Keyloggers can generally be classified as either software or hardware keyloggers. Software keyloggers are running as a background task on the system while hardware keyloggers are little devices that are most of the time connected between pc and keyboard recording every keystroke in their own memory.
Did you know that the iPod is supporting two additional audiobook features ? Audiobooks in the m4b format support the adjustment of the reading speed and pointers to the last reading position of the audiobook. Those features are not available if your audiobooks have the extension mp3.
Microsoft Office introduced several new file formats which can't be read by older versions of the various Office products. I'm not sure why Microsoft decided to change the file formats but it is really a hassle for me. I'm running Office 2007 on my system while my girlfriend is still running an older version of Microsoft Office.
It happened twice already that she worked on my computer and saved a Microsoft Word format in the new format (.docx) and was not able to read the file on her computer. She does not have Internet access there which means that it was really problematic to get the right format on her computer.
Handy Recovery is a file recovery software that is able to recover (accidentally) deleted files on your system. If you have read my blog in the past you probably know that deleting files does not really delete them immediately but only removes the reference to the file.
Handy Recovery is a file recovery software that is able to recover (accidentally) deleted files on your system. If you have read my blog in the past you probably know that deleting files does not really delete them immediately but only removes the reference to the file.
I personally think that is is very important to use anonymizers whenever possible for most of the tasks on the Internet. All of your movement and actions are tracked and can be easily traced back to you which is probably something that most users on the Internet are either unaware of or do not like at all if they know that this is the case.
One major problem are P2P networks where anonymity is not that easily achieved. If you do lack the technical background you will face severe difficulties on the road to anonymity. There is however a great solution if you want to be anonymous while downloading and sharing files on Bittorrent.
I found a great free software that is able to manage all of my media collections with ease. One of the greatest feature of Data Crow is that it is not only a software for managing DVDs, CDs or books but provides a way to manage all of them. To be precise it is able to manage Software, Movies, Music Albums, Audio CD's, Books and Images.
I was looking for a way to automatically scan specific file types immediately after finishing the download instead of scanning them when unpacking or executing them. This way I could sort out malicious files immediately without having to worry about some files that contain viruses or other sorts of malware sitting on my hard drives for a longer period of time.
Are you using the rating feature of iTunes and your iPod a lot ? I can only speak for myself but I never used that feature at all because it seems to be a lot of work to rate thousands of songs.
There is however a way to rate songs automatically using a free software called AutoRate (Macintosh) that rates track automatically according to how often they have been played and skipped. The ratings get synced with iTunes which means that you do not have to rate all of your songs by hand to achieve this goal.
I was looking very hard to find a replacement for my favorite audio player Winamp and found a ultra-lightweight alternative with an exceptional functionality called XMPlay. This audio player which has a size of only 300 Kilobytes does not have to be installed and can be run from any location.
It supports all major audio formats such as mp3 and ogg format, plays internet radio streams, supports playlists, compressed files, library functions, skins, plugins and a lot more. Did I mention that it is possible to save mp3 streams that are automatically named to your hard drive ?
I'm always going the extra mile when I take screenshots in Windows XP. I hit the Print button on the keyboard, open GIMP and paste the contents into a new image, cut the part of the image that I need, resize it and finally save it to be able to upload it to my ftp.
The worst part of this job is that it takes a lot of time to complete all the steps and I think I found a nice free screen capturing software with the name MWSnap which can optimize this process.
Four different ways of creating screenshots are supported by MWSnap: Fixed Rectangle, Any Rectangle, Window / Menu or Full Desktop. The Any Rectangle method is working best for my purposes.
I found a nice little Windows Vista utility to change the appearance of the Aero Glass theme even further by allowing color transformations. The normal Windows Vista style has a static color while the Vista Color Transform application may change colors over time.
The software offers a pre-defined sets of colors that have names such as Patriotic, My Eyes!! and Winter displaying small preview images of the colors that are cycled through. If you take Winter for example you see white and icy colors when you click on edit.
I'm always looking for new free softwares out there and although I already found an automatic wallpaper changer called Wallpaper Juggler I decided to give the wallpaper changer ScrollWall a try. It is always good to be able to choose from more than one program that has a similar functionality.
ScrollWall offers a very clean interface with only a few options to choose from. You can choose if you want to stretch, center or tile wallpapers that do not fit your resolution and select the frequency of the change.
I always thought that it would be nice to administrate uTorrent from work as well. Do things like adding new torrents, deleting old ones and the like would be really comfortable. The great thing is that this is actually possible if you use uTorrent. All you need is to enable to so called WebUi and download a small additional rar file that will be placed on your local computer. I would suggest that you download the latest official version of uTorrent but you could also use the beta versions that are posted in the forum.
Spyware Terminator is a free antispyware software which can be downloaded in several versions. The main version contains the Spyware Terminator program which scans your system for spyware plus the so called Web Security Guard which assigns threat levels to websites in the search results. Both applications can also be downloaded separately from each other and I decided to download the Spyware Terminator without the Web Security Guard.
I have written an article a few days ago about the problem that the Vista Aero theme was consuming a lot of power which reduced battery life on notebooks by a measurable amount. One of my suggestions back then was to disable the Aero theme completely which is not really practicable if you want to work with Aero whenever the notebook is connected to a power source.
Many people sell their old digital camera when they buy a new one. Those cameras are often sold on sites like eBay and it is a wise move to make sure that all photos in the internal memory and on external smartcards are not readable anymore. This might not be a big problem if you simply took some pictures of landscapes all the time but it soon becomes one if you took personal and private pictures with that camera.
I have been writing about a program called Eraser some days ago which I used to delete all file information that existed on the unused space of my hard drives. I verified the results with a recovery program and found out, that Eraser was indeed deleting all file information of files that had been previously deleted on my computer. The recovery software was not able to detect any files after using Eraser on the hard drive.
Gmer is primary a free rootkit scanner which offers additional functionality such as offering an Intrusion Prevention System and a Firewall. The interface looks very user friendly but the settings, options and the results require at last basic knowledge of rootkits and other means of harming the system to apply and interpretate them in the correct way. Gmer does notify the user if it spots something suspicious and displays those results in red in the main window. The two screenshots below show two typical scan results after performing a scan of your computer with Gmer.
Files do not last forever. Corruption can be caused by hard drive failures or unreadable compact disks for instance. The files might be partially readable but this does not help much if it is corrupted. There are some ways of preparing yourself against data loss. One obvious way is of course to make regular backups of your important files. But it could of course happen that backups get corrupted as well which most of the time happens in the worst moments possible.
I'm usually not using iTunes at all because I think the software slow and overloaded like the Windows Media Player. If I want to play music I use Winamp and to transfer songs to and from my iPod I use Floola. I still have iTunes installed but as I said it is only used very seldom. To be honest, I did not even knew that there were visualizations for iTunes available. You can think of them like the ones on Winamp for instance. I found this amazing visualization for iTunes and decided to write an article about it. I think it would be best to walk you through the installation and activation although it is nothing complicated. Download and install Magnetosphere and start iTunes afterwards.
Flash cookies are a new way of tracing your movement and storing a lot more information about you than with normal cookies. One major disadvantage of flash cookies is that you can't locate them in your browser. They are not shown in the list of cookies that you can see when you take a look at the cookies that are currently saved in your web browser. Normal HTTP cookies can't save more than 4 Kilobyte of data while Flash cookies can save up to 100 Kilobyte. If you want to try out how they work you could do the following.
We all know that it is important to securely delete all files on a hard drive before giving it to someone else. This holds especially true if you plan on selling the hard drive on Internet sites such as eBay. I know that some users buy used hard drives on eBay purely for the thrill of trying to find data that was deleted on that drive. This could get you in a world of trouble if you think of the private information that you save on your computer.
How are you normally transferring new videos to your Apple iPod Video player ? You create or download them, transcode them into a format that your iPod video understands, add them to iTunes and sync iTunes with your iPod Video again. What if there was a way to automate every single step of this procedure after creating or downloading new videos ? Yeah, I thought that you would like that. To automatically add new videos to your iPod Video you need the free iPod software Ipodifier. Just download iPodifier which has a size of about 8 megabytes and install it on your system.
CopyRightLeft is a Open-Source application that has two processing modes. The first is an image by image mode that manipulates one image at a time. You can use the tool to open […]
NiN - Nine Inch Nails - added a new announcement on their website stating: "As a reward for stealing Year Zero, We've prepared the next batch of multitrack audio files for you to download". Beneath the announcement are links to three of their songs, Capital G, My Violent Heart and Me, I'm not in Garageband / Logic Format for the Macintosh and a generic format for other applications. The interesting aspect of the generic format is that the links are actually torrent files that point to the Piratebay.
I was always a math freak in school and preferred math over most other classes such as English or Geography. I was especially proud of my mental arithmetic skills at that time and I can say that I'm still proud of them after playing around with Math Ninja for a while. The author of Math Ninja wrote it for his 8-year old son and his math skill improved in a couple of days of using the math software. The objective of the math game is to answer as many questions correctly as possible. You can define in the setup which mathematical operators should be included (Addition, Subtraction, Divisions, Multiplications and Negative Numbers) and select a difficulty level.
Running a Bittorrent client from a web server is a good way for sites like Jamendo to seed the torrents that they offer on their sites. This is also an excellent opportunity for authors of Open-Source and Freeware applications to cut their bandwidth costs by sharing the bandwidth with the users who are downloading the software. If you run a bittorent client from a web server you are plattform independent which means that you can access the client from every computer with Internet access - even from work or school to add new torrents to the queue, check the current downloads or administrate the client.
If you want to make sure that no one is able to eavesdrop on your mail traffic you should use encryption. The problem with most encryption services is that setting them up and talking others into setting them up as well is a problematic task. Encryption only works if both the sender and the recipient use the same service to encrypt the emails. One of the easiest ways to setup a service that encrypts your emails is the encryption software Ciphire. Ciphire is a program that is available for Windows, Linux and Mac and can be downloaded for free from the developers homepage.
I prefer to use a mouse and a "real" keyboard over working with the touchpad and the keyboard of my Toshiba notebook. I do like slim keyboards but I'm not that used to keyboards from notebooks and have troubles typing as fast as with the keyboard on my desktop pc. I obviously have to use the keyboard and an external mouse when I'm travelling around with my Toshiba notebook but I thought that it would be nice if I could use the keyboard and mouse from my desktop pc for my notebook as well when I'm at home.
Creating "session files" can help you speed up your work and also give you a tiny little bit of rest by preventing you from doing repetitive tasks every day again and again. For example, when you work on some kind of project (webdesign, audio, video, graphics), maybe you often start some sort of programs at once, together, like say |:Paintbrush - Photoshop - ColorPickerTool - ImageViewer:| or maybe |:Audacity - MusicPlayer - FrequencyAnalyzer:| and so on.
I found a nice USB software called My Pen Drive which can be freely downloaded from the developers homepage. It is basically offering two great features: One is the ability to autostart applications from the USB drive when it gets connected to the computer, the other a automatic backup function which backups (pre-)selected folders that are saved on the USB drive when it connects to the computer.
Sandboxie does what virtual machines such as VMware Player, Virtual Box and Microsoft Virtual Pc do with the difference that it works on the application level and not the operating system one. Instead of running a virtual operating system that makes it safe to try and test software it lets you run software in a sandbox on your current operating system with the same result. The normal process in an operating system is that applications can read and write date from the system.
I use many phrases over and over again. When I write someone an email, a business letter or reply to a private message in a forum. If you are tired of writing "Thank you for your email", "Yours sincerely" or a signature over and over again you might want to take a look at the free software Phrase Express. You can use Phrase Express to paste commonly used phrases into any text field using defined phrases. The program adds some of its own at the beginning but the real beauty is the flexibility of it. It is possible to create a folder and text structure that works best for you. You could for instance create folders for business, private and forums and add as much phrases as you want to those folders.
It is no secret that companies like Logistep are monitoring p2p networks to sue file sharers who are offering software from clients like Zuxxez, a German company who recently sued 500 British p2p users claiming that they illegally distributed the game Dream Pinball 3D. The website Torrentfreak got their hands on a copy of one of those letters that have been send out which details the process of how Logistep determines which users are illegally distributing the game.
I love tiny free softwares that have been developed by passionate authors. Winroll is one of those applications that is useful and so small in size that it is astonishing how the functionality has been squeezed into the software. The binary has a size of 9 kilobytes. and does the following. Whenever you right-click a title bar of any window it "rolls up" so to speak and only the title bar is visible. Take a look at the screenshots below to get a better impression of how it looks like.
I read an rather obvious article over at the TorrentFreak blog that was entitled "Piracy Investigators Infiltrate Private Torrent Sites" which confirmed that piracy investigators have been getting access to private torrent sites by either joining them when they were still open for registration or being invited from a man in the inside. It was always pretty obvious to me that private could not really mean private if the site owners did not know each of the users personally. This system was bound to fail right from the beginning and the article on TorrentFreak only confirms this.
The VideoLan team has upped a first test version of VLC Media Player 0.86b which happens to be my favorite media player. The new version fixes some crashes, adds VP31 decoding to Windows platforms and Direct3D Video Output modifications for Vista compatibility. You can download this version right from the VideoLan ftp site; Simply select the version for your operating system (Win,Mac,Linux) and install it. I had no problems using the new version. If you experience crashes you might want to try this new version out.
Let me ask you a question: What do you do with old CDs and DVDs that have data on them ? Do you simply throw them away, recycle them ? What do you use to destroy the data on the disks ? If you never thought about this matter before and have a stash of used disks lying around you might want to take a look at the compact disk eraser. The disk eraser is a handy compact tool that wipes out CDs and DVDs environmentally friendly keeping the disks intact. You slide the disk once or more through the disk eraser creating a wide strip that can't be polished out.
Many novice users use the software that comes preinstalled with their purchased computer and rely on these to be safe from the dangers that lurk on every corner in the Internet. Trojans, Malware, Spyware, Phishing and worse are threats that every user should know about and be able to deal with. It is pretty easy to detail my security concept, it is not the most secure on earth but even those are not secure at all. If you want security do not connect to the Internet at all, that is my advise.
It happened to me more than once that I was not able to unpack a zipped archive and recover the files within because the zip file was broken. Reasons for this can be numerous: Read errors, scratches on CDs or a system crash. Object Fix Zip is a zip tool that tries to repair corrupt and partially damaged zip files. It is possible to extract files from zip archives that have CRC errors or have only been partially downloaded. The free software creates a new zip archive while trying to recover the contents of the damaged zip archive.
