2.0.1

Find A Word is a simple but challenging word game that's also a lot of fun to play. This jumble variant presents you with a list of random letters, including vowels, and you have to make as many words out of them as you can before your turn is up without using any proper names, contractions, abbreviations, or words not on the program's approved list. Turns can be 30, 60, or 90 seconds long.

Find A Word's interface is basic but designed very well for the job. It starts with Start Game and Start Turn buttons at … Read more

CoolNovo Portable is the new name for ChromePlus, an enhanced version of Google Chrome. As the new name indicates, CoolNovo is totally portable, meaning it runs when you click it without having to be installed. You can set up CoolNovo on a USB stick and use it a home, work, and on the go, with all your bookmarks, passwords, and settings. CoolNovo has all of Chrome's features plus some useful extras, such as Mouse Gestures, Superdrag, EI Tabs, support for downloads from context menus, and the ability to close tabs directly with a double click.

CoolNovo is basically identical … Read more

We admit that hearing the term "meta-analysis" always leads us to imagine Groucho saying, "I never met a nalysis I didn't like," but the technique of combining the results of several studies to achieve a more accurate overview of the subject is nothing funny to statisticians. MIX 2.0 Lite is a free add-on for Microsoft Excel that performs professional-level meta-analyses from Excel's ribbon. It offers more than 20 built-in datasets taken from published methods, plus a data wizard that cites book and page number for users who want to look it up themselves. … Read more

As far as we're concerned, the mark of a good computer game is our inability to stop playing it even when we have other things we need to be doing. By that metric, Born Into Darkness is a very good game indeed. Although we've seen plenty of similar games, the mystery aspect of Born Into Darkness kept us engaged for much longer than we expected it to.

First things first: To download the game, you must download the Free Ride Player, a game manager that will then download Born Into Darkness. It will also download three other games … Read more

We love a good adventure game, and Samantha Swift and the Hidden Roses certainly qualifies, as long as solving puzzles meets your criteria for adventure. As much as we enjoyed the game, however, we were quite put off by all of the advertising and uninvited bloatware that comes along with it.

Samantha Swift looks like it's going to be a lightweight program at just over 720K, but all that download really includes is the Free Ride Games Player. The actual game must be downloaded using the player, and at 112MB, it's not nearly as small as you may … Read more

We've reviewed quite a few puzzle games, and in particular, the match-three games seem to be quite popular. In these games, players must match three items of the same color to clear them from the board and earn points. Diamond Drop 2 is a fun variation on this theme that we hadn't seen before. It takes the basic premise of match-three and adds a story featuring various kinds of anthropomorphic wildlife and an assortment of fun twists. We found it charming and fun.

Users should be aware that in order to play Diamond Drop 2, they must first … Read more

We love Google, not just for its search engine but also for its many other useful services. We're particularly big fans of Google Calendar, which allows all our family members to keep track of and share their goings-on. DayHiker is an extension for Chrome, Google's browser, which makes Google Calendar even more accessible. Unfortunately, not all of its features worked, which was very disappointing. This extension would be fantastic if not for a few functional issues.

Like all Chrome extensions, DayHiker installed with minimal fuss. It appeared as a small calendar icon to the right of Chrome's … Read more

It's not just a bad pun to say that the "key" step in configuring a Wi-Fi network is protecting it with an encryption key that must be entered into each compatible device. Wireless Key Generator is a free tool that generates strong wireless encryption keys and saves them to a text file that you can store on a USB drive or other portable device and use to secure your home or office network.

The program's compact, dialog-based interface has two drop-down menus: Security Type, with two choices, WEP and the stronger WPA/WPA2; and Key Strength, … Read more

OpenBook is a Firefox add-on that promises to customize users' bookmarking experience. While it does work--to some extent--it doesn't do everything it promises, and doesn't make much of an effort to help you use it. In the end, it's a bit disappointing.

Firefox automatically installs add-ons like OpenBook when you download them, and you access and configure them from the Firefox add-on menu. OpenBook's interface consists of a small selection of check boxes and radio buttons. You can choose which components of Firefox's bookmarking dialogue you want OpenBook to display, including the keyword, URL, and … Read more