freeware

Facebook is in the process of rolling out yet another interface revamp. As Sharon Vaknin described in a post earlier this month, the new look for the Facebook News Feed provides many new options for viewing your friends' posts.

You can add your name to the waiting list for the new-look News Feed, but you don't have to wait to enliven your Facebook page's appearance.

While the company provides only a handful of options for tweaking the look of your Facebook profile, Matt Kruse's free Social Fixer browser add-on (formerly named Better Facebook) takes Facebook customization to … Read more

Pixia looks like it came straight out of a Windows 95-era, but is one of the most popular drawing tools in Japan. Like other freeware image editors, Pixia allows you to create digital art and supports layer editing, selective undos, and an assortment of brushes and tools for artists.

When you first launch the program, you're greeted with options for filters, right-clicking tools, and a whole bunch of other tools that just flat out won't make sense at first glance. Pixia doesn't exactly win any awards for first impressions and welcoming interfaces for new users because it … Read more

Last June, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo told a tech-conference audience that the microblog's 140 million users tweet 400 million times a day, as CNET's Dan Farber reported.

Some days it seems nearly all 400 million of those tweets appear on my home feed.

To ensure your tweets don't get lost in the crowd, you need to post your tweets at the times your followers are most likely to read them. Twitter-analysis services offer businesses and individuals tips and tools for ensuring tweets receive maximum exposure. Twitter itself provides Advertiser Analytics in various price ranges.

Determining the best … Read more

Capcom dropped a Christmas gift to the public today: the free release of Street Fighter X Megaman. It's still in all its 8-bit glory and makes my 6-year-old gamer spirit tingle with nostalgia.

SFxMM is a fan-made game cover of Megaman, an old 8-bit platformer that lived on the original Nintendo Entertaiment System since the late '80s/early '90s. The mechanics of the game are simple: run, shoot, jump and slide through each stage until you reach the boss at the end. Though the game is centered around the Blue Bomber himself, most of the fan service seems to … Read more

I love a good win-win.

From now until December 24, you can get SoftMaker FreeOffice for Windows or Linux absolutely free. And when you do, SoftMaker will donate 0.10 Euros to betterplace.org, which raises funds for a variety of worthy worldwide projects.

So what the heck is SoftMaker FreeOffice? As you may have guessed from the name, it's the free version of SoftMaker's commercial office suite. It provides word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations, all with an interface that closely resembles Microsoft Office 2003.

Speaking of which, FreeOffice is fully file-compatible with Microsoft's suite, though it'… Read more

The dreaded Reply All button rang up another victim last week when a Los Angeles Police Department commander asked his officers in an e-mail to arrest someone for the illegal sale of underage bunnies so the department wouldn't receive a "black eye" in the media.

As Ana Garcia reports for NBC Southern California, the commander didn't realize his reply to an LAPD officer was also sent to the TV news producer who requested information on the lack of animal-cruelty arrests months after the department claimed to be cracking down on the practice.

Unlike many Reply All … Read more

When choosing a free screenshot tool, consider why you're saving screenshots and what you need to do to them. It must quickly and easily capture all or part of your screen. You should be able to obscure, blur, annotate, or highlight parts of the image as you create it. Finally, you should be able to save or export your screenshot just as effortlessly as you created it, including uploading it directly to sites such as Picasa using plug-ins. That describes our new favorite screenshot tool, GreenShot. Recent updates include Windows 8 compatibility.

GreenShot's installation wizard lets you choose … Read more

Open Hexagon is a polygonal endurance run that draws heavy inspiration from Terry Cavanagh's Hexagon. Much like its former Web app game, Open Hexagon challenges players in a collapsing environment of walls that cave in. Your goal is to keep a dinky little triangle alive by orbiting around the core while dodging walls and crushing barriers. The game's overall design is a simple pixelated collection of lines and shapes, with some added chiptune tracks to appease the eardrums of our inner geek.

Since its release, the developer, Vittorio Romeo of Vee Software, has received mixed reactions for releasing … Read more

The Internet is a pretty great resource for work or school, but it can also be an enormous distraction. timeStats is an extension for Google Chrome that allows you to see how you spend your online time. A few clicks will get you a chart distribution of your Internet activity; a couple more, and you can get even more detailed reports. The reports break down your daily/weekly/monthly activities with awesome pie charts and bar graphs showing what you did on which day. It can also show you other details such as the sites, domain zones, and time spent … Read more