Internet

If you are looking for an easy-to-use, light on resources weather application for your Windows desktop, you'll want to consider Mr. Weather. It's amazing how heavy some desktop weather applications can get. Besides current conditions and a forecast, many weather applications are set up to display ads, weather maps, videos, etc., etc. That's great if you want all that, but its overkill if you just want to discover current conditions and the current forecast. Mr.

While the recoding companies would like people to think that they have to pay -- and often pay through the nose -- for music, there are still a number of ways to legally get music free via the Internet. There are thousands of Internet Radio stations for example, and it is perfectly legal (at least in the US) to record music from radio stations -- over the air or over the Internet. There are a large number of good payware programs for recording music from Internet radio stations. Most of them look better than streamWriter in the interface department, but few have useful features beyond those provided by the free streamWriter.

Google Reader is probably the most popular RSS Feed Reader around. It allows you to follow RSS news feeds from your favorite web site in one place. And you can access Google Reader from any computer. Some people, however, prefer to use a RSS Reader program on their computer as these programs generally provide features that online RSS Readers -- like Google Reader -- do not.

Many parents want some way to control their children's computer use: to help prevent them from accidentally (or purposely) accessing inappropriate sites, to prevent them from using the computer to play games when they should be using it to do their homework, etc. Most parental control software is not cheap, sometimes even requiring regular fees to keep it up to date and blocking the newest obviously inappropriate sites. Crawler Parental Control is freeware from the people who make Spyware Terminator.

Have you ever wanted to set up a web server just so you can easily provide a few files to friends and family (or to yourself when you are at another computer) via a program they understand - their web browser? If you've looked into this, you've probably discovered that setting up a full web server is a lot of work. HFS (HTTP File Server) makes it easy. Install the program, add the files you want to make available to a list, create user accounts for those you want to have access to the files, and you are set.