Most of you will agree with me when I say that education (especially in university) is expensive. After tuition and living costs, the next highest expense on the list will no doubt be textbooks. College textbooks prescribed by the university change on an almost yearly basis and most students have no choice but to cough [...]

The Internet can be an amazing resource for free ringtones. There are technical ways to obtain ringtones by using audio editing software programs or simpler by using ringtone search engines. One of easiest to use is Tonzr, a search engine for free ringtones that finds more than eight million different songs. The search works by [...]

I felt weird all day today so I spent an hour stumbling around the web, which yielded some quite cool results. One of them is Print What You Like, a truly awesome service designed to help you print only what you need, and to save the environment, nice combination! If you want to print a [...]

You know that I’m a happy Giganews customer. I have been using their Usenet service for the last years and they never let me down. Sure, they are not the cheapest Usenet provider when it comes to comparing the monthly subscription prices but they quality level surpasses anything else on the market. Giganews are running [...]

Google is introducing a lot of developments for Adsense, with font selection implemented not long ago, now comes a new, much anticipated feature, Adsense for parked domains. Many people own lots of domains which they keep around to sell at a higher price, or they simply haven’t gotten around to developing it, and as such, [...]

Sometimes, you may urgently need to share some information with a friend or family member. Or maybe you need to access a particular file from another computer. The easiest way to do this would be to use portable media like a flash drive. But what if that’s not an option? Then you have to find [...]

gHacks suggested Spotify as an alternative to Pandora last year, and Spotify has recently gained a lot of attention in the British press. I thought it may be wise to discuss Spotify on here. Spotify is a service which allows users to stream many songs online free and legally. The service is ad-supported and currently [...]

Here is a very ingenious method of download music from Myspace. It is actually one of the easiest methods to download the music. All that is needed is a web browser which makes the method universal independently from the operating system. Start by visiting the Myspace website and locate a page with a music player. [...]

Digital music has come a long way. From just one or two portals, the present scenario has an innumerable catalog of stores offering music completely legally and at a reasonable price. Digital music is not without its pitfalls though, most notably DRM. Still, most online stores now offer DRM-free music, which is great news. One [...]

Torrent websites come in two shapes on the Internet. Public sites like The Piratebay can be accessed by anyone while private torrent sites can only be accessed by those with user accounts. What makes this difficulty is that most private torrent sites are closed for registration most of the time and only open up registrations [...]

For many the idea of Linux accounting and financial software falls squarely in the lap of either Quicken or Microsoft Money. But did you know there was one particular open source alternative that offered nearly all of the features of both heavy hitters and was available for Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, OS X, and Windows? That [...]

Catching up with the BBC’s iPlayer and Channel Four’s 4oD, British broadcaster ITV has released its own free video-on-demand service: ITV Player. ITV Player uses Microsoft’s Silverlight format to stream its media, which allows it to be played on Windows and Macs. Users report problems with it working under the Linux build of Silverlight. The [...]

In today’s digital world, pretty much everything is possible online, including creating photo slideshows. And ImageLoop is an online service that helps you do just that. This free service makes slideshow creation a breeze and also provides lots of other services. With ImageLoop, creating a slideshow is very easy. You can either upload a bunch [...]

Microsoft Live Video Search provides a great way of searching for videos online. It is not only indexing various popular video portals like Youtube, MySpace Video or MSN but also crawling websites in the search for new videos. Read the following before you start complaining that it surely is like all the other video search [...]

ZumoDrive is a online storage service that follows an easy to grasp concept. Today’s users use a variety of devices including desktop computers, laptops, netbooks, mobile phones and pda. Some data is required to be on all devices, be it documents, media files like music or other files. Copying large amounts of data across multiple [...]

Cloudo is a web operating system that has been in private beta for a long time. A public beta started just recently which allows interested users to signup and use the web operating system. A web operating system is basically an online desktop that is providing many features that operating systems like Windows or Linux [...]

Some webmasters and tech savvy users seem to live in their RSS reader. They have it open 24/7 to be among the first when a subscribed websites publishes new content. This makes a service like Reminder Feed valuable which is sending out reminders to the user’s RSS reader. Reminder Feed is one of the few [...]

In July 2008, Giganews made big news for increasing their USENET retention to 240 days. Most other providers had a maximum of about 160 days, but several of these are now promising to surpass Giganews. Giganews is quite expensive, costing $25/month for a unlimited package. The retention and speed made up for this, but I [...]

Photo editors are a dime a dozen, both as software and browser-based apps. Programs like Photoshop and GIMP are far ahead of browser apps in terms of the functionalities they offer. However, once in a while, you come across something that’s worth checking out, even if you normally use feature-rich software. piZap is an online [...]

animoto is a site which allows video presentations to be made in a minimal amount of time, claiming to be the killer of slideshows (although in reality they are slideshows!). The end result is an extremely slick slideshow. The site makes creating a video presentation easily: to create one, all you must do is simply [...]

An app I’ve been using on and off for a while is Joe’s Goals, which is a goal tracking application designed to motivate you and help you visualize and accomplish your goals. You can create a list of goals like “Drink at least 0.5L of water instead of Coke”, “Write at least 2 posts a [...]

Like most people, I have a fairly large collection of music in a digital format. The only problem is that very often I get songs that are at different volume levels. This is irksome because then I have situations where one song is really loud and the next one is very soft. To solve this [...]

If you do any collaborative work you know how difficult some collaboration tools can be. With both MS Office and OpenOffice you can collaborate with notes and track changes. But what about collaborating in real time? What if you are wanting to quickly collaborate on a simple text document with multiple editors? Fortunately there is [...]

Why buy a calendar for $10 or more if you can get free calendars to print out online? A search for free calendars to print displays lots of websites that offer free printable calendars. Microsoft Office users can download dozens of calendar templates at Microsoft’s Office Online website. All calendars can be downloaded if the [...]

I’m not a huge fan of free web design stuff, mostly because its either hard to modify, or low quality, or if you can tailor it to your needs, you can probably do whatever you need yourself. I also prefer not to use others’ designs since it takes away my sense of identity, but in [...]

I have to confess I am rather into money management apps, although I never actually got into any of them, except for one of the best, Clearcheckbook. Let me state right from the beginning that this is not an automated service, so it won’t pull stuff from your bank account. The reason I found it [...]

I have been an active Paypaler for a while now, and I was surprised when Paypal sent me a letter asking me to verify that indeed I am not laundering money. Do I need to send photos of my apartment so it is apparent I do not have a printing press at home? Nope, I [...]

Having subscriptions to hundreds of RSS news feeds can sometimes mean news overkill. This is especially true for times when a big new application or service gets announced because these usually get picked up by more than 20% of all the tech sites out there. News Filtering – or keyword filtering – describes the process [...]

Many companies, schools or universities love to block popular websites. A large proportion of computer users however start digging around to find ways to overcome the block instead of concentrating on work. Many make use of web proxies to access blocked websites. Proxies however come and go rapidly and get blocked very fast as well. [...]

Helvetireader is a minimal Google Reader interface theme supplied as a userscript that turns Google Reader into an optimized feed reader that is displaying only the essentials. It was especially designed to view feeds in the expanded view using keyboard shortcuts. A userscript compatible browser is needed for the new interface theme to work. Long [...]

Ghacks author Daniel Pataki is pretty busy these days with all the new Internet websites and services that he is creating. His latest service is called Shrinkomatic. It is an url shortening service with one interesting unique feature. But first things first. To shorten an url one would simply head over to the Shrinkomatic website [...]

Online services that tell you things you already know seem to be becoming increasingly popular. Some analyze your browsing history to tell you if you are male or female while others analyze websites and tell you what kind of person you are. The author’s at Ghacks are Duty Fullfillers according to the analysis of Typealizer. [...]

The first thing to do when connecting a new computer monitor is to calibrate it properly to ensure that it displays the best possibly image. Most computer monitors come with a CD that can be used to calibrate the monitor. Most of the time those programs are not the best possible way to calibrate the [...]

Don’t have the time to read a long article on a web page? Then it might be worth to give the Great Summary service a try. The service extracts the most important sentences of a web page and provides them as a summary to the user. It is pretty obvious that a computerized summary won’t [...]

If you want new wallpapers for your Blackberry cell phone you could try and find sites that are offering them, you could try and create them yourself locally with an image editor or you could use the online service BBsnap which turns Flickr images into BlackBerry wallpapers. BBsnap can be used without registration which is [...]

Ever so often, the people in charge try to get tough with those who break the law. Sometimes, the ‘bad guys’ get away but more often than not, they get caught. And that’s exactly what happened to Torrentvalley.com yesterday. Torrentvalley is different from other BitTorrent services in that it’s not a file tracker like Pirate [...]

Here is a quick tip send in by Alex who is a regular reader and commenter here at Ghacks. If you want to watch CNN live and all other methods and applications do not seem to work right now you might want to try the following easy method providing that you have access to a [...]

Currently, if you want to purchase music legally, you can use a variety of online music stores from big companies like Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo, etc. The modus operandi of these sites is pretty much the same. You can either buy an individual song or pay for the entire album. Now imagine this scenario: what if [...]

RSS Feeds are probably the best way of receiving updates from favorite websites and services. They are however still more of a thing for the technical inclined Internet users and largely ignored by the average users. They do have a few other limitations like only being viewable in applications that support RSS News Feeds. One [...]

How many times have you turned on the TV and thought ‘Hey, I can create better shows than what’s on’? If you’re one of those people with a penchant for creating your own videos, you now have a place to show them off. You can use UStream. Ustream is a live interactive video broadcast platform [...]

I have been trying to use the default WordPress Flash uploader for the last days only to find out that it did not work at all anymore after updating Flash to version 10. Clicking on the Choose Files To Upload button did not have any effect anymore. The only solution was to use the basic [...]

No Virus Thanks is another web service that provides options to scan files with multiple anti-virus detection engines. It pretty much works like other web services of its kind like Virus Total by providing an upload form on the website which can be used by the user to upload a file to the service. The [...]

OpenOffice.org 2 GoogleDocs is an Open Office extension that is compatible with OpenOffice.org 2.0.4+ or StarOffice 8+. It provides import and export options for Google Docs, Zoho or WebDAV servers from withing Open Office which should be interesting for all users who use at least one of the services and Open Office regularly. Installation of [...]

We have covered the online service Rasterbator in the past that converted an image into a rasterized wall poster. Block Posters is a similar service with the difference that the images are not rasterized which makes the results even more impressive. A large wall poster is created in three steps. An image is uploaded to [...]

Joe Anderson who recently began writing articles for Ghacks send me a message two days ago asking what I thought about Twitterfeed and I had to admit that I never heard of that service before. He let me know that webmasters could use Twitterfeed to publish RSS News Feeds on Twitter. What it does is [...]

You find two Rapidshare Search sites on the Internet. The first is using a custom Google search engine effectively making use of what Google has already indexed which also means that many links will be outdated and not working because of the time difference between indexation and the user search. The second type of websites [...]

Pixolu is an academic reasearch project on semantic image search. It does increase the quality of the search results by asking the user to refine the first batch of results and using the selected pictures to discover images that are closely related to them. The process is made up of three steps. The user enters [...]

Esnips is a popular file sharing and storing service that offers its members 5 Gigabytes of online storage space that can be used to host videos, pictures and audio files. The audio hosting comes with a music player that recently got updated having the result that Esnips music downloaders were not working anymore. Esnips have [...]

Using an online desktop recorder like ScreenToaster eliminates the problem of having to install software on a computer system first before being able to record the computer screen. ScreenToaster is a free online service build with Java that can record the full desktop or just part of it by drawing a rectangular shape around the [...]

Joost was previously only accessible by using a video player that had to be downloaded. That seemed to fail to bring in the desired user numbers and Joost decided to drop the software client and create a web based Flash portal with all their contents. The transition phase which ended yesterday required users to install [...]