If you do own a website you probably wondered about the value of it. With value I mean the amount of money that someone would be willing to pay for it. The following information could be very helpful if you need to sell your website, want to buy one or get approached by someone who offers money for your website. It actually happens quite often that webmasters receive mails from companies or individuals who want to buy their domain. Let us examine some factors that play a role in determine the value of a domain.

When I first tried to run a command in Windows Vista i expected to find the function at the same place where it is in Windows XP. When I opened the Vista start menu I was a little bit perplexed to find the Search in the place of the run command. Sure, I was able to simply press Windows + R to open the run command but I somehow still missed that function. I soon found out that it would be possible to customize the start menu and add the run command to it again.

This article explains how to disable Balloon Tips in Windows Vista. I thought it would be a nice follow up article on the one that described how to make the balloon tips transparent. I personally think that Balloon Tips have no right to be there at all, they look awful and most do not contain information that are important in any way. I disabled them the first day I started using Windows XP and I did the same on my Windows Vista notebook. Balloon Tips are a waste of time in my opinion. Let me explain how you can disable balloon tips in Windows Vista.

I’m using Wordpress as the blogging software of choice for Ghacks and all of my other blogs. After reading Paul Stamatious article on optimizing CSS for Wordpress I decided to give it a try and see if page loading times would benefit at all from it. I also had to check if the optimization would change the way my blog would be displayed or would throw up errors. I began by analyzing the page loading times of my blog without any optimization. The result for the frontpage was that my blog used 166K and that users with ISDN (128 Kbit) would have to wait 18.55 seconds before my site was fully loaded.

The Big Brother State is a short educational film created at the German university of Augsburg which tries to provide a different view of certain laws that are supposed to protect our freedom for the sake of our rights and privacy. Do we really need more observation at public places, trusted computing, biometric passports and network traffic monitoring. Who is able to tell that that no misuse will ever happen with the collected data ?

Time has passed since my last article about Ubuntu and I have decided to concentrate more on Linux and Ubuntu because it is a real alternative for Windows Vista. The Ultimate Ubuntu Tweaking Guide is a new user friendly guide that explains how to tweak Ubuntu for a better performance. It is a guide for new users because it explains every step instead of explaining just some and assuming that the user has the experience to get to the point where the explanation starts.

Did you ever have the feeling that your computer is making to much noises when it is running ? A high noise level can be distracting to say the least reducing work effectiveness. The worst effect: it could make you ill. I’m going to identify the most annoying pc noise makers and suggest ways to reduce the overall noise level of your computer.

One of the flaws of the Xbox 360 is the inablity to playback divx movies on it. Microsoft might have left it out intenionally to push their own wmv format or avoid that the Xbox 360 would be used as the universal media center like the orginal Xbox with the (unofficial) Xbox media center was able to do.

Windows XP will be the dominant operating system for the next years even though Microsoft released the successor Windows Vista just a few days ago. The major disadvantage of Vista is that it is hardware hungry and poses problems to users of Windows XP who would like to change but can’t because of the hardware of their computer.

I experienced some troubles installing files on my system and discovered that my partition with Windows was having only 50 megabytes of free space. This was astonishing because it is a 10 gigabyte partition with only Windows and some tools that occupy no more than 3 gigabytes. A quick check revealed that the mail folders from Thunderbird would occupy more than 3 gigabytes of space in the application data folder on the partition.

I was so excited to write this article that I could not sleep well all night. Yesterday I have written an article that explained how you could setup a webserver on your computer and use it to display websites or share files with your friends. Today I’m going to show you how to use this webserver to host a local proxy server that you can access from anywhere on the net to surf sites that are blocked at your current location.

It is relatively easy to use your home computer running Windows to become a webserver that is accessible from anywhere. The following method is highly flexible and makes it possible to host websites, documents and files on that server and protect the contents with passwords if so desired. All you need is a software called XAMP which installs the Apache server environment on your computer.

Fake torrents are spread into the system by organizations for two reasons. The first and in my opinion dominant one is to unsettle the torrent users by lowering the rate of successful downloads. Nothing is more discouraging than downloading the latest blockbuster for days only to see that you downloaded only garbarge in that time. In addition to this the trackers that spread the fake torrents are recording every bit of information they can get their hands on.

I don’t like the iTunes software that much – it is slow and big and the only reason for me to use it is that it is the offical software that comes with the iPod. I recently ran into a problem which was fixed pretty fast by a quick tip that I found at one tip a day. I assume that iTunes is already installed at least on your main computer and you want to access the same library of songs that are stored on the main computer.

We all made our jokes when Nintendo’s new system Wii emerged about how the fat video gaming kids would lose weight while playing video games. Well, someone decided to give it a try and use see if a daily Wii workout would reduce his weight and body fat. He called it the Wii Sports Experiment and had some astonishing results.

I finally decided to give uTorrent another try and switch from my favorite client Bitcomet to it. It seemed to me lately that Bitcomet was using more system resources than it was expected to use which is the main reason for the switch. Others are that the torrent community frowns upon Bitcomet naming it bandwidth stealer.

A recent forum post from ffolke at the ghacks forum asked about a free method to clone a hard drive to another one. There are actually several freeware tools out there that can do this and they distinguish each other mostly by ease of use and interface. The one tool that I would use for such a purpose is called DriveImage XML which supports SATA drivesn external hard drives and flash memory such as that of my iPod Nano.

I sometimes have the desire to create custom DVDs of movies that I own or that I downloaded to be able to view them on my tv using a dvd player. Many people might think that it is a rather difficult procedure to convert a avi file into a DVD compliant format and create DVD menus to be able to playback the movies on a standard DVD drive. This is not the case.

Not long ago I wrote an article about converting flv files which are used by Youtube and Google Video to another format like avi and mpg to be able to watch them on your computer without the need of using a flv player or plugin. Fastdump pointed out in the comments that the program VDownloader would do the same faster and easier, what can I say – he was right.

Do not Disconnect was implemented on Apple Ipods to prevent data loss by warning the user not to disconnect the iPod while it is still in use on the computer. This message should be taken serious most of the time. If you transfer files to the iPod for instance. Removing the iPod while transferring files could lead to data loss and file corruption.

It sometimes happens that I delete a mail by accident because it does look like spam or a message that I do not longer need. Thunderbird does not display that message anymore if it is completely deleted from the mail client. Unknown to many Thunderbird does not delete the messages but flags them only which means it is relatively easy to recover corrupted or deleted mails. This method only works if you have not compressed the mail folders because compressing removes deleted messages from the mail files.

Welcome to the second part of the how to create your own blog with domain series. I would like to add some information about what I have said in the first part of this article. Hosting is essential of course but you should not be to afraid to make errors. I switched hosts three times before I found the one that offered me everything that I was looking for. The others decided to disable my website at a certain point because it was causing to much load and traffic on their network.

Creating your own blog is no big deal anymore. All you need is some time at hand to think about a topic that you want to write about. I found out that it best works with topics that you are passionate about. You could of course write about other topics but it is in my opinion much harder to output regular articles in a niche that you do not like or know that much. I’m also only writing about text blogs, not about the two other possibilities video blogs and podcasts.

I do not like Quicktime that much. I hate to use additional clients next to VLC to be able to view certain movies on websites. I also do not like the fact that you can’t save movies easily if you do not use Quicktime Pro. I discovered a method that makes it possible to save movies from the Apple Trailer website to your local drive and watch them in your favorite movie player afterwards. I use VLC for this purpose but Quicktime Alternative for instance should be fine as well.

I was getting some emails lately asking about the plugins that I have installed here at ghacks. I know that many webmasters read my blog and I thought it would be nice to write about the plugins. I also thought to write a little series of articles about setting up a blog with your own domain, please let me know if that sounds interesting enough. I have been using Wordpress since the beginning and find it really easy to administrate.

Bebo is a community driven website that, among other features, allows bands to have their special place on the web and offer songs and information to their audience. Clicking on the bands tab will load the central page for all bands at bebo. Once you click on a special band information about that band are displayed and a songs link is revealed.

I decided to start a Internet Censorship 101 series of articles that takes a look at and explains the various methods of censorship on the internet and possible solutions to this situation for the user who tries to access information that are blocked / censored. I’m going to start with a relatively weak form of censorship called DNS Filtering.

If you are looking for a comprehensive, and I mean really really comprehensive, guide on bypassing internet censorship you might want to take a look at the excellent guide written by Freerk. The guide is divided into two parts; The first analyzes different methods to censor information on the internet and the second part describes different ways to bypass censorship.

My first impression of Windows Vista was that it was a very shiny operating system with lots of useless stuff (for me) that wasted lots of valuable ram on my system. Things like the sidebar which may be useful for some are absolutely useless to me. Besides that they use ram. I have decided to remove everything that I would not need to increase performance on the system.

Lifehacker.com recently profiled the release of PortableApps Suite 1.0, a polished, light weight application that adds new functionality to USB keys, mp3 players, and external media by transforming these storage platforms into portable, private, personalized vehicles for launching programs and storing data.

Welcome to the fourth and final part of my Things to check before switching to Vista series. Today we are going to take a look at DRM. DRM which stands for Digital Rights Management controls access and usage of media files. In case you are wondering, Vista is not the first to use DRM. Many portable media players and gaming systems use DRM as well to protect the media.

ShowMeDo is a relatively new website that is about videos by the people, for the people as they put it. Not the normal type of videos that you find on sites like youtube but videos that teach the viewer. The site currently has seven categories where movies are located, those are Python, Java, Ruby, Linux, Blender, Screencasting and Other. The biggest category is the Other category which will most likely be the most interesting category for everyone who is not into programming, linux and 3d.

Welcome to the third part in my Things to check before switching to Vista series. The last two articles dealt with possible hardware and software incompatibilities and ways to check whether your hard- and software would run in Windows Vista. It is imminent to check this before you make the switch. Just imagine that you make the switch and a program that you run on a daily basis will not install or run properly.

Fox, the big media company, is apparently forcing a website owner to shutdown his website for linking to tv shows at sites like youtube and dailymotion claiming that linking to those shows would be illegal. This question never made it to court before it seems – here we have it again. A big company with money enough to pay a dozen lawyers is suing a website owner who probably can’t afford to even higher one lawyer.

That did not take long. Gamersreports published an article that explains how to replace the existing Playstation 3 hard drive which is either 20 Gb or 60 Gb with a bigger one. All you need is a bigger 2,5mm SATA drive which replaces the orginal hard drive. You can even use faster hard drives that run with 7200 rpm instead of 5400 rpm.

I don’t have much time at hand before I go to sleep and decided to post a quick link-o-rama which is in my opinion better than no post at all. The reason for not updating with a second article today was the game 1701 A.D. from Sunflowers. It is a great waste of time so to speak. Let us start with some gaming news; PS3 is out, Wii is out – the next-gen is now officially this gen. Both systems have sold quite well and it seems almost impossible to buy one at the present time.

Websites sometimes split movies into smaller parts to make it easier for users with low bandwidth access to the internet to download the movies without facing problems like timeouts. Once downloaded it is rather tiresome to view such a movie because you have to click on each part which naturally means a short pause between the last and the next movie.

Well what do we have here ? FBI director Robert Mueller wants that service providers record their customers online activities with the same lame excuses that men like him come always up with: Protecting minors and terrorism. Let me get something straight here. Terrorists are not uneducated, they know how to build explosives, they know how to work with computers. They especially now about encryption.

Don’t you hate it when you visit a website, see an interesting movie stream and can’t find a way to dowload it to view it again later ? Most websites hide their streaming content urls using javascript or other scripting languages and it is almost impossible to detect the url of the stream manually. Thankfully mouser coded the tool url snooper which does this work for us.

I’m going to show you how to create a secure usb data safe that can be used to store sensitive data. Secure means it is encrypted and will only be encrypted if you need the data that is saved on the stick. This method is also working with other removable media such as zip drives and hard disks.

I’m ready to celebrate the first anniversary of my website in less than four weeks with you. Without you this site would ne nothing, what good is a blog that no one reads, that no one comments on ? I would like to tell you more about yourself, as stupid as it sounds – I took a long glance at my sites stats and will present some interesting figures, believe me.

Quadmaster posted a nice guide to streaming video in lan on the techenclave website. All you need is the great media player VLC (video lan client), in a recent poll 36% of all voters on ghacks voted for vlc as the best media player. You need to assign local IP addresses if you have not done so allready, for sake of simplicity I assume the main pc that streams the content has a IP of 192.168.0.1 and the first client pc that recieves the stream has the IP 192.168.0.2.

Meebo is a web instant messenger that currently supports AIM & ICQ, Yahoo Messenger, Jabber & GTalk and MSN. Instead of installing the instant messenger itself you simply login using the Meebo website which offers the same functionality as the standalone messenger.

Free public domain language courses developed by the United States Government ? To good to be true ? The Foreign Service Institute created a website offering eleven different language courses for free. Languages included are: Cantonese, Chinese, French, German, Greek, Spanish, Portuguese, Serbo-Croatian and Turkish.

TVU Player is a free media player that uses P2P technology to stream tv channels like ABC, ESPN, Disney and HBO. Everyone using TVU Player will recieve and send data from the streams in order to be able to stream the tv channels to an almost unlimited amount of users. I recently wrote about tvu player, first in a Worldcup Preperations article that explained how one could view the worldcup using tvu player, and then in first version of the tvu player faq.

The message “Disk Mode Ok to Disconnect” appeared suddenly on my Ipod Nano without me knowingly turning this mode on. I tried to use the buttons or the wheel to turn it off but nothing seemed to work. I was getting desperate and decided to google for a solution. Many people are using the Ipod and it was highly unlikely that I was the only one experiencing this strange disk mode.

Do you know about the differences between Blue-Ray and HD-DVD ? I mean, the real differences, not the technical mumbo jumbo that has no meaning in real life. With the releases of Training Day, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and Rumor has it on Blue-Ray and HD-DVd the guys at High Def Digest were able to compare the two formats directly. All three reviews analyze the video and audio quality, the depth of supplemental content, the overall ease of use and menu navigation.

Rapidshare hacks, downloaders for rapidshare, no timelimit, unlimited downloads, free premium accounts. Those are some of the keywords that users are looking for. I thought it would be nice to write a definite guide about rapidshare. Which rapidshare hacks, tools and tricks are working, which are not. Rapidshare imposes a download and timelimit on non premium users of their service. Downloading from Rapidshare is only possible with one connection at a time and rapidshare limits the size of the files that you download to 30 megabytes every hour.

This topic might not look interesting at first glance but I promise it will be worth reading it. More than 900 readers subscribed to the feeds of ghacks.net using feedburner alone while many more are using different services to read my feeds. But what are feeds ? They are a short abstract of every article that gets posted here. This means whenever I write an article it will automatically appear in those peoples feed reader software. Many browsers for instance are able to read feeds or can be upgraded to read them.

I find this rather interesting and thought I give you some insights. Google Checkout is a new google service similar to Ebays Paypal that you can use to send other people money over the net without a bank transaction between the two parties. Checkout went live a few days ago and Ebay was quick and reacted agressivly by not allowing their buyers and sellers to use Google Checkout as a method to close the transaction.