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JPEGsnoop is a free image decoder that wrings every drop of data that can be extracted from JPEG images. It's compact and fully portable, so you can take it along with you on a USB drive or other memory device and run it from any compatible Windows machine without having to install it. It can open not just JPEGs but also AVI, DNG, PDF, and THM files, and it also extracts embedded JPEG files. As for the data it extracts, we didn't know that JPEGs contained so much information.

We extracted JPEGsnoop's compressed download and opened the … Read more

JB Music Catalog is a personal database for music lovers and collectors. It catalogs your CDs, LPs, tapes, MP3s, and more with a level of detail few other databases can match at any price, yet it's also freeware. It's highly customizable in its look, layout, and properties. It incorporates a music player and can generate detailed reports and discographies, too.

To open JB Music Catalog, you must first create a new catalog or open an existing catalog. We created a new catalog, which involves either changing or accepting the default name and directory in Explorer. The program opened … Read more

Media players are a dime a dozen, which makes it hard for them to stand out from the crowd. Media Player Classic Home Cinema is another contender in the category, but its glitchy performance failed to impress us enough to make the switch from our current player.

The program's user interface is as basic as it gets, which isn't a bad thing. A menu runs across the top of the window, offering navigational options: File, View, Play, Navigate, Favorites, and Help. A bar with buttons for playing, pausing, stopping, and skipping forward and backward resides at the bottom … Read more

Desktop Ticker is a free scrolling RSS feed display that you can place anywhere on the desktop for an unobtrusive yet instantly accessible and highly customizable news crawl. It's easy to use yet offers lots of options. It can follow news, stocks, and pretty much any other feed you can subscribe to.

Desktop Ticker's small dock-style interface resembles a ticker tape, only with small directional arrows at either end for quickly scrolling forward and back and, on the right, an icon to minimize the display and close the program. A left-side menu has three entries: File, for managing … Read more

Adore Puzzle is an interesting combination of virtual picture puzzles and visual travelogue. It depicts historic scenes and attractive views of the countries of the Western European seaboard, beginning in England and progressing through France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain, and Portugal. Each puzzle has two modes: Puzzle, in which the pieces can be moved to any position, and Slide, which works like a slider puzzle where players must slide squares around to form the picture. The puzzles get progressively harder as you travel, and the game keeps track of your moves and time.

Adore Puzzle is a substantial download, and … Read more

We've all stood and waited while an inexperienced cashier calls in a supervisor to void a charge or enter a discount in a point-of-sale system that would be more at home in Mission Control than Corner Drugs. The Corner Store application has Mom and Pop in mind. It's a POS system specifically for small retailers, so it's designed to be as easy to use as possible. It supports bar code scanning, cash register hot keys, and customer tracking. Most importantly, it supports secure credit card transactions via major national services.

Corner Store POS uses Microsoft .NET Framework … Read more

Online banking has been one of the Internet's greatest conveniences, eliminating not just tons of paper but also delays, lag time, and errors. What could be better, you say? Well, electronic bank and credit card statements could be more useful. ProperSoft's Bank2CSV is a free utility that converts your electronic bank and credit card statements from the OFX, QFX, QIF, QBO, and OFC formats used by programs such as QuickBooks, Quicken, and Microsoft Money into spreadsheet-compatible Comma Separated Value (CSV) files that are compatible with Microsoft Excel, OpenOffice.org, and other spreadsheets.

Bank2CSV's simple, dialog-based interface is … Read more

Wikitup is a free desktop reference tool with extensions for Google Chrome and Microsoft Internet Explorer. Wikitup uses open-source data from sites like Wikipedia, Wikitionary, and Wikiquote to deliver search results quickly to your desktop via a system tray icon. It can translate selections in more than 700 languages as well as find photos and videos and present them in a Cooliris 3D Wall display.

To access Wikitup, we clicked the W icon in our Windows notification area, also known as the system tray. We right-clicked the icon and selected Settings, which let us select languages, data sources, hot keys, … Read more

Hash functions have a variety of cryptographic uses, such as providing digital signatures, checking the contents of downloaded files and programs for corrupted or changed files, and time-stamping secure documents without revealing their content. Easy Hash is a freeware hash value calculator from odzysk.info. It supports more than 130 file and text hash functions, and it can crack CRC-32 passwords. It can also reset passwords in a variety of dynamic content management and e-commerce platforms, including Joomla, Mambo, Wordpress, Magento, Drupal, and Prestashop.

Easy Hash's compact interface is easy to manage, with a plain window that displays the … Read more