed,your drive will be shipped back to you at no charge. This is worth trying out if you worry about losing your USB drive and its totally free.

Check it out and download here.

DownForEveryoneOrJustMe.com is a web service that serves a single and effective function: to see if that website you’re attempting to load is actually down, or if your own computer or network filters are the trouble.

When you can’t get your homepage, or your favorite website (this one of course!), just go to DownForEveryoneOrJustMe.com,and put in the url of the website that’s gone AWOL, and find out if it’s really, um…down for everyone or just you.

I guess this may not work perfectly in a multi-server situation—for example, if a few Google servers were down but not others.
Even so, its still a quick and easy way to determine if your problem is at your end or the site you’re trying to reach.

May be worth bookmarking – http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/ !

Totally Free Burner is a CD/DVD burner with a pleasant, minimalistic user interface and a great array of features.This simply named burning application provides a range of features that will handle most people’s CD/DVD burning needs. It also provides a slick design with a good look-and-feel as a further bonus.

Features include:

• “Screenshot2Bootable”: can produce bootable CDs and DVDs
• An effective array of configurations are supported; all current hardware interfaces (IDE/SCSI/USB/1394/SATA).
• Multi-Session or Disc-at-Once mode for all formats; any combination of UDF/ISO9660/Joliet bridged file systems, and UNICODE support.
• Burns Audio CDs: supports mp3, wav, ogg and wma file formats.

One drawback is it doesn’t rip audio CDs, but there are many other utilities that can do this.

It can burn from local DVD files or ISO. There is also support for using UDF format, for compatibility with hardware DVD players. Latest version has Drag and drop support for files and folders for further ease of use.

This is an all round good burning application for anyone who’s looking for a free burner program and is well worth checking out. You can get it here at the homepage.

Smart Shutdown is a tidy and easy to use scheduling tool.

It has right click operation from system tray menu to execute system operations such as shut down, log off, reboot, lock, turn off, hibernate, disconnect from the Internet or network, enter standby mode in Windows, and shut down and reboot computers in your network – all both manually and automatically, as well as if you’re away from the computer for a certain amount of time. It has the power to schedule to nearly any time.

I have tried a few other similar shut down programs, but some of them failed to completely shut down resulting in me waking to find my computer still on all night as it waited for some never to be completed shut down step to happen. Apparently the creators have given a 99.8% guarantee that this will shutdown your computer each time! Gotta be a good sign!

This small program does exactly what I need – to shut down my computer automatically when i’m not around to do it manually! Let’s not ignore that it also has style and groovy animations to add that edge, in addition to inbuilt transparency as well. When you’re in a hurry to shut down or want to do so automatically when you’re away, you’ll be glad you installed this neat program.

Its freeware, so check out the homepage.