This month we bring a collec¬tion of programs that let you have loads of fun on your PC, whether you want to catalog your media collection, scour through recipes, or just stare at the night sky.

BigOven: Cooking advice from one's grandma won't be missed with BigOven installed on your computer. The sheer variety - and quantity! - of food concoctions to browse through is noteworthy: over 150,000 mouth-watering recipes from around the world, and across several unique cuisines. Click Find in the toolbar, and start searching for recipes. And it is far more than a mere recipe catalog, as it bundles in the option of uploading your own cooking experiments for the world to see, a shopping list manager, and a meal diary for advanced planning. There's also a calorie calculator to know the nutritional value of your meal, for the health conscious.


KidzUI: A free browser specifically built for children, KidzUl makes browsing the Internet a fun experience. And it also empowers parents to avoid the nuisances
of unsupervised browsing surfing. Opening the browser unboxes a user environment that can only be for children: cute icons, sparkling taskbar, and glossy buttons. Step-by-step voice instructions guide you through the process of creat¬ing your Zui, the avatar for the browser and KidzUI community. Parents will breathe easy as childrens can't browse non-KidzUI content without their permission. While signing-up, you also have to create a parent login for the account to monitor and control your child's Internet browsing habits. I couldn't even open google. com without prior approval from the parental control account. You can get emailed reports over your child's browsing hours, rejected websites, and also block potential friends on the Kid¬zUI community from interacting with your child. It's supervised fun, and worth checking out.

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Libra 0.9.2: What to do, if you have a ton of music, heaps of movies, and scores of DVDs all lying disorganized? Install Libra, a library software, on your computer to set your multimedia collection in order. Most of the stuff you organize on Libra's shelf is powered by Amazon search: look up movies, music, games, and pull them onto your virtual shelf. Books loaned to friends can be tagged, and you can place an "Out" stamp on them. You can also assign the duration (say, two weeks) of the loan, and find out which friends are good (or bad) at returning books on deadline. Libra also has a community, but I couldn't quite connect through the provided interface. But apart from this hiccup, Libra does what it says pretty smoothly.

ArtRage 2.5: Last time we used this impressive painting tool, back in May, it clinched our Editor's Pick spot. And it continues to provide oodles offun. ArtRage's primary function is to simulate reallife paintings, and it's incredible how every brush stroke on the virtual canvas feels so close to reality. It offers a wide canvas with unobtrusive toolbars, including layer sup¬port. Even brush sizes and thickness can be changed, and in the Help section, you can learn the key combinations that support short-cuts to perform quick maneuvers.

StellariumO.lO: Buddin asti "onomers should sit up and take notice of Stellarium, an open source, cross-platform tool to gaze into the sky accurately. 'Accurately' is the key .. word, since everything you see through Stellarium is an accurate representation of the sky. Search for a location on Earth, and instantly get a slice of the heavens from that Vantage point in real-time. You can speed up time and see the position of Venus or Jupiter on a particular day, chart the sky in minute detail (re: latitudes and longitudes), observe constellations and nebulae like never before. And once you have seen Stellarium, the only thing left to do is grab that telescope on a cloudless night. Happy stargazing!