Freeware makers are usually avid computer users who do not program for profit, but use their skills to improve something. Thanks to the free programs, computing is more fun and convenient! We discuss the best freeware at the moment and new versions of “evergreens”.
Tip 01: Animated
Suitable for: Windows 7, 8.x, 10, MacOS
If you ever watch a 3D animation film, you may be surprised at the lifelike that is achieved today. In 3D games, the image is no different and where the individual images in a cinema film have often taken hours of computing power, a fast game PC often does its trick in 4K and at 60 images per second.
If you want to get started with making 3D objects and possibly animating them, you can choose from a number of free products. K-3D is one of them. It is a very versatile program that, to begin with, has everything on board to (re) shape objects. Usually that process starts with an elementary shape, such as a sphere or a cube, which you can stretch and indent in many ways. You can merge multiple shapes into a hierarchy (think of a doll with a head, arms and legs) where the different parts can move depending on each other.
Nobody is waiting for exclusively objects made of white plastic, so you can provide each object with certain materials in many ways. You can even think of hair or carpet, something that until recently was unthinkable.
Ultimately, you generate an image with an external program (called a renderer) such as the free RenderMan. K-3D is expandable with plugins and offers excellent online documentation in English.
Tip 2: Chess staff
Suitable for: Windows 7, 8.x, 10
Nowadays the computer may play chess better than humans, but that does not mean that the game is dead. On the contrary, many enthusiasts still go to his or her chess club every week and / or play games on the internet.
Those who play a bit seriously play down their moves in order to learn from mistakes later. Traditionally, there have been database programs to store and replay games. Often these were nice but expensive products or very basic freeware. Scid is the positive exception to this pattern. Not only is Scid free, the program is also extraordinarily beautiful and complete. The supplied sample database with 127,000 games can be searched by opening, player, position and so on. Of course you can expand that database with your own parties and other databases. If desired, parties can also be entered via an electronic board. Scid comes with the strong chess engine Stockfish to analyze positions.
On the visual side, a lot of attention has been paid, including photos of players and graphs with opening success rates. A must for the chess enthusiast.
Those who play a bit seriously play down their moves in order to learn from mistakes later
Tip 03: Beautiful
Suitable for: Windows 7, 8.x, 10, MacOS, Linux
You can use the photo viewer that comes with Windows 10 for viewing images. Nowadays, you can even unleash facial recognition on it (if you don’t mind Microsoft scanning your images at that level, otherwise it can be turned off). All in all, the Photos App has few features, so it’s a good thing that there are good alternatives. One of the most complete is XnView MP, of which updates are still regularly released (at the time of writing version 0.94.1 is current). A portable version as well as an installation version of the program is available for 32 and 64 bit systems.
To start with, XnView is a fast viewer for viewing large collections of images. This can also be done as a simple slide show, so without effects. In addition, the program is a database with which you can add labels, keywords and ratings to your photos. You can also easily edit or delete the often automatically added data, such as the EXIF ​​data. The program also offers a nice collection of tools to crop, rotate and pep up photos. If all that is not enough, you can also link XnView to your favorite photo editor.
Finally, XnView allows you to convert large collections of photos in bulk and the program can handle a stunningly large number of file formats.
Tip 04: Booklet open
Suitable for: any system
New books and magazines are published daily, but there is still so much reading material on the internet that you will not be bored for many lifetimes.
Especially when it comes to Dutch literature and related matters, there is the Digital Library for Dutch Literature, in short DBNL. Here you will find a phenomenal collection from all over the Dutch language area, created through a collaboration between the Language Union, the Flemish Heritage Libraries and the Koninklijke Bibliotheek in The Hague. Every month new titles are added, ranging from classics from the Middle Ages to complete volumes of magazines from the past decades, such as Onze Taal and Bzzlletin. Of course, the intermediate time is not skipped either, as we see, for example, from the collected work of Simon Vestdijk and the 100-year-old volumes of Elseviers Illustrated Monthly Magazine.
You can read all that beautiful online, but usually you can also download the publications as ePub or PDF, so that you can also read the stories on your e-reader or tablet.
Tip 05: Health!
Suitable for: Windows 7, 8.x, 10
Anyone who ever visits a doctor will undoubtedly be confronted with the ice-cold end of his or her favorite toy: the stethoscope. The cold case tells the doctor something about your health condition. Well, if only our body was equipped with sensors that it could just read …
Fortunately, the PC is and so we can see the well-being of that device with a program that can display the value of those sensors. HWMonitor is a good choice for that purpose, because the program measures a lot of things and – very nice – manages to limit all its findings to one clear window. HWMonitor tells you all about the voltages on the motherboard, reads the different temperature sensors, keeps track of fan speeds, measures the processor load and temperature per core, reads the clock speeds of the CPU, monitors the disk space and temperature and gives all relevant information about the graphics Map. It is very nice that the program not only shows current values, but if you let the program run a little longer in the background, you also see the maximum and minimum values ​​that occurred during that time. Handy to find out, for example, how hot the CPU or GPU got during heavy work.
HWMonitor is available as installation file (exe) and portable version in both 32 and 64 bit.
Tip 06: Assignment
Suitable for: Windows 7, 8.x, 10
In Windows, you sometimes can’t avoid executing commands from the so-called command prompt that hides behind cmd.exe or in Windows 10 in the PowerShell section. Often as a user you have little to look for, but especially with computer problems it can happen that the support site of Microsoft also points you to that part. However, it is rather limited in its capabilities; you can type assignments and cut or paste something. A convenient alternative ColorConsole. This also gives you access to the command prompt, but the program also offers useful extras. This way you can navigate to folders via a menu instead of having to type in the name. You can also easily adjust the foreground and background color and even the font size for better readability.
In Windows, you sometimes can’t avoid running commands from the command prompt
Tip 07: Vrrroemmm!
Suitable for: Windows 7, 8.x, 10
A program like HWMonitor (see tip 5) is of course indispensable if you want to keep track of the condition of your PC, but it does not say anything about its speed. To quickly find out how fast your PC is, there is the handy UserBenchmark. This program tests in a few minutes the performance of the CPU and GPU, the memory and the hard and external disks. You will then receive an extensive report for each part. Here you not only see the absolute scores, but you can also compare your system with many other systems to which the program has previously been released. When components perform comparatively below par, you also get tips for performance improvement. The difficulty of carrying it out naturally differs per part; sometimes a Windows setting is sufficient and sometimes you have to dive deep into the bios.
Tip 08: Diagnosis
Suitable for: Windows 7, 8.x, 10
We tested our hardware and measured the speed of our system. Can we release even more simple diagnostics on the PC to assess health? Well and or, with the tiny and simple ScanCircle4D. Although this program also provides an overview of existing hardware, it focuses primarily on installed software.
After a scan – which takes less than a minute – tells ScanCircle4D you know which programs could be updated and if software problems were found, for example a program that is in the automatic startup list, but is no longer present on the PC. All findings can be found in a concise and clear summary. In addition, there is a tab with advice that is subdivided according to the degree of seriousness. If you have solved any problems, you can do a new scan to see how this improves your system score.
Tip 09: recognizable
Suitable for: any system, iOS, Android
Suppose you see a nice font somewhere that you would like to use yourself. How do you find out what it’s called? In the past, this was only possible by searching through large collections of fonts, but fortunately computers nowadays “recognize” enough to do such a job for us. The free service WhatTheFont understand that trick. Using it is simple: take a picture of the text to be analyzed and drag it to the search box on the website. After clicking the search button, the site comes up with a list of suggestions. In addition to (hopefully) the correct font, this also contains the necessary fonts that resemble it. The only drawback is that they are all commercial fonts. This is no problem for professional use, but of course you do not want to pay tens of euros for a font privately. Fortunately, that problem is easily solved with a search on Google, such as “free alternatives to …” with the name of the font you are looking for on the dots.
WhatTheFont also offers apps for iOS and Android.
Tip 10: Viewing pictures
Suitable for: any system
Almost every magazine works with photographers who take the necessary pictures for the articles. They often supplement that footage via a subscription to a commercial database with stock photos. But because of the high costs, this is not an option for your own website. If you then went looking for an alternative on the internet, you would sometimes come home from a cold fair, because suddenly there was a notice on the mat of a company that claimed to have the rights to the image.
You can only work with photos of someone else if you know the origin and can find out for what purposes you can use an image for free. An excellent place to search is the website of Pixabay. Here you will find around 1.5 million free photos and illustrations that you can search by keyword.
Although searches in Dutch do yield some results, it is still more convenient to search in English, because that almost always yields more.
Tip 11: Converted
Suitable for: Windows 7, 8.x, 10
Those who go on holiday in America may have to get used to the fact that they do not work with the units of measurement that are customary almost everywhere, but stick to all kinds of their own units of measurement such as miles, feet, ounces, acres, Fahrenheit and so on. To turn them into a unit that we can interact with, there are countless websites and programs, but few are as comprehensive as Converber. This program has many dozens of categories, such as distance, weight and temperature, but also some more technical units, such as storage capacity and radiation. If what you are looking for is not among that huge offer, you can easily find (for example in Wikipedia) a conversion line and add it yourself.
Tip 12: Museum at home
Suitable for: any system
In the Europeana project the treasures of thousands of European museums are made available online. The introductory phrase on the site says it all: “Explore 57,704,325 works of art, artifacts, books, videos and sounds from over 3,500 museums, galleries, libraries and archives in Europe.”
Of course, strolling through a museum yourself is wonderful and educational, but sometimes you don’t feel like going out of your house. In order not to get lost in the gigantic online collection, the site offers both a search function and all kinds of sections to browse. And… for those who were not satisfied with the photo material from Pixabay (see tip 10), you will even find a collection of 14 million free images.
Don’t forget to get a breath of fresh air every now and then, because with so much beauty you can easily stick to the screen.
Dangerous?
With some freeware, you can expect a scary warning from your security program. Do not be put off, but read carefully what is going on and whether you think this makes sense. For example, programs connect to the internet. This action can already trigger a response from your security guard. Your security officer can also issue a warning for software that is relatively new or is referred to as “rare”. Do you trust the download? Then let the program run. Do you feel doubt? Have your download investigated www.virustotal.com, we do that too. This service checks your program with more than fifty security programs. This way you can quickly see whether you are dealing with a risk or an over-zealous security program.
Don’t click too fast
Unfortunately, we see it too often and it should be banned: installation procedures that bundle additional programs and make adjustments just like that. You try a program and before you know it, the homepage of your browser has been adjusted and you have a number of unwanted programs richer. This method is popularly called “underhanded”, but the neat designation is “potentially unwanted program” (pup). More and more security programs pay attention to this when you try to install something. We use Unchecky to notice “wrong check marks.” You can also prevent the extras yourself. For example, download a program only from the makers’ website. Always opt for the advanced or custom installation. This way you can check which options are active. Remove the check marks from changes / programs that you consider undesirable or reject the change in another way.
