All posts by Locutus »
[Windows 8] Break and place triangles for as long as possible in LINX
Each triangle you place gets you more points… but the screen fills up quickly! Link L shapes into rectangles of 3×2 or bigger, but beware that each rectangle then turns into another L–of a different color. This keeps you running and running, until the board inevitably fills up.
Linx is [...]
Read More »[Android] Screen turning off while you’re reading? Keep it on with SmartStay Ex
Many people enjoy reading things on their tablets and cell phones. There’s an issue with this: if you take too long, your screen will turn itself off! Samsung solved this problem in the Galaxy S III. The S3 takes a photo with your front facing camera, and if it detects [...]
[Android] Find and review local businesses with the free Yelp app
There are thousands and thousands of businesses in every city, and each and every one of them is either awesome, terrible, or somewhere in between. How do you find out without spending years going to and spending money at each one of them? You let other people spend collective years [...]
[Android] Save money and find cheap gas with your new friend, GasBuddy
The United States has some of the cheaper gas in the world, beating European countries by around 50%. However, we drive a lot more, and as such, we spend a large amount of money on gas. If you don’t like paying large sums of money for gas–who does?!–GasBuddy is a [...]
[Windows] Laggy games? Speed them up with Wise Game Booster
My computer is slow and laggy. There’s not much I can do to help that, though, as it’s a mid-2010 laptop that had half of its RAM die within a year. However, what little I can do can be automated with Wise Game Booster: it’ll close programs, stop services, and [...]
[Windows] Love photographing but hate the blur? Magically deblur photos with Blurity
The future is here! Instead of coming in the form of hoverboards and hovercars, however, it came in the form of magic: the magic to unblur blurry photographs. For many years, computer scientists have been coming up with algorithms to deblur photographs, but none of them ever made it into [...]
[Windows 8] Flick off the lights with the classic puzzler Lights Out
There are a set of classic games that must be repeated on every platform before it can be considered a viable platform. There’s Tetris, of course, and Minesweeper. But then there’s also Lights Out. It’s a supposedly simple game, and with its simple logic, it’s even been created in Minecraft. [...]
[Android] Paddles and powerups, oh my! Play the next generation of Pong with Paddletronic Duel
Pong was a wonderful game… back in the early 70s when it was released. Now, we have games like Call of Duty and Assassin’s Creed, featuring mind-blowingly realistic graphics on increasingly powerful systems. Paddletronic Duel upgrades Pong for the Modern Era, giving it powerups, customizable paddles, and much more game-changing [...]
[Android] Smash bricks and keep the ball in the air in Brick Breaker, a remake of the Atari classic
Do you remember playing Breakout or Arkanoid, the game in which you bounce a ball off a paddle to break bricks, on your old Atari or at the arcade? I do! And now, you can get that same game on your phone with the free, ad-supported Brick Breaker.
Brick Breaker, [...]
Read More »[Android] Die once and for all in the new platformer One Single Life
In a lot of games, dying is inevitable. You die, and click respawn–it’s that simple. One Single Life is not like that–not at all. In it, you get but a single life. You have to risk it by jumping between buildings, and the jumps get harder as they go. At [...]
[Windows] Increase drive speed by creating superfast temporary RAM disks with RAMDisk
Your computer’s hard drive is slow. It’s even slow if you’ve upgraded to the next generation of disk drive technology, a solid state drive. What’s faster? Your computer’s RAM. That’s right–there’s technology that exists to temporarily create a storage space on your RAM, making for lightning speed access speeds [...]
[Windows] Automatically flip through open windows with AutoTab
The scene: a trade show. The time: ten minutes before it starts. The problem: you’re supposed to be flipping through a pile of graphics, but have no idea how. Suddenly, you remember a small program you read about named AutoTab. It’s designed to flip through every open window you have [...]
[Windows 8] Play Scrabble with friends and random players with WordFeud
Are you a fan of the real-world game Scrabble, or the Facebook game Words with Friends? Try WordFeud. Building on the everlasting classic, WordFeud adds twists like random boards, push notifications, multiple languages, and more.
Everyone knows at least the basics of Scrabble. You are given a set of letters, [...]
Read More »[Android] Get beautiful, intuitive voice command searching and life management with Maluuba
Are you a fan of voice-based helpers like Apple’s Siri and Google’s Now/Voice Search? They’re both quite technically amazing, but both are only available for a limited number of devices, with Siri being only for 2011-2012 devices and Google Now only for Jelly Bean devices. Maluuba is different: billing itself [...]
[Android] Launch emulated games the beautiful way with the free GameShelf game launcher
Are you a fan of using game emulators? I know I like them! They let you bring your love for older game consoles on the road with you. However, they’re generally as ugly as can be, and launching game ROMs as unintuitive as could ever be designed. GameShelf is nice, [...]
[Android] Take and share FX photos with FxCamera
Are you a fan of photo effects? There are big names in the photo-filtering industry such as Instagram, but like in every industry, every once in a while, a cool independent developer will come along and release a new tool that rivals the big guys. While FxCamera can’t meet Instagram [...]
Bring Google Voice (text, talk, and notifications) to your desktop with GVNotifier [Windows]
Google Voice is an awesome Google service that lets you use one universal number with any telephone and line you might own–calling or texting. If you’re a user of this extremely convenient service, you might have been looking for a program that lets you text and listen to voicemail on [...]
Upload and manage images on Imgur with MyImgur [Windows]
Are you in need of an easy to use program to upload images to the web? MyImgur is a free tool that integrates with online image hoster Imgur to not only upload, but take screenshots and delete previously uploaded images.
MyImgur is definitely not the best looking of Imgur clients. [...]
Read More »Convert as many units as you want as quickly as you want with Unit Converter++ [Windows 8]
Are you bad at math? Even if you aren’t, you’d still have a hard time converting 10 liters to US fluid ounces. With Unit Converter++, you can take away the pain of number crunching and convert units in seconds flat. Just select a category, a beginning unit, an ending unit, [...]
Get a better stock calculator with graphing, matrices, and more with Calculator [Android]
Your Android phone is a supercomputer. It can calculate the exact number of pixels from here to the Moon, but even then, there are some seemingly obvious things it’s missing. For instance, on the standard, pre-installed Calculator app, you can only do standard scientific calculator tasks. This lets your phone [...]
Hate your alarm clock? Get woken up easier with Sleep Time and a little dose of science [Android]
Are you waking up tired after hours and hours of sleep? You might think that it’s weird that, even after a beautiful 8.5 hours of sleep, you’re not as rested as you sometimes are. It turns out that it might come down to something called a sleep cycle: 90-minute periods [...]
Get full-screen, animated notifications that pop with Pops [Android]
![Get full-screen, animated notifications that pop with Pops [Android]](http://cdn.dottech.org/media/2012/09/pops.png)
Are you looking for superfluous animated notifications that take up your entire screen? You’ll love Pops. It’s a free app that lets you send and receive silly messages and notifications from your friends by both sending messages within the app and capturing the notifications of other apps.
The way Pops [...]
Read More »Compress your files to the smallest possible size with File Optimizer [Windows]
Every file on your computer is way larger than it really needs to be. That’s because there’s a tradeoff between bandwidth, storage space, and processing power, and processing power usually wins. If you’re looking for a way to save drive space or bandwidth, compressing them as much as possible is [...]
Resize images from right-click context menu with Free Image Resizer [Windows]
Looking for an easy way to resize your images? In Windows, there is none by default. The only way to resize images is to open them in Paint, scale them, and save them. Once you install Free Image Resizer, however, that all changes: you’ll get two context menu items and [...]
Read stunning photo blogging on your Windows 8 computer or tablet with the official Big Picture app [Windows 8]
The internet is full of many wonderous things, not the least of which is a bevy of photo blogs. Of those photo blogs, however, one stands out: The Big Picture. This photo blog, run by Boston.com, is nothing short of amazing. Each entry they put out is around 40 crisp, [...]
Always missing spur-of-the-moment photos? Take photos faster with InstaCamera [Android]
“Hey, that’s interesting!” You quickly pull out your phone and slide to open the camera app. It nonchalantly starts as a black screen, sliding into a choppy “live” view of the camera’s viewfinder. After around three or four seconds, your phone’s finally decided to let you take a picture–but of [...]
Download Wikipedia to your Android device with Wikipedia Encyclopedia Offline [Android]
Are you a fan of knowledge? Of course you are, and Wikipedia is a great place to both find new information and contribute to others’ quest to do the same. Unfortunately, certain places–such as airplanes, Alaska, and the middle of the ocean–do not have cellular data, and even if they [...]
Keep track of, and manage, shared expenses easier with “iouo” [Android]
Bob paid for the $50 for the movie tickets, but Sue paid the $200 for the hotel rooms and John paid $100 for the food. If the three of them wanted to split the bill evenly, how would they go about doing it? There’s some math you can do by [...]
Bring command line package management to Windows with Chocolatey [Windows]
Are you a fan of Linux, and its incredibly easy to use Terminal-based package management? Installing programs on Linux is as easy as a single command. With Chocolatey, you can bring that easy installation to your Windows computer.
With Chocolatey, you just run a few commands:
- clist [program name]. This
[...]
Read More »Play an extremely confusing game of Tetris in 3D with Blockability 3d [Windows 8]
Are you a huge fan of the 2D falling block game also known as “Tetris”? If you are, you probably love that we’ve been covering a lot of Tetris-like games recently. Blockability 3d is yet another one of those: it’s Tetris, in 3D.
Unlike some 3D Tetris games, Blockability 3d [...]
Read More »View local wireless networks in detail with WifiInfoView [Windows]
Are you getting a consistently weak wireless signal? Do you find that there are tons of wireless networks around you? WifiInfoView, the latest tool from NirSoft, is a free tool to view all of the WiFi networks around you, and detailed information about them.
In the main screen, WifiInfoView shows [...]
Read More »Avoid the falling flooring and try to keep up in Mohuca, the odd free game [Android]
Some games are fast-paced. Others are much more relaxing. Mohuca (stylized mohuca.) is one of the relaxed ones. In it, there’s only one goal: survive for as long as possible.
To play Mohuca, you do one thing: tap on the screen. If you come across a roadblock, you tap [...]
Read More »Try to keep up with the other cars in Lunar Racer, a free racing game [Android]
Are you a fan of racing games on your phone? Try Lunar Racer: it’s a free racing app, and in it, you have to race on alien planets while managing gravity and nitro. But watch out! The powerups are dangerous, so you’ve got to keep an eye out.
Lunar Racer [...]
Read More »View your phone’s sensor data (accelerometer, etc) with Sensible Sensors [Android]
Your phone is a lot like a mini-Star Trek tricorder. It can scan the ambient acceleration, magnetic pull, location, and more, and it’s entirely hidden from you the majority of the time. If you’d like to see what your device is scanning, however, try Sensible Sensors: it’s a nice looking [...]
Play Tetris on your computer or tablet with Tetriblox [Windows 8]
By this point in life, you must be familiar with the game of Tetris. If you’re not, it’s the game of falling blocks in which one must attempt to stack up a full row of blocks. Doing so causes them to disappear–earning you more time before they reach the top. [...]