There are plenty of wallpaper-changing applications out there, and plenty of them can tap into photo sharing sites like Flickr and Photobucket for access to a plethora of images. Still, not many of them are quite as well-connected as Wally.

Even fewer are cross-platform. Wally, though, is happy to share its background-rotating skills with Windows, Mac, and Linux users alike. It’s built using Nokia’s Qt4 framework and supports an insane number of image sources: local and remote folders (via FTP), and popular photo sites like Flickr, Yahoo!, Panoramio, Pikeo, Ipernity, Photobucket, Buzznet, Picasa, Smugmug, and Bing. You can use any combination of sources you choose by adding and removing them on the settings screen.

Customization options are plentiful, from specifying the delay between image changes to tweaking the size of your local image history store. Images from the ‘net are pulled in based on the search terms you specify – and yes, you can shut off Bing’s adult filter if you want to.

Wally is free and open source, and pre-compiled downloads are available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. The project is also mirrorerd over at Sourceforge.

Trying to extract clips from a DVD is usually a roundabout process that involves a lot of waiting. Free utility DVD Knife makes it easy to extract clips from any part of your DVD.

Generally, in order to extract a small clip from a DVD, you’ve got to rip and convert the entire movie—or at least a specific chapter—before you can work with it. DVD Knife does away with this lengthy process with a quick, four-click solution. When you start it up, you just open the disc, navigate to and mark your start and endpoints, and click save. DVD Knife will extract the clip (without compressing or decompressing) into a small VOB file that you can then convert into whatever file type you need, giving you more time to actually concentrate on the goal at hand (or to finish up that project quickly and go do something else).

[ Download DVD Knife ]

Want to turn your Windows installation DVD into an installation flash drive? WinToFlash can do that and more.

WinToFlash can transfer Windows XP, Vista, and 7 onto a flash drive as well as Server 2003 and 2008. WinToFlash can also transfer Windows Preinstallation Environments to flash drive.

The process is simple and mostly obvious. You tell WinToFlash where the installation files you want to transfer are located and either let the transfer wizard take care of things, or specify settings like what kind of format the flash drive will undergo. In our test using a USB 2.0 generic flash drive it took about 12 minutes to turn a Windows 7 installation DVD into a USB-based installer.

WinToFlash is freeware, Windows only.

[ Download ]

It is not easy as it sounds to transfer a Windows installation DVD to a flash drive. The whole process can be divided into two manual steps. Files from the Windows installation DVD have to be transferred to the USB drive which has to be made bootable as well. Beginners might prefer an easier solution to the manual approach.

WinToFlash has been designed to make the process as straightforward as possible. The portable software program comes with a wizard that helps users transfer files from a Windows installation DVD to an USB flash drive. The software supports the transfer of various Windows installation DVDs, namely transferring Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003 and 2008 or Windows 7 installations to an USB flash drive.

The program can also transfer Windows PE installations to USB flash drive. All it basically takes to transfer the files is to specify the path of the Windows installation DVD and the path of the USB flash drive. The program will handle the rest. It will transfer the installation DVD to the USB flash drive and make the flash drive bootable so that users can boot from it and install the Windows operating system from USB flash drive.

[ Download WinToFlash ]

Network administrators and home network users need to check the speed of the local area network during installation but also from time to time to make sure that the speed matches the expected speed of the lan. This is important for a variety of reasons including overal network performance and discovering slow network nodes that can have a impact on services.

LAN Speed Test is a portable software program to test the speed of a local area network. The program will display the name and IP address of the computer that is it running on. Tests are started with a click on the Start Test button. This will open a file browser to select a folder the data should be read from and written to. This should be on a different computer system so that the actual lan speed is tested.

The program will ask for a file size of the file that will be written and read in the second step of the lan speed test configuration. It will then write the file to the target location, clear the Windows file cache, read the file back, clear the cache a second time, delete the file and display the results of the speed test.

The results can be printed but not exported to a file. Lan Speed Test is available from the developer’s website. It is compatible with all Microsoft operating systems including Windows 7 (not sure about 64-bit though).

[ Download Lan Speed Test ]