Clif Sipe

Distant Suns 6 (Special Edition-Free Version) is a great astronomy program that lets you see the stars and the constellations just as if it was a clear, dark night at your desk. Distant Suns SE allows you to view the night sky as it currently ... appears outside your house or any time in the past or future. You can choose which direction to look and whether you wish to see the outlines of the constellations displayed. Other features allow you to zoom in on some of the planets for a closer look or hover above the earth for a look at our home. It's very cool! Click here for a screenshot. You can ... (view more)

I'm happy to announce that we have a winner in Clif Note's Photobucket Give-away contest! To recap: Photobucket is a free photo and image hosting service for web site owners and bloggers. Photobucket was recently named the Fastest Growing Site of ... 2005 by Nielsen/NetRatings and is now the leading image hosting, sharing, and publishing site in the world. They have over 11 Million registered users and are now growing by over 1.2 Million users per month. That's pretty impressive! Here's what the winner, Paul G. had to say: " Dear Clif, Thanks for allowing this opportunity to write in about the ... (view more)

WinRoll is an add-on for managing all of the open windows on your desktop. If you typically have more than four or five windows open, it can be a chore switching between windows. WinRoll will "roll up" a window when you right click on its title bar. ... Right click again and it unrolls. Hold down the alt key before clicking and all open windows roll up. Quote from the homepage: " Make a window roll into its title bar, send it to the back or make it stay on top. Minimize, maximize or close all visible windows, including minimizing to the tray area. Make a window translucent on Windows 2000 or ... (view more)

I happened to be walking by a co-worker's PC and I noticed his cool looking "Matrix" screensaver. I saw that it was from Kellysoftware.com so I clicked on over to check it out. After installing, I found it to be one of the best freeware Matrix ... screensavers around. It has lots of features and it even displays your PC system properties at the top of the screen (if so desired). See a screenshot of the Matrix Screensaver Download Matrix screensaver Join the rest of the freeware fanatics at Clif Notes Newsletter, today! (view more)

At some point, we've all stumbled across a .PDF (Portable Document File) on the Internet. And most of us use Adobe Acrobat Reader (free) to read these files. Acrobat Reader has grown substantially in size over the years; in fact, the latest ... downloadable version is now over 16 megabytes in size! As a result, Acrobat takes it takes longer to launch a .PDF file for viewing. If you're sick and tired of waiting for your .PDF's to launch, I suggest you try Foxit PDF Reader. FoxIt has a considerably smaller footprint that Acrobat Reader (at only 1.2 megabytes in size). To install, just unzip it to a ... (view more)

Have you ever lost track of a file on your PC? I got sick of using Windows Search (and waiting forever for it to find anything) and started looking for an alternative. Unfortunately, most of the Search programs I came across either didn't do what I ... wanted them to, or had a lot of overhead. For example: overhead can result as some search tools index your entire hard drive (similar to a file system table). Among other reasons, indexing is performed so that searching is limited to 1 huge database file (rather than scouring through the entire hard drive, bouncing from file to file, as is the case ... (view more)

Two years ago, I started up a blog to document my adventures in freeware. Unfortunately, I later discovered that my blog host didn't allow me to store any images on my site. The reasoning was that images can eat up a lot of bandwidth, and bandwidth ... costs money. So (for example): if 100 people came to visit my site and they all viewed a picture that was 50k in size, that would eat up (100 x 50) = 5000k, or 5 megabytes in bandwidth. Obviously this isn't an issue if you're a small-time blogger like myself; nonetheless, if a blog host [company] is hosting 1000 blog sites and there's 100 people ... (view more)

Back in May of 2005, I read that my favorite freeware antivirus program (Grisoft AVG) was changing to shareware ("try and buy") with the release of their next version. I was panic-stricken! That set me to looking for a new freeware antivirus ... alternative. Not too long after my search, I was amazed to find that there were in fact two viable alternatives to Grisoft, inlcuding: avast! and AntiVir. I personally settled on using Avast! antivirus, and have been using it ever since. On a related note: it turned out that Grisoft AVG continued to offer a free edition, after all. If you're curious as to ... (view more)

Bring back 'far out' memories of the 1960's with "Drempels" -- a psychedelic celebration of color and motion for your desktop! From the Drempels website: " Drempels makes colorful, swirling, hallucinogenic patterns that resemble a hurricane or ... tornado. It normally runs in your Windows background or 'desktop', replacing your old still-image wallpaper with gently-animating visuals... and meanwhile, you can use your computer just like you normally would. It uses very little CPU overhead -- so little that it even runs smoothly on a 233 MHz system! Drempels can also be used as a screensaver; in ... (view more)

According to the Washington Post, the "number of phishing Web sites skyrocketed in December [2005], as did the number of sites designed to spread password-stealing badware, according to the most recent report from the Anti-Phishing Working Group." ... Furthermore, it's been estimated that the number of phishing web sites rose 55 percent from November to December in 2005. (Source: WashingtonPost.com ). So what can you do to protect yourself? SiteAdvisor is an investigatory service that monitors web surfing habits and offers a safety-rating on the sites you visit and those that appear in ... (view more)