Anamon

DxWnd is one of my go-to examples of an unassuming but impressive piece of open-source software. Started simply by someone wanting to be able to play fullscreen games in a window, today it's an incredibly feature-rich secret weapon to get older games to run on newer versions of Windows at all. Activate "Extended mode" and you'll be battered with four rows of tabs, most of which containing dozens of options. And I love it! This is how functional power-user software is supposed to be. Not trying...

This is an excellent tool! It's one of those where you both wonder why Windows doesn't offer it out of the box, because it seems like such essential functionality for a graphical operating system, but also know for sure that if it did, it wouldn't be done nearly as well as here. (How in the heck does Windows still not understand dpi in the year 2026? Probably for the same reason it still can't find local files.)

You get a great visual overview of your current setup, and helpful tools to...

I'm way ahead of the curve here! I didn't even get this update on my work computer yet, but Outlook already becomes unresponsive multiple times a day.

I usually work on two big screens with Outlook open on the laptop screen to one side, so I always have it in the corner of my eye. My favourite bit is when I haven't touched it in a few hours, and it suddenly starts flickering, all the rendering getting garbled up, UI elements jumping around, disappearing, reappearing… it wouldn't be simple to...

It looks really promising. I would love an open-source alternative to Microsoft Access, which, for some reason, is still pretty much unchallenged for 30 years and counting. LibreOffice Base is on the right track, but has a lot of usability issues. Kexi looks awesome, SQLite support is a great plus, as is the ability to migrate to/from PostgreSQL. Unfortunately, the project seems to be dormant. The last stable release was in 2019 and, browsing through the commit history, the last years have only...

2024 Update: The developers announced earlier this year that the desktop applications will not see any new feature development. There will only be maintenance updates "for as long as it is feasible". They strongly encourage users to move to their cloud-based, web-only applications.

Personally, this is a(nother) dealbreaker for me. For an application where I spend a lot of time entering data, it is completely unacceptable to me to not have this data stored locally and under my control. I'd...

I decided to start backing up some files that are particularly valuable to me on M-Discs, which are supposed to be very resilient and long-living. Having all of my data only stored on magnetic storage (SSDs, hard disks, USB drives, SD cards…) increasingly felt like a cluster risk, so I wanted to make some optical backups again.

The issue: what software to burn the files with? Optical drives have gone out of style, and you can easily tell just by browsing disc burning software on AlternativeTo:...

Don't Google Cast and AirPlay transcode the video? That would be a pretty considerable downgrade, especially since one of Vimeo's main selling points is that their video quality is better than the crappy low-bitrate encodes of YouTube.

I'm not sure if casting from my phone could reach the same bitrate as when my Ethernet-connected TV streams directly (not to speak of the fact that it's really not ideal to burn through your phone's battery just to watch videos on your TV). I guess accessing...

This is why we can't have nice things.

Selfish people causing services to implement rate limiting, mandatory registrations, and quality downgrades for everyone, just to keep the lights on.

On the Embarcadero website, you're asked to share your personal information before receiving the download link. However, you can download without registration from the project's GitHub releases.

In my experience, this is the best hex editor for Windows. Of course, it has all the needed tools and settings. You have lots of options to customise the view, there are powerful search and diff features. You can calculate checksums, open drive images, and even memory snapshots.

But what really sets a hex editor apart from the rest is, in my opinion, the speed at which it handles large files. And HxD has one of the cleanest, best-performing large-file implementations I've ever seen. You really...

AnyDVD HD works. Rarely is it almost sufficient to know that much about a software.

I own many relatively obscure commercial Blu-rays, but also sometimes want to watch rather new ones. Both of those properties can be a problem when trying to watch them on a PC the usual way, using a key database, because often the keys for those discs won't have been shared yet. I don't know how it does what it does, but simply having AnyDVD HD running in the background, so far I didn't encounter a single...

Unfortunately, this add-on has so far not been ported to WebExtensions, so it's incompatible with Firefox Quantum (versions 57 and up).