My Freeware Apps

Remember back to the days when you needed a lot of utility programs to get things done in Windows. These are all portable programs, meaning they don't require any sort of installation. They will even happily run from removable media. None of these have been updated in a very long time. Many things have changed in the way Windows works, and some parts of these programs don't seem to be quite right any more. They still might be useful to you. I'm not about to update them.

BeaverCAD.exe

This is an absolutely worthless little app I wrote in a couple hours somewhere around the year 2000. It's only purpose was the entertainment of a group of machinists on UseNet who were being harassed by an asshole called Beaver. The program makes fun of his belief that he knew everything there was to know about CAD software.

Dogs.exe

A game similar to "Whack-A-Mole." This was a popular game in 16 bit Windows. It broke in 32 bit. Before it was available for Windows 95, numerous people asked me to recreate it.

GR_About.exe

Just a simple "About Box" that I included in many programs for many years. It does something I still like. It displays a constantly updating list of the processors in the computer with their current usage. Sometimes it's a helpful thing to have.

GR_Bit_Set.exe

This program was originally written in the early 1990s to teach the basic concepts of the bits in a byte. It was given to novice programmers as sample source code and to novice computer users as an executable file. Use mouse clicks and the keyboard, including arrow keys to see what happens to a byte when bits are changed from set to unset.

GR_Char_Map.exe

A simple ASCII character map that compies to the clipboard when a char is selected.

GR_File_Date.exe

A program to set the dates on files. It does one file or an entire directory.

GR_FTP.exe

This was a killer app in it's day. It seems to still work although I didn't test it for long before uploading here.

GR_HexViewer.exe

A simple hex file viewer. Was a time when this was a much needed utility. Maybe someone still has a use for it.

GR_Keyboard.exe

A character map app in a different shape. This looks and acts like a keyboard to get the chars and codes on the clipboard.

GR_SlidePuzzle.exe

Aw, man... this was a lot of fun in the day. Many people downloaded and played it for a long time.

GR_Tetris.exe

A faithful implementation of Tetris. It's as addictive as the Slide Puzzle.

GR_Window_Class.exe

If you're not a Windows programmer then this will be of no use to you. If you have need to look around at the many windows in Windows to get class names and such, then this may be of use.

GTunes.exe

In 1992 one of the first things I wrote for Windows was a media player. A few years later it had evolved into a program called "GR Music." ITunes came out much later and did nothing but crash. GR Music got renamed "GTunes" to poke fun at Apple's lame attempt. GTunes was a modern marvel in it's day. It still works fine. If your music is mp3 files with each album in it's own directory, then this will kill it. It also loads album art from jpg files in the album directories.

XMaslights.exe

This puts a string of Christmas lights around your monitor and plays included holiday music. In 1994 you were too cool if you had this on your office computer at Christmas time.