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Copy data from and to a Microsoft Zune

I do not own a Zune and will probably never own one but I know a few people who do own one, this article is for them. You can enable a hard drive mode in the Zune which is similar to the hard drive mode of the iPods. All you need to do is change some registry keys in windows which enables this.

watch tv movies

List of free movie sites

The guy who is running One Tip a day posted a monster list of free tv sites and softwares that make it possible and easy to watch even commercial tv series and live events. Most sites and programs work for users from any country, only a few - like ABC - check the origin of a user and block access if he does not come from the allowed countries.

pocket divx encoder

Encode divx movies for certain devices

If you are looking for an easy way to convert divx movies for special devices such as mobile players, pdas or mobiles you should take a look at the excellent freeware application Pocket Divx Encoder. Pocket Divx Encoder can be unzipped and run from that location without installation. You may select a device from the list if you want to encode the files for that device, it is possible to change the device later.

public fox

Lock Firefox Settings on public computers

Everyone is able to download all the files that he wants and change the preferences of your Firefox browser if he gets access to it. It could be family members that tend to use your profile and add bookmarks to it and change the layout or a public computer in an internet cafe that needs to be protected from users who like to add bookmarks with explicit content or change the startup page to a explicit image or website.

Host your own webserver

It is relatively easy to use your home computer running Windows to become a webserver that is accessible from anywhere. The following method is highly flexible and makes it possible to host websites, documents and files on that server and protect the contents with passwords if so desired. All you need is a software called XAMP which installs the Apache server environment on your computer.

sysinternals suite

Sysinternals Suite

If you ever wanted to download all the troubleshooting applications from sysinternals at once you can do so by downloading the Sysinternals suite right from Microsoft. The suite contains all troubleshooting applications that made sysinternal famous, 67 utilities in total which make it easy to troubleshoot Windows problems. This suite is not for you if you already have most of the utilities installed.

firefox profile

Protect your Firefox Profile

A Firefox profile stores all personal information such as bookmarks and passwords in it. Everyone who is starting up Firefox with that profile is able to use your saved passwords and cookies as well which is a security risk if you ask me. One way to overcome this would be to protect the Firefox profile folder by moving it to a location that is not accessible to anyone except you.

itunes sharing preferences

Share the iTunes Library on a network

I don't like the iTunes software that much - it is slow and big and the only reason for me to use it is that it is the offical software that comes with the iPod. I recently ran into a problem which was fixed pretty fast by a quick tip that I found at one tip a day. I assume that iTunes is already installed at least on your main computer and you want to access the same library of songs that are stored on the main computer.

thunderbird attachment extractor

Attachment Extractor for Thunderbird

I had a situation recently where I had to extract about forty emails with attachments in Thunderbird. Doing this manually wastes so much time and I was looking for a way to extract all the attachments automatically. Thankfully genbeta posted a reference to the Thunderbird Attachment Extractor extension which does exactly what I was looking for.

Game for the Weekend Toblo

Fast Paced Multiplayer CTF action, that's what Toblo is about. Two teams, the read and the blue team try to capture the flags of the other team and reach the own home base with it. The only weapon that exists in the game are the cubes that compose every structure in the game. Every player may pick up those cubes and either throw them at the enemy or destroy structures for better access to the enemy base. The flags themselves are located on top of structures at the beginning which have to be destroyed as well to reach them.

Hey!Watch encode videos online

Hey!Watch is a great new web 2.0 service that makes it easy to convert video files online. Hey!Watch offers advanced features that no online encoding service offers at the moment. You may upload your own videos and encode them into a great selection of formats or use a bookmarklet or firefox plugin to convert videos found on websites such as youtube and dailymotion.

screengrab

Screengrab Add-on for Firefox 2.x

I have been using the Screengrab extension in Firefox 1.5 all the time. What it does is to save a website as an image. Everything is saved in the process which means that the image can become really big. I love it because I think it is so much easier and better to save a website as an image instead of saving the htm files with all the other elements using Save Page As.

etsy

Etsy the Ebay for handmade goods

Etsy is a website where people can buy and sell (only) homemade goods. Everything is neatly categorized and accessible through various innovative methods such as colors where you choose a color and the site displays everything that is offered in that color. Anyways there is also the traditional way of clicking through categories like Furniture, Children and Weddings.

How to create your own blog with domain Part 2

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.

archive email

Back Up Your Gmail emails

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.

apple movie trailers download

Save Quicktime Movies from Apple Trailers

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.

http file server

Share Files with HTTP File Server

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.

bitcomet

BitComet 0.80 has been released

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.

Make your apps portable

Lifehacker.com recently profiled the release of PortableApps Suite 1.0, a polished, light weight application that adds new functionality to USB keys, mp3 players, and external media by transforming these storage platforms into portable, private, personalized vehicles for launching programs and storing data.

Another site that offers TV streams for free

Wow those sites seem to popup like nothing else at the moment. Everton from connected internet was writing about streamick and I decided to add an article of my own to give you an alternative to all those other streaming sites out there. Streamick offers more than 300 tv channels to choose from including BBC One, ESPN Starsports, CNN & several other news channels.

test disk

Testdisk - A Free Data Recovery CD

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.

Windows Error Codes Explained

What do you do if windows pops up saying the operating was aborted because of Error Code 32 ? Not really helpful is it ? Looking it up would be one solution but this is not the best one. A register with all error codes would be helpful and Gregory Brauns Error Messages for Windows is just that. Once installed you can either type in an error code or view the complete list of codes.

Top Xp Freeware that every user needs part 3

What ? Part 3 ? You said that there would be only two parts in the top xp series. I know that I said that but I wanted to write a third part because of the nice comments that the other two parts recieved. (access part 1 and part 2) This time I will write about the lesser known tools, special purpose ones that most users do not need but some can't live without. I thought it would be nice to give those tools some exposure as well, they are great and they deserve it.

Block windows update from automatic updating to IE7

It seems that Microsoft added the upgrade to Internet Explorer 7 to the automatic upgrade feature of Windows XP. Automatic Updates will notify the user that a new version is ready for download giving the user the option to Install, Don't Install and Ask Me Later. It seems a pressing matter to Microsoft to get a large basis of Internet Explorer 7 users in a hurry to regain lost grounds in the waging browser war against Opera and Firefox.

Burn Audio CDs using exotic audio formats

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..)

run system tools windows

Faster Access to XP system tools

What do you do if you want to access one of the administrative programs in Windows XP ? You click through various menus most of the time to reach the destination. If you wanted to reach the Device Manager you would have to click on Start, Control Panel, System, Hardware Tab and then the Device Manager.

A catalog for your movies

I have a large collection of movies both off-line and on my computer and it is sometimes hard to keep the overview of everything that is in my possession. It happened more than once that I bought a movie that I already own which is rather dumb because there are ways to prevent this from happening.

Firefox 2 News Archive and Update History

The Mozilla team finally uploaded version 2.0 final of Firefox to the ftp servers with the web servers surely to following not later than tomorrow. If you want to be one of the first to download the new final version I suggest you do so with the links for: Windows or Mac / Linux.

import emails gmail

How to import mail into your gmail account

You might want to import already received mails into your gmail account, one reason could be that you want to make the complete switch to gmail and never use the old email client again. There is unfortunately no import function to do that in gmail, at least none that I was able to find in my gmail account.

southpark warcraft

Make Love, not Warcraft

Soutpark goes World of Warcraft - many people think this is the best Soutpark episode ever. You watch our southpark heroes play characters on the alliance side of world of warcraft which confirms again that only kids are playing alliance in wow, hehe. It's the complete episode so rejoice and take your time to watch it, a must see for everyone who is playing world of warcraft.

true crypt traveller disk setup

Create a secure USB Data Safe

I'm going to show you how to create a secure usb data safe that can be used to store sensitive data. Secure means it is encrypted and will only be encrypted if you need the data that is saved on the stick. This method is also working with other removable media such as zip drives and hard disks.

windows thumbnail previews

Change the Windows Thumbnail Preview Size

Well this is just a little registry hack that changes the size of the thumbnails of images that are displayed in windows explorer by default. The default size is relativly small and most people surely would like a bigger size for the thumbnails to get a better preview of the images. To do that you have to add a new entry called ThumbnailSize to the following registry key:

Google Image Wallpaper Application

I found a pretty small and useful open source application that pulls images from google images in a given interval and displays them as the wallpaper on the pc the application is running. Once unrared you can run the application right from that location without installation; you will see a small icon in your system tray if the application is running. Right-click the icon and select options.

logmein hamachi

Hamachi Virtual Private Network

Hamachi is a small freeware application that creates virtual private networks (vpn) on the fly without configuration at all - well almost. You can download the application from the hamachi homepage, once downloaded install and run the software. Versions for Windows, Linux (installation guide) and Macintosh OS X exist, means everyone should be happy although the linux and mac versions are console only while the windows one comes with a gui. Before I go into configuration details I want to describe the main advantage of Hamachi, it gives you LAN over the Internet.

virustotal

Free Online Security Scan Websites

Many sites offer to scan your computer for viruses online which should be seen as a last resort because this method has advantages but also disadvantages. If you scan your system online you can be sure that the latest virus definitions are used while scanning your system and that the script that is running was not compromised by a virus or trojan running on your system.

error zilla

Error Zilla Firefox Extension

The requested web page was not found. Errors. I hate them. Never know if the server is down because it was taken offline, because it is experiencing traffic spikes or the admin is tampering with the system. My normal solution would be to hit F5 a few times and see if the website loads fine. If it does not I tend to forget about it or save it in the bookmarks if it is worth trying again in a few hours.

The perfect multimedia device

Do you like watching movies on your computer monitor or do you prefer to watch them on your television ? I think most people who answer this question prefer to watch the movies on tv which has many advantages: Bigger Screen, you can watch with more people without feeling crowded around a pc monitor and it has that certain tv feeling that watching on a pc monitor has not.

folders report

Folders Report

Your hard drive is filled to the brim but you don't know why ? You want to free up some disk space on a drive because you are going to need it for some other files that you want to save there ? Windows is not offering many help when it comes to determining which folders are holding the largest files on your hard drives.

convert pdf

Convert to PDF online

PDF Online is a nice and easy way to convert documents to pdf. All you have to do is select a supported document type from your hard drive, name the output filename and select an email address where the newly created pdf file will be send to. The script does not only support document files but also image files. The maximum file size of your document can't exceed two megabytes.

Fear Combat for free

Fear Combat is the multiplayer part of the game Fear which is an egoshooter game with horror elements. Fear which stands for First Encounter Assault Recon was developed my Monolith who created great games like No one lives forever and Condemned. The game recieved numerous awards including Best First Person Shooter from IGN, Best Action Game from PC Gamer and Top 10 PC Game of the Year from Pc Informer.