Laptop theft is growing at alarming proportions. One laptop is stolen every 53 seconds, according to Gartner. A study by Dell revealed that over 12,000 laptops are lost in US airports every week. There are different ways to secure your laptop against theft, but in this article, we’ll show you a free way to improve your laptop security.

LAlarm is a free laptop security alarming software. It has several different alarms to help protect your laptop, the most important of them being the Theft Alarm.

Install LAlarm

Download and install the free laptop security software here. LAlarm is free for personal use, and version 4.0 works with Windows Vista, XP (SP2 or SP3). On Windows 7, you can try the latest beta version 5.0. The download is less than 1MB, and the setup program looks the same as the main program that you launch after installation.

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YouTube is not only about crazy videos going viral. It’s also a huge archive of videos of the musical kind. From garage bands to the platinum artists, you will find them there. I don’t know whether you have the feeling (or not) that watching music videos is not exactly the same thing as listening to them. Sometimes you just like to be left alone with the tunes. That’s where TubeRudio.fm starts playing.

The makers of this Internet music player have perhaps got the right note when they describe it as iTunes meets YouTube meets Spotify.

TubeRadio.fm is YouTube at its core with the look of iTunes. And functionally it offers the streaming access to millions of songs like Spotify. It’s better as an alternative because Spotify is not available in a lot of countries including my own. The free web app has Last.fm behind it.

We have many online jukeboxes and we can always go to YouTube and ‘listen’ to the tracks…

So Where Exactly Should We Put TubeRadio.fm?

TubeRadio.fm wraps it all up and comes out as a slick dedicated Internet music player for YouTube. But the power of the web app is not merely playing the music but it’s in the way it lets you find and organize the music videos. Search for your favorite artist or band and add the track to your custom playlist. From just this single search, you can get all their available albums and build a complete playlist with a couple of clicks. And another click can take you to Amazon if you desire to purchase the albums. The whole process takes seamless seconds.

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The internet is no longer ‘just’ a source of information. It’s riddled with online communities, and of course, online media.

More and more, media is making the switch from digital storage to the cloud. Away with digital storage, here comes the internet!

This change is becoming ever more apparent with online music stores and streaming audio portals springing up all around.

There’s a musical buffet waiting for the internet audiophile, but if you aren’t properly informed, you can be sure you’re missing out.

MakeUseOf is proud to present The Internet Music Guidebook, a manual for the internet audiophile. An introduction to the World Wide Web of Sound!

In fourty illustrated pages, Will Mueller from willm.me tells you all you need to know about free internet listening to music, streaming audio to your computer, and free download music sites to get all your favorite songs and albums in a whim. Learn how to share music with others and track a band’s performance and album releases!

Don’t wait, download the Internet Music Guidebook now in PDF, to view it offline and on your computer, or read it online on Scribd.com.

No strings attached, this free eBook is entirely for you to enjoy! If you liked this release, you should also check out our other MakeUseOf PDF Manuals.

U.S. might invade Iran. Click. 2 Canadian Soldiers Die in Afghanistan. Click. Unemployment Up 15%. Click. Click. Click. No matter where you look, it seems like the apocalypse is upon us. Websites, television, radio, Twitter. It’s no wonder antidepressants are one of the most popular medications these days. What is there to be happy about?

Well, we can be happy that there are serious journalists who desire to bring us the good news, who feel that if they can share someone else’s successes with us, we can see that there is more than just hope. There is, in fact, at least as much good news as there is bad. There are millions of people in the world who care, and strive to do the right thing. It’s just finding these stories is hard.

Well, let’s get a prod in the right direction.

The Optimist

In a clean and light-hearted website, you’ll find seriously good news from around the world. The Optimist is a community based site, bringing you news in the categories of: Charities Doing Things to Inspire, Companies with Conscience, Travel Tips and Global Goodness, Sports with a Positive Spin, Stories from Optimistic People, and if reading the good news isn’t enough – watch it on Optimist TV!

Here’s something interesting. Go to the page where they list the Optimists. Look through all the pictures of the self-proclaimed optimists there. Did you notice that they all look healthy and happy?

Very few of them are overweight and those that are, are so only by a little bit.  Do you think maybe there is a direct correlation between finding the small joys and being healthy and attractive? I think so.

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Remember The Milk is one of the most popular to-do webapps on the net right now. While it has an extensive list of ways to be integrated into your daily routine, from iCal exporting to mobile syncing through iPhone, Blackberry, and Android apps, some of these features are only accessible to Pro users.

To users who would much rather not pay $25 a year to access RTM through their iPhone, luckily, there is an alternative to RTM’s own iPhone app. Milpon is the only iPhone todo app in the iTunes store that is both free and functional for managing your RTM tasks.

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Do you keep a list of all the items in your home? You do? Really? And how about serial numbers, warranty information, purchase dates and how much that special something is worth? I recently had to create a home inventory list for the insurance company and now here is a great program that will let you track this data on your computer.

Let us take a look at Household Register 2010 which is a 6.8MB download. Once it is installed you can launch it from your start menu.

You will see a screen that looks like this:

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Check out some of the latest MakeUseOf discoveries. All listed websites are FREE (or come with a decent free account option). No trials or buy-to-use craplets. For more cool websites and web app reviews subscribe to MakeUseOf Directory.

(1) SafeMess – New browser based text encryption tool that lets you quickly encrypt your text. It uses secure XXTEA 128-bit block cipher algorithm and the encryption is done with JavaScript locally inside your browser, no text or password is stored online. Read more: SafeMess – Browser Based Text Encryption Tool

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So you have a great idea for a web show but you have no idea where you’d like to archive it yet alone no idea where you’d like to stream it live to your viewers. But you want a good service. In this article, we’ll take a look at the popular, free live video streaming host Livestream. So, if you’ve got the show idea, a webcam, a good internet connection, microphone and a computer, Livestream has the tools you need to get your show live!

Livestream, originally known to some as Mogulus, is a free video streaming host that provides a live stream solution which allows you to create your own internet TV channel for broadcasting on your website through their player or on your channel page with them, 24/7. Livestream provides the “studio”, an elaborate flash app on their website where you can create a team of reporters, cue webcams, manage your library, record shows, control an “autopilot” that manages your channel, and manage a video-on-demand for your viewers.

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Clothes make the man (and always, the woman!) but how much care do you put into dressing up your documents? Is it all title, headings, subheadings, bullets and paragraphs or do you put some more thought into the Word document?

There are a lot of things which can go into creating a professional looking document. But when we are talking about first impressions, then we have to speak about the first thing that catches the eye and that’s the cover page.

The cover page is the very first page of your document. Its purpose right at the beginning is to give the reader the Big Idea about the document. The why and wherefore is communicated through a specific title, the author name, date, a one-liner on the subject and any other bit of important information on the cover page.

If Black Text On A White Page Is A Turn Off…

One of the reasons I am writing this post is that Microsoft Word makes it painless to create a professional cover page. Unlike the previous versions, Word 2007 has Building Blocks which are pre-formatted templates for cover pages, headers, footers etc. Learning how to make a cover page in MS Word is as easy as a few clicks.

So let’s move away from the monochromatic black on white to more colorful beginnings.

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Not many people know this, but Google Chrome is based on Chromium, an open source browser project. Everyone willing can download the source code, and make a few tweaks to their own Chrome-like browser. That’s right, Firefox isn’t the only contender showing off their code!

Although there are a whole bunch of Firefox spin-offs, Chrome is still pretty much solitary – at least, it used to be.

ChromePlus

Created by Maple Studio, ChromePlus is a Google Chrome alternative that uses the Chromium source code. They’ve released a Chrome spin-off, with some additional features that should make the browser even more fun to use.

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