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September 24, 2007

Free: 38 September Songs, daily commercial games and programs

At WFMU's Beware of the Blog: "There are only a few days of September left, so here are 38 versions of Kurt Weill's beautiful (and misleading) September Song." They're mp3s, by

James Brown | Lee Hazelwood | Santo and Johnny

Lotte Lenya | Walter Huston | Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra

Gene Bianco | The Harmonicats | Arthur Lyman

John Lennon | Django Reinhart | Bryan Ferry

Charles Mingus | Duke Ellington | Errol Garner

Ian McCulloch | Lindsay Buckingham | The Young Gods

Lou Reed | Hank Penny | Earl Bostic

Scatman Crothers | Artie Shaw | Chet Baker

Chico Hamilton | Dean Martin | Dee Dee Bridgewater

Delcos | Dion and The Belmonts | Harry James and His Orchestra

Jimmy Durante | Mill Brothers | Nat King Cole

Nate Butler | The Platters | Ronnie Scott Quartet

Sarah Vaughan | Stan Kenton (w/ June Christie and The Four Freshmen)

Go.

via Robot Wisdom

Free $ software: Giveaway of the Day and Game Giveaway of the Day each offer a new commercial program or game every day. No spyware, no time limits, these are registered programs, but without support or upgrades, and they are limited to noncommercial use.

You must download AND install the program the day it's offered. It connects to the server to check the time. After that, it's yours.

The Giveaway site has been around awhile -- Lifehacker wrote about it last November.

I downloaded a full version of a $14.95 kids' platform game called Fairyland today. The download server was busy enough that I had to retry a few times, but otherwise the only unusual part of downloading and installing it was the Net connection by the validation program.

Italian software developer Andrea Nagar's account (Promoting your software on Giveaway of the Day) of offering his email enhancement software for download there is illuminating. He says it's a Russian site.

To get your software listed, just write to the support team of Giveaway of the day and you’ll get a reply in few days. If they are interested in listing your software, they will be back to you in a few days and you will even get paid for it. You will send them a brief description of your software (and optionally a description of other software of your company) and you are all set.

Nagar also links to the review by Giveaway's reviewer, Andrew Klein, of BladedThoth.com, published with the download link.

Email and rss feeds to tell you what's free today, if you'd rather have that pushed to you than browse to it.

Don't expect Photoshop or Dreamweaver. Some of these programs aren't better than freeware equivalents; others are just screensavers.

But, if nothing else, it's a chance to try commercial software and games, then uninstall what doesn't interest you without feeling you wasted your money. You might also find something you'll love enough to buy the next version.

Scavenge away...

Later: Every downloaded zip file comes with a readme. txt. Today's game, Mad Magic, requires that you run activate.exe before setup.exe. I only found that out by actually reading that file after I first blew through straight to setup, and got a demo version of the game.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 10:54 PM | Permalink