Want to be part of the new Internet of things (IOT) Then, you want to get a helium minor

files for download

utilities

clip speak
Clipspeak is a program that will speak the contents of your clipboard. If you need to verify something is written properly, or if you want your computer to read something outloud, just run clipspeak.
It's a pretty simple program, all it does is load, speak the contents of the clipboard, then exit. That's all. If you don't find it useful, then pass it along to someone who might.

talking calendar (version 1.1)
This is a small universal calendar program with only a few features.
It has only about a dozen or so holidays in it, but it can handle dates for just about anything since the current calendar began up to the year 9999, and it shows dates in a month at a time display. You can move by month, day or year, and the documentation on how to use the program is included with the download, so hope it works for you. If it doesn't, that's ok too, as always, feel free to pass it along to someone else who might be able to use it.
This version fixed a bug in the calculation of father's day, it was using the wrong sunday.
It also won't show holidays if you go back past their official start in the U.S.

dir zip
Dirsip is a program that will compress all the subdirectories in any given directory into their own zip files. It doesn't (currently) handle subdirectories included in any directories it compresses, (I.E. the main directory is level 1, and anything under that is level 2, which the program does handle, but anything under one of those directories would be considered level 3, and it won't handle those).
It will happily compress as many directories as you have, so if you have source directories, with each directory being a different project (like I have), then this program provides a quick way to create backups of all those projects with a single command..

pdf to text
This program will extract the text from any pdf file (that isn't protected), and place it in a text file with the same name as the original pdf file.
It's not able to handle every pdf file you throw at it, and it won't handle those with complicated formatting, but it should handle most things you need turned to text as long as they are relatively simple conversions.
The documentation has download links for the xpdf program this one calls to do it's actual work.

disk size
A simple program to show disk size in various units (bytes, kilobytes, megabytes, gigabytes, terrabytes), and is easier to get to than the control panel where that information is usually found.

Youtube Downloader User Interface
is a program to add a graphical interface to the youtube-dl program (though it works with wget and curl as well) for downloading youtube videos. It can also if desired download other files as well. You can paste in your urls (one per line), and it will then proceed to download each in turn until it's complete. A complete log is now kept of all the downloads, so you can see what has been downloaded. Hope this helps.

Softcon Reader

Last updated on May 4 2022

Softcon Reader is a program to read epub books. At the moment, it's pre release software, so expect bugs.
It is a work in progress, so it has limitations on what epub files it will work with properly, but it does provide a nice simple interface to reading epub format ebooks.
I'm fairly confident I've squashed a majority of the bugs in this release, (pre-10), so if there aren't any reports of game stopping bugs, this version of the program will become version 1.0 for real.
This release fixes a few bugs, such as removing several files from consideration that shouldn't be listed in the viewable files list, and releasing timeslices back to the os preventing it from monopolizing the cpu when it's in the background tasklist after a crash.
This version adds support for content.opf files, and even fixed a bug in parcing of said opf files that would sometimes cause it to be unable to find the files in question.
As always, let me know if you find errors, other than the scripting error messages that come up with certain epub files. I thought I had that problem solved, but apparently not.
The only solution I've found for this particularly annoying problem is to hold down the alt-N keys for a second or two, which seems to get past all of those messages. You'll likely need to alt-P to go to previous files in the epub file, until you're back where the book started, but it's a crude work-around for the scripting error notifications.
This problem doesn't seem to appear if you've previously opened the book and read a chapter or two, but I guarantee nothing, I've seen too many badly formatted epub files for that.

Weather

Weather program
This is a program that uses the noaa weather site to show your local weather. It only works for locations inside the U.S. which limits it's usefulness, but I was tired of seeing so many weather programs that used other sources instead of the one they all draw from themselves.
You'll need to edit the weather.cfg file to add in your longitude and latitude, and to place a label on the open window, but that's all you need. Then you can run the program, and get a 7-day forecast of your location.

Generic music player

generic music player
This is a music player that handles several formats (mp3, ogg, wav, au, and midi).
See the included documentation for details. It currently is a work in progress, so not all planned features are implemented, though it will play a single directory full of music files, it won't search for multiple directories, so whatever is it's starting folder is where it will operate. It writes nothing to your system, so it can easily be run from a thumb drive.

games

Battle at sea
One of the first games I wrote for blind users back in the early 2000 timeframe.
It's a simple battleship game, (instructions are included in the download), You are against the computer, and to be honest, the only strategy the computer has is to drop boms randomly until it gets a hit, then it will try to find the rest of the ship, and continue dropping bombs around that area until the ship is sunk. It leads to interesting results if you put multiple ships side by side, and it only finds one of them, but hits both of them while trying to sink one.
There is a bug in the program that sometimes prevents ships from being placed on the grid properly especially if you use the auto command to place your ships randomly on the game board.
Oregon Trail
This is a version of the original oregon trail. This one has been (slightly) modified to work on Freebasic ( and source is included. The original source is included in a pdf article copied from a 1978 magazine article located at: github.com/zstauber/oregon. The source should compile cleanly (except for a single warning) on any supported platform for FreeBasic, which includes windows, linux, OSX, BSD, and others. Empiremud version 2.0Beta5
This is a windows version of empiremud. It's been compiled with cygwin, so should work on any version of windows, but if you have trouble, let me know, and iI'll see if there's anything I can do. This is a binary release only, source is available at the official empiremud github page which is in the readme file in the top level directory.
This is a self extracting rar file, just drop it on your system, then type empire. It will prompt you for extraction directory. After that, change to the directory you extracted it from, and type bin\empire. That will run the mud, and get it started. After that, you'll need to login with telnet or a mud client. The first user becomes an admin.
Hope this helps those looking to get started on muds.

tutorials

tutorial for using winrar with NV?DA

other services

If you need web hosting, then check out our main pages at: softcon.com, and see what we have to offer, we have everyting from free hosting up to and including lifetime hosting for one low fee. Never pay again for your web hosting. No, it's not too good to be true, it's here, and we have it, and you too can benefit from it.