Have you ever wanted to improve your website by adding widgets that would provide some kind of interesting or important information about local weather, time, events, news or whatever else that might benefit your website without the need to write the code yourself or make a third-party script work on your own site?
I see a lot of file hosting recommendations lately for files that are larger than 1 Gigabyte and I was always wondering why the writers thought that this was the best way to share those files. Uploading large files to a file hoster has several advantages - but also disadvantages - which I would outline in the following paragraphs.
I regularly work with a lot of applications in Windows Vista at once which should not be a problem because I have enough RAM and a fast enough CPU to handle all of those applications with each. It happens that I experience a strange behavior which can be only be attributed to the number of applications and windows that are opened simultaneously.
One Click Installer is a Firefox extension and Wordpress plugin combination for Wordpress blog owners replacing the need to upload themes and plugins by ftp with a one click installation in Firefox. The extension will take any link pointing to a plugin or theme and upload it to the right folder of your Wordpress installation without the need to do that manually.
Thunderbird, the email client from the Mozilla team, was in the news just a few days ago with the announcement that a separate Thunderbird will receive an independent organizational setting allowing the Thunderbird community to determine its own destiny.
Would you be able to write down the serial number of your Windows operating system if I would ask you to do it ? Or of Microsoft Office ? This is normally not a problem because you have the serial number in written form and can look it up if it is needed. But what if you can't find it anymore because it somehow got lost during the last move ?
The Alien Breed series was a successful action game series on the Commodore Amiga back in the good old days and several guys decided that it would be great to rewrite Alien Breed '92 from scratch and make it available on PC's as well. The game has been released for some time and really catches the Amiga spirit.
It seems that the lovely Swedes from The Piratebay are branching more and more into different Internet services. After announcing their Youtube competitor they released an uncensored image hosting service called Bayimg.
Uncensored means that it is possible to upload all kinds of pictures as long as they are legal under Swedish law which is pretty much everything imaginable. The site is blazing fast, uses a slick ajaxified interface and tags to categorize images.
You should take a look at the Media Convert online script if you want to quickly convert an audio or video file into another format without installing a software like Super or Media Convert on your computer. The online script is able to convert files from urls or from your computer with a maximum size of 150 megabytes.
The input format is automatically detected if you chose to upload it from your computer while you have to select the format for the url links by yourself. Various output formats exist that can be selected. The list of available audio and video formats is long and all popular formats are supported.
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.
Don't you think it is annoying that Windows assigns drive letters automatically to certain drives such as the floppy disk drives A: and B: ? The A: drive letter is assigned even if no floppy disk drive is installed on the system. There is a way to reassign all drive keys in Windows by manipulating the registry.
A word of advise before I'm going to explain how this is done. Do not try to change the assignment of the drive letter C: which has to stay the way it is. If you change it Windows will not boot anymore. So, what you need to do is to open the Windows registry by hitting Windows + R, typing regedit and pressing Enter afterwards.
Did you know that it is possible to override the way a website is displayed by default in Firefox. This can be useful for instance if a webmaster decided to use CSS code to remove the underline of links, change the color for links that open in new windows or display additional information for certain file type downloads.
The first thing that you need to do is locate or create the file usercontent.css in your Mozilla Firefox profile directory. It can usually be located in %appdata%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\
Some programs ask you if you want to start every time when Windows starts while others do not ask but still add an entry to an autostart location. This is most of the time not that useful unless you do use the software a lot. I can only think of security products that would fall into that category. Makes no sense to always start the antivirus software after Windows has loaded.
We all know that we can prevent autostarts by using the msconfig utility which ships with every Microsoft operating system. The problem that arises here is that although the programs are not autostarted anymore they still exist in the list which looks rather messy because it is growing over time. It does not make much sense to keep them in the list if you disabled them from the list.
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.
I grew up playing boardgames like Risk, Monopoly and Trivial Pursuit and witnessed that board games evolved almost as much as computer games did. I would like to introduce one of my favorite online boardgames websites where you can play about 50 excellent boardgames online. Boardgames include Settlers of Catan, Carcassone and Thurn and Taxis. All boardgames of the year and of course playable in multiplayer.
I think it has become incredible hard to find bargains these days on eBay and I reduced the time I spend on eBay a lot over the last two years. Actually, I'm only visiting eBay when I know what I'm looking for and can't find it at a local retailer or online shop. The Lastminute Auction service might make me spend more time again on eBay though. It lists auctions that are running out in an hour or less and have a maximum price of $1. Various categories like computer, business and books make it easy to navigate the website and find what you are looking for. It is also nice to just look around and see if you can find something interesting.
OperaTor is a combination of Opera, the anonymization service Tor and Privoxy similar to Foxtor which offers the same functionality for Firefox. I don't want to bore you with a lengthy technical description of how Tor is providing anonymity, just that much: Tor uses a layered approach sending your request through a series of servers that only know the server before and after them. This means that the destination server does not know that you requested the package, it only knows the IP of the server before that made the request.
The best software to control every program that is loaded automatically when Windows starts is Autoruns by Sysinternals. While this is an excellent software it requires some knowledge to use it the way it was meant to be used. A similar free software that is way better suited for novice computer users is the program Startup Control Panel by Mike Lin. It looks like a crippled version of Autoruns and concentrates on the most used locations where programs are added to be started with Windows.
Most video editing programs are rather complex and it takes a while until one is able to work with the video editing software without the fear of doing something wrong or missing a crucial step in the editing process. This is a huge problem for amateurs who would like to cut a video that they created without having to learn a complex software. There is however a possibility for them. Jumpcut is a online video editing website that lets you upload videos from your computer and edit them online on their website.
I found the reference to Auto Ftp 2 at the Donation Coder blog. The free software can be used to copy or synchronize files between one local and multiple remote computers. You configure so called sessions in Auto Ftp 2 that have certain variables set such as local and remote path, the operations that should commence and the login details for the remote computer. Everything is looking pretty straight forward and I would like to explain only some of the options available.
Audiobooks become increasingly popular and there are many pay sites that offer downloads of Audiobooks after you paid for them. It is however possible to download free Audiobooks from various sites from the Internet. The main problem with finding those free sites is that many pay sites offer free samples of the Audiobooks as well but you have to pay when you want to listen to the complete book.
MD5 (Message-Digest algorithm 5) can be used as a way of checking that a computer file has not been maliciously or accidentally altered. To put it simple, it works like a fingerprint. So, nowadays most of websites includes this information to their software, which looks like this:
I still believe that Starcraft is the best real-time strategy game that was ever produced and hope that Blizzard will one day create a second part of at least a MMORPG out of it. Starcraft is part of my past, I used to meet with friends back then and play it in local lan games all night long. It was perfectly balanced and much better than Command and Conquer in my opinion. Someone - I suppose another fan - has created an unbelievable amount of Starcraft Origami and uploaded pictures of them to Flickr.
If you are an early adopter and don't want to wait a few more days to download and install the email client Thunderbird you could head out to the Mozilla ftp and download it for your operating system and language right away. The Mozilla team is usually upping the latest version of either Thunderbird or Firefox on their ftp mirrors to ensure that they can serve the server load when they publish the links on the official program pages. This is indeed a good way to download Thunderbird 2 fast because the servers will not be that populated at this time.
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.
A reader of my blog recommended a great music download site with the name ElectroBel, a free underground electronic music community site. The mp3 music that can be found on Electrobel can be listened to online or downloaded as mp3 files to your own computer. Every single song has been created by a member of the music community and released under Creative Commons.
Keeping up with application updates can be a very tedious task even if you have only a handful of them installed on your system. If the software has no update reminder you have to manually visit the developers homepage and see if an update is available. Most users simply do not look for updates actively and use old versions that might have security holes or miss important features that have been implemented in later versions. But there is hope..
Did you ever try to remotely access a computer of a user who is not tech-savvy ? How long did it take to configure the client system correctly ? One great solution for this kind of problems is the software Teamviewer which is free for non-commercial use. Teamviewer uses two software modules: The first is the one that is run by the person who wants to access a computer remotely while the second is run by the user who wants to permit remote access to his machine. The client module is absolutely easy to use. It just needs to be executed and displays a username and a password which the user who wants to access the clients machine has to enter in his Teamviewer software which is called the Supporter Module.
I came upon the article "How I would hack your weak passwords" yesterday and pondered if I should write an article about it. I decided that it would be worth it. The author of the article details how he would try and find out your passwords and get access to all of your accounts in the end. His first approach would be to use the most common used passwords by users on the net. He needs information about your personal life for some passwords but those information can be obtained pretty fast through social engineering. Trying those "top 10" passwords would already cover a large percentage of online users, statistically speaking that is.
Since I started blogging two years ago I came upon thousands of essential, ultimate and top freeware lists but only few really had a lasting impact on the internet community. Most are forgotten the next day and everyone heads on to the next list in line. It does not make sense to simply write another essential list, it does however make sense when I'm concentrating this list on freeware and Open source that I have reviewed here at ghacks. I reviewed more than 360 freeware and Open Source products which could be seen as a preselection.
It is not that easy to download all images from a page with many images in Firefox. It would be possible to use a download manager or wget to get all the images but this would mean that you would have to rely on external tools and know how to use them. A far easier method is to use the Firefox extension Batch Downloader. It does exactly what the name suggests, it downloads all images that have a resolution of 200x200 or more in one batch to your hard drive.
It is getting better and better. I was describing a method to extend the activation period of Windows Vista by 90 days to a total activation period of 120 days. But this is actually not the maximum that you can extend the activation period of Windows Vista. Ryan from Cybernet wrote a nice article today that explains how every Windows Vista user can extend the activation period by the factor three raising the total time until Windows Vista has to be activated to
I'm not using Internet Explorer 7 at all but I know some guys who like it so much that they might ditch Firefox for it. The new Internet Explorer 7 has basically the same functionality and expandability as Firefox. You can download add-ons for Internet Explorer 7 to add functions to it. The Windows Marketplace lists more than 550 add-ons for Internet Explorer 7. The major difference that I can see is that Microsoft offers free and commercial add-ons for Internet Explorer 7 while I do not know of a single Firefox add-on that is commercial. (correct me if I'm wrong)
Pando is a free online service that utilizes p2p technology to share large encrypted files by email and instant messenger. The sender selects files and folders that he wants to share. Those files are immediately uploaded to the Pando server where they are stored in encrypted form. The recipient receives an email that contains a small attachment which starts the download process when executed. Data will be send from the Pando server and other users who are currently online.
Media Convert is a new online service which makes it possible to convert a lot of file formats before downloading the file to your computer. All you have to do is add an url and select the input format. Select the format that you want to convert the file to and click on convert. The only restriction is that the file has a maximum size of 150 megabytes, everything above that amount will not be processed.
There are so many supported file formats that it is impossible to name them all. I try to list the most important ones. It supports the most important text formats, such as doc, txt, pdf, rtf and Open Office, many zip formats such as zip, rar and cab. It supports 17 movie formats such as avi, mpg, mov and mp4 and more than 40 audio formats.
I'm currently using the Screen grab extension in Firefox to save complete websites as pdf files to read them later or print them eventually. Screen grab has some limitations, mainly size of the website that should be saved and that it only works in Firefox. I sometimes use Opera or want to convert other documents such as emails to pdf.
DoPDF looks like the perfect replacement for Screen Grab. It is a freeware application for Windows and takes only a few megabytes of hard drive space. It adds a virtual printer to your installed printers in Windows and you can choose to make it the default one. Please make sure that the Print Spooler service is running during installation, otherwise the setup of the virtual printer will fail.
The tv companies in your country decided that it is not worth to show all the games on free tv ? I always have the feeling that my time gets punished the most by this decision because i rarely have the opportunity to watch live games on tv. One great way of seeing the football games with no additional costs at all is to rely on a tv streaming application that uses p2p data transfer methods to stream the content.
Most people don't ever think that it is possible that free and legal torrent websites exist, they automatically assume that torrents equal illegality. The list of then free and legal torrent sites proves this assumption wrong. NewTeeVee did a great job of compiling the list which is just a tiny fraction of the whole torrent scene. I still think that it is a good beginning to show others who do not know that much about bittorrent that there are indeed legal applications.
Yesterday I was writing about a method to get a working Windows Vista key by bruteforcing. The method would generate random keys and check them locally for validity. If the local check would be successful the user had to try and use the key to activate his version of Windows Vista. This could of course still be rejected if someone else did already use the key to activate his version.
I'm sick and tired. Sick and tired of the RIAA, the Recording Industry Association of America, their methods, their pressure against their customers, their inability to cope with a new situation, their stubbornness and their greed. Instead of listening to their customers and possible customers they cling to their old ways of distribution and show an unbelievable ineffectiveness to cope with new technologies and ways of spreading music.
