Zoodles Internet Browser and Virtual Toybox for Kids

How early your kids should be allowed to use computer? Probably, everyone has its own answer to this question, as it depends on multiple factors, as kid personality and interests. But, no matter what answer do you choose, you probably would not give a kid access to the entire WWW with all the questionable content and virtual violence. It is also quite complicated to navigate for the newcomers, so the best way to introduce your kid to the Internet is creating special safe artificial environment, funny, easy to operate, and absolutely safe.

There are multiple solutions already available on the Web, both free and commercial. Today we will present you Zoodles Internet Browser and Virtual Toybox for Kids.

Zoodles.com is a simple, safe, and free web browser for young children, created by a team of educational professionals with your child's Internet safety in mind. Kids love the Zoodles browser because it offers them a virtual toybox full of educational, entertaining sites that are age and interest specific.

The graphics are pleasing and the navigation is simple, even for the youngest of children. The activities and videos housed within the browser come from sites that your child will immediately recognize: NickJr.com, PBSkids.org, Starfall.com, and PlayhouseDisney.com, to name a few. Some of the free features that make the Zoodles solution quite interesting and attractive is that there is no typing needed and no URL address bar is visible; only interactive thumbnail images for the child to click on. The Zoodles browser opens in full screen mode, taking away the temptation to open other programs on the desktop.

As in many cases with free utilities, Zoodles also has a catch. No, there is nothing wrong with freeware in terms of viruses or Trojans, and there is no need to fulfill some offers. The catch is in additional features available for the users, which are not free. With a premium membership, the Zoodles browser offers many features. For starters, ads will be removed by the Zoodles Ad Blocking feature, which enables your child to only have access to the content that has been pre-screened and pre-approved by the Zoodles educational team.

The parental features that come with the premium membership are incredible, and can all be found within the Zoodles Parent Dashboard. The Dashboard provides detailed reports of your child's activities and interests. Parents can control which games and activities are found within the child's toybox and also promote time on specific educational subjects. The Zoodles parental controls are available to all members during the free trial period; however, the cost to continue these controls is $7.95/month.

Access Zoodles website: http://www.zoodles.com/

Download is available after your free sign up for the site.

Zoodles is rated 3 of 5 on the RateItAll list of 31 freeware utilities included in Free Parental Control Software. Feel free to browse other entries, if current software does not satisfy your needs due to the features offered and age of your children. 

5 freeware utilities to find duplicate audio files in your music collection

You are a music fan, and you have huge amounts of the audio files, downloaded from the Web. If your collection is not organized, you might have big issues finding whatever you need and keeping it efficient and compact.

You may not even realize of how many duplicate music files you may have on your computer after numerous downloads from the Internet, and scattered over your home or corporate network. Duplicate files are in most cases redundant and unnecessary, so keeping them is merely a waste of valuable hard disk space. Your hard drives may be full of extra copies of audio files waiting to be removed.

I would like endorse in this post several freeware utilities, which will help you to locate and delete duplicate audio files from your storage. As you understand, that will save you huge amounts of time to check them manually, especially when the names and meta tags do not match.

1. Similarity

Similarity is a useful program that helps you to find and remove similar, duplicate musical files (MP3, WMA, OGG, WAV, FLAC, APE, WV, MPC) with the same or similar sound content, and music tags (ID3, WMF, and Vorbis). This is the one of the best programs on the market, where similarity of a sound part is checked, not just music tags or file content (through byte to byte comparison). In addition, the program analyzes the artist, title, album information from the music tags, contained in the audio files, and compares these with the appropriate entries in other files.

You can adjust sensitivity of searching criteria to find exact or similar files. In this way it is possible to identify similarly titles with smaller differences. Duplicate files can be deleted or browsed. The list of duplicate files can be sorted, exported to playlist, and acted upon.

Similarity multilingual application with full Unicode support. Currently available languages are: English, French, German, Spanish, Russian, Czech, and Bosnian.

Website: http://www.music-similarity.com/

Direct Download: http://www.music-similarity.com/downloads/similarity.zip

2. Find Duplicate Music Files

Find Duplicate Music Files is an open source freeware utility for Mac and Linux, allowing detecting audio files that contain the same music, even if the files are differently named, and are in different formats such as MP3, OGG, WAV, WMA, M4A, and RealAudio and contain different or non-existent meta-information such as ID3 tags.

The program operates on whole directories of music files, analyzes them, and outputs the filenames of pairs that seem similar, based on their audio fingerprint or perceptual hash.

Website: http://freshmeat.net/projects/fdmf

Direct Download: http://freshmeat.net/urls/330cb4f122c651cab85089bd583c46bf

3. dupeGuru Music Edition

dupeGuru Music Edition (ME for short) is a tool to find duplicate songs in your music collection. It can scan filenames, tags or contents. dupeGuru ME is a big brother of dupeGuru. It does everything dupeGuru does, but it has more information columns (such as bitrate, duration, tags, etc..) and more scan types (filename with fields, tags and audio content). dupeGuru ME runs on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

Main Features

* dupeGuru ME is efficient.

Find your duplicate files in minutes, thanks to its quick fuzzy matching algorithm. dupeGuru ME not only finds filenames and tags that are the same, but it also finds similar ones. For example, with the right settings, dupeGuru ME can determine that "The White Stripes - Seven Nation Army" and "White Stripe - Seven Nation Armies" are duplicates.

* dupeGuru ME is customizable.

You can tweak its matching engine to find exactly the kind of duplicates you want to find. The Preference page of the help file lists all the scanning engine settings you can change.

* dupeGuru ME is safe.

Its engine has been especially designed with safety in mind. Its reference directory system as well as its grouping system prevents you from deleting files you didn't mean to delete.

* Supports multiple formats.

dupeGuru supports multiple formats: MP3, WMA, AAC (iTunes format), OGG, FLAC, lossless AAC and lossless WMA.

* dupeGuru ME is flexible.

Do whatever you want with your duplicates. Not only can you delete duplicates files dupeGuru finds, but you can also move or copy them elsewhere. There are also multiple ways to filter and sort your results to easily weed out false duplicates (for low threshold scans).

* Supported languages: English, French, German, Chinese (Simplified), Czech, Italian, Armenian, Russian, Ukrainian, Brazilian.

Requirements

* Mac OS X: 10.6 and up (Snow Leopard (64-bit), Lion, Mountain Lion or Mavericks).

* Windows (64-bit): Win7/Win8.

* Windows (32-bit): XP/Vista/Win7.

* Linux: Ubuntu 13.04 and 13.10, or Arch Linux.

Website: http://www.hardcoded.net/dupeguru_me/

4. AllDup

AllDup is free software that will help you to remove duplicate music files, remove duplicate music tracks and remove duplicate songs. The software will also assist you to automatically sort, organize and rename music files for your music collection to be in ideal order. AllDup will remove duplicate music files automatically, even if they have different names and are packed in archives.

Website: http://www.alldup.de/delete_duplicate_files/remove_duplicate_music_files.htm

Downloading page: http://www.alldup.de/en_download.htm#alldup

5. Duplicate Music Files Finder

Duplicate Music Files Finder can track your music files duplicates and delete them. The program uses advanced search techniques to detect duplicates (it searches MP3s TAGS, detects duplicates even if the file names are not the same etc). If duplicates are found you can delete the files you want: just check them and press the right mouse button. You can also play the selected files in your favorite Media Player to see if they really are duplicates.

Duplicate Music Files Finder comes with two more modules that can be used to quickly rename bad formated music files/Tags (artist & title tags). Just load one folder and it will detect the bad formated files/Tags and let you choose which of them to rename. Even though Duplicate Music Files Finder is specialized in detecting duplicates of music files, it does not mean that it can be used only for these file types. You can use the CRC Match or Exact File Name match methods to detect duplicates of other file types.

Note: The developer - LC IBros Solutions S.R.L. – does not support the software from 2007, and the their web site is not accessible. However, you still may download the software from other software portals.

OS: Windows

Download page (from Software Informer): http://duplicate-music-files-finder.software.informer.com/download/

Multiple TV channels on your computer

MegaCubo is very popular Open Source software that allows you to listen to radio, plus watch and record TV for free on the internet, developed in Brasilia.

A Collection of 700+ channels organized into one player. All centralized for your viewing pleasure. You can watch sports, watch cartoons online, adult TV, movies, news, music, shopping all your favorite shows and much, much more with MegaCubo for free!

The MegaCubo gives you an easy access to various television channels to watch on your computer through streaming. The simplest and most comprehensive of its kind, utility comes with all necessary plug-ins and pressing the F1 key the program will do a check to identify possible errors, all to avoid any headaches.

Features:

 - Audience data channel between the users of the program;

- Classification of color channels according to connection speed required (channels marked in green are the lightest);

- Automatic updating of links;

- Support P2P transmissions;

- Search videos from Youtube;

 - Data from each channel as description, bit rate and site of the channel.

- Has parental control;

- Ability to create a favorite channels list;

- Adjust (Video): Full Screen, Resolution, Enable / Disable screen saver

- Adjust (Audio): Volume, Toggle sound

- During the execution of the application you can:

- Search for channels using keywords

- Update the channel list

- Schedule automatic termination of the program

- Lets tune: broadcast TV channels, international channels, radio stations national, international radio stations, videos on YouTube

- Sort channels: Country / Region Themes / Genres

Supported Operating System(s): Windows 2K, Windows 7, Windows XP, Windows 7

Developers Websites: 

http://sourceforge.net/projects/megacubo-br/

http://megacubo.org/

http://www.megacubo.net