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Best free obscure software

Ian Osborne

JREF Kid
Ian Osborne
Joined
Aug 4, 2001
Messages
8,957
What's your favourite free-but-obscure software package? Let's stay away from things like Gimp or OpenOffice.org; everyone knows about them. Let's share our top apps, games, utilities and whatever which are free, but not widely known about. Here's a couple of Mac OSX utilities from me for starters:

FinderCleaner - This little utility lets you remove Mac resource files such as .DS_Store and .Trashes from external storage drives before ejecting them. It's ideal if you've a cheap MP3 player which gets confused by these files, which are invisible on the Mac. It's ideal if you pass data from your Mac to a PC on a pen drive too.

CleanArchiver - This removes the same files as FinderCleaner, but for folders which you want to Zip. With CleanArchiver you get exactly what it says on the box - a clean archive. This is useful for passing material between Macs and PCs, and essential if you want to create a .cbz file for use on a sequential image reader. Many such readers on the PC won't read an archive containing Mac resource files.

Over to you then, guys - share your fave free software we might not otherwise have heard of, with links where possible.
 
StartupMonitor - Essentially, anytime something tries to insert itself into your registry for loading on bootup, this program pops up a box asking you if you want to allow it to. Much easier than killing stuff in msconfig.
 
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Hitman Pro

Great spyware tool. Hitman Pro with a single click automatically downloads, installs and runs the 7 most popular free/free trial anti-spyware programs as well as it's own built in anti-spyware. Can be configured to do virus scan as well.

No more having to install Spybot to remove one spyware, and adaware to remove another.

xxcopy

Awsome tool for copying large amounts of data very quickly. Ideal for backing up hard drive data (much faster than copying it with windows file system). It's command line only but still pretty easy to use.

Here's the basic command to copy the contents of one drive or folder to another. Includes logging so you can tell if any files didn't copy (usually only some temp and system32 files won't copy as they're in use by windows).

xxcopy "(location)" "(other location)" /yy /BACKUP /oAlog.txt
 
Depends what you call a 'software package' I guess.

A couple of my favourite small apps:

WinURL : This launches URLs copied to the clipboard using a hotkey setting (Win-W by default). Amazingly handy, particularly when copying URLs in PuTTY windows.

Launchy : App, URL etc. launcher using a text interface. Avoid the Start Menu. Very handy for those of us who use the keyboard rather than the mouse by preference.
 
ASCIIcat
PC ONLY but there is a smaller PDF file. Granted, it hasn't been updated in a couple of years, but it's still a pretty useful Help guide.

Electric Sheep
One of the coolest screen savers ever!

Heromachine
Not really downloadable, but you can play a really cool game of paper dolls.
 
Paint.Net - If you're running Windows (XP & Vista) and don't have a commercial image manipulation program (Photoshop, Illustrator, etc.), then this program is the one for you.

Windows Sysinternals by Mark Russinovich - Mark is a stand-up guy who wrote most of these (free) apps long before Microsoft made him an offer, and Microsoft continues to offer (most of) these for free because they were so good.

IE7Pro - For those of you running IE 7, this program adds functionalities to the browser to give it even more capabilities and flexibility. Very nice.

KeePass - this is a password manager that lets you store all of your passwords in an encrypted file. It even lets you lock it with a single "master password" so others can't get to it. There is also a Mac version called KeyPassX that I use to share the password file between my Windows desktop and iBook.

Power Tab - Little Windows program to help you build guitar tablature.
 
SyncToy
Microsoft does little for free, but is a pretty good way to synchronize two directories. After the initial synchronization, it only copies changed files. I use it as an easy way to back up data files.
 
USB Drive PC Repair system

Awesome little "Field repair Kit" for computers, it contains 38 different little freeware repair/diagnostic tools and only takes up 32mb!

It builds an auto running system tray icon (a Coffee bean) and when right clicked brings up all the funky little tools. Highly recommend trying it.

Sandboxie

Little program to test if software your installing contains anything malicious/annoying, it runs the program or "sand boxes" the program in a transient storage it makes, separating it from the rest of your hard drive.

Das Boot!

Makes a mac diagnostic and repair tool with any portable HDD, even your iPod! (I'm sold on the name alone!)
 
First of all this is a good thread.

I tried to run Hitman Pro as suggested above.
What a ***** program. It took over my computer and picked its own settings. Then it started to scan for adware, spyware etc. and spyware doctor installed itslef in my task bar at the bottom right corner (near the clock) and I could not turn it off. What more is that it didn't fix what it found since I need the Pro version (costs money) to remove them.
the next move I did was to uninstall it and throw it away.
 
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yairhol said:
First of all this is a good thread.

I tried to run Hitman Pro as suggested above.
What a ***** program. It took over my computer and picked its own settings. Then it started to scan for adware, spyware etc. and spyware doctor installed itslef in my task bar at the bottom right corner (near the clock) and I could not turn it off. What more is that it didn't fix what it found since I need the Pro version (costs money) to remove them.
the next move I did was to uninstall it and throw it away.
Click to expand...
I had the same experience installing Hitman Pro on w2k,

nimzo
 
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MathGV: A really simple, nice function plotting tool that makes clean, pretty graphs. Really good for making simple illustration functions for documents and what-not.
 
GreNME said:
KeePass - this is a password manager that lets you store all of your passwords in an encrypted file. It even lets you lock it with a single "master password" so others can't get to it. There is also a Mac version called KeyPassX that I use to share the password file between my Windows desktop and iBook.
Click to expand...

I use Password Safe. Originally by security guru Bruce Schneier, it requires a master password. It also supports autotype (i.e. it takes over the keyboard and types your ID/password for you), clipboard management (so your password doesn't stay on the clipboard) and more. It can run from a USB drive (i.e. won't change the host system). Windows-only, unfortunately; there is a Java version but it's rather old and corrupted my password file when I ran it. Very well designed. Open source, too.

It can import KeepPass files, by the way.
 
grmcdorman said:
I use Password Safe. Originally by security guru Bruce Schneier, it requires a master password. It also supports autotype (i.e. it takes over the keyboard and types your ID/password for you), clipboard management (so your password doesn't stay on the clipboard) and more. It can run from a USB drive (i.e. won't change the host system). Windows-only, unfortunately; there is a Java version but it's rather old and corrupted my password file when I ran it. Very well designed. Open source, too.

It can import KeepPass files, by the way.
Click to expand...

Great mention! Yeah, I used that previously, but switched to KeePass (which has many of the same features, though it doesn't require a master pass) because there was a Mac port. That way I can keep a master file at home and update it to my iBook without any extra steps. I can attest to PasswordSafe being a good download (for Windows) too!
 
yairhol said:
First of all this is a good thread.

I tried to run Hitman Pro as suggested above.
What a ***** program. It took over my computer and picked its own settings. Then it started to scan for adware, spyware etc. and spyware doctor installed itslef in my task bar at the bottom right corner (near the clock) and I could not turn it off. What more is that it didn't fix what it found since I need the Pro version (costs money) to remove them.
the next move I did was to uninstall it and throw it away.
Click to expand...

Well crap I'm sorry Hitman Pro didn't work for you. It was the only thing we used all the time at my old tech job. It does install a bunch of anti-spyware programs automatically. It doesn't change anything about spyware doctor or adaware or spybot (some being trials will only have 30 days or so and then they can't be used anymore) so they will install themselves in your task bar and stuff until you edit their settings. But if it doesn't work junk it. It's not worth pulling your hair out over.
 
Ian Osborne said:
Interesting Windows and Mac programs here. Do the Linux users have anything to add?
Click to expand...
As a Linux user, I'm using always open source software :). As I'm mostly into system administration and programming, I mostly write my own scripts to automate tasks the way I want them :D.

For the Windows users though, I'd nominate this one:

NT password editor: very convenient if you forgot the administrator password. Of course, it's Linux based :rolleyes:
 
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