Image2ASCII is an open-source Windows application which converts digital pictures to stylised ASCII art.

The program is tiny, and arrives as a stand-alone executable. There’s no installation required, simply download and run it.

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ESET SysInspector (32-bit) is a powerful tool for examining the low-level details of a PC, and perhaps spotting malicious files, poorly configured settings and other issues that might be causing you problems.

The program has been around for a long time, but we’ve not looked at it for everal years, and as ESET issued a rare update recently we decided to see what it could do on a test Windows 10 laptop.

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AUTOSET is an interesting $2 app which enables altering your Android device settings when you run an app, when an event happens, on a particular schedule, and more.

This opens up all kinds of possibilities. Choose a navigation app in AUTOSET’s list, for instance, and you could increase the screen brightness and media volume.

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Adobe has released Adobe Scan 17.05.31 for iPhone, iPad and Android mobiles. The app allows users to turn their mobile camera into a scanner for various types of paper document, including receipts and magazine pages.

Apps that turn your phone or tablet into a portable scanner are two-a-penny, so at first glance Adobe Scan looks like a very late gate crasher to a party that’s already in full flow. But it claims one major advantage over its rivals: OCR support for free.

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Dipiscan is a professional network scanner, fast, capable, and with a huge number of configuration options.

The package is easy enough for anyone to use. Launch it, click Analyze to scan your current network (no need to enter an IP address range, it figures out sensible defaults for itself), and the process is completed within seconds.

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Bitdefender has released Bitdefender Home Scanner, a free tool which scans your wireless network, identifies connected devices and checks them for vulnerabilities.

The program claims to spot devices with poorly encrypted or insecure authentication, weak login credentials and “hidden back doors”.

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LXtory is an open-source tool for capture screenshots, saving the results locally or uploading them to Imgur or other sites.

It’s a familiar idea, and the program interface didn’t impress us, either. Calling it “unfinished” would be a compliment– it’s so basic that it barely looks started.

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The freeware video surveillance system ContaCam has been helping PC users monitor their video feeds since 2010, and it’s grown to be one of the most capable and configurable systems around.

We haven’t checked out the program for a while, but after the recent release of ContaCam 7.0, we grabbed a copy and took a closer look.

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NPS Image Editor is an unusual freeware tool which aims to provide the simplicity of Microsoft Paint with far more functionality, including custom brushes, filters and transparency control.

The program looks much like a stripped-back version of Paint.NET, no surprise as it was also a Paint-inspired project: tiny drawing toolbar on the left, palette on the right, menu bar at the top, details of the current image on the status bar.

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EasyBCD developer NeoSmart Technologies has released LastPass to 1Password, a simple automated tool for converting exported LastPass CSV files to the 1PIF format used by 1Password.

If you’re wondering why, check out the official method for transferring data from LastPass: export from Firefox (other browser export options don’t work properly), install Strawberry Perl, run custom Perl commands to export individual data types, manually import each exported file later…

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MP4Tools is a cross-platform collection of tools for the lossless splitting and joining of MP4 files.

The package is the project of Alex Thuering, the developer behind DVD authoring application DVDStyler.

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