Daily Freeware Reviews

IPCop Firewall is a Linux firewall distribution geared towards home and SOHO (Small Office/Home Office) users. The IPCop interface is very user-friendly and task-based. IPCop offers the critical functionality of an expensive network appliance using stock, or even obsolete, hardware and OpenSource Software.

IPCop Firewall basically sits “in between” your Internet connection (dial-up modem, cable-modem, DSL, etc) and works directs traffic using a set of rules for the TCP/IP traffic that underlies all Internet activities. The default rules, ideal for most users, are essentially simple in nature. They allow you to “surf” to the outside world and visit web-sites, FTP, email and so forth. And as you go about your tasks on the Internet, IPCop allows return traffic from those tasks, that you requested, to pass through. If, however, some random TCP/IP traffic comes in, requesting information from your computer, and that traffic is not in response to your requests, IPCop Firewall refuses to respond, and logs that attempt. Thus, you are allowed to go about your normal business, but when the bad guys try to come after you, they are stopped cold, because they are not responding to your requests. Think of IPCop Firewall as your friendly traffic cop down on the corner, making sure that things travel smoothly, and enforcing good rules on your Internet traffic.

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If the sky does not look like it will be raining I tend to go to work without a jacket. It happens that it will rain on that day nevertheless and I tend to be completly wet when I arrive at home. A freeware utility like Weather Watcher might have spared me from that fate. Now, what does this application do ?

Weather Watcher is your personal Windows desktop weather station. Automatically retrieve the current conditions, hourly forecast, daily forecast, detailed forecast, severe weather alerts, and weather maps for over 77,000 cities world-wide. The current conditions can be quickly viewed by holding your mouse pointer over the Weather Watcher system tray icon.

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Axcrypt is a free file encryption software that uses the AES-128 algorithm to encrypt files. It adds entries to the right click menu of windows giving you easy access to encryption options. If you have an encrypted file you can easily decrypt it by double-clicking the file. Can’t find a easier solution than this.

“AxCrypt is free and easy to use open source strong file encryption for Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2K/XP, integrated with Windows Explorer. Encrypt, compress, decrypt, wipe, view and edit with a few mouse clicks. Cryptographic primitives are AES-128 and SHA-1.” 

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Fresh Download Manager is an easy-to-use and very fast download manager that turbo charges downloading files from the Internet, such as your favorite freeware and shareware, mp3 files, movie files, picture collections, etc. Unlike any other similar utilities, this software is 100% free, no charges, no banners (which steal your bandwidth), no spyware inside it.

Some key features are that it is able to pause and resume downloads, use multiple connections to download files, can be integrated into many popular browsers like internet explorer, firefox and opera, able to schedule downloads and support for proxys and antivirus tools.

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URL Snopper is a freeware program that tries to detect the urls of streaming audio and video media on websites. Many times such streams are hidden from normal detection by using scripting languages like Javascript or PHP. It is difficulty to manually find out those urls and url snooper is a real helpful utility that searches for those urls.

URL Snooper provides easy solution to finding the URLs for all streams by by watching network traffic and identifying potential urls, especially streaming media urls.

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Flipbook Printer creates special “flipbooks” from avi files. There is not much to say about this freeware utility so bare with me if this post is getting rather short. All you have to do is select an avi file that you want to use to make your flipbook from, some suggestions would be private videos from your loved ones for instance.

Select a start and ending point of the flipbook and the program does the rest for you. All you have to do is print the results, that is if you like them, and cut them out when they have been printed. Great gift idea if you ask me.

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