You need to use the tools of the trade to check if your website is revealing emails from visitors or yourself. Most webmasters have a contact form somewhere on the page which is sometimes revealing the real email address of the webmaster. But even tricks like adding spaces to the email address, a REMOVEME part, writing (at) instead of @ and other means are recognizable by some email harvesters that do nothing else but to harvest websites and the websites that they link to for new email addresses.
Windows XP with Service Pack 2 and Windows Vista have both a TCP/IP connection limit that limits the half-open connections of the system. If that limit is reached a new entry in the Event Viewer is created stating "EventID 4226: TCP/IP has reached the security limit imposed on the number of concurrent TCP connect attempts.".
Oxygen Office Professional was formerly known as Open Office Premium, so basically a modified version of Open Office with lots of extras that remind me of the extras that ship with Microsoft Office. The extras include more than 3400 images including clip arts and photos, more than 90 fonts, templates and sample documents, VBA support, better PDF support and lots more.
I was looking for a way to keep track of my expenses and earnings and found the software Buddi to be sufficient for my needs. I'm using it mainly to analyze my online activities, the earnings of my websites and the expenses that I have monthly. Buddi has a nice way of displaying statistics that give a quick overview which should be sufficient for most users.
Windows Live Photo Gallery made a big leap forward with the release of the newest beta version 2.2. The greatest enhancement over previous Live Photo Gallery versions is the ability to publish pictures directly on Flickr with a stamp of approval from Flickr. Another aspect will please many users. Before this beta users had to install Windows Desktop Search to work with it which is no longer needed for Windows XP users.
Instantbird plans to be for Instant Messengers what Firefox is for web browsers. The first version with the number 0.1 does show a lot of promise but naturally lacks the stability of a software that has been developed for years. It uses the Mozilla rendering engine to render IMs and the Pidgin libpurple to connect to the various networks.
There is a lot of coverage going on at the moment on various sites that all report that the new Radiohead album In Rainbows which is exclusively available on a official In Rainbows website is spreading like any other major music album on Bittorrent. The main difficulties that the reporting sites have is that listeners may pay the price they like to purchase the album on the In Rainbows website which can be anything from $0 to hundreds of Dollars for the album plus a small service charge.
I described a way to compress the Windows registry manually yesterday. The process itself was not really complicated but it involved booting into DOS to complete the changes to the registry that have been made by the process. Tehmul (more of that please) commented in that article pointing to a software named NTREGOPT (NT Registry Optimizer) which would optimize the full registry and perform the replacement during the next system boot automatically.
RightLoad adds the ability to upload selected files to a ftp directly which removes the step to start the ftp client, choose the ftp server, browse the local hard drives and the possible location on the ftp server. All this can be set in RightLoad which should be a really useful software for most webmasters who regularly upload files to their ftps.
I always keep my notebook in sight when I travel around or sit in a public place like a library or Internet cafe. Not only because of the fear that someone could grab and steal it but also because someone could install software, invade my privacy or use the notebook for malicious activities.
If you have bought a TFT monitor you might want to consider using a software like Dead Pixel Tester to see if it has any dead pixels. This could for instance be useful to see if it is possible to get the current monitor replaced by a new one because of to many dead pixels.
Zoogmo offers a way to securely backup personal data and store that data on so called partner computers. Partner computers can be anything from USB devices, network computers or even the computer of your friend that you can access over the Internet. The advantage of this approach is that you backup will be stored in an encrypted form on an external computer so that it remains accessible in the case of a computer crash.
The title of this article might be a little confusing at first glance. Why would someone want to scan files in a directory for certain strings and output them in a new file ? Few ideas come to my mind why this could be useful. Imagine that you were surfing a website with lots of images that you liked very much. You could download those images manually or use the software Win Text File Patch to scan all files in your browsers cache for a certain string and output them in a new file.
I'm a regular at several webmaster forums where I tend to read up on the latest trends and techniques. While forums are great for exchanging and gaining knowledge they have one disadvantage and that is that one needs to be online to be able to read what has been written there.
I'm sick and tired of a new kind of blog spam that is appearing on the Internet in general and on my site in particular. So called auto-blogs, that is blogs that are running an automated script adding content to their website without user interaction, are pinging the blogs that they rip off like crazy for a reason.
Microsoft Office 2007 uses a new standard to save documents. You might have noticed that the documents saved are no longer named document.doc but document.docx. While this is not per se a problem for users with Office 2007 it is a major one for everyone else.
If you share a computer with several other users you might have noticed that it is not possible to set a differing screen resolution, refresh rate and color depth for each user. Windows XP forces each user to use the same resolution, refresh rate and color depth which is a great annoyance.
Updatestar seems to be the most comprehensive software to scan your system for installed applications and check whether updates for those found are available. I did try several similar applications like Secunia Personal Software Inspector in the past but was somewhat disappointed by the small amount of softwares that could be detected.
Taking Windows Registry snapshots can be a way to analyze changes that have been made to the system during a set period of time. The time being of course the days, hours or minutes between the first and second snapshot.
Hotkeys can really speed up the daily working routine in Windows. Instead of using the start menu, shortcuts on the desktop or the Windows Explorer you simply press a few buttons which start the software automatically.
I recently discovered Qliner Hotkeys which is in my opinion close to perfect. The real advantage of Qliner Hotkeys is that it displays a graphical keyboard of all hotkeys currently in place. Users can drag and drop softwares around and browse their system for applications to add to spare keys.
Just a quick login into Gmail at work to see if I received any new mails. Oh, no. My Boss is coming. What now. Panic ! If you experienced a situation like that, be it at work, school or even at home you wished for a function to quickly hide any window that should not be open right now.
The open and save dialogs in Windows have the nasty habit of not remembering any of the changes that you made while using them. I prefer a wider window to be able to read all filenames, navigate more easily through the folder structure and have more details in sight all the time.
Windows Vista has that feature build in that lets you flip through all the open Windows by pressing Alt + Tab. This feature is called Windows Flip in Windows Vista and is available in all editions of Vista except Home Basic.
It is sometimes important to concentrate on a task at hand and blend out everything that is not related to it. This could be the case when reading an interesting article, editing a Microsoft Word document or playing a flash game. Everything around the needed area could be a distraction.
I never use the Send To menu in Windows. Never saw a reason why I should use it but I know that some love it to send files quickly to a defined folder or attach them to an email. As usual it is rather complicated to manipulate the Send To menu in Windows directly which is why users who would like to do so have to rely - as always - on third party developers.
The makers of CCleaner and Recuva have created a new software called Defraggler which is a defragmentation software for Microsoft Windows 2000 up to Windows Vista. Defraggler introduces some new features that most - if not all - other defragmentation softwares are missing.
If you prefer Open Office over Microsoft Office you might find the following plugin for Open Office useful. The so called Writers Tools for Open Office are a set of new functions that are added as a new menu in the software.
Winston was asking me if I would know a way to merge one or more pdf files so that the contents of all the files would appear in one pdf file at the end. A quick research revealed a software pdftk - pdf toolkit -which can be used to merge and split pdf files. Many shareware softwares exist that do the same thing but pdftk seems to be one of the few that can merge pdf files for free.
You might remember the technology demonstration a few weeks ago that introduced a new way of intelligently resizing images by automatically defining important and lesser important parts of the image. The results looked way better than the traditional approach which did not care about importance but reduced every aspect with the same ratio.
It sometimes might be a good idea to get a list of all installed Windows Updates on your system for administration or security purposes. WinUpdatesList is a sweet small software from one of my favorite developers NirSoft. The software lists all installed Windows Updates on your system detailing all updated files on your system.
So, you have been on holiday in that beautiful country making lots of photos but after a year you realize that you can't remember the names of most places and people that you took a picture of. Or, you have been at a family reunion or anniversary and after looking at the pictures taken you are not able to identify some of the people on the images.
Preezo is a fast powerpoint maker on the web. Like most of the web 2.0 apps it uses Ajax to power its site. To use the application you need to register and log in. The first thing I notice is there is no lag at all using the different features. It is very responsive. Even with Google Docs there is some lag while adding stuff. I would happily use this on my browser.
I never thought about processing the images that I used to take with my digital camera to make them look better because I thought those softwares would not be able to improve image quality by a lot. I nevertheless tested several softwares that are supposed to improve image quality and found one sticking out: Digital Camera Enhancer.
I have written about a way to manually repair file type associations in Windows by using two commands and the Windows command line. While this works in most cases and is certainly faster than using a software for the matter it has its limitations.
If you would like to take a look at up to date weather forecasts and weather reports for your location you might want to take a look at the software Weather Watcher. Weather Watcher displays all the relevant information that you would expect. You can choose to display the weather forecast for one of the more than 77000 cities that are stored in the database.
I have to regularly resize images to make them fit into my articles here at Ghacks which I used to create using a combination of a screenshot software and the image manipulation software GIMP. While this method worked flawlessly it simply took to long to start GIMP and resize the image.
What do you normally do if you want to share your screen with someone else who is not sitting in the same room ? You could use a software like Screen Stream to stream the contents of your monitor to the other person so that he would be able to see your actions on his monitor.
Media Defender, the company that is spreading fake releases to p2p networks such as edonkey or bittorrent in order to spread chaos amongst file sharers, has been hit by another devastating blow. First thousands of internal emails leaked on the Internet detailing information about fake releases, ways of spreading those releases and several other internal Media Defender internals.
One click downloads of Flickr Images have become a reality. Flickr Downloader is a software for Microsoft Windows including Windows Vista that lets you download Flickr Images with the click of the mouse button. Configuring Flickr Downloader is done in the matter of seconds.
I'm currently using several tools to clean my system, change settings to increase security and privacy, control startup items and tweak system settings to improve performance. Softwares like CCleaner, Xpy, Autoruns and several others do the job just fine with the only minor issue that I have to open them if I want to change specific settings. It would be far easier to use one software to do all of those tasks.
