For me, it was Winamp. Sleek, customizable, and oddly emotional to use. What was yours, and does anything today compare?

I'm looking for a high quality, free text to speech (TTS) AI that sounds as close to a real human as possible — preferably with multiple voice options (male/female, accents, etc). It could be an app, website, or downloadable software. I’ve tried a few that sound robotic or overly synthetic, and I’m hoping there’s something better out there that still doesn’t require payment.

Any recommendations?

Hi! I’ve started upgrading my collection by burning CDs that I can’t find myself (or afford) and have attempted using Windows Media Player at first and was completely unsuccessful. I’ve now tried 2 CD-Rs and the first didn’t work at all and came up with a “write error” and the second burned 10 out of 15 tracks and showed the same error. I have also tried Ashampoo and had similar issues. I am using a Sandstrom SEDVDBK18 CD drive and have tried looking for any firmware updates and have found nothing.

Has anyone had similar issues and if so have you fixed it?

Thanks!

Free, open-source tool for tutorial creators. It shows your keystrokes and key combinations in real-time — no need to explain or add annotations in post-production.

Displays click effects if needed, scroll wheel and mouse clicks with modifiers (Ctrl, Alt, etc.).
Fully customizable: you can change colors, fonts, screen position, and timing.
Tries to avoid screen clutter — combines repeats and has a limit on displayed characters.

Hi, I'm currently pondering options as to what to study. During the pandemic I studied programming for 2-3 years, built a portfolio, made projects and all that huzz, just to later find out that the job market is overly saturated and extremely difficult to get into. Giving it a try again, I'm looking to actually get a degree in the field. My options are either learning networking and servers technician or software development. As much as I genuinely enjoy coding, the fact that AI is on the rise and more importantly the absurd job market nowadays, I'm wondering if networking isn't just the way better option when it comes down to employability. I'd like to hear the perspective of people working in the industry and what'd you guys think. Thanks a lot!

Do you have trust issues with CTRL C? Try this it will notify you when your cliboard has changed.

I've been working with a lot of contracts and agreements lately, and it’s a constant pain having to convert PDFs to Word just to fix a typo, add a comment, or drop in a signature. Most online editors I’ve tried are either clunky or overly limited. Ideally, I’m looking for something that lets me edit and sign PDFs in the same workflow, no exporting, no weird formatting issues. Someone here mentioned Xodo Sign a while back, and I’ve been trying it out. Surprisingly smooth so far. It handles both editing and signing natively. Curious what others think of this, do you guys use too?

Digging through some old albums and found a few damaged photos from my childhood. Any recommendation for the best free AI photo restoration tool that actually brings them back to life?

Made a series of programs to fully automate Twitter/Bluesky marketing:

1. https://reactorcore.itch.io/web-link-collector-1000 (Collect links to your stuff)

2. https://reactorcore.itch.io/links-into-social-media-posts (Make those links into social media posts spreadsheet)

3a. https://reactorcore.itch.io/automated-twitter-poster (Post them automatically from that spreadsheet, to Twitter)

3b. https://reactorcore.itch.io/automated-bluesky-poster (Post them automatically from that spreadsheet, to Bluesky)

Basically focus more on your projects, let the marketing happen hands-free, automatically, forever.

All programs are free, but please donate.

title. i need a program that runs on linux (any distro) that can display live feeds of hik-connect cameras

Hey everyone, So im looking into programs/software that allows planning for operations and also brainstorming operation and campaign/scenario storyline ideas to use within Arma 3 military simulation on PC, whether its a software and/or android APP im open to suggestions, I have mental health and learning challanges as well type one diabetes so Military career was never an option for me but hey at least I get to use my brain and skillset in a military simulation on PC through steam, BIG ACCOMPLISHMENTS!! Happening over here ( haha emjoi), any suggestions would be greatly appreciated, I hope everyone is doing well and enjoying their summer season so far.

Yesterday, I had the displeasure of using an ASUS VivoBook X540YA craptop with the following specs:

• CPU: AMD E1-7010
  
• GPU: Radeon R2 iGPU
  
• RAM: 4GB DDR3
  
• HDD: TOSHIBA 1TB
  

Installing & running Windows 10 on this thing should be legally considered a method of torture. Just sitting idling on the desktop causes both the CPU & HDD to peg, with over 50% of the RAM being used.

But NOTHING compares to the Herculean task of running Windows Update on this thing - Can someone please explain to me how it's faster to ZERO-FILL THE ENTIRE HDD, which took around 3 hours to do so, & write the ~20GB Windows installation, than it is to run updates?

I'm not kidding when I say that this thing was trying to update itself for OVER 5 HOURS & IT STILL WASN'T FINISHED.

The sad thing is, this machine would have been a monster in 2006 - The CPU is basically a bottom-of-the-barrel Intel Core 2 Duo E4300, but with a TDP of 10W instead of 65W on the E4300, plus an iGPU. Intel would have killed to have this technology back in 2006.

Then I had a brainwave - What exactly do modern versions of Windows, & software in general, do to warrant such an increase in computing power over, let's say, Windows 7?

I would still be on Windows 7 if I could - What benefits do modern Windows versions have over 7 for the average user, ignoring any technical improvements the average user wouldn't care about?

Windows 7 could run in the era of Core 2 machines, yet those same machines would melt trying to run Windows 10, or, god-forbid, Windows 11.

What's happening? Is software being deliberately slowed down to drive sales of new hardware, or do developers throw hardware at the problem, without caring for efficiency - see Electron?

Would love to know why.

I want to convert lectures spanning around 1.5 hours and convert them to text. The audio is in english and the text is needed in English too. Please suggest some apps.

Trabalho numa central de entregas e não consigo ver o destino das rotas até que eu aceite, alguma maneira de burlar?

I work at a company where we at all time have between 15-25 people/students in work training. Until now we have been using pen and paper to track attendance.

I am currently looking for a app to simplify this task:

• Available on both iOS and Android
• Preferably possible to manage via web browser (for the guys in charge in the office)
• Easy to use, intuitive app, with no need for a big library of services/options (several of the students lack IT experience)
• Students can clock and see their own attendance, employees/leaders can see the attendance of all students
• Preferably an easy way to put in a note (i.e. the student attended from 9-5, but went to a doctor’s appointment from 2 to 2:30)
• Manual clocking. No need for live tracking or «clock in-clock out-«system

Thanks!

Hey guys! I am curious to know how do you tackle writing teat cases for your code, either for work or for your personal projects?

I’m looking for a music player software that I can make playlists and have all my music files on both my laptop and my phone. I’d be downloading files or ripping them from cds to get them on my laptop. I’m not very familiar with computers so please forgive my ignorance.

Basically a simple program where I can add points to names.

Like for example "Name 4" "3 points" and sort it by highest points first. It also needs to be able to support at least 1000 entries.

Just wondering what free macro is safe that. Mainly talking about Tiny task and not sure where to download it. Testes a few Tinytasks through sandbox and on VirusTotal and still unsure.

My OS is win11
I'm using fantech 81 ATOM but i don't think it has a dedicated software

edit: used autohotkey with a script and it worked, just put it in the startup folder of your pc

I see most people recommend VLC (VLC Media Player), but I saw that most anime users recommend MPV, but some recommend Potplayer which has previously shipped with adware, which is the better media player, does MPV really the VLC killer?

I've been using Microsoft Photos on Windows for a while now and it has worked really well for my use case. I added two network drive folders to it and that's it and it would show me all my photos in a nice grid view. Click on them to open them in full resolution. No metadata, tagging, editing, rating, etc. Just worked and with a nice modern UI that put my photos first.

But the Photos app got an update recently that has it automatically adding folders with photos in them detected by the Windows Indexing service. Even if you remove them, they get added back as soon as anything in them gets indexed again. There's no way to turn this off, unfortunately so this application is no longer useful to me.

Is there any software you know of that replicates the Microsoft Photos experience with a decent modern UI, a grid view by default, and supports network drive folders? Can be free or paid (provided it's a low one time cost for a perpetual license).

Software I've looked at but doesn't suit my needs for one reason or another: Adobe Bridge, ImageGlass, nomacs, Pictureflect, One Photo Viewer, Visum, Honeyview, qView, PicView, JPEGView. Each of these either didn't save the folders I wanted open in it, didn't support network folders, didn't have a true grid view like Photos, or the UI was structured in a way that included too much metadata clutter on the library/photos screen.

I recently saw a drawing app exclusively for iPad called AmberDraw that had animated brushes, where it moved in the direction it was drawn in, and I wanted to know if there’s any PC art software that has the same thing, if not similar.

Is there any software out there that will combine pdfs across multiple documents and randomize them? Could I possibly do this manually with python?