Coolringer. Freeware lets you create ringtones for your mobile phone or Skype. Install and just right mouse click on any MP3 file – for which you have copyright of course, eh? – and presto a ringtone. The program is supposed to analyse the MP3 to ‘clip the coolest part’ of the song, but what it actually seems to do is just create a smaller clip file of the beginning. But hey, it’s free right? Oh and your handset needs to support MP3 ringtone clips.  Coolringer…

Poser 5 is being offered for free download until September 8th. If you’re into creating 3D characters you may just want to hurry over and take advantage of this doozy of an offer. Tell them the Ferret sent ya. (psst…you need to register first).

Dark Room. Retro word processing program for Windows. Proof that weird stuff can be…ah…interesting.  Dark Room is a full screen, distraction free, writing environment. Unlike standard word processors that focus on features, Dark Room is just about you and your text. Basically, Dark Room is a clone of the original WriteRoom that is an OS X (tiger) exclusive application. It is a child of necessity, as there were no viable alternatives in Windows to produce the same behavior.

Volumouse. Control your computer audio volume with a mouse wheel. Heh, neat little piece of freeware.  Volumouse provides you a quick and easy way to control the sound volume on your system – simply by rolling the wheel of your wheel mouse. It allows you to define a set of rules for determining when the wheel will be used for changing the sound volume. For example: You can configure Volumouse to use your mouse wheel for volume control when the…

MechCommander, the game. For free download. ‘Nuff said?  Originally released in 1998 by Fasa Studios, MechCommander was at the very cutting edge of Real Time Strategy (RTS) games. Combining elements of the Battletech universe with solid multiplayer game play, it gained a huge following amongst both RTS and Battletech fans alike and still has a loyal following today.

Here are 5 lightweight and free alternatives to MSN Messenger. Enjoy! Instan-T Messenger. Glitzy multi-network chat client. MSN, AOL, Yahoo!, ICQ. SIM-IM. Open Source instant messenger for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X. Geeky? Jabber. Famous MSN alternative, huge developer community and very extensible. Miranda IM. Tiny, floppy disk sized client with over 350 plugins available. Easy Message. 240kb gives MSN, AOL, ICQ and Yahoo! Also POP3 monitoring.

Man, you gotta just keep loving Firefox and the developer community doncha? The new Video Downloader Extension puts a button on your Firefox bar which lets you download any YouTube, iFilm, MetaCafe, Google Video or whatever other multimedia material you can find out there, from over 60 different sites. Including MP3, Quicktime etc. It’s an absolutely superb extension, so grab grab grab it. And if you want the icing on the cake, just use SUPER to convert the footage to any other format (to…

The Skype Email Toolbar. Beta toolbar which looks quite useful. Install it into an email client like Outlook Express or Thunderbird and email messages become IM and presence enabled. And you can call them too while reading their messages.   * Call Skype Names and phone numbers written in emails * See when your contacts are online * Start instant messaging in follow up to emails * Add a Skype Button to your email signature, so other people can just click to…

The rather gorgeous CompactLibraryExtensionOrganiser or CLEO, lets you bundle up all your Firefox extensions into a single xpi file which can be installed in one go. It’s a great way to backup and restore your whole extension list when you move machines, and also a cool way to distribute extensions to Firefox newbies or anyone else for that matter. As proof, here’s the download link to my Top 10 Firefox Extensions file. Download it, unzip and install my faves all…

Bubbles. No, not Michael Jackson’s chimp friend, but a free application which gives you a system tray on steroids. Minimise web sites to it, drag photos there to upload to Flickr and view notification bubbles from online applications like Google Calendar and Yahoo! Mail. My system tray would explode if I stuffed anything more onto it, but still, sounds like a useful app.   * Keep your favorite web-sites a click away, on the system-tray. * Enjoy new features in existing web-sites with Smart-Bubbles. * Enhance…

Real7ime Converter. Tiny bit of freeware which claims to convert any RealPlayer stream to AVI/WAV/MP3 on demand in real time. Haven’t had a chance to try it yet, but if it works as advertised it could be quite a nice utility to keep in the tool chest.

RemoveWGA. Fed up with Microsoft’s Windows Genuine Advantage spyware clogging up your Windows XP installation, phoning home every 10 minutes and otherwise acting like a nasty bully? You might need this little software utility then. See, there really is a Santa Claus.  RemoveWGA enables you to remove the Microsoft “Windows Genuine Advantage Notifications” tool, which is calling home and connect to Microsoft servers every time you boot (pilot version), or every two weeks (current release)…Windows Genuine Advantage Notifications is different…

Printer Anywhere. Man, colour me frustrated. This appears to be one of the most innovative and downright useful applications I’ve come across in a long time and can I get it to work on my rig? Can I heck! Tsk. Basically it lets you set up any printer as a global shared unit, so you can literally print a document to that printer from anywhere you’ve got a web browser. It’s such a cool app my teeth are chattering. But…despite…

We’ve talked about the Snaptune audio recorder program before, but they’ve now gone and updated the software to allow you to record any Internet radio station to your hard disk. It’s pretty neat, and seems to work well, although we’re still in love with Station Ripper really.  Snaptune works with any audio source including web radio stations, USB radio tuners, or a simple line-in connection to your radio receiver. Pick a station from Snaptune’s extensive list of local or web radio stations;…

Volume Tray. Adjust your PC volume via a more sophisticated tray utility. Interesting.