Andrew Lee's favorites (1444)

Balabolka is a feature-rich program to read text aloud from a variety of file types including DOC, RTF, PDF, ODT, FB2 and HTML. The program uses built-in Windows speech tools, but lets you fine tune voices, including rate and pitch, and a substitution list can also be applied to improve the quality of the voice's articulation. The program supports customized font and background color, skins, control reading from the system tray or by the global hotkeys.

The program can save to a variety of audio formats and quality levels, and can include synchronized text to external LRC files or in MP3 tags inside the audio files. When the audio file is played with players on a computer or on modern digital audio players, the text will be displayed synchronously (in the same way as lyrics for songs).

The program includes batch conversion tools from of a wide variety of document formats to audio or plain text and a file compare tool, file splitter and screen magnification window. Command-line functions also supported.

O&O ShutUp10 modifies system settings to disable distractions and enhance user privacy. The program makes recommendations on available changes that are useful or rarely interfere with standard operations. You can disable tracking, personalization, advertisements, and a variety of system data sharing.

Everyone Piano is a computer keyboard simulating piano software; it can use the general computer keyboard to play the world famous piano music. With powerful timbre database, Everyone Piano's tone is lifelike and real-time. Even on onboard sound card, Everyone Piano can reach real-time musical performance, meantime it also simulates the pedal of the piano.
Everyone Piano can customize the keyboard, play the halftone, support record, playback, music score show, inflexion and octave. Besides all the features above, Everyone Piano also has the demo and teaching music. Everyone Piano saves everything for you, it is not only for free, but also supports a mass of music scores for studying.

XAMPP is an integrated server package with mail, Web, FTP, and WebDAV. Named for Apache + MariaDB + Filezilla + PHP + Perl (AMPP) plus Mercury and Tomcat, the program includes a open software packages combined to power the various services, including JSP Java, OpenSSL, and more.

Also available for OSX and Linux.

Notes:

1. To also add portable Python:
   1. Download and extract Python's NuGet package
   2. In XAMPP's control panel, click Config=>Apache (httpd.conf)
   3. Add AddHandler cgi-script .py into the end of the file (see this blog post for other info)
   4. Start your PY files with #!..\Python\python.exe (or wherever else you extracted the Python folder)
2. To also add portable Composer:
   1. Download Compser's Manual Installation (i.e. portable) version
   2. Extract it in any folder you like
   3. Modify the command in the link above to the relative (or absolute) path to the main PHP file, for example (assuming you'll run composer from htdocs):
      @echo ..\php\php "%~dp0composer.phar" %*>composer.bat
   4. In order to be able to download packages, edit php\php.ini and uncomment ;extension=zip (i.e. remove the ;)
3. One useful function of this program is the Wiki on a stick tool that works with XAMPP.
4. XAMPP has add-on capabilities, currently only a WordPress installation (but previously also a portable MediaWiki).

Python is an interpreted, interactive, object-oriented programming language. It incorporates modules, exceptions, dynamic typing, very high level dynamic data types, and classes. It has interfaces to many system calls and libraries, as well as to various window systems, and is extensible in C or C++. It is also usable as an extension language for applications that need a programmable interface.

The NugGt package is a portable version of Python with support and even basic built-in inclusion of third party tools like the package installer pip.

Alternatively, download the official Python's embedded version (which doesn't natively support any third party tools).

Either of them can be manually added as part of XAMPP.

Carbon CD is an feature-rich utility for CD burning to duplicate, erase, and create/write media image files, master audio and data discs. The program can rip audio tracks, ignore read errors, function without ASPI driver, and more.

Based on the Japanese-only CD Manipulator by Y. Kanechika, Carbon CD's UI has been revamped and the code cleaned and updated to VS 2010. Disk image formats supported include ISO, IMG, CUE, CCD, CDM.

Note: Carbon CD doesn't support DVD burning.

CurrPorts displays the list of all currently opened networking ports on your local computer. For each TCP/IP and UDP port in the list, information about the process that opened the port is displayed, including the process name, full path of the process, version information of the process (product name, file description and so on), the time that the process was created and the user that created it.

In addition, CurrPorts allows you to close unwanted TCP connections, kill the process that opened the ports and save the TCP/UDP ports information to HTML file, XML file, or to tab-delimited text file. The program will automatically mark with pink suspicious ports owned by unidentified applications (applications without version information and icons).

CredentialsFileView decrypts and displays the passwords and other data stored inside the Windows operating system Credentials files. You can use it to decrypt the data of your currently system or on an external hard drive.

Credentials files include: login/passwords of remote computers on your LAN, mail accounts in Outlook, Windows Live session info, RDP 6 information, IE 7.x and 8.x, MSN Messenger / Windows Messenger accounts.

TeraCopy lets you copy or move files at the maximum possible speed. It uses dynamically adjusted buffers to reduce seek times, as well as asynchronous copy to speed up file transfers between two physical hard drives. When an error is encountered during copying/moving, TeraCopy will automatically retry and skip the files that cannot be transferred instead of aborting the entire operation. It also shows failed file transfers and lets you recopy only problem files.

Once the destination directory is selected, files can be dragged-and-dropped onto the window, even while a transfer is in progress. Once files are transferred, the Verify option uses a hash check to see if files are identical.

Note that a Pro version of the program is available with additional features.

WirelessKeyView recovers all wireless network keys (WEP/WPA) stored in your computer by the "Wireless Zero Configuration" service. The program lets you quickly connect other devices via a QR code generator.

You can search connections for keywords and easily save all keys to text/HTML/XML file, or copy a single key to the clipboard.

SideSlide is a desktop extension that docks to any screen edge. It allows you to store your favorite RSS feeds, shortcuts to files/folders/URLs, notes, reminders etc. in "containers" that you can arrange, shrink and fold in the workspace. You can also drag-and-drop text/images from your web browser to the workspace to create web snippets.

WinMerge is a tabbed, visual file differencing and merging tool. It's primary use is determining changes between two text files, but includes tools for folder, image, and 3-way comparison. It comes with a built-in editor with syntax highlighting, line numbers, word-wrap, synchronized scrolling, and handles a variety of file formats.

An unofficial plugin (xdocdiff) is available to enable comparison functions for the text of Word, Excel, PDF, LibreOffice, RTF, and other file formats.

WinMerge Portable is a portable version of WinMerge from PortableApps. Alternatively, an outdated X-WinMerge is also available.

Flash Movie Player is a stand-alone player for Flash .SWF files. It requires the Macromedia Flash Player plugin to be installed on the target machine. It adds advanced features such as animation rewinding, advanced full screen mode, playlists, browser cache integration and EXE projectors support.

Celestia allows you to view the universe in 3-D including planet view, over 100,000 stars, traveling beyond our galaxy, and more.

Celestia Portable is a portable version of Celestia.

Shutter is a customizable program that lets you perform a variety of actions when a user-specified event occurs. Events include timer countdown, a certain time trigger, low CPU usage, user inactivity, a low battery etc. The corresponding actions include shutdown, reboot, logoff, lock workstation, sleep, hibernate etc.

The program can play a custom sound and/or run a program of your choice, in addition to displaying a user-configurable message. A web interface is also available that permits remote execution of one of a list of actions.

Note: A pro version is available without the limitation of 5 presets, events and actions.

Resource Hacker is an utility to view, modify, rename, add, delete and extract resources in 32-bit and 64-bit Windows executables and resource files (*.res). The program can modify program icons as they appear in the taskbar, Start Menu and Desktop, among many other things.

It incorporates an internal resource script compiler and decompiler.

System Scheduler Free schedules unattended running of applications, batch files, scripts etc. Intended as a replacement for Windows' own scheduler, the program adds more flexibility and features including popup reminders for appointments, reminders, and events that can be set to run once or every minute, hour, day, week, month, or year.

The program also includes it's own scripting tools for mouse, keyboard and other operations. Additional features are available in it's "Pro" version described on the home page.

7+ Taskbar Tweaker allows you to configure various aspects of the Windows taskbar including mouse configuration, thumbnail handling, pinned items and button combining.

SlickRun is a floating keyword utility that allows you to create command aliases, or "MagicWords" that launch applications or URLs. For example, "browse" can be set to open Firefox, "note" to open Notepad, and more. You can type an application's path or location as well.

The program includes its own notepad program opened by typing "jot", but major applications such as MS Office and Online Shopping resources can be added using add-on packs available on the website.

SlickRun supports auto-completion, relative paths and drive letter macro for improved portability.

CSVed is a fast, basic spreadsheet file editor that supports the CSV file format. You can add/delete columns, rearrange column order, change separator, filter items, remove duplicates, split/join columns etc.

FreeOffice is a fast and lightweight office suite with word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation tools. The interface supports themes, a dark mode, and classic or ribbon-style toolbars. All components include a wide variety of formatting, functions, and animation.

The program will import and export to standard Microsoft formats with reasonable fidelity. A forum post about the previous 2006 version can be found here.

NOTE: The program will eventually require email registration, but a workaround is available.

Softi FreeOCR is an image-to-text program using the Tesseract Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. It supports multi-page TIFF images and import of documents via TWAIN scanners. Scanned text can be saved as ASCII text files.

Note: Images must have high detail (around 300 dpi) to recognize text reliably. Additionally, the application has been discontinued and website taken offline, so we have made it available for direct download.

VLC is a skinnable, feature-rich media player that supports a wide variety of multimedia file and streaming formats. It can play files while they download, from inside RAR files, online radio stations, convert video formats and much more.

The software can also behave as a streaming server for delivering video in unicast or multicast mode.

SumatraPDF is a lightweight, tabbed document reader for a variety of formats. Includes a wide variety of views including table of contents, rotation, facing pages, book view (2 pages side-by-side), full screen and presentation mode. Includes support for bookmarks, command-line arguments, hotkeys, and more. Additionally, SumatraPDF can function as a portable browser plugin. Supported formats include PDF, eBooks (EPUB, MOBI, FB2/FB2Z, PDB, TCR), Comic Books (CBZ/CBR/CBT/CB7Z), DJVU, CHM, XPS, TXT, images (JPG, PNG, GIF, TIFF, J2K, WEBP, TGA) and PostScript documents (PS/EPS, AI, PRN - requires Ghostscript).

Alternatively, Sumatra Portable adjusts recently used and most used file paths.