The problem arises, however, when we’ve got more than one space online where we’re present. And that’s true for a huge, and rapidly-growing, percentage of people. How do we keep interested people, whether it’s one person or ten million, in the know about all the different places we’re active?

The best solution is also the most expensive and time-consuming: creating, maintaining, and updating a personal website.  There’s something to be said for that, but what about all the people without the money, time, or interest in creating a whole website?

If you’re in that realm, try Card.ly, a service that aggregates and shares your entire online presence. It’s a personal website for those who don’t want a personal website.

The first step is to sign up: You’ll choose a password, and an email address. At the same time, you’ll pick a username: this will be the name used to find your page at the url http://card.ly/yourusername. Choose carefully, because that name becomes your brand (using the same name as your Twitter or Facebook page is a good idea).

Once you’ve signed up, you begin by adding social network accounts to Card.ly. Currently, the site supports, among a huge number of others: Blogger, Delicious, Digg, Disqus, Facebook, Flickr, Friendfeed, Google, Last.fm, Linkedin, MySpace, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Twitter, Vimeo, WordPress and YouTube. And those are just the better-known ones – there are even more supported services.

To add a network, all you have to do is enter the username. There’s no need for passwords, so no security issues – since you can’t add information through Card.ly anyway, there’s no need for a password anyway.

Next, you’ll add some personal details about yourself – a bio of sorts. Add your name, birthday, gender, location, and pick an avatar (you can pick and choose among these – don’t share what you don’t want to). Add your IM accounts, RSS feeds, and whatever other information you want. Below it, there’s a space for a longer-form bio, as well as a space to put contact info – this is where to put an email, or a phone number you want people to be able to reach you at.

The design of the Card.ly site is your choice, too – well, out of 27 templates. They’re nice-looking, though, and most people should be able to find something useful from them. The design’s the last step, and then you’ve got a page that might look something like this:

Once you’ve got your Card.ly account set up how you want it, start sharing! Card.ly lets you send a message on Twitter about it, as well as tons of embed codes for various sites; or you can just share the URL of your profile anywhere on the Web.

If you want even more features (like registering your own domain, removing ads, or tracking all the statistics on your site) you’ll want to get a Premium account – either $2.99 a month or $24.99 a year. The free version, though, will be more than enough for most people.

If you’re looking to build a brand online, there’s no better way to do it than to have a personal website. If you don’t want to pour your time, money and energy into it, though, Card.ly makes simple work out of it.

How do you manage your presence online, especially across multiple places?

Photo: NathanaelB

Whilst disk space is no longer seen as a problem, considering 1GB only costs about $0.20! However, I find it an issue on my MacBook where I only have 120GB of space and it can’t easily be expanded.

Finding hogs could be quite a task. Naturally, trawling through every directory is impractical, so automated tools must be used to find large directories and files. Software exists on most major operating systems to graphically show which folders are large and how large they are.

In 2005, gHacks reported about WinDirStat. This is freeware that shows how big directories are. WinDirStat displays everything in the C:\ (etc) drive, colour coded for the first level directory (eg Program Files or Windows), and on tiers below that it is divided as blocks. This is a easy to use visualisation. WinDirStat runs on all Windows operating systems from 95 (w/IE5) to Vista!

An OS X alternative to WinDirStat is Disk Inventory X. It is essentially identical to WinDirStat. GrandPerspective is another essentially identical option.

Linux users can choose between KDirStat or Baobab.

Another option is JDiskReport is a Java-based piece of software which analyses disk usage using pie charts. Presumably this will work on Windows, OS X and Linux.

The user has to create an account with the service to be able to log into the software. Once logged in it is possible to add documents, the software is able to work with the formats txt, doc, rtf and html – and compare these documents against local and Internet resources.

Local resources can be selected by adding folders to the plagiarism checker. The contents of the folders will be analyzed. It is possible to submit the contents to an online database by clicking on the Publish button. This is however not a requirement. The benefit of publishing the data is that documents scanned by other users will be compared to those documents. The process is rather unclear as there are no information about the data that will be submitted in that process.

Searching the Internet for similarities to documents that have been added in the first step is the last option of the plagiarism checker Viper. It is again unclear how and where the search is performed. Results will be shown in the end. Documents that have been discovered in the process will be shown with ratings to make it easier for the user to identify how similar they are to the original documents. Reports can be saved in the end to archive the results.

The number one reason to use Viper is probably to check local documents against other local documents as this is the only transparent process of the plagiarism scanner. Internet search could probably also be conducted by simply entering a few sentences of a document into a search engine (don’t forget the “”).

File And Folder Unlocker is basically a similar application. It does however work in a different way.The software can be started manually by double-clicking its program file. It does integrate itself into the right-click menu as well but behaves differently than Unlocker does. The portable software will list all running processes on the computer system and a search box that can be used to search for specific processes, files or folders. The search box will be automatically filled with information if the software has been integrated into the right-click menu. An alternative to listing open objects is to double-click any process to list all of its open objects in the second box in the interface.

All objects will be listed including their location on the computer system, their owner and handle / offset. File And Folder Unlocker is definitely not as handy as using Unlocker when it comes to specific files or folders that are locked by the computer system. It does however provide extensive information that Unlocker does not provide.

This can be useful to analyze the current situation in depth. Might for example be useful if a file, process or folder is locked every time the system is shutdown. This program can help the user find out why it is locked while Unlocker would only be able to unlock it so that the computer system could be shutdown. The list of open objects can be exported for further analysis.

It can also deal with all of the following situations:

• Access denied.
• The file is in use by another program or user.
• The source or destination file may be in use.
• Cannot delete file: It is being used by another person or program.
• Cannot delete Folder: It is being used by another person or program.
• The process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process.
• There has been a sharing violation.
• Close any programs that might be using the file and try again.
• Make sure the disk is not full or write-protected and that the file is not currently in use.

File And Folder Unlocker is a 36 Kilobyte freeware that is compatible with Windows 2000 and Windows XP.

The program comes with a process modules viewer which will display the various modules a process is accessing on a computer system. The modules are rated with the same rating system and can give additional information about the process in question. Additional options include the ability to explore the system directory of a process and to perform a action on selected processes.

Actions can be to ignore (the default value), close or delete a process on the computer system. Closing will simply kill the process on the system while deleting will try and delete the file on the hard drive so that the file cannot be executed anymore.

Microsoft processes can be removed from the display to get a better overview of the non-system processes that are running on the system. The main problem of Assassin SE is the lack of ratings for several known applications. It was not able to identify True Crypt, Foxit Reader or Newsbin Pro which are common applications. It did however identify Firefox, uTorrent and Skype.

The software program can be helpful when checking the processes that are running on a computer system. It still requires some manual research after being left with unknown and potentially dangerous processes but it helps at reducing the amount of processes that have to be checked.

PagePlus is a ‘budget’ desktop publishing suite published by Serif. The latest version (PagePlus X3) costs £80 but an older version, PagePlus SE, is offered free-of-charge.

PagePlus SE contains many different paper sizes and when installing, it asks the user whether they are American or European (for paper sizes). PagePlus SE can be therefore be used to design everything from an envelope to a letter!

Most of PagePlus SE’s features are also in Publisher but I feel that PagePlus SE is easier to use when designing something more than a greeting card etc. For example, instead of having to go through all sort of context menus to be able to specify an object’s position, PagePlus SE bears a bar which allows the user to numerically enter information like the position, size and angle of objects. This is much easier than having to right click an item or guess-timate its position.

I also feel PagePlus SE is better with kerning, with this also being in the changebar as opposed to being hidden in a menu!

Some options in PagePlus SE are also more technical: it allows the user to state the rendering they want on screen and on print, for example. The user can also opt for grid lines. There’s also a resource and text manager, where all images and text used inside the publication are listed to allow a quick summary.

Unfortunately, PagePlus SE cannot export into industry-standard formats like PDF and EPS.

Serif host a number of designs on their website which people can import int PagePlus to use.

It may not be Quark, but it’s free and easily up to the same standard as its nearest competitor: Publisher. Unfortunately, like Publisher but unlike Quark, it is Windows-only.

Whilst KompoZer has not been updated since 2007, the major mark-up languages haven’t changed since then so it should still work. KompoZer is based on Gecko, the rendering engine which Mozilla amongst others utilise, and is a fork of Nvu (another WYSIWYG editor which is now not developed), itself a fork of Mozilla Composer!

KompoZer has all the obvious features of a WYSIWYG web editor: HTML and CSS can be edited; FTP support; tables; and tabs to navigate between pages and views. Some nicer features include an integrated W3 validator and support for XFN.

Binaries are available for Win32, PPC Macs (which will run on Intel-based ones) and Linux. Source is also available so it can be compiled for other operating systems.

Like Nvu, the application can be used from a USB pen.

I personally use KompoZer if I quickly need to whip up a webpage and I don’t have the patience to code it in Textmate. It’s certainly usable, produces relatively clean code and it’s £500 cheaper than Dreamweaver!

In Northern England, we have been ‘fortunate’ enough to have had quite a bit of snow this week. Not everyone is as lucky though, and Snowflakes is an application which ensures those at lower latitudes won’t miss out. Snowflakes allows snow to fall either on the desktop or, should you really need reminding, in front of all windows. The speed and number of the snowflakes can be modified. It is a little distracting even behind all windows, as the snowflakes falling can be seen in the space just above the dock.

Mac users love widgets and fairy lights. Festive Lights is a widget which allows you to ‘decorate your dashboard’. Users have several options: festive lights can surround the dashboard, or only hang from the top; they are available in different colours; mistletoe can be added; and the pattern which the flashes follow can be selected.

Fairy lights are also available for the desktop. One way would be to drag the above widget to the desktop (a little hack required). Another option is Xmas Lights, a standalone application which allows lights to appear behind and in front of windows. Several lights are available and more can be added.

Christmas Countdown is another useful widget which does what it says on the tin, displaying the amount of days until Christmas in the form of a Christmas Tree.

AssaultCube

AssaultCube is a quite simple 3D FPS available for Linux, OS X and Windows, which just reached version 1.0 about a week ago. The graphics are not very advanced, but a benefit of this is that it’s easier to run a server and that it can run on nearly any machine.

The best aspect of AssaultCube is the online play; there’s always a few busy servers available where one can play capture the flag, deathmatches or variations on those modes. AssaultCube is limited to seven weapons: sniper rifle, assault rifle, handgun, grenades, knives, shotgun and submachine guns.

Maps can be created for AssaultCube quite easily.

Sauerbraten

Sauerbraten is an FPS built on the same engine on which AssaultCube is built but has much more sophisticated graphics and is built in a fantasy world as opposed to a real one.

In Sauerbraten, weapons include crossbows, guns and rocketlaunchers. This is definitely a more interesting variety than AssaultCube! Once again, CTF and deathmatch are popular game modes.

The game notably lacks a crouch mechanism and struggles to run at higher resolutions on my MacBook Pro. However, it is an amazing open-source game with many fantastic maps.

Once again, Sauerbraten is orientated towards online pay but the CPU games are much better than AssaultCube’s.

Interestingly, the game can also be played as a 3rd person shooter!

Nexuiz

Nexuiz is an FPS with quite fictional weapons, like electricity guns etc. The game clearly belongs in the realms of fantasy, being set on a space station where one must shoot aliens.

I find the game difficult to play. Movement is far too fast compared to Cube engine games and it really does require quick reflexives.

The game isn’t smooth either. Before a game starts, there’s a text-only screen telling me what is loading etc. and the menu at the start looks terrible, especially at my screen resolution.

It’s still a fantastic game to play, however.

AssaultCube

Sauerbraten

Nexuiz

Needless to say there’s scores of other good games, these are just my favourite free (as in beer and freedom) shooters.

Every user who is running the Faroo client contributes to the web search engine in two ways. So called words, some would say keywords, are stored on the user’s computer which are linked to websites. If another user of the system searches for those words they will be retrieved from the first user – or another user who is also hosting those words – and send to the user searching for them.

This means that every user has to contribute disk space to the Faroo project so that the words and information can be hosted. The disk space that is provided can be set in the options from 1 Gigabyte to unlimited storage space.

The second contribution of every user is the web surfing. If he visits a new website it will be added to the crawler to keep the index up to date.

Faroo is receiving additional information compared to convention search engines such as Google. Among that data is information like the time a user spend on a website and the users behavior on that site which are factors for the ranking calculations.

Faroo does not keep search logs and protects the privacy of its users. Search queries are encrypted which provides an interesting option for users in countries that like to censor search results.

Every search engine is only as good as its results. Can Faroo deliver the same search quality that Google or Yahoo are offering? Searching for names like ghacks, cnn or microsoft did return the correct results on the first pages.

The quality of two or three word queries on the other hand was not optimal yet and more often than not lead to mediocre results. This can be mainly attributed to the number of users who are currently actively using the search engine.

At the time of writing only 106 users were connected to the system which is obviously to low to crawl the entire World Wide Web and provide results for any search term one might enter in the search form.

If Faroo manages to attract enough users that fuel the engine it could become a contender in the search engine market.

I used to move each file manually from the subdirectory into the main directory until I could not take it anymore and decided to search for a solution that would automatically move all files in all subdirectories of a selected folder into that folder. I did find Dir Utils, a software that can do that and much more.

Dir Utils adds six entries to the right-click menu, among them is the option called Unify which moves all files from all subdirectories (and their subdirectories..) into the main folder.

Here are the five other options that are available:

• Extensionize: Categorises files in a folder by their extensions. It is possible to move all video files into one subfolder, all audio files and so on. That’s the only option that comes with its own .ini file that can be configured to add file types to groups.
• Alphabetize: Moves files in a directory automatically into subdirectories beginning with the first char of their name. Chars beginning with a-z will be moved to the subdirectories a-z accordingly, all numbers will be moved to the subdirectory 0, all file s beginning with any other char will be moved to the ! subdirectory. Great for directories with many files in them.
• Arrange: Automatically creates subdirectories for multi-volume archives. I’m using Extract Now for that purpose.
• Unzip: Will find all zip files and unzip them into a directory with the same name. I’m using Extract Now for that purpose.
• New Dir: Reduces the number of clicks needed to create a new subdirectory from 3 to 2.

Update: The developer website is no longer available. You can download the latest release version from our servers by clicking on the following link: Dir Utils (46)

The user can choose to force the following subsystems into separate processes to increase the stability of your Microsoft Windows operating system: Desktop, Explorer (Folders) and Internet Explorer.

All three or only some can be selected during installation and a restart is required before the changes take effect. The big question is however if the program delivers what it promises. I fired up Process Explorer from Sysinternals and checked if there would be more than one process when I opened Windows Explorer.

A new process was indeed added which means that the software is indeed dividing important subsystems into different processes which means that the chance is higher to recover the system if one subsystem fails.

Many open folders or Internet Explorer windows can increase memory usage slightly which is the downside of using this tool. The software can be downloaded and run from any location that you unpack it to.

Rest assured that I mention new applications separately in single articles to introduce them first. They will then be added to my observed applications and will be mentioned in future Software Updates posts.

This week has been rather busy with updates for twelve softwares including several beta and release candidate updates. If you feel something is missing here let me know please.

• CamStudio 2.5 Beta 1 – Screen Recorder
• DVD Flick 1.2.2.1 – DVD Authoring tool
• Filezilla 3.01 RC1 – Ftp Client
• Free Music Zilla 1.0.3 – Music Downloader for Myspace, Imeem and other music portals
• KMPlayer 2.9.3.1373 Beta – Multimedia Player
• Libra 0.9.2 Beta – Organize your Media Collections
• Notepad++ 4.3 RC – Notepad Replacement
• QuickTime Alternative Lite 1.90 – Replaces Quicktime on your Computer
• SpeedFan 4.33 – Monitor Temperatures and control fans.
• Startup Delayer 2.3 build 127 – Delay Startups
• Xpy 0.9.11 – Security and Privacy for XP
• TeraCopy 1.25 Beta 2 – Replaces the copy function in Windows
• Ultra VNC 1.0.4 RC3 – Remote Control Software
• µTorrent 1.7.5 Build 4602 – Lightweight Bittorrent Client

Please let me know if I missed something, will add it later on then.

Punishment is a jump and run game with a twist. All the levels are stacked on top of each other and your task is always to reach the plattform in the current level that gets you in the next area. The difficulty is of course that if you miss a plattform you fall and if you are unlucky you could fall all the way down to level 1.

Not a nice feeling if you ask me. To make things worse several objects in the game change key game elements. The eye for instance rotates the complete level clockwise while the animals swap left and right movement. This is a big challenge but real fun as well.

The game can be played from any location even from usb devices because it does not have to be installed at all.

Punishment 2 is the sequel of the game created by the same author. It adds several new game elements which add even more excitement. A main switch has to be switched whenever you enter a level to open the exit. It remains open until you happen to fall down again.

This in turn means that you have to climb back down again to switch it again to be able to process into the next level. A two player mode has been integrated as well making it a tad easier at the beginning because both players do play simultaneously which means that one player could operate the switch while the second tries to reach the exit.

If the exit is reached both players will be teleported into the next level. If one player falls both players fall. This is a nice twist in gameplay that really makes this game worthwhile.

The tiny software Custom Folder integrates itself seamlessly into the windows Explorer adding advanced folder creation options to the right-click menu of it. You can choose a combination from any of the following:

• Static text:
  Place static text anywhere in the mask to define your default folder name
• Date:
  Chose from a two or four digit year mask; two digit month mask and two digit day mask
• Time:
  Chose from a two digit hour, minute and/or second field and add an optional three digit millisecond field
• Increment:
  By adding a simple switch, Custom Folder will automatically add a three digit incremented identifier to a default mask, making it ideal for backups or version control.
• Trim:
  Helping you to keep your filing tidy, the “trim” switch instructs Custom Folder to trim any blank spaces from either end of the default folder name, ensuring that subsequent searches or batch operations are not bugged by unseen leading or trailing spaces.

source: Donation Coder

After this has been done a scan can be started by clicking on the scan button in the toolbar. The main window will be populated with the results displaying information about the keys, values, data and categories. The registry cleaner rates every entry with “safe to fix” or “Not fully safe to fix” and checks only the ones that are safe to fix.

Checked entries can be removed by clicking on Fix. Before you do that you can check or uncheck every entry that has been found. Alternatively it is possible to undo fixes to revert back to the original state. The scanner found 1360 problems of which 1212 were rated as safe to fix and only 148 as not fully safe to fix.

I decided to remove only the safe to fix entries and was not able to spot any problems after restarting my computer and working with it for some hours.

found at: my digital life

Sandboxie steps between the application and the system and allows only reads from the system itself but no writes. Writes are only allowed in the sandbox. This is great if you want to run applications without having to worry about system safety at all. It is still a good idea to be careful as usually when working with Sandboxie. If something bad slips through it is intercepted by Sandboxie.

It is a good idea to run applications that are used to attack computers with malware, spyware and viruses inside the sandbox to avoid that they reach your operating system. What can I say, it is a nice uncomplicated way to add an additional level of security to your system.

You may then use those phrases by either right-clicking the system tray icon and selecting the phrase from the menu or by assigning hotkeys to folders or single phrases. The second method is of course a lot faster than the first. Phrase Express offers several other features that make it a great software. It can automatically expand abbreviations in some programs and append a signature with a random quote as well. The spell checker is another feature which unfortunately does not work in Firefox or Thunderbird.

You may disable the Capslock key to avoid pressing it unknowingly as well. I think that Phrase Express is very helpful if you write a lot regularly. I reply to about 20 emails per day plus numerous private messages on various forums and I was always looking for a program that would let me paste phrases that I always used. Guess what, Phrase Express saves me a lot of time everyday.

The default commands open Word, let you search Google, Yahoo, Live Search and IMDB, use Sudo application to start the application with admin rights and search Wikipedia and Dictionary.com. Using the command “y spyware spam fighting” would open search results from the Yahoo search for that query in your default browser. Everything described until now have been so called Command Startlets. Start++ has another feature which is called Search Startlets. The commands play, playartist and playalbum followed by the name of an artist search your hard drives for that name and play the songs, videos or albums automatically. Play Who by Fire for instance would search for the Song Who by Fire from Leonard Cohen and play it if found on the system.

The biggest advantage of Start++ is of course that every user may add commands to Start++ that aid him in working with Windows Vista. You can add new commands and search startlets. New commands could open applications with a simple shortcut. Let me give an example of how that would work.

I will add a command to launch notepad from the search box. I click on New in the list of commands and type !note as the shortcut. Name can be anything that you like so Notepad would be good to be able to identify what the command is doing. The command itself is simply notepad.exe

Once Saved I can start Notepad by typing in !note in the search box of the start menu. You sometimes have to add the full path to an application but that is the only thing that might differ.

Adding Internet searches is a little bit more trickier. Lets add a command that searches eBay for the search string that we enter. We have to perform a search on eBay to see how eBay handles the parameters. Go to eBay.com and enter a search term, test for instance. Take a look at the url and search for test in there. We have to replace test with %+ in the command box from start++.

So, to add a eBay search we would create a new command, give it the shortcut e and the name eBay and add the following line to the command http://search.ebay.com/search/search.dll?satitle=%+&category0= Please note that I removed some of the options in the url to shorten the output on my blog. You can now search eBay for antivirus software using the command “e antivirus”. The same principle applies to many other sites such as Amazon, Digg and others.

I compiled a list for some popular web services on the next page, just copy the urls into the command box.

• Amazon
• Del.icio.us
• Digg
• Ebay
• Engadget
• Gizmodo
• Lifehacker
• Myspace
• Techcrunch
• Youtube

As you can see it is pretty easy to add your favorite site to start++.

Search Startlets use a slightly more complicated syntax. If you take a look at the play shortcut you notice the command kind:(music OR video) %* store:file ; Let me explain the variables here:

• kind: refers to the type of file that you want to play, in this case we have choose to include a OR statement which means that a search for music and video files is performed.
• %* means that all results are added to the playlist, %1 would mean that only the first and %n where n is a number would add that number to the playlist and play them.
• store:file – Well I can only guess here but i suppose that it defines that it should search for files only.

Start++ is a very nice application that added tremendous usability to Windows Vista. Can only recommend it to everyone who is running Vista.

I managed to find a free software that would do exactly what I needed. It is called Folder Size as well which could lead to some confusion. The biggest advantage is that it displays the size of the folders only if you run the application which can slow down the system as well but only at this time and not constantly. So, you double-click a drive or folder and Folder Size calculates the size of all folders and subfolders. You can then switch between folders to display the site of its subfolders as well.

The software is pretty easy to use. One nice feature is the so called filter list which can filter for special file types only. If you wanted for instance to only see the biggest folders that contain mp3 files or temp files you would simply use one of the many filters that are available there. You can edit the existing filters to add new file types to the filter or create new ones by editing the FolderSizeFilters textfile. Just add a new line at the end and add some filetypes to it.

Folder Size does not need to be installed, just run it from any location. The size of the application is only 300 K, works in Windows XP. Not sure about other operating systems. The developer does not mention the supported operating systems on the site.

Update: The Folder Size alternative is no longer available. The developer website returns a 404 not found error. The original Folder Size application on the other hand is still available for download at Sourceforge. It is recommended to use this program instead.