Do not Disconnect was implemented on Apple Ipods to prevent data loss by warning the user not to disconnect the iPod while it is still in use on the computer. This message should be taken serious most of the time. If you transfer files to the iPod for instance. Removing the iPod while transferring files could lead to data loss and file corruption.
Code Red Alien Arena reminds me a lot of the first Unreal Tournament and Quake 3 Arena games that came out. I think I was addicted to Unreal Tournament in 1999 playing in a high skilled CTF clan for more than a year. It was tremendous fun and we were all pretty disappointed when the successor brought shiny graphics and shitty gameplay to the community. Alien Arena has nice enough graphics for a freeware game but the most important aspect is of course the gameplay. What can I say, it is fun.
I guess one of the following situations has happened to everyone who is viewing Divx movies on his computer. If you have experienced a frozen image with the sound still playing normally or pixels that distort the image then Divx Repair is the program that you could use to fix the errors automatically.
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.
Welcome to the second part of the how to create your own blog with domain series. I would like to add some information about what I have said in the first part of this article. Hosting is essential of course but you should not be to afraid to make errors. I switched hosts three times before I found the one that offered me everything that I was looking for. The others decided to disable my website at a certain point because it was causing to much load and traffic on their network.
Readyboost is a new disk caching technique in Windows Vista which uses flash memory from flash devices to boost system performance. Caching system ressources for small, random I/Os in flash ram is faster than caching them on one of your hard drives which speeds up certain disk reads by the factor 8-10.
The bios can be protected with a password to prevent others from accessing its settings. You have to enter the password to be able to access it, if you can't provide the correct one the access gets denied. The following method describes a way to recover the password if you forgot it or bought a used computer with a bios password.
Creating your own blog is no big deal anymore. All you need is some time at hand to think about a topic that you want to write about. I found out that it best works with topics that you are passionate about. You could of course write about other topics but it is in my opinion much harder to output regular articles in a niche that you do not like or know that much. I'm also only writing about text blogs, not about the two other possibilities video blogs and podcasts.
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.
Jamendo is a music service that tries a different distribution model for music albums. Instead of paying money to download and listen to music you download the music for free and pay or donate money later directly to the artist who created the music. You may either donate money using paypal or visit the artists website to purchase music directly to support them even further and receive CDs that are send to your location.
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.
It seems that everyday a new tower defense kind of game appears on the internet and gets linked pretty quickly. I found areference to the game Curator Defense in the donation coders blog and can absolutely recommend it. You have to download the 50+ megabytes freeware game but the download is well worth it. Pieces of art invade the museum and you have to stop them to prevent them from replacing the master pieces in your museum.
I do not like Quicktime that much. I hate to use additional clients next to VLC to be able to view certain movies on websites. I also do not like the fact that you can't save movies easily if you do not use Quicktime Pro. I discovered a method that makes it possible to save movies from the Apple Trailer website to your local drive and watch them in your favorite movie player afterwards. I use VLC for this purpose but Quicktime Alternative for instance should be fine as well.
Most users that work with Windows XP in a home environment use the administrators account which is probably the easiest but also least secure way of working with Windows XP. A solution that most users dislike would be to create a limited second account and only switch to the administrators account if the privileges of that account are needed. Many users don't like this idea because it means switching accounts every now and then to be able to use the system.
Sexy Girl, Dancing to music that you like ? What can be better ? The Visualize Her plugin for winamp adds the visualization of a pretty exotic barely clothed dancer to the list of your winamp visualizations. Once installed and activated you see her dancing to the music that is currently playing. The moves are of course limited because, hej, this is not the real thing, hehe.
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.
Vista can't be bought by the public but some developers are already starting to create special tools for Windows Vista that give you the same functionality that you enjoyed while using Windows XP. The freeware that I'm going to review today is called Tweak VI and is the successor of the well know Tweak XP program. You need to supply a email during installation and will be asked if you want to install EasyBCD as well.
This game for the weekend will keep you busy for a long time. Ahriman's Prophecy is a 2D roleplaying game that reminds me a lot of the old Zelda 2D games. The looks of the game are nice and the developers did their best to create a believable world. You start as a young lady named Talia in the small village of Elden who is supposed to become a herbalist but finds out a little bit later that actually magic is her destination.
Keyloggers are a serious threat for everyone who is using the internet for sensitive applications such as online banking or shopping. The biggest thread in my opinion comes from trojans and viruses that log all keystrokes once activated. Other possibilities include local installations of keyloggers and successful hacking attempts.
I was getting some emails lately asking about the plugins that I have installed here at ghacks. I know that many webmasters read my blog and I thought it would be nice to write about the plugins. I also thought to write a little series of articles about setting up a blog with your own domain, please let me know if that sounds interesting enough. I have been using Wordpress since the beginning and find it really easy to administrate.
Did you ever buy a new computer from manufacturers like Dell, HP or Sony ? If you did you know that those computers come loaded with a bunch of preinstalled software products that are normally not very useful and use valuable disk space. One option would be to uninstall one product after the other until you have every last one of them removed from your new computer.
I bought a Nintendo Wii when it came out. As you might know you do not use gamepads to play the games but the so called Wiimote which looks very much like a tv remote control and uses bluetooth to communicate with the core system. Carl Kenner developed the software Glove Pie which can be used to control games and applications with gestures, speech and other input devices.
RivaTuner is a freeware tweak utility for NVIDIA and ATI based video cards. I have been using RivaTuner for a while to reduce the fan speed of my video card to decrease the noise level. I configured it to decrease the fan speed to 25% in 2D mode which includes all applications such as word processing and internet surfing. This is the lowest setting that is possible and it did reduce the fan speed so that the video card is almost silent.
It was only a matter of time until someone implemented a translator add-on for Mozilla Firefox. The add-on currently supports the following languages: English, French, German, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, Simplified Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Arabic. You may not translate between all languages though, for example you may only translate from Simplified Chinese to English but not to other languages.
I always thought that it should be theoretically possible to record any sound that you are hearing on your computer. Sometimes solutions for selected programs exist but I was looking for a free program that could record any sound no matter the source it was coming from. This can be for example quite useful if you want to record conversations in Skype or Teamspeak or record a sound that you heard on a website on the internet. Yes, even streaming radio poses no problem but you should note that the following free tool is not capable of recognizing the beginning and end of songs. It just records for as long as you want.
As you might know I have a modded xbox that has a replaced bigger hard drive and I use it to watch movies from my Xbox Media Center. I dislike watching downloaded movies on my computer and transfer them to the Xbox via ftp to watch them on tv instead. I was looking for a solution to add some of my DVDs to the Xbox as well which has the main advantage that I have them accessible all the time from there. No matter if I lend them to someone for instance.
It seems that currently a blog tagging game is making its rounds and finally reached me thanks to my friend Everton Blair who tagged my blog. Everyone who gets his blog tagged has to write about 5 things that his readers did not know about yet and tag 5 additional blogs afterwards to keep the ball rolling. Here we go, 5 things that you did not know about ghacks:
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.
If you do now Pandora you feel right at home when entering the FineTune website. Guests may use only part of the streaming radio services offered at the website but it is good enough for a rough overview of what FineTune has to offer. Just enter an artists name in the search field and FineTune will search for the artist that you have entered and related artists and start with the playback of songs that the search found.
Ding Ding Ding, welcome the the next round in this amazing fight. In the right corner we have the underdog, a Russian mp3 website that offers what customers apparently want: MP3 files without DRM, variable bitrate at low costs. Did I mention that this is a perfectly legal company under Russian law ? In the opposite corner the RIAA, a institution living in the past, trying to hold of progress by sueing its customers and denying them what they really want.
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.
The objective in the highly additive freeware game Base Invaders is simple: Defend your central tower. Hordes of aliens, among them the feared drillers, ninjas and bombers try to overcome the obstacles that the player creates to lay siege to the central tower. Every structure in the game can be planted by the player, reminds me a bit of the famous Dungeon Keeper games by Bullfrog.
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.
About a month ago my mother called and asked if I could help her with a problem on her computer that I build and installed for her. The computer reacted slowly to her input and was opening unknown websites for no reason. It was immediately clear that some sort of spyware or even worse virus or trojan was responsible for this behavior. She was really desperate and I began to scan the system immediately.
I decided to start a Internet Censorship 101 series of articles that takes a look at and explains the various methods of censorship on the internet and possible solutions to this situation for the user who tries to access information that are blocked / censored. I'm going to start with a relatively weak form of censorship called DNS Filtering.
If you are looking for a comprehensive, and I mean really really comprehensive, guide on bypassing internet censorship you might want to take a look at the excellent guide written by Freerk. The guide is divided into two parts; The first analyzes different methods to censor information on the internet and the second part describes different ways to bypass censorship.
I'm currently using the Video Downloader add-on for firefox to download videos from websites such as youtube or google video. It is working perfectly on those websites but has limitations when it comes to different type of websites that use MMS or RealMedia links for their movies for example.
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Ghacks is a technology news blog that was founded in 2005 by Martin Brinkmann. It has since then become one of the most popular tech news sites on the Internet with five authors and regular contributions from freelance writers.