files for download
utilities
clip speak
Clipspeak is a program that will speak the contents of your clipboard.
If you need to verify something is written properly, or if you want
your computer to read something outloud, just run clipspeak.
It's a pretty simple program, all it does is load, speak the contents
of the clipboard, then exit. That's all. If you don't find it useful,
then pass it along to someone who might.
talking calendar (version 1.01)
This is a small universal calendar program with only a few features.
It has only about a dozen or so holidays in it, but it can handle dates
for just about anything since the current calendar began up to the year
9999, and it shows dates in a month at a time display. You can move by
month, day or year, and the documentation on how to use the program is
included with the download, so hope it works for you. If it doesn't,
that's ok too, as always, feel free to pass it along to someone else
who might be able to use it.
This version fixed a bug in the calculation of mother's day, it wasn't
always picking up the second sunday properly.
dir zip
Dirsip is a program that will compress all the subdirectories in any
given directory into their own zip files. It doesn't (currently)
handle subdirectories included in any directories it compresses, (I.E.
the main directory is level 1, and anything under that is level 2,
which the program does handle, but anything under one of those
directories would be considered level 3, and it won't handle those).
It will happily compress as many directories as you have, so if you
have source directories, with each directory being a different project
(like I have), then this program provides a quick way to create backups
of all those projects with a single command..
pdf to text
This program will extract the text from any pdf file (that isn't
protected), and place it in a text file with the same name as the
original pdf file.
It's not able to handle every pdf file you throw at it, and it won't
handle those with complicated formatting, but it should handle most
things you need turned to text as long as they are relatively simple
conversions.
The documentation has download links for the xpdf program this one
calls to do it's actual work.
disk size
A simple program to show disk size in various units
(bytes, kilobytes, megabytes, gigabytes, terrabytes), and is easier to
get to than the control panel where that information is usually found.
Youtube Downloader User Interface
is a program to add a graphical interface to the youtube-dl program
(though it works with wget and curl as well) for downloading youtube
videos. It can also if desired download other files as well. You can
paste in your urls (one per line), and it will then proceed to download
each in turn until it's complete. A complete log is now kept of all
the downloads, so you can see what has been downloaded. Hope this helps.
Softcon Reader
Softcon Reader is a program to read
epub books. At the moment, it's pre release software, so expect
bugs.
It is a work in progress, so it has limitations on what epub files it
will work with properly, but it does provide a nice simple interface to
reading epub format ebooks.
I'm fairly confident I've squashed a majority of the bugs in this
release, (pre-8), so if there aren't any reports of game stopping bugs,
this version of the program will become version 1.0 for real.
This release fixes several bugs, not the least of which is it will now
always find the table of contents .ncx file if it exists, and is located
in the same directory as the contents.opf file (all epub files should
follow this practice, but I won't guarantee it's true, since I've seen
lots of epub files that don't follow standards).
It also fixed a bug where files would not load if they were in the root
directory of the epub file, and I believe I've squashed a particularly
irritating bug that would sometimes send the program off into cycles of
unable to run scripts messages. Do test this one, and let me know if
you find issues, I'll certainly do my best to fix them.
The next step is to get the program to read content.opf files, though
that isn't likely to be done in time for a 1.0 release.
Weather
Weather program
This is a program that uses the noaa weather site to show your local
weather. It only works for locations inside the U.S. which limits it's
usefulness, but I was tired of seeing so many weather programs that used
other sources instead of the one they all draw from themselves.
You'll need to edit the weather.cfg file to add in your longitude and
latitude, and to place a label on the open window, but that's all you
need. Then you can run the program, and get a 7-day forecast of your
location.
games
Battle at sea
One of the first games I wrote for blind users back in the early 2000 timeframe.
It's a simple battleship game, (instructions are included in the download), You are against the computer, and to be honest, the only strategy the computer has is to drop boms randomly until it gets a hit, then it will try to find the rest of the ship, and continue dropping bombs around that area until the ship is sunk. It leads to interesting results if you put multiple ships side by side, and it only finds one of them, but hits both of them while trying to sink one.
There is a bug in the program that sometimes prevents ships from being placed on the grid properly especially if you use the auto command to place your ships randomly on the game board.
Oregon Trail
This is a version of the original oregon trail. This one has been (slightly) modified to work on Freebasic ( and source is included. The original source is included in a pdf article copied from a 1978 magazine article located at:
github.com/zstauber/oregon. The source should compile cleanly (except for a single warning) on any supported platform for FreeBasic, which includes windows, linux, OSX, BSD, and others.
tutorials
tutorial for using winrar with NV?DA
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