Month: September 2007

Bowling for Burgers is a great bowling game with a bit of a difference, as well as slick graphics and simple gameplay it has a great story which makes the action much more fun. You must compete against champion bowlers in the Annual Bowling for Burgers Tournament. However, you are not actually bowling for burgers, as the title suggests, instead the competition is played between the ‘hippest’ burger joints in the land.

Solly offers you 4 different games (Solitaire, Memory, Peg and Tiles) all in one sleek interface. The collection offers very clear descriptions of each game and the difficulty level is high enough so that it stays challenging for anybody. Nice to have on your Mac if you have some time to waste.

I know what you’re thinking, Maths isn’t fun, but I’m telling you now: Sit down, shut-up and listen. Maths isn’t fun, you’re right. But as I’m going to make it a little more enjoyable the least I expect is you do me the duty of paying attention. Right, here goes:

• Math Test Generator – Simple sum compiler to test the children
• Math Ninja – Bizarre mixture of Ninja training and maths exercises – 8 levels of difficulty
• Mathemagus – A young magician’s apprentice must outwit the grumpy witch Myrgiana
  
• Kids Abacus – Fun way of counting to 100
• MixedUp – Challenge yourself with endless fractions

A day after a new update to OpenOffice.org, Yahoo’s purchase of Zimbra and the release of Google’s Presently, a free (and ‘lite’) alternative to PowerPoint, industry monolith IBM has announced that it too has joined the ranks of the free office brigade. The beta for IBM Lotus Symphony is already available for download, and includes word processor, presentations and spreadsheet components.

In fact, Microsoft must be pretty concerned about the impact of free office suites on what is their core product line, Office. Indeed, it has been a tough couple of days for the firm: an appeals court in Brussels has just upheld the European Commission’s biggest ever fine against MS for what was effectively considered monopolistic behaviour. My bet: in five years’ time, we won’t be using paid office suites for anything but the most advanced database and data management tasks.

Once Symphony has downloaded (in about 3 hours’ time by the looks of it!), we’ll put a full ‘first look review’ together. In the meantime, why not check out the revamped OpenOffice.org 2.30?

UPDATE: Check out our full review of Symphony here!

Personal computing has given rise to new hi-tech hobbies such as playing videogames, blogging, editing photos all sorts of digital artistry. However, more traditional hobbies maintain a place in our lives, now kindly supported by software applications that make them even more enjoyable.

Popular pastimes like sudokus and crosswords have quickly been adapted to the digital life with their correspondent PC versions, such as Just Sudoku and Crossword Forge. Other paper-based hobbies like designing paper planes or creating coloring books are also available as software tools.

If you feel on the creative side, try learning piano with MidiPiano or practising guitar chords with Guitar Guru. After your music lesson, you can take a look at JigSawedME to create and solve jigsaw puzzles, or use LEGO Digital Designer to play with Lego blocks, like you used to just a few years ago. If you prefer needles, you can create your own cross-stitch patterns with Stitch Creator or even visit this website to convert any image into a PDF knitting chart.

Finally, there’s also room for obsessive collectors. Whether it is coins, stamps, books or famous quotes that you’re collecting, just choose the appropriate application and enjoy!

“Movin’ to Montana soon, gonna be a dental floss tycoon”, sang Frank Zappa back in the day. Living the life of a multimillionaire with all of the mansions, private yachts and billions of dollars it entails doesn’t sound that bad, but the truth is it takes a lot of hard work, elbow grease and a fair share of luck to make it to the top. Instead, you can get your hands on a good ol’ tycoon simulation game, which will give you the fun of building and managing a financial empire without taking any real risk.

Sir Alan Sugar started out by selling electronic appliances from the back of a van, so why couldn’t you make it with beverages? In Lemonade Tycoon you have to build an empire from the ground up, selling the citric drink out on the street. If public transport is more your thing, how about emulating the American entrepreneur, Cornelius Vanderbilt, who made his fortune by building a railroad empire? Sid Meier’s Railroads lets you build tracks and win over markets by distributing goods over the railroad system of America. Think you’re more like Donald Trump? Real E$tate Empire is probably the game you’re looking for then. Buy and sell property as quickly as possible to become king of the property market. Mall of America Tycoon is pretty similar, only this time you get to manage a shopping center, selling retail space and adding all sorts of boutiques, fast food chains and department stores. Finally, Wildlife Tycoon : Venture Africa lets you be the king of the jungle, protecting the eco-system by managing different species, winning jewels in the process.

GDesk is the software solution that gives your mobile exactly the kind of desktop you need. You can add anything to it that you want, making your phone much more accessible. Simply place icons of your favourite and most-used mobile applications onto the desktop, these can be applications, page links and plug-ins. Plug-ins can be added at any time and further functionality is promised over time.

If you can’t afford a personal secretary, then you’ll have to find some other way to have your e-mails or written work read-out to you. Fortunately, your PC can be your best friend in this area, patiently reading through reams of text. One of the best I’ve used is TTSReader which is is a fully-featured, text-to speech software package that allows you to read text aloud as well as save them to WAV or MP3 files.

TTSReader has a very simple interface which consists of a text box where you can type or paste text. As it reads, it follows the text with a blue cursor. If you want to save the reading for listening on an external device or share with someone else, you can save the file to WAV or MP3 format. MP3 is recommended, especially if you’re going to send it, as it’s much smaller and features more options for adjusting the volume.

If you only want TTS to read certain paragraphs, you can instruct it to skip sentences and paragraphs while reading. You can also saved read segments to a clipboard so you can go back to it later. If you get bored of the several voices included in the program – for which you can alter the pitch, volume and speed – you can download more from the developer website. Even if you don’t use this for serious purposes, you’ll have a lot of fun just hearing your computer swear!

Backing-up is something that all PC users should do whether it’s for important files, your registry, or even your entire operating system configuration. The problem is, we rarely worry about it until the worst happens i.e. your hard drive crashes, your files corrupt or you simply lose an essential piece of data. Therefore, here’s a compilation of the top 5 backup tools that every PC user should have installed on their system.

• Norton Ghost – The ultimate backup tool for absolutely everything on your PC

• Deep Freeze – Roll-back your PC to the last time it worked bug free

• Comodo Backup – Auto-backup your important files to external devices or servers

• All Image – Create image files for any type of disk for instant recovery

• CVSNT – Tracks your documents and updates in real-time as you edit