VirusTotal
Virus scanning service
Developer: Hispasec Sistemas
OS: Web-based
Price: Free
Site: http://www.virustotal.com
Though anti-virus vendors argue over which offers the best virus and malware protection, no anti-virus scanner is perfect—and it only takes one undetected virus to ruin your week. Less harmful but more prevalent are files your scanner flags as virus-ridden, but come from a trusted source, such as a download site you frequent or a friend. Deciding which of the two is more trustworthy can be a hard decision. If only you could get a second opinion.
Generally it's inadvisable to run more than one anti-virus program on your own system at a time, since multiple scanners may interfere with each other's real-time and scheduled scans. That's where VirusTotal comes in. The online service is an on-demand scanner that can take a file you upload and submit it to several anti-virus scanners at once. VirusTotal's arsenal of scanners includes popular packages such as Symantec's Norton Antivirus, Kapersky Labs' AVP, AVG, and a host of others.
The results are broken down by scanner, so you can find out exactly which scanners gave your file a clean bill of health and which ones found something suspicious. You can then Google the virus names VirusTotal returns to find more information on what you may be dealing with. The service isn't a substitute for a desktop virus scanner, as it can only scan individual uploaded files, but it's a great way to determine just how much of a threat a received file poses to your system.
Inquisitor (tested v1.0.2 Firefox, v3.2 v58 Safari Mac)
Search auto-complete and suggestion plugin
Developer: David Watanabe / Yahoo
OS: Windows/Mac, Firefox/Internet Explorer (IE7 and above)/Safari (Mac only)
Price: Free
Site: http://www.inquisitorx.com
Search engines have subtly grown more intelligent over the years, and though you may not notice at first glance, many of the features available from search engines like Google and Yahoo are relatively recent innovations. It wasn't so long ago that features like auto-completion of search terms, or suggested phrases that refine your search, became available to the masses.
The in-browser search bar is another such innovation. But in many ways, those search bars act very much like the search engines of old—if you're lucky, you're using a browser that offers search auto-completion, but even this basic feature may not be available. Inquisitor puts your search engine bar on steroids by adding several neat features you've come to expect from search engines.
The most obvious addition is the drop-down menu that appears in your search bar after you've installed Inquisitor. As you type in a search phrase, Inquisitor finds and displays summaries of the first few search results from either Google or Yahoo. It also shows you suggested phrases based on what you've already typed, and even offers the option to search other sites like Flickr or Amazon.com simply by pressing the displayed hotkey. Inquisitor even takes advantage of your browsing history, marking sites that you've visited in the past.
The plugin isn't a complete replacement for the full search results you get from going to Google or Yahoo normally—the find-as-you-type summaries may be a little too short for your liking. But for the vast majority of searches, Inquisitor can help you find what you're looking for faster and with less effort.
AutoLyrix (tested v0.5.1 Windows)
Lyrics auto-downloader and viewer
Developer: Alex A. dos Santos
OS: Windows/Mac/Linux
Price: Free
Site: http://autolyrix.com/
The digital realm can't recreate the ambience of a movie theatre (for better or worse), nor can it give you the physical sensation of turning the pages of a good novel. But for many people, digital music files have all but supplanted CDs and vinyl. You can download high-quality audio files that sound great to all but the most discerning listeners, and high-resolution cover art is in some ways a step up from tiny CD booklets. But though text is the easiest thing of all to distribute on the Internet, it's proper lyrics that end up being the most difficult to find.
To make finding and reading lyrics a friendlier experience, you need a program like AutoLyrix. As the name suggests, it automatically searches for lyrics, album art and karaoke-style synchronized lyrics, and displays them beside the media player of your choice. Able to automatically detect the presence of most popular music players, you don't even need to invoke AutoLyrix to find lyrics; it will automatically start searching as soon as you play a song.
As with anything that relies mostly on Google searches for data, AutoLyrix's ability to find the proper lyrics is somewhat limited, though better than many other lyrics-finding programs. Generally speaking, the more popular an artist is, the more likely you'll find lyrics. AutoLyrix does offer several options for refining your search, and you can submit lyrics to an online library for others to find. These fallback options, in addition to its already decent hit rate, makes AutoLyrix one of the most accurate lyric hunters around.
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