The Unlocker

This site offers quite a few free themes for your nokia ranging from very bad ones, up to some excellent themes. All the downloads are free, and requires no registration. It even offers a facility to create your own theme’s.

The Unlocker

Free Nokia themes

A huge site offering free Nokia themes is the one at Free nokia themes. Good luck finding your theme here.

Freenokiathemes

Nokiasoftware

This Dutch site not only offers free Nokia themes, but also software, wallpapers, ringtones etc.

Nokiasoftware

Ownskin

Lastly, Ownskin offers the facility to make your own theme, as well as flash and animated wallpapers.

Ownskin

Tonebee

Tonebee offers the facility to make ringtones of your favourite mp3’s for free. What some folks will not like about their facility is that you have to register to make your ringtone. What I find really promising about this site is that they are currently developing a function to transfer to ringtone that you just made to your phone via WAP. If they can pull this of, they will definately be top choice. Let’s hold thumbs.

Tonebee

Make your own ringtone

This site is the most impressive of all. They even have various facilities to process the ringtone before you download it. No registration and no funny stuff. This seems to be the real deal. This site also supports various file formats, so most cellphones will be covered.

Make your own ringtone

The Unlocker

The unlocker is another site that offers the facility to create your own ringtone. It only supports mp3’s, so it is much more a mp3 “cutter than anythng else. Still, it offers a no nonsense interface, and fast creation of ringtones.

The unlocker

Where to get MP3’s

If you’re wondering where to get mp3’s to make your ringtones with, check out this article

Overview

I innitially thought that this would be easy, but again it was a matter of quantity over quality as normally is with this www of ours. In the end I managed to come up with a collection of sites that should answer your questions. Here’s the list:

Dog-names.us

Of all the sites with dog names and meanings this one was the best for me, not because it had th most names, but the best quality

Dog-names.us

All Dog Names

Here’s a site with not just dog name meanings, but also with a few discussions, like tips on naming a dog, recent trends in dog naming and most popular dog names. It also break the names down in country of origin.

alldognames.com

Dogs united

This site breaks down the names of dogs, in type of bread. The list is not very extensive, but they have quite a unique take on dog naming conventions. By subscribing to their site, they also offer a free e-book on dogs names.

Dogs United

Agilitybits

This site have entries for popular dog names, and an article on how some of the popular dogs got their names.

Agilitybits

Bowwow

The last entry is of an Australian site with quite an extensive database of dog names, and a name of the month section. I liked this site, and it has quite a comprehensive database.

Bowwow

To my mind the free tools available have overtaken the commercial tools, so I will not spend time on reviews of commercial tools. Archiving as t is called in Linux is quite a easy task except for unzipping rar files, so i’ll leave it for a next post.

7 Zip

If I was made to choose one archiving tool, this would be it. There is no ends to what this piece of software cannot zip or unzip. It supports multiple compression formats. This piece of software is a free download with no strings attached, no registrations or any unwanted jazz. Simply download install and go.

In windows, it will seamlessly integrate into the windows shell, and will be available if you rightclick on a file. It also supports encryption so you can password protect all your zips nicely

Download from here.

Zip Genius

I do not personally know this software, but a buddy of mine raves about it. Here is what it says in the introduction on their site:

Claim your space back and reorder your files with ZipGenius: ZipGenius is the that lets you compress files to almost any kind of archive. ZipGenius supports more than 20 compressed archive formats, including CD/DVD-ROM image files in ISO9660 standard. This is the file compression suite you were searching for: it is free and easy to use, plus it supports more than 20 formats of compressed archives, including RAR, ARJ, ACE, CAB, SQX, OpenOffice.org documents and the excellent ZipGenius now can executable files going to be added to a ZIP archive through the compressor.

If The above do not work for you, here’s a list of some other freeware zip tools. Click on the name to go to the website:
Jzip
Peazip
Freezip
Coffecup free zip wizard

Now off you go. Go zip something

Regards

AJ

The most popular names

We found that a quite a few sites listed names by popularity. Wondering how the popularity was determined we set to investigate. Before giving the results of our findings, here is a list of the most popular boys names:

Jacob
Michael
Ethan
Joshua
Daniel
Christopher
Anthony
William
Matthew
Andrew

And girls names:

Emily
Isabella
Emma
Ava
Madison
Sophia
Olivia
Abigail
Hannah
Elizabeth

We found out that the names came from the American Social Security Administration who published the most popular names registered in America up to 2007. The results changed quite every year, and this means that the results is outdated and rather a of historical value and not a very good barometer of current naming trends.

There is quite a complete list of popular names for other countries at Wikipedia. Wikipedia being a humanly editable encyclopedia, the data could be very accurate, or not.

Baby name facts have further lists of popular names in different countries

Origin of names.

A super site with the meanings and origins of almost 50.000 names is the meaning of names. A database like this is not easy to search, but if you have some time it is worth it. to go through and search for meaning of names.

Another site with a very impressive database can be found at parentsconnect.

It all started with my friend Mike calling me with a tight nervousness in his voice.He was tired of his rented “dream house” and had the need to build his own. He then requested me to find free house plans on line.  I called on my old friend Google to assist me, typed in free house plans and was amazed by the number of search results, realizing that my friend was lazy,he could have done it himself. Little did I realize that the word free and house plans are thrown around on the internet like politician promises before an election…unable to deliver, as were these sites.

Why is there so little house plans available?

The reason for the unavailability of free house plans are cited as deviations in building codes in different countries,s tates and provinces, slopes and elevations on the property needs to be measured, technical know-how needed to be given and various other factors. One thing that scared me about the “buying” of the plans on the internet, is that in buying a plan on line, you are not much further that having bought a sketch, and would probable have to fork out more money to get it tweaked to perfection.

Our Top Find:

Our top find was tucked away between searches 1050 and 1150: floorplanner.com.
Floorplanner is the easiest, quickest, and best looking way to create and share interactive floor plans. Using point-and-click, drag-and-drop tools, you can make your house plan in minutes, and rearrange it as often as you want. Then you can save, send, and print your designs to share them, or place them on your own website.It is easy to use and works in any modern browser, no extra downloads required.

The one draw-back is that it will not export plans for you, but will be good in your preparation in seeing a proffesional as it gives a detailed idea of your expectations.

Limited free house-plans available:

www.freegreen.com functions as a semi-opened source site where designers can upload their home designes and make their price,although there is a limited list of designs available that cannot be reconfigured.

http://josephkenyon.com offers a service where he make available as he calls free plans to your tiny dream home or house.The plans are quite detailed,but as he says it’s for tiny houses.

Free software:

The first site which offers free software for designing your dream home is german and is www.cycas.de.They make their software available with few limitations for non-commercial use. Some people reported it easy and others hard to use but it all depends on your personal experience of the site.

Another free software is qcad from www.ribbonsoft.com. It seems quite technical and most people will find it very difficult to use.

The cheapest software option is the home design package from punchsoftware.com, which is about $100.

Most of the available free plans that we found were on individual sites, and were difficult to read and of low quality, making us realize once again,that free on the internet does not always mean free.

Is there any really free,no strings attached,sms services available?

The short answer to this question is an unreserved…no.There is however quite a few services that will lower the cost of sms’s,there is also afew services that will allow you to send free sms’s,subject to certain conditions and there is a number of services giving you limited sms’s depending on your account status at certain providers.

Our hoax list:

We have found only one hoax site offering free sms’s but actually charging you an excessive amount for that.The site is www.freebiesms.co.za.The sender can send the sms for free but the receiver must pay R30 to retrieve it.In Webson’s eyes this is criminal and for that reason I will not link to that site,but if you need to pay R30 urgently you can go google the service.

My sms is still floating somewhere:

There was quite a few services offering free sms’s,but when we tested the services,no sms’s were received,we will promptly update our site if they are received before Dec 2009.If you feel lucky and want to give it a try go to www.text4free.net and za.simplesms.co.za.

Free sms’s for members

There are tow sites that allow free sms’s for members of these blueworld.co.zawhich is a facebook clone,seems to be the best,all though they monitore use of sms’s very close and cannot access it frequently without becoming part of the community.If facebook is your thing go ahead.

mydigitallife.co.za allows members to sms other members,which in my mind is limiting.The service is still on trial basis and we will never know when the trial will end.

Free sms offer by cellphone providers:

All the cellphone providers offer a number of free sms’s vodacom4me.co.za offer 20 free sms’s a day,amounting to roughly 600 a month and virginmobile.co.za offer 1000 free sms’s a month.

The best deal:

In my eye the nearest to free sms’s are offered by mjoy.com,which allow free sms’s from anybody worldwide to anybody worldwide making use of WAP.The cost of sending an sms will be a fraction of a real sms and in testing the service we have found no flaws.We feel that all though not free it is the best opyion to send free sms’s without becoming a subsriber or having funny strings attached.