I delete files most of the time by pressing down the shift key which will delete them immediately without moving them to the trashbin first. It happens from time to time that I deleted a file that I want to recover, sometimes it is because another file depents on the deleted one or it could be that I need to access the information again that was contained in the file. There is unfortunately no direct way to recover the files in windows which means that we have to rely on third party tools to recover lost files.
Not many free or open source video editing software suits exist and many people rely on commercial programs like Adobe Premiere to transfer videos from a camcorder for instance and edit / convert the video. Jahshaka is a open source video editing program that offers its users a huge functionality that can almost be compared to those commercial programs.
USB Virus Scan is a nice little command line utility that performs predefined operations if a usb drive is connected to your computer. It is able to distinguish between various drives which means that you can add custom operations for the drives that you own and a general option for drives that are not recognized. The tool uses the volume serial number of the drives to identify them and perform the operation.
I found the freeware wallpaper changer at one tip a day a great blog that posts a useful tip every day. The wallpaper changer changes the current wallpaper in an interval between 15 minutes and 24 hours. It already has six nice wallpapers to in an album and it is easy to add new ones to it. You do not have to configure the program at all, just add some more wallpapers, delete some and set the interval, that is all.
The older I grow the more I have to rely on notes to remember due tasks. It is not that bad at the moment but I do seem to forget tasks more often than a few years back. A software like Task Coach comes in handy to aid me and everyone else who needs to write down certain tasks to remember them. Task Coach can be used as simple reminder of tasks to come (birthdays, events) or for business projects adding budgets and start, due and completion dates.
Why would someone want to backup his DVD`s ? The Movie Industry apparently thinks that no one should be able to backup his own, bought, DVD movies because of the build in copy protection of almost all new movie DVD`s. We, who pay money for the DVD`s, want to have the right to make a backup of a DVD that cost $20 or more. Some users don't want to have scratches on their DVD`s, some want to use the DVD in their cars or Notebooks without fearing to lose or damage the original one.
Bitthief, as the name already implies, is a bittorrent client that leeches from the community without giving something back to it. It basically reminds me of those leecher mods for emule that have been popular a few years ago. Bitthief accomplishes this by reducing the upload speed to 0. The developer of Bitthief, the Distributed Computing Group at ETH Zurich puts it this way:
It does not make much sense to have the prettiest background image if it is cluttered with shortcuts and other icons, especially the way windows handles them. Shortcuts come with an arrow in the icons and the background text that is displayed beneath the icons is not transparent. We are going to change this with a few short fixes.
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.
We all knew and heard about the common method to upload fake torrents into the torrent system to punish downloaders of copyrighted media files. The Torrentfreak blog reports that some torrent admins were able to identify some of the IP ranges that spread fake torrents and probably also the company that is behind it. The easiest way to cope with the situation would be to block the IP ranges either in your firewall or in a utility such as Peer Guardian. Below are the information for Peer Guardian 2, simply use the IP ranges if you want to block the IPs in your firewall.
Most solutions that encrypt files require the installation of encryption software which has to be started again if you want to decrypt the encrypted files. A quick and easy way to encrypt text files would be to use the free Steganos Locknote program which encrypts text files using the 256 AES algorithm.
Windows reacts in a predefined way if you right-click a folder, file or blank space. It offers all kinds of actions such as Open, Delete, Add to archive and Send to which is a convenient way but I sometimes have the feeling that some commands are missing in that dialog. The freeware FileMenu Tools makes it easy to add new entries to the file menu by offering a set of predefined actions that can be enabled with a mouse click.
Would not it be nice to have lyrics for every song on your iPod to be able to sing along or look up some lines which were hard to understand. Canto Pod is a freeware application for Windows that makes it easy to add lyrics to most songs that you have on your iPod.
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.
More than twenty applications have been released at the N.A.N.Y. Challenge website of donation coders. New Applications for a New Year is a collection of more than 20 freeware applications that do all kinds of useful things. I decided to list every application that was released and write a short paragraph about them to give you the perfect overview of everything that is available.
Recently some news emerged on the internet that some gmail users lost some or even all of their mails that have been in that account. There is no obvious way to backup the mail that exists in your gmail account. You could probably forward the important mail to another account but this solution is not really that practicable.
Do you know that your anti-virus solution is working ? You could try to test your anti-virus program against the EICAR (European Expert Group for IT-Security) test file to see if it reacts the way it should. All you need to do is create the testfile and scan it with your virus scanner. If the scanner detects something it is working as intended, if it does not you should consider changing immediately to a more reliable one.
If you ever wanted to paint again the way you did when you were in Kindergarten then Art Rage is the right program for you. The free version is limited but sufficient for everyone who just wants to play around. I think it would especially be a very nice application for kids because they surely will enjoy the ease of use and ways of painting that art rage offers to them.
You have some friends or business partners that you want to share data with but have no website with enough space and don't want to use p2p as well ? One simple way to share files of any size is to use the HTTP File Server which emulates a basic file server on your home computer. The server can be run in public or private mode and it is normally a very good idea to run it in private mode.
Men has been looking to the stars from the beginning of the world and this tradition is still visible in our modern world, although for slightly changed reasons. After the download of Stellarium finishes (Windows, Mac and Linux version available) you may startup the application to take a first look at the stars. I took a look from Paris, not sure if this is the default for everyone though. The name of the stars that I was able to spot were shown in the 360° landscape.
The name of this software distribution is probably a little bit out of line but the purpose is not. The goal is to reduce software costs for students but the compilation is also attractive to everyone else. The website offers a version of this distribution for Windows computers and for Macs. You may download it using the preferred method bittorrent to ease the load on the servers and reduce bandwidth costs.
I think it is funny that I never experienced a hard drive failure in my whole life. Many friends that I have been talking to did experience corrupt or damaged hard drives and lost data because of this. Did I mention that I do backup my files regulary while they are not ? I could bet a large amount of money that one of my hard drives would fail as soon as I would decide to discontinue backing up my files.
It began with the ban of the Russian website allofmp3 by the internet provider Perspektiv. The Piratebay decided to ban users of the provider from accessing their website as a response of the ban against allofmp3. Guess what, Perspektiv announced today that they lifted the ban of the Russian website and the Piratebay in turn decided to lift their ban as well.
While downloading the latest version of the bittorrent client BitComet it came to my mind that I never wrote an article about this excellent client here at ghacks. I have written about Azureus and uTorrent which I have tried both but not about the client that I'm personally using because I think it is the best one of the bunch. I like BitComet because of several reasons: speed, usability and because it is using low resources.
A new version of the communications suite Skype has been released today. Just head over to the Skype homepage and download the version for your operating system. Skype 3.0 introduces some new features and bugfixes, please take a look at the release notes if you are curious about them. The interface has seen some slight changes and some new features like public chat have been introduced.
Whenever I want to save a flash file, like a game or animation that I have been playing / watching, I have to go to the cache folder of Firefox and search for a file with the right extension and size. This is a lot of work if you have either a large cache or want to extract many flash files at once.
I'm very happy about the fact that Firefox 2.0 has a build in (English) dictionary which helps me correct most of the mistakes I make while writing articles here at ghacks. The build in dictionary is great but lacks certain features and that is why I went on a hunt for a better dictionary. Look what I found in my net today: The Sage's English Dictionary and Thesaurus.
Did you ever want an shortcut bar for programs you tend to use allot?
There are a few different programs that do this, and rocketdock is one of them.
You might remember the other stories that circulated the internet before: get a free usb stick, get a free microsoft visual studio 2005. This time it is a free microsoft vista and microsoft office if you do the same as last time. Register at the power together website, listen to three webcasts and bam, you might get vista and office shipped right to your doorstep.
I do love my iPod Nano. I carry it around all the time and listen to music when I go to work or visit friends. Sometimes I have some nice new tunes on my iPod and would love to copy them to my friends computer. (or a secondary computer that I own, notebook for instance) My friend has to install iTunes or a similar software that is able to recognize the songs on the iPod and copy them from the device.
Ever encountered a problem on your computer that made it impossible to access a partition or complete hard drive ? Or something that erased your Master Boot Record which meant that you were not able to boot your operating system as usual ? Something like this could happen if you try to install a new operating system to dual boot both systems for example. If you do not know what caused this and do not know tools that can fix this your only option is to install the operating system again.
Donationcoder - do you know the website ? Mouser is a regular here at ghacks and I had the pleasure to test some of his excellent applications before. Flipbook Printer is another great idea especially for birthdays, the holiday season or other occurrences where kids are around. It makes it possible to create flipbooks from avi files and is easy to manage.
Many portable media players and software players support album cover art which is displayed when a song is played from within the player. Most players unfortunately do not have a feature that automatically searches for and downloads album cover art for the album s that you have stored on your computer. One of the tools that can help you if you like to have album cover art displayed is Album Cover Art Downloader.
Most burning tools that support the creation of audio CDs support only the most common formats by default. Those formats are normally mp3, wav or wma. Some suits support other formats as well but I never found a burning suit that supported all of the formats that I needed. One way to solve this issue would be to use plugins that would increase the supported formats, one plugin pack for Nero can be downloaded here. (Click on Nero Audio-Plug-Ins..)
Do you have a folder with many files and file types in it ? Sorting those files reminds me a lot of two famous stories I heard when I was a child, namely those of Cinderella and Sisyphus. If you ever tried sorting a folder with 10000+ files you know what I mean. I always thought that it would be great to have a freeware that would help me presort the files and let me do the fine tuning afterwards.
The uninstaller that ships with Windows is slow and lacks functionality. You have to enter your control panel, click on add or remove programs and a new window with most installed programs pops up. Information in that window are scarce - only the program name and the size of the installation is displayed. You do not see the directory the software is installed, the registry keys it is using or the name of the company that developed the software.
The freeware Auto Window Manager adds additional functionality to the way windows manages the windows it displays. You could for instance customize that whenever a program opens it opens in maximized, minimized or default state. This setting should work with most programs and windows, i tried it with firefox and thunderbird for example.
Windows Explorer is a basic file manager with severe limitations that make it rather painful to perform some operations using it - you know what I mean if you ever tried to compare two directories using it for example. DMEXBar steps in and adds lots of functionality to the windows explorer by appending a toolbar to it. Once installed a toolbar should be automatically added to every windows explorer window, moving the mouse over one of the buttons in the menu displays a short information about that button.
There are times when it is safer to remain anonymous on the internet - be it that you want to write something about your current company on the web, live in a country that does everything to prevent it's citizens from accessing unbiased information or simply for the reason that you do not wish that someone could track what you are doing on the internet. In an ideal world every user should have the right to read and publish on the internet without the fear of loosing his job or life. The world however is not ideal and tools like FoxTor exist to help those people out.
