Firefox, and all other browsers as well, offers two methods to display pdf documents. The first displays the pdf file in firefox itself and uses the Adobe Reader plugin to do so. The second method would start the Adobe Reader itself and display the pdf file there. The first method might be convenient but has some disadvantages that I would like to address.
This extension is a great time safer. Whenever I wanted to upload an image to add into my article I had to fire up an external ftp client and use it to upload the image to my ftp space. This extension adds a full features ftp client to firefox, this means you can add an unlimited number of ftp hosts, transfer / delete / rename files, set passive mode and much more.
What´s running 2.2. gives you an insight look into what is running on your system. It is completly free to use for non commercial usage and includes information about processes, services, modules, connections, drivers, startup and system. You can control everything with what´s running, e.g. start and stop services and processes.
The free transparent customizable calendar called Rainlendar is a great addition to every windows system. Rainlendar is a lightweight open source application which supports lots of languages (must be 30+). It displays three independent transparent windows on your desktop, the calendar showing the actual month, a todo list and an events list. You can add or edit entries by doubleclicking the window.
It is a good idea to make sure that no one is able to find and use private files on your computer against you. I can think of several reasons why it is wise to secure private files. If you are sharing a computer you have multiple users working with it, would not it be embarrassing if your mother (wife, sister, girlfriend..) found your hidden adult picture stash ? A thief would be more than happy to use all the personal information (login details to sites like paypal or ebay for example) to make some extra bucks.
The Mozilla Firefox Cheat Sheet is a great way to learn more about the firefox browser. New users will find this one page firefox reference useful because it lists all those little tips and workarounds that speed up your firefox workflow.
Adobe Reader is really slow when it starts. Did you ever try to view a pdf document that was available on the web ? The reader tends to load very slowly although the document itself might be only a few hundred kilobytes. This is bothering me and I suppose it´s bothing a lot of people who are using the Adobe Reader to view pdf files.
The Music Industry (from now on only called MI) is putting a lot of pressure on the consumers. They release copy protected media but fail to realise that this is a punishment for the people who buy music. Even if you don´t download music from the internet you most likely know sources where to get that music for free, without DRM and in high quality. The commercial pirates as well don´t care about copy protection.
Everyone knows how to send and recieve emails but only a few understand the concept behind the process. Emails are normally not send directly from your machine to the recipient. Mailservers that are setup by your ISP for instance process incoming emails and send them on their way. This information is stored in the headers of the email. Understanding email headers helps you identify spam directed at you.
Nettools is a small freeware utility that plays a sound whenever a website that you specified changes its contents. All observered websites are also cached on your local hard drive. The tool has two other features: A web search option and a dictionary lookup. Great tool, really tiny (180k). Grab it while it´s hot.
Now this is a nice idea. If you install the firefox extension Googlepedia your google search results will feature another column showing a related wikipedia entry. It uses your local wikipedia as default and disables the showing of google adwords on the search result page. (That´s the area where the wikipedia entry is shown).
The football worldcup 2006 is taking place in Germany and will start in exactly six days with the opening match between the host Germany and Costa Rica. Would not it be great to have a listing of all games, all teams, all kick off times and live results ? Sure, you can visit a website of a local news site and hope they update the scores in real time or you could try the excellent firefox extension called FootieFox.
The guys over at techspot published a large article on tweaking winamp. They focus input and output plugins but cover other areas as well. The recommended Shibatch mpg123 input plugin for instance offers better audio quality and more features than the default nullsoft mpeg decoder.
Krunch is a nice little service that offers you the option to upload and compress files in three different formats (zip, rar and gzip). After compressing the file you have the option to download it for yourself and mail it to other recipients either with a download link to the file or directly as an attachment. The service offers the option to upload and decompress a compressed file in the formats zip, rar and tar.gz. It seems to have problems with my rar files though.
Many people have problems accessing they favorite sites from work or school because access to the internet is filtered and restricted. The freeware application UltraVNC might help you in your tries to access those sites although you are working on a restricted computer. The software basically connects to and displays a image of your home computer on your restricted computer. You can now use the ressources of your home computer to surf to the websites that are forbidden.
Versionbackup is a little free for personal use (single pc) application that lets you backup files according to a schedule that you define in the program. It would be possible to load the program at windows start and let it backup the file right after windows started for instance.
Many people consider themselves to be very secure when they are surfing the internet and that very well may be true. However, there are some things that are often forgotten about. The one thing is the cookie. This is not speaking about the edible version with chocolate chips, but instead the file that a good many web sites across the internet that put onto your system that tell the site that you have visited before and what you have done.
If you happen to run a webserver that uses linux or happen to run linux as your operating system for the computer you work with you should know the basics of the shell. Sometimes you quickly have to find your way into the shell and a site like linuxcommand helps you alot doing so.
It is sometimes a good choice to disable USB drives and still use other USB hardware. This is especially true for computers and notebooks that are publically accessible from time to time. So, to disable USB Drives you simply fire up regedit and browse to the following key:
The avi bug which makes it impossible to delete avis in windows xp by chosing delete from the menu or hitting del at your keyboard is caused by Explorer reading the .avi file to determine file information as soon as you move the mouse over the file. This causes 'permission denied' errors when trying to simply move, copy or delete these files as they cannot be changed while Explorer has an open handle on them.
It seems that the method that I previously posted is not working really well. If you rename the files windows will try and install the update again. Therefor one has to find another way to disable this, what we do is disable the execute bit on wgalogon.dll. That way, winlogon can't call it as a notification package at boot, and since WgaLogon is responsible for running and maintaining WgaTray.exe, no more tray popups either.
Wikibooks is a great service that collects books that are freely available. The bookshelf (aka the listing of all available categories) provides links to categories like computing (and its subcategories like Programming languages) and Humanities and in those categories descriptions and links to those books. Some categories contain subcategories that contain the links, for example the programming language main category contains lots of subcategories that contain all the various programming languages.
Lot´s of people complain that webproxys are not working at their works / schools computer because they have been banned by administrators. A way around this would be to setup your very own proxy server that is being hosted a) by a free webhosting service that supports either php or cgi or b) your own website that is being hosted by a webhosting company.
I´am back. I finished moving to my new apartment and can again write article and entertain you. Autohotkey is a nice little freeware application that has many purposes. Take a look at its features:
I´am in a hurry because I´am moving to my new appartment today and don´t have the time to write much, because my pc of course goes with me to the new destination. I thought I post some interesting articles with a short description to keep you entertained while I´am moving.
XSite will load and parse any webpage into a simple structured view for displaying images, email addresses, and all links. Generate a result report that section out all the links, images, and email addresses. Easily grab all images in a web page by downloading them to a local folder. Export lists out to CSV format which makes it easy to push the information into any database.
The little freeware application Windows Worms Door Cleaner has a very strange name if you ask me. It´s purpose is to disable certain services that worms rely on to attack your system.
A new version of the popular Ubuntu linux distribution has been released to the community. You can download it from the official homepage using http connections or bittorrent. Let us hear what the developers have to say about this new release.
I´d like to present five freeware tools that everyone should at least take a look at and try out. They are not the "normal" freeware applications that you find in every top ten list like firefox and open office. I write about tools that many users don´t know but would be grateful if they knew they existed. Please be aware that this is my top ten list and that your´s most likely would have different applications in it.
The c-64 was my first computer. I had an atari 2600 before and it seemed like a quantum leep at that time. The C-64 had many classic games that I enjoyed playing: Archon, Boulder Dash and Pirates for instance. You know have the chance to play some of the alltime classics of that era in your browser. The website c64s.com is the Eldorado for everyone who wants to play that classic games again or take a look at games of a time long forgotten.
The free ftp software Smart Ftp 2.0 has been released and is available for download at the developers website. Changes include a new graphical user interface with tabs, a new local and remote browser and support for 64 bit windows operating systems. If you are looking for a free ftp program give it a try, it might be exactly what you are looking for.
I´ve been using firefox for a long time and can recommend it to anyone who is still using Microsoft Internet Explorer. Besides being more secure firefox users have the ability to install extensions, little addons that add to the functionality of the browser. I collected ten nice extensions that are worth a try if you are using firefox. All work with the latest build 1.5 and versions before, of course.
I found a pearl script at binaryhack.org that lets you mass-download images that are hosted at imageshack.us. All you need is the pearl script and the mechanize module to download images from imageshack. If you are running windows you need a pearl interpreter, PxPearl seems to work with this script.
VIEWTCP is a free network monitoring tool by MicroWorld that examines TCP/IP activity on your Windows-based systems. This free utility lists all TCP and UDP endpoints on your PC, including the remote address (along with Domain name of the remote address) and state of TCP connections.
WinHTTrack is an easy-to-use offline browser utility. It allows you to download a World Wide website from the Internet to a local directory, building recursively all directories, getting html, images, and other files from the server to your computer.
I found an interesting article over at logicalexpressions.com that presents an astonishing solution if you have forgotten your windows xp password. This is clearly a security hole because everyone is able to change the passwords, the only requirement would be to have the original windows xp cd at hand.
We read it in the news everyday. The major music industry players like Sony BMG or EMI are reporting losses all over the place and blame it solely on internet pirates. Internet pirates are actually a very good excuse for bad times. Hard facts do not exist and no one is able to check on the numbers the MI provides for losses due to internet pirates.
They don´t seem to realize that they criminalize their own customers with measures like copy protected cd´s and rootkit software installed on customers pc.
Yesterday I´ve written a short tutorial about streamripping and one of the questions that occured was if its possible to rip real audio music as well. Today i present a guide on how to rip the real audio format.
Most banks in Europe offer a new service on their internet pages. When a user has to enter his login data he has the option to enter the password using a keypad that is displayed on the screen using a java applet. The user then clicks on the numbers and they appear in the password field. This is done to prevent the keylogging of the password.
The Anti-Keylogger does the same thing, only difference is, that its a tool that is started like every other windows program. After the tool is started you simply use the displayed keys to enter your passwords or other data on websites or even local programs.
Richi posted a nice introduction on how spammers actually send the millions of spam mails every day. He begins by describing two ways of sending spam mails: traditional and viral.
