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Picture your weather with Instaweather app

A picture is worth a thousand words, but even that might not tell the whole story. If you want a unique way to describe where you are, InstaWeather Free can add some cool details to your smartphone photos, such as the city name, location data, and temperature. It's fun for a few shots, but the thrill doesn't last long.

Though the app makes you think it's connected to Instagram, there's no real link. The app can share your finished product on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, though. You can take a picture right from the app and … Read more

Video ripping and converting

HandBrake is a video converter program intended to both rip and convert video files to work on a number of supported devices.

The features of this converter are easy enough to understand. An advanced computer user will most likely be able to use HandBrake for its full purpose, but a user who knows the basics should be able to figure out how to work through the main steps. You simply have to have a file or DVD to work with, and HandBrake will help with some of the less obvious steps by indicating the missing information that needs to be … Read more

Laptop battery guardian

Batteries are laptops' Achilles' heels. Many mobile users have been let down by their battery meters, too, which can misjudge or misrepresent how much charge is actually left in your battery. The shortcomings of the built-in Windows meter lead to free tools like BatteryCare. It's a simple utility that displays your laptop battery's status and capacity and the time remaining in its discharge cycle. It monitors and displays CPU and HDD temperatures, too.

BatteryCare has a small but attractive interface that offers a lot more information than the built-in Windows tool, or many other battery meters we've … Read more

Mediocre Mac mimic

Fans of Apple's Mac Dashboard may want to try Kludget Engine, which promises to replicate the Dashboard experience on Windows machines. It'd be great to touch a button and see a variety of useful widgets fly onto the screen. But, like many attempts to bring Apple style to the Windows world, it's better in theory than in practice.

That isn't to say that Kludget Engine is bad. It looks much like Dashboard, and it's actually designed to run Apple widgets. So, we hurried over to Apple's Web site and downloaded some widgets. And they … Read more

Honey, I shrunk the Firefox tabs!

If you find yourself browsing dozens of Web pages at once, this free add-on offers a handy way to manage all those open tabs.

FaviconizeTab is a behind-the-scenes add-on for Firefox 1.5 and newer. It quickly transforms the size of a single tab into nothing larger than the Favicon already displayed on it. Users can simply right-click any open tab, select the FaviconizeTab option, and the tabs shrinks instantaneously. The same action quickly returns the tab to normal size. Although that's the sum total of FaviconizeTab's functionality, the program worked without flaw in our tests.

When Internet … Read more