I guess I configured mine properly to stay out of my hair and not interfere with my other applications – and I do not work in Japanese, Portuguese or any other language other than English. But when I heard from Tamar Weinberg, she also expressed interest in a Texter alternative text replacement tool and MakeUseOf does not disappoint, so without further ado I bring you Phrase Express Beta 7.0.94. The download is available from their website at PhraseExpress.

For those of you who want to see it in action, there is an animated gif at the bottom of this post.

For those of you not familiar with the Texter text replacement tool, Phrase Express is a text replacement solution. It can replace phrases or keywords with canned text. This can be useful for replacing initials with a full signature or addr1 with your full mailing address. Trust you me you will find many uses for this application and it is free for personal use.

Once you arrive at their website you will see several versions – we will be working with the USB version. The network version is very nice with central server files for all workstations – but it is not free. So back to the USB version. Download, extract and run the executable to begin.

Above you can see the main interface window. You can always bring up this screen by right clicking on the system tray icon and choosing Settings

On the interface you can click New Phrase or right click on the system tray and choose New Phrase. You will need to fill in the Autotext, which is what you will type in. The phrase content is what your autotext will be replaced with and the description is to help you easily identify your rules. Make sure the autotext check box is selected on the left and you have options like match case, exact match and match whole word to help prevent accidents.

Click OK at the bottom of the screen and you have created your first Phrase Express rule. When you type sig now it will automagically be replace by your signature.

Let’s try some more complex ones now:

Now I can replace my initials with my full (real) signature. But that’s not all, this is not a one hit wonder. It can import all of your Microsoft Word autotext rules and bring them into every application by doing the following:

Then once the import is complete you will see a new set of rules like so:

So now when I type a R with an a after it – it will automatically write a Registered symbol like so: ® . It will also prompt you to disable Word’s similar feature so the applications will not be competing.

But there is still more!

There are functions that are called macros and they can do tasks when you type in a keyword like to insert the current date, time or both. You can have the clipboard pasted, create an email, open a URL, execute a application, open a file or folder – even switch the focus to another application!

This text replacement tool is very sweet and it did not interfere with any of my other hotkey programs – and as a bonus it works on Windows 7 and Vista!

Do you have another favorite text replacement program that is free? We would love to hear about it in the comments!

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In this article, I’m going to describe how you can use Pinnacle Video Spin to take those photos that mean so much to you, and convert them into your own movie that really expresses the emotion that the photos represent for you. With special effects, a meaningful audio track and even a voice-over track if you wish, you can transform static photos into a movie that will impress.

Using Pinnacle Video Spin to Make Your Own Movie

You don’t have to pick up a video recorder to create a meaningful movie. Even if you only have photos, the Pinnacle Video Spin software has enough features so that you can use voice-over audio, special effects and music to make your movie interesting and fun to watch. In this article I’m going to guide you through the simple process to make your own movie from just the photos you may have buried away on some directory on your hard drive. Go ahead and dig those photos out, choose a cool soundtrack that expresses best how you feel about the people or events in those photos, and let’s get started.

The thing I really like about Pinnacle Video Spin is that everything is organized in areas of the application that are very easy to follow. In this case, the upper left corner of the application contains the area where you insert your media into the movie – including (from the top button downward in the photo above) video, transitions, titles and text, photos, sound effects and music. As you click on each of these items, you can choose from preloaded files (like the titles or sound effects that are included with Pinnacle), or you can bring in your own file. In this case I brought in an MP3 song.

Loading your selected media into your actual movie tracks is as simple as clicking on the file in the upper left of the application and dragging it down into the “My Movie” track area. Once you drag it in, the background music file will show up on the bottom track as shown above.

One reason I prefer loading the music first is because it gives you a timeline that you can use to determine how long your movie needs to be if you want it to end when the song ends. In this case the movie consists of a picture slideshow, so you click on the photo icon and the application will present you with a series of preview thumbnails when you’ve selected any folder that contains pictures.

The upper right side of the application is where you’ll find the preview window. Click on a photo thumbnail, and this shows you a larger view. Click on an audio file, this is where you can play it. Click on a video file, and this is where you’ll preview it.

To create a photo slideshow alongside the music track, you just grab the photos that you want with your mouse, and drag them down into the movie timeline wherever you want them to show up. As you can see above, the width of each image as it appears in the timeline represents how long that image will appear on the screen. If you want to know exactly how long, just look at the time scale above it. Keep in mind that when you’ve selected the “My Movie” area at the bottom of the application, the preview window displays your entire movie, so if you want to preview what you’ve already created, even before you’re done, just press the play button.

If you just throw a bunch of photos in the timeline with background music, you’ll have a decent movie, but it won’t seem very professional. The images will switch abruptly from one to the other with very little grace. Instead, click on the transitions button and drag your preferred scene transition into the timeline. In the case of pictures, the transition will give you a nice flow from photo to photo. If you chose fade (my favorite), as one photo dissipates, the other one appears. There are 5 pages of cool transitions to choose from. These apply to videos as well, and good transition from one scene to another is the sign of a good movie maker – so choose and place your transitions carefully!

Finally, when you’ve finished with your movie timeline and you like how it plays out in the preview window, you’re ready to “produce” your final movie. Pinnacle Video Spin provides you with a lot of options. When you click on the “Make Movie” tab, you can either export your movie to a file, or to the web. The file formats depend on whether you run the free version of the software or not, as many advanced codecs are not included in the free version. However, if you are just creating movies for the web, then go ahead and click on the “Web” button and you’ll find that you can easily export your new movie to either Yahoo! Video or YouTube.

Do you use Pinnacle Video Spin to make your own movies – if so, what do you like or dislike about it? Do you have some other favorite free movie creation software? Share your insight in the comments section below!

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So I then did a little digging around on MakeUseOf for free unzip programs that support the format and stumbled upon a 7Zip, an open-source file compression/extraction program which supports a multitude of compression formats.

Although there is also a IZArc which MakeUseOf recently recommended in its 15 Must-Have Free Software Programs I still decided to go with 7zip. While both seem to be rather popular among techies, I went ahead with 7zip mainly for its high compression ratio.

7Zip – How To

So in this article I’m going to get down to basics and show you how to extract and compress files that aren’t of the common variety.

First, download and install the free unzip program, 7Zip, from here.

After it has installed, start up the program from ‘All Programs’ under the start menu. The home screen should look like the screenshot below.

Extraction

Your first step is to locate the file you want to extract.

Normally, after you install 7Zip it should automatically recognize supported archive formats and integrate extract options to Windows context menus. When you right click on the file, there should be a 7Zip option.

Clicking on one of the Extract options will extract the files form the archive.

OR

Alternatively, you can just run 7Zip directly and open the archive from the program interface. You can either paste the file location into the text entry box or browse for it using the icons shown at the bottom part of the above screenshot. Once you have located your file, click on it once. This will highlight it. Then, press the minus sign ( – ) in the menu bar across the top. The window below will open.

Fill out the details below including where you want the extracted file to go and a password (if any). Then select ‘OK’. It shouldn’t take too long to extract and once it does your file will be ready and waiting for you beside the original compressed file provided you didn’t specify another output location.

Compression

Compression follows along much the same lines as extraction. Navigate to the file you want to compress within the 7Zip window and highlight it. Then click the plus sign (+) up in the top left hand corner. The window below will appear.

Enter in the information such as compression level, compression method and password. Then click ‘OK’. Now the compressed file will be beside the original file.

A bit more on compression. 7Zip offers a compression ratio that is about 10% better than WinZip. Moreover, by compressing a file into its native 7z format, you can achieve a compression ratio up to 70% higher than the zip format.

7Zip supports many other formats for extraction and compression. Some the main ones are listed here:

• Extracting and Compressing: 7z, ZIP, GZIP, BZIP2 and TAR
• Extracting Only: ARJ, CAB, CHM, CPIO, DEB, DMG, HFS, ISO, LZH, LZMA, MSI, NSIS, RAR, RPM, UDF, WIM, XAR and Z.

To conclude, 7Zip will take care of most of your extracting/compression needs when your standard extractor isn’t up the the task. And unlike many of its competitors it’ll do the job for free!

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Many movies that we download for viewing on the computer don’t have hardcoded subtitles. Sometimes they are included in the subtitles download as a SRT or a SUB file. If not, there are lots of online sources where you can download subtitles in your preferred lingo. Then, there are several methods to include them with your movie. Including the subtitle file in the same folder and letting the media player recognize it is probably the simplest.

But there is a little piece of free software that takes away the pain of manual scrounges on the web and makes watching movies with subtitles as easy as a click.

Sublight is a must have freeware for movie junkies. The simple tool is a desktop search tool to download movie subtitles and a bit more. Let’s ditch the manual locate and download method for once and try out the Sublight way.

Post installation, the Sublight settings wizard takes you through five screens. Three screens are important –

Choice of default media player

Let Sublight know your preferred media player for playback. Right now, the wizard provides only two choices but you can set your own by giving the custom paths in Settings.

Choice of subtitle search plugins

Let Sublight know which search engines it should use. Check all for better results.

Choice of file types for Explorer integration

Let Sublight know which file types should bring up a subtitle search feature in the right-click context menu. Check all for complete cover.

The Sublight interface itself

1. Using the main interface of Sublight is as simple as choosing the video file which needs subtitles. Sublight automatically detects the title of the movie and on your green light (the green checkmark) Sublight fills up the details like the exact name and year, format information like codec info, resolution, running length etc.
2. Then it takes you to the next step. Click on Search Subtitles and within a few seconds the results are displayed with all accompanying details like language and media type. If you think that the auto-search isn’t accurate, you can perform a manual search and even combine the two searches.
3. Linked subtitles marked in orange are subtitles which are connected with the selected video by other Sublight users. They should ideally be synchronized with the video file you selected. (If you download a correctly synchronized subtitle file, contribute to its rating by clicking on Valid Link).
4. Right click on any of the search results and you will see a lot of options that take you beyond the subtitle into what else the movie is about. For instance, the IMDB page on the movie or the subtitle preview which can help you find out the quality of the translation.
5. You can click on Properties too and get the complete dope on the subtitle file.
6. After selecting the subtitle you can play the video with a click on the Play with subtitle on the toolbar or on the right click menu. The second option is to download the subtitle file to your computer. The default destination is the same folder where your video is present.
7. A set of filtration options let you narrow down your choice by language, rating, number of discs and publisher.

Sublight – Is it worth a download?

Hey, it’s free! Sublight gives a lot of control over the way you handle your subtitles. The Settings let you control some of them like changing the default formatting. A registered user also can collect points for contributing pro-actively. A registered user is rewarded with higher priority service, especially downloads.

Some drawbacks like subtitle synchronization need to be handled on a case by case basis. More search engines would certainly help (especially with foreign films), but these hiccups aside, Sublight is a software worth checking out if you are a movie junkie.

Sublight is a good choice for not only the English-speaking movie lover but also for the guy who speaks and watches in another language. In the end, the freeware makes subtitle search and download a quicker, more controlled process.

Sublight v1.7.0 is compatible with Win98/98SE/XP/7 and requires Microsoft .Net Framework 2.0.

How do you go about watching a movie in a different language?

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Over the lifetime of a computer, numerous tools are installed, updated, moved or removed. Even if done thoroughly, this can create a mess in the registry when files are left behind and references become outdated. As a result, the computer slows down, programs produce registry-related errors, and eventually the system becomes unstable.

There is a number of free tools out there that can fix common registry errors, such as missing shared DLLs, incorrect file extensions, invalid paths, missing shortcuts, orphan Active X objects, invalid devices, invalid links to startup programs, and lots more.

Here is a short review of the five best freeware registry cleaners.

5. CCleaner

CCleaner definitely is the most popular Windows system optimization tool. It comes with a ton of features, one of them being a freeware registry cleaner.

CCleaner is available for all Windows versions.

If you’re a diligent user, who only installs programs he really needs and who uninstalls programs thoroughly, you won’t need a full-fledged deep registry cleaner. The registry cleaning feature included in CCleaner should be sufficient. And since CCleaner is a tool you should use in the first place, it’s very convenient.

CCleaner can not backup your registry. It’s advisable that you create a manual backup of your registry.

4. Eusing Free Registry Cleaner

Eusing’s Registry Cleaner is a tool dedicated to registry cleaning. It’s perfect for people who cannot be bothered as it is very basic and easy to use.

The tool is compatible with Windows 95 through Windows 7.

This freeware registry cleaner scans a little deeper and finds many invalid entries that were not detected by CCleaner.

Through > File you can access additional features, such as a full registry or a Windows backup. If you run into problems, you can easily restore a previous registry version under > Action or the Tasks option.

3. nCleaner second

nCleaner comes highly recommended from our IT industry superhero and tech guru Karl, who wrote a thorough nCleaner review last year. Please refer to Karl’s review for in-depth information!

The latest version of this tool is called nCleaner second and it is one of the most comprehensive free system cleaning tools on the market. Like CCleaner, it also features a registry cleaner.

Unfortunately, it is not yet available for Windows 7. Currently, Windows XP, 2003, and Vista are supported.

To clean the registry, go with the > Clean System option and continue with the > Registry clean and repair option. Before you start, you can backup the registry and in case something went wrong, restore it. Right there, you can also create a system restore point, which also backs up your registry.

2. Auslogics Registry Cleaner

Here we have a very simple to use registry cleaner, which is perfectly suited for the novice user.

Auslogics Registry Cleaner is distributed for Windows 2003 through 7 and supports both 32- and 64-bit.

The cool thing about this cleaner is that it comes with a wizard that guides you through the scan. You can select either a quick or an advanced scan. When running an advanced scan, also critical items, e.g. software and shared DLLs, can be examined. Per default, only safe items are checked and a warning is displayed, if you attempt to scan items that require experience.

The wizard offers a restore changes option. So I was wondering where the option to backup the registry was hidden. Per default, registry keys are backed up before you fix problems. However, you can deselect this option.

Finally, the tool displays the speed the computer supposedly gained after the cleaning process. Before you close the application, you can also view the full report.

1. Wise Registry Cleaner

Wise Registry Cleaner is one of the most comprehensive cleaners in this list. Hence, it made it to the number 1 position.

Despite many options, the interface remains clear. Even the novice user will find this tool easy to use, since the program guides the user through each step upon running it for the first time.

Wise Registry Cleaner is available for Windows 98 through 7 and supports 32- and 64-bit.

While the tool may ask you for your eMail address and offer to download further software during installation, it’s all optional. Just be sure to uncheck the respective boxes.

When you run Wise Registry Cleaner for the first time, you are greeted with a window that provides a link to a quick start guide. The next notice offers to perform an automatic registry backup. You can choose to never see these windows again. And don’t worry, you can manually launch a full registry backup or restore a previous registry version anytime. Also the guide and further material is available through > Help.

Once you got through the initial welcome procedure, you are pointed to the start button. Entries are categorized as safe or not fully safe to fix. Using the respective buttons you can check the safe entries, all, none or invert all checks. All these options make the tool look complicated, but I find them quite convenient.

Through > Options you can edit settings and create a scheduled task to launch and auto run the tool.

If you would like to further enhance your computer’s performance, check out TanaG’s post for 7 Common Reasons Why Windows Can Get Unresponsive and refer to Angelina’s article on Top 8 Programs That Can Make Your Computer Run Faster. This material should point you into the right direction.

How often do you clean your registry and what tool do you use?

Image credits: tryout0

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So what do you do?

Get an intern to do it? Nope because it is confidential!

Bang your head against the wall?  Nope!

As you are a Make Use Of reader we are here to show you a solution.

That solution comes from one of our favorite utility programmers – NirSoft . NirSoft has two applications Mozilla History View and IEHistoryView. As you can probably work out, each one of them works for their respective browser and will not work with the other. So keep both of them on your memory stick when you go a’ hunting.

Run the portable application and it will start scanning the machine instantly. Below I ran this on..umm…a user’s machine – yeah that’s the ticket – a user’s machine and not mine at all!

The application will scan all your (or a user’s) browsing history and return it in the graphical user interface. If you browsed your local machine with your browser it will show up here as well.

Uh oh….this person (not me! ) has been browsing the Pirate Bay and Rapidshare! Wow and they have been downloading files! For shame for shame! Now we need to record and export browsing history to send to Human Resources. We simply hit the save button on the tool bar which you can see represented by a disk like so:

Once you hit that button you will have several options for file types such as CSV, TXT, XML, HTML or even a “tabular” file. Once you save it you can print or email it at will!

The Internet Explorer version is very similar – actually identical but it obviously reads in a different history file and has a different name.

Again your desktop browsing will also show up in here so you can catch someone opening porn or other non work related items (unless you work for a porn company!). Both applications have a different set of fields and they are from the IE application:

• URL
• Title
• Hits (counter)
• Page Modified Date
• Expiration date of the page
• User
• History folder

Firefox’s columns are a little better with:

• URL
• Title
• First Visit
• Last Visit
• Visit Count
• Refering site
• Host Name
• Title
• Record Index
• Visit type (Download, link or typed URL) <— This is the big one that proves the site was typed in instead of being opened by a pop up or something along those lines.

No one wants to be the bad guy and get people fired but network security is a administrator’s job and sometimes the job can fall on a executive secretary or anyone – at least make the job of recording browsing history a little less painful with these easy to use tools.

Nirsoft rocks! Do you have another method of doing this? Hit us up in the comments!

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New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

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Launcher applications increase productivity and help us to streamline our Windows interface. After all, if you launch your most frequently used programs from a behind the scenes launcher instead of shortcuts, our desktop becomes a more uncluttered place.

There are a host of launcher apps out there. Launchy is one of the more popular ones you might have heard about. Then we have covered a bunch at Top 7 Unknown Free Launcher Applications For Windows. Is there room for one more?

You bet, because when it comes to software, it’s more the merrier.

This one’s called Key Launch. Key Launch is a little freeware that lets us ditch the shortcuts, the start menu and the run box. The working of Key Launch is simplicity itself. Type in a few characters that stand for your program and Key Launch opens it.

How to Launch Applications From the Command Line

• Key Launch installs as a System Tray icon. Key Launcher automatically indexes all the programs under the Start Menu (including folders like Recent Documents). To activate it, you need to hit Ctrl+Space. At first, you will see a blank interface like the one below. Type in a few words and Key Launch lists all programs that correspond to it. You can click on any to open it.



• Well, that’s not very customized. To add files, folders and programs that you want to quickly access, you have to set up a few things by hand initially using Aliases. Aliases are nothing but a short identifier that stands for any file, folder, program or web page you want to open using Key Launch. All the mechanism is in the Key Launch Preferences box.



Like ‘muo’ is defined as an alias for MakeUseOf.com or ‘ww’ for WordWeb, setting up aliases is easy with a click on the + button and choosing characters that can stand for a favorite webpage or a program. While defining the alias, do test it out once by clicking on the Test button.

• With aliases defined, bringing up the relevant application now requires you to hit Ctrl+Space and Enter as the aliased shortcut is usually the first one that’s on the list. The other minor but great thing is that the Key Launch also ‘learns’ which programs you operate frequently. So after a few launches, it automatically pushes that specific program on top of the list. For example, I could push ‘n’ for opening Notepad after opening it 3-4 times.
• There are some special prefixes like mailto: followed by the email address that will open your default mail client with the address in the ‘To’ field. Or callto: followed by the contact name that will open up the VoIP application like Skype (but I found that this part didn’t work so smoothly with me).
• Though Launch Keys indexes certain folders, you can set it up to include some of your own choices through the Folders to Index button in Preferences.



• As a launcher, Launch Keys takes over from the default ‘launcher’ that Windows gives us – the Run box. Use Launch Keys to run a command by pressing Ctrl+Enter.



• Launch Keys can also act as your de facto calculator. Type in your math in the field box and hit enter.

That covers the basic capabilities of this little application. To further it, one can use DNM scripts but that’s a bit beyond the average user. But what’s not is that you can take the whole installed folder and transfer it to your pen drive and use it as a portable app. That’s a help.

Key Launch and application launchers of its ilk help us be more productive. After a few uses, using the aliases becomes almost a subconscious habit. After a while aliases become more real than the shortcut icons themselves.

Which is your launcher app of choice?

Key Launch (v2.0) is a 1.3MB download and is supported on Windows XP/Vista.

Image Credit: Lukasz Strachanowski

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Without an extremely good (read: loud) alarm clock ruining the party, it’s all too tempting to stay in bed just a little bit longer.

So if you don’t have a decent alarm clock, you know you’re in big trouble. A lot of people use their cellphone’s alarm, but that’s often just a mediocre solution.

We’ve scoured the internet looking for free alternative alarm clocks; great applications for your PC, Mac, Windows Mobile, iPhone and even Android that’ll make waking up a delight. Or at least a little bit easier.

(Windows) College Alarm Clock

Strangely enough, free alarm clocks for Windows are the hardest to find. An incredible application, but sadly costing $12, is the Citrus Alarm Clock.

When looking for a free Windows alarm clock, our biggest sacrifice is going to be the eye-candy. College Alarm Clock – these days unsupported by its developer, but still available for download – doesn’t look like much, but it comes packed with a truckload of functionality.

As the name implies, this alarm clock can especially come in handy for college students. It allows you to set different alarms for each day, and to skip a day, if need be or if the need is just high. You can use your own music to awaken, play a CD, or go with the old fashioned Beep.

College Alarm Clock isn’t a big comfort on the eye, but it does everything a decent alarm clock needs to do, and more.

(Mac) Alarm Clock 2

Alarm Clock 2 was developed by Robbie Hanson. This alarm clock looks like a typical Mac app; a slick design and incredibly simple interface. Don’t be fooled, it has a few surprises under the hood.

The application wakes your computer out of sleep mode, so you won’t have to keep your computer running. You can set up as many alarms (and timers and stopwatches) as you want, creating a different alarm for each day of the week, if you need it. Play an irritating array of sounds, or pick soothing music right out of your iTunes library.

(Web) Sleep.FM

Don’t like the preceding two applications? Maybe you’ll like this one better. Being an online web-app, it doesn’t matter whether you’re a Mac, PC or Penguin.

You can set two personal alarms. Due to the limited interface, these can’t be recurring or date-dependent. More originally, you can choose to wake up with a weather broadcast, or a voicing of the current time or date. Prefer to wake up to a female voice? Check the top-right page corner.

Tina has also previously profiled some more online alarm clock apps.

(iPhone) Alarm Clock Free

There are hardly any free alarm clocks available for the iPhone. True, most of them don’t even pass the one Dollar mark, but we still prefer free.

Alarm Clock Free, as you might’ve guessed from the name, is one of those scarce free alarms. Nevertheless, you’ll never need another one. This alarm clock supports all basic functionality, and does so in style. Set multiple alarms, wake up to a sound or to your own music, and better yet, be sure to use that big Snooze button!

(Windows Mobile & Android) Klaxon

For Windows Mobile, I’ve long been a fan of G-Alarm. It’s an ex-freeware alarm clock that forces math puzzles on you before you’re able to snooze. The app has now turned payware, costing around €5.

Klaxon is a Windows Mobile – and recently Android – alternative that (aside from the math puzzles) is very similar in style and quality.

It’s a slick, dark app that allows you to set multiple day-dependant alarms with your own music. One of the more original features of the alarm clock is that you can snooze by turning your phone upside down, or turn the alarm off completely by giving it a wild shake.

Download Klaxon here for Windows Mobile, and here for Android.

Do you ever use your computer or mobile to wake up? Tell us what (free) applications or websites you use in the comments section below!

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• MakeUseOf Your iPhone: iPhone as a Remote Control for iTunes (7)

The premise behind the text replacement software is simple – you type something and Texter expands it into something larger or more difficult to remember. How about typing addr and hitting the tab key to type out your mailing address? How about a few characters to spit out awesome quotes that you would never remember? If you are a coder you can use this for repetitive code-like functions you use over and over again – do you see where I am going with this?

Let’s take a look at how to install and use Texter. You can grab the installer from here. The download link is halfway down the page – you can’t miss it!

Run the installer and you will be prompted for an install directory like so:

Then you can click finish to launch the application or uncheck the box if you don’t want to start it.

Once Texter is done installing it will take a few minutes on first launch while it configures things in the background. You will see the following screen:

Once the app is finished initializing you will see the graphical user interface below:

Hit the plus sign below and enter your first “hotstring” – don’t be put off by the terminology – that is where you type your codewords. Then choose what will be its trigger. If it is a common few letters you will not want to use instant or you might be shooting yourself in the foot If you use a common word and use instant it would turn your common phrase into your replacement text right away. So for those instances use tab or space.

I love using instant! As you can see below I used the hotstring klg and it instantly turns into my name. Pretty nifty eh? This saves me a ton of time and typing during the day.

You can see below I created my work email, memo or document signature with Texter and when I type Thank and hit tab – blamo!  Instant signature. That shaves 10 minutes off my day.

You can include as much text as you want, see below for my preamble to the United States Constitution. I type preamb and hit tab and automagically the preamble appears. Really I can’t get enough of this!

Do you have another method for text replacement? Let us know about it in the comments. I would love to take it for a test run as improvements are always welcomed! Thanks Adam.

• Sublime Text: The Text Editor You’ll Fall in Love With (Windows) (21)
• Top 5 Yahoo Mail Classic Tips & Tricks (23)
• PhraseExpress – A Great Alternative Text Replacement Tool (3)
• MS Outlook Tip: How to Automatically Organize Incoming Emails (11)
• How To Turn Gmail Into A Multitasking Machine (Part III) (12)

For a long while, you needed to use Microsoft Word to design and print media resources using one of hundreds of Avery templates. But Avery also now provides two free standalone applications, called DesignPro (one for Mac and one for PC users) that includes all its templates and the design features for putting together and printing media projects.

If you want, you can design your digital printing project in say Photoshop, save it as JPEG file and import it as an image file into DesignPro. In this article, however, I will give you an overview of designing a label project in DesignPro for Mac.

• Start a new project (File>New) in DesignPro. Select the type of media project you want. Search for the type of template you want to use. You’ll probably want to make sure your local office supply store carries the media stock for the template you’re using. Or you can order the stock online.

• Double-click on the pre-designed template label you want to use, or select a blank design. Now customize the template. For many projects, like labels, I suggest using strong bold fonts (e.g. Arial Black, Helvetica, Baskerville) with a 10+ point size. The design features of DesignPro are not nearly as advanced as what you can do in Photoshop, but most for jobs, the tools are sufficient. The application includes tons of clip art and vector shapes, and you can also import existing image files from say iPhoto or anywhere else on your computer.

• Now here’s the tricky part. You can select to print the same text and design on each label, or you can choose to have different text and/or design for individual labels. If you choose the latter, you’ll have to select each individual label and copy and paste in the design and/or text you want. There’s no way, as far as I can tell, to select five labels at once and paste in the design or text. If you select the first label and create a design, it will be applied to all the labels that come after it. But when you click the All Same – Off button in the tool bar of DesignPro, you can further customize individual labels.

• There’s also an option to use Mail Merge in DesignPro with your contact data in Apple’s Address Book or Mail application. But for some odd reason, this mail feature merges all the contact data in those applications. You can’t select individual contacts to merge with those data applications. So it’s better to create a comma delimited (CSV) or tab delimited (TSV) spread sheet of your contacts and import it for mail merge in DesignPro.

• After your labels are set up, you‘re ready to print. I suggest first doing a test printing on regular typing paper before using more expensive Avery media stock. When you’re ready to print, make sure you have selected the appropriate media stock in your printer’s dialogue box.

If you have any questions about using DesignPro, drop me a line in the comment box.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• [Google Picasa 101] – Getting Started (22)
• The Challenging World Of Image Editing (8)
• PHOTOSHOP DISASTERS: 2 Blogs with Bad Photoshop Images (5)
• Mightier – Innovative Puzzle Platformer Fun (5)
• How to Color Correct RGB Images Easily in Photoshop (14)

I know some people that have – but most of you are just downloading away without a care in the world. Would you like a little bit of extra downloading protection?

Companies set up fake peers and trackers that either send you malicious files or note your IP address. Now using Peer Block we can stop them from getting all of us! Once a IP range is detected as being malicious they are added to the Peer Block database. Peer Block will then prevent your machine from allowing them to connect. It is not foolproof by any means but for those of you who keep on downloading, this might be a little piece of mind.

Let’s take a look at how it works. You start your downloading protection by downloading the application from here.

Just unzip the contents and run the exe file. If you have show extensions turned off in your Windows Explorer it will be the icon shaped like a blue cube. It is the third one down in my screenshot below:

Once you run the executable the setup wizard will begin – the program does not install to the best of my knowledge. It looks like it lives in the directory you unzip it to making it a great companion for portable uTorrent.

We hit next on the first screen to move along through the installer. The rest of the screens will have information for you to fill in. On the second screen which you can see below, this screen allows you to pick what you want blocked. For most of us it will just be P2P (for most file sharing applications) but you can also block ads, spyware and educational sites. You can import or create your own list and there is an option to allow http always – this means you can browse via your web browser to sites in the ranges that are in your list. Check which ones you want and hit next to continue. You should also read the recommendation at the bottom of the screen.

Now these lists change daily so just like your antivirus software you need to keep your definitions up to date. Configure this on the next screen that you can see below.

That is it. You have a little bit more downloading protection in your online adventures of bootlegging and pirating… Arrrr matey!

The application will start updating the Peer Block application and the selected lists that you choose way back at the beginning.

Once the updates are complete the application will generate a list cache so it can do its thing.

That’s it. The application is now running and blocking what you requested. You can click on the disable button to disable the whole kit and kaboodle or click the allow HTTP to allow web access to an address in your list.

Do you have any other methods of staying safe? We would love to hear about it in the comments!

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on Twitter ? Now you can follow MakeUseOf on Twitter too.

• How To Secure Your D-Link Wireless Router (14)
• Got a Copyright Infringement Notice From ISP? What’s Next (3)
• Protect Your Privacy On P2P With Peer Guardian 2 (29)
• How To Install LimeWire & Use it Without Getting a Virus (10)
• How To Hide Text In Microsoft Word 2007, Reveal It & Protect It (6)

In this article, let us look at Free FLV Converter, a simple freeware application you can use to convert FLV videos to AVI.

Free FLV Converter is developed by Koyote Soft, and can also be downloaded from CNET Downloads. Free FLV converter can download embedded FLV (or SWF) videos directly from the Internet, and can convert FLV to AVI, iPod (MPEG4 or H.264), iPhone, 3GP, PSP, or MP3 audio only. Conversely, it can also convert videos from other formats (DivX, XviD, MpeG, DVD, and AVI) to FLV.

Installation

Download and run the setup program to install the software. It is a light-weight download at 6MB, compared to most other video converters, and does more than just convert videos as we shall see. The only thing you would want to take care of during installation, is to avoid installing the Dealio toolbar. This is a “bloatware” toolbar that is promoted to support this freeware application, but you can easily opt out of installation by deselecting the two checkboxes during setup. Select your preferred language the first time you launch the program.

Convert FLV To AVI

Let’s say you have already downloaded a video in FLV format to your PC and want to convert it to AVI. On the Free FLV Converter toolbar, click the Conversion from FLV button.

This will bring up a Select File Dialog from which you should select the FLV video file you wish to convert. A conversion window opens up showing the file to be converted at the top, and settings to be used for the conversion at the bottom. Click the Convert button at the bottom to convert the file.

You can customize the conversion settings if you wish. You can choose the output format, output quality, and location of the output video file in the Output configuration section. The video and audio sections allow you to set advanced settings for the codec, frame rate, aspect ratio, bit rate, etc. The default settings work fine if you don’t want to dive into technical details.

From this dialog itself, you can click the “+” button at the top to add more files to convert multiple videos in batch mode. The program shows you a preview while converting. The speed of conversion is quite fast, and the program did not slow down my PC or interfere with other applications, thus working very efficiently.

Convert To FLV

In much the same way as converting FLV to other formats, you can also use Free FLV Converter to convert other video formats to FLV. Just click the Conversion to FLV button on the toolbar, select the file to convert, and you get a FLV file that you can embed on your website. You also get a HTML webpage created automatically with the embedded video.

Search Videos

You can use Free FLV Converter to search for videos on popular video sharing websites without opening your browser. Click the Search button on the toolbar to search for videos. You can select websites like YouTube, Google, DailyMotion, MetaCafe, etc. from the Site drop-down list, enter your search terms, and click Search.

The search results are shown in the right pane. You can play, download, or go to that video’s page on the site. You can multi-select and download multiple videos at once.

Download Videos

If you already know the URL for a certain video that you wish to download, click the Tube downloader button on the toolbar. Here you can enter the URL of the video page that you wish to download.

You can also load a text file containing a list of URLs of videos you want to download.

For a freeware application, Free FLV Converter’s feature set is very impressive. Are you familiar with any other freeware FLV to AVI converter? Share with us in the comments!

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• How To Easily Convert Video Files to DVD, MP4, VCD, MPEG, AVI … with VideoSpiritLite (22)
• How To Copy & Edit YouTube Videos On Your Computer (20)
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• vTap – Download videos on your mobile for FREE (10)
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Conceal is meant for use on Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7. What sets it apart from other encryption software is just how easy it is to use and how easy it is to choose the type of encryption that you want to use. Let’s take a look at the software, shall we?

There it is. That’s about as simple and intuitive an interface as one can have for an encrypting/decrypting program. If you have it open and just want to drag files over the lock to encrypt the files, you can do that! The same goes for dragging encrypted files to the key to decrypt them.

If it appears that there is text in the picture above, that shouldn’t be there – you are correct. The application interface is slightly transparent so you can see what is underneath it. I guess that’s an attempt to look cool like a Vista program. Anyway, that’s a minor drawback. For some, I suppose it might be considered a good feature.

Once you drag a file to the lock to be encrypted, this is what you will see:

Just choose a destination for the encrypted file, and provide your password for that file. For added security, you can delete the original file by checking the Delete Original File box. No sense having an encrypted and an unsecured version of the file on the same computer. That kind of defeats the point.

Clicking on the Options button shows you this:

This is where you can determine what kind of encryption you want to use. The author has done a good job by briefly stating the strengths and weaknesses of each method.  If you don’t specify the method you want to use, the program defaults to TripleDES. Again, good thinking by the author. Given choices, the one that should be default should be the most secure choice.

You are then prompted to save your password. Go ahead and click Yes.

Now,  you’ll be asked where you want to save the outcome. Choose wherever works best for you, and click OK.

Once you get to this window, just click OK. The encryption will begin. On the fast encryption. the progress happens so quick that you won’t see it happen.

As all good programs should do, Conceal notifies you when the encryption is done. Just click the OK button to confirm. File secured!

The process is almost identical for unencrypting a file. Just find the file that was encrypted. It should have a file extension of .xcon. Seems ironic to me that something secured should have a file extension that reads aloud as ex-con.

Drag the file to the key side of the Conceal program. A small window will open asking you for your password.

Go ahead and enter the password that you used to encrypt the file. Then click on the link that reads Save and Close. You can also choose an alternate destination to save the decrypted file. However, that’s not necessary for this article.

The decryption happens pretty quick as well. Once that’s done, Conceal presents you with confirmation that it happened. Once again, click the OK button to clear the notification.

It’s that easy! The program works very well, has the basic options that most people would ever need, and, as all of my favourite software is, it’s free!

To be picky, I would like to see some slight changes to the interface, like the placement of the Save and Close. If that were a button placed near the bottom of the window, the flow would be more logical. But, as I said, that’s being picky!

Overall a good piece of freeware that I would recommend.

Conceal

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• Hide & Protect Your Files with Easy File Locker [Windows] (18)
• Keeping Under the Radar and Securing Your PC Files (21)
• How To Hide Text In Microsoft Word 2007, Reveal It & Protect It (6)
• How to Hide Folders Using 7 Free Apps (28)
• Encrypt Sensitive Data with TrueCrypt (19)

[Update: This list is continuously updated ]

These are the essential programs that we recommend you install and keep on your arsenal.

1. Firefox / Chrome (Web Browser)
2. AVG Anti-Virus (Anti-virus Software)
3. Auslogics Disk Defrag (Disk Defragmenter)
4. Glary Utilities (System Maintenance)
5. Malwarebytes (Spyware Removal)
6. IZArc (Universal Archiver / Extractor)
7. Google Picasa Software (Photo Management)
8. doPDF (PDF Printer)
9. Memento (Post-It Notes)
10. xVideoServiceThief (YouTube Video Downloader)
11. Mozy (Backup)
12. Digsby (Multi-protocol Instant Messenger)
13. VLC Media Player (Video Player)
14. Foobar2000 (Music Player)
15. ImgBurn (CD / DVD Image Burner)
16-20. Plus 5 Bonus Programs

1. Firefox / Chrome (Web Browser)

Both Firefox and Google Chrome are excellent browsers. They are both fast, user-friendly and known to be secure. So, which one do you choose? The rule of thumb here is that you should use Firefox if you’re looking to add additional features (i.e. ad blocker, password manager, video downloader, page translator etc.) to your browser.

You can see all add-ons for Firefox at https://addons.mozilla.org/. There are extensions for Google Chrome as well, but the choice is rather limited. See, 10 Cool Extensions for Google Chrome.

2. AVG Anti-Virus (Anti-virus Software)

AVG Free Anti-Virus is the most popular free anti-virus software in the world. It’s also the most downloaded software program according to Download.com.

Most of the MakeUseOf authors use AVG and we highly recommend it to others. It’s easy to use, consumes a relatively small amount of system resources and auto-updates itself with virus definitions on a daily basis. Install it once and it will keep your system secure without your intervention.

For those of you who frequently shop online and do regular online banking, AVG recommends AVG Internet Security. While it’s not free, it does offer complete Internet Protection that will keep you safe even from advanced online threats.

Download AVG Free: http://free.avg.com/gb-en/homepage
Download AVG Internet Security (Free Trial): www.avg.com/gb-en/download

(Platform: Windows only)

3. Auslogics Disk Defrag (Disk Defragmenter)

Auslogics Disk Defrag is a must-have free PC maintenance tool that was designed to cure system sluggishness and prevent crashes caused by disk fragmentation. Windows already comes with its own disk-defragmenter but Auslogics Disk Defrag is considerably faster and much more efficient.

It’s extremely simple to use, does not require any analysis phase and is faster than most of the other disk defragmentation software.

While there are several other free disk defragmenters, Auslogics seems to be the defragmenter of choice according to the poll results on MakeUseOf, Lifehacker and mega tech sites like CNET.

Download: www.auslogics.com/en/software/disk-defrag/overview

(Platform: Windows only)

4. Glary Utilities (System Maintenance)

Glary Utilities is a free system maintenance tool for protecting, cleaning, repairing, and speeding up your PC. It comes with a one-click maintenance option that automatically runs all optimizations and repair jobs with a click of a button.

But the best thing about Glary Utilities is that it integrates over 15 other useful tools that nearly every computer user is likely to make use of. These are:

- Uninstall Manager
- Startup Manager
- Memory Optimizer
- Context Menu Manager
- Registry Defrag Tool
- Track Eraser
- File Shredder
- File Undelete
- File Encrypt/Decrypt Tool
- Disk Space Usage Analysis
- Duplicate File Finder
- Empty Folder Finder
- File Splitter and Joiner

Highly recommended!

Please note, it’s highly recommended that you create a System Restore point when using system maintenance tools like Glary Utilities. This is a precaution to ensure that you can always revert your PC to an earlier state in case something goes wrong unexpectedly.

Note: During the installation process make sure to uncheck the Ask Search toolbar.

Download: www.glaryutilities.com/gu.html?tag=download

(Platform: Windows only)

5. Malwarebytes Anti-Malware (Spyware Removal)

[update: In the original list we recommended the Spyware 360 as a primary tool for fighting spyware. But then we found out that Security 360 was actually using the definition library of Malwarebytes.]

Malwarebytes currently ranks among the top 10 most downloaded software on Download.com. It’s a very simple tool that does an important job, that is protecting your computer from spyware, hijackers, keyloggers and other kind of malicious craplets.

What makes Malwarebytes standout from the pack is its huge library of threats to protect against. That’s exactly what it makes so effective when it comes to detecting spyware that other spyware scanners miss. This same library made the earlier recommended Security 360 a powerful tool.

Malwarebytes may not be as feature-laden as say Spybot Search and Destroy (another good spyware removal tool), which has a ridiculous number of tools, but it is a very lightweight alternative with good spyware coverage.

There are both free and premium versions. The only difference between the two is real time protection. With real-time protection, Malwarebytes will alert you about the spyware before it’s even able to install itself on your system.

Download MalwareBytes (Free): www.malwarebytes.org/mbam.php
Download MalwareBytes (Premium): https://store.malwarebytes.org

(Platform: Windows only)

6. IZArc (Universal Archiver / Extractor)

One archive utility to rule them all. This archiver suppots both popular (ZIP, RAR, ACE, 7-ZIP, TAR etc.) and less popular (IMG, ACE, TZ, GZ, TAZ etc.) archive formats.

Basically this unpacker/archiver gives you everything you get with other popular archivers (ex. Winzip, Winrar etc.) but with additional features and support for a huge number of archive formats. It can decompress archived folders in over 40 formats.

7-ZIP, A, ACE, ARC, ARJ, B64, BH, BIN, BZ2, BZA, C2D, CDI, CAB, CPIO, DEB, ENC, GCA, GZ, GZA, HA, IMG, ISO, JAR, LHA, LIB, LZH, MBF, MDF, MIM, NRG, PAK, PDI, PK3, RAR, RPM, TAR, TAZ, TBZ, TGZ, TZ, UUE, WAR, XXE, YZ1, Z, ZIP, ZOO

That is to say, it supports pretty much every format you’re likely to come across.

There is something else, you can also use the IZArc utility to open CD image files like ISO, BIN, CDI and NRG. Do you know of any other free archiver that can do that?

Note: When installing IZArc make sure to uncheck the “recommended” option to install PalTalk.

Download: http://www.izarc.org/download.html

(Platform: Windows only)

7. Google Picasa Software (Photo Management)

Picasa automatically finds all the photos on your PC, wherever they are, and organizes them in seconds. It’s an excellent photo manager, editor and viewer for your computer.

With Picasa not only you can nicely organize your photos but also fix common problems (i.e. red eyes), add cool effects and even browse photos by people in them. Yes, it includes face recognition!

Plus one really cool thing about it is that regardless of changes you make to your photos on Picasa the original version of each photo always preserved.

Features include:

- create video slideshows and photo collages from your photos.
- organize photos based on the people in them.
- browse photos by folders, albums, people.
- geotag your photos on Google Maps.
- one-click fixes for common problems like red-eye, color, and lighting.
- 12 cool effects to make your best photos look even better.

You can find out more about Picasa by watching this Youtube video. The Google team compiled a getting started guide for Picasa. Highly recommended for new users.

Download: http://picasa.google.com/

(Platform: Windows / Mac / Linux)

8. doPDF (PDF Printer)

Almost everyone once in a while needs to convert documents to PDF. The doPDF is the easiest tool that does exactly that. It installs a virtual printer on your computer that you can select using the print option from any program on Windows.

Whenever you need to convert a web page, Word document, Excel spreadsheet, photo or pretty much anything else to a PDF file just go to the print option in your program and select doPDF from the ‘Printer’ drop-down menu.

You can set the resolution to anything from 72 dpi to 2400 dpi, and the “printed” files are text searchable.

Download: www.dopdf.com

(Platform: Windows only)

9. Memento (Post-It Notes)

Chances are you have never heard about this program before. Memento is a simple bare-bones post-it notes program for your desktop. It’s better than anything else out there because it’s extremely simple and yet a very effective tool.

Whether you want a program to keep track of your tasks or quick note taking, Memento can help. It’s very intuitive to use and consumes very few system resources. Highly recommended!

It’s an excellent program – and I’ve compared many other free ones! I have been using this for the last 5 years and recommend it to everyone. The very first MakeUseOf article was about this app .

It’s also easily transferable from one PC to another, it saves all your notes in Memento.notes file that is stored in the My Documents folder.

Features:

- double click memento icon on the taskbar to create a note
- show/hide notes on the desktop
- keep notes expanded or closed
- notes always remain on top of other windows
- position notes anywhere you like
- instant autosave
- notes are resizable
- randomly makes each note a new color
- make notes transparent

Download: http://www.guyswithtowels.com/downloads.html

(Platform: Windows only)

10. xVideoServiceThief (YouTube Video Downloader)

Almost everyone is on Youtube these days. And the fact that Youtube has more searches than Yahoo is good indication of this. The only issue with Youtube is that there is no option to download videos so that you can watch them on your computer, PSP, iPhone, mobile phone, iPod etc.

Fortunately there are lots of free software for that, and my favorite is xVideoServiceThief. Apart from downloading videos, it can automatically convert the downloaded video file to another format.

xVideoServiceThief can convert videos to several formats, including AVI, MOV, MPEG, DIVX, MP4 and several others.

Moreover, xVideoServiceThief works with other sites as well, not only Youtube. It can also download videos from Yahoo Video, Google Videos, Metacafe, Dailymotion, CollegeHumor etc.

Download: http://xviservicethief.sourceforge.net/index.php?action=downloads

(Platform: Windows / Mac / Linux)

11. Mozy (Backup)

Backups are very important! Here on MakeUseOf we have published dozens of articles explaining why you should always keep a fresh backup of important data. And Mozy is the perfect program for that. It’s an online backup and recovery service that allows you to select files and folders on your computer and safely back them up online.

It’s fully automated, just set it once and it will do the backups without bothering you again. What’s even better, whenever you make changes to individual documents or files within selected folders, your changes will be replicated on your backup copy as well. So your backup always stays up-to-date.

In the case of file corruption, accidental deletion or hardware failure, you may easily restore your backed up files from the web to the original computer or any another computer, be it a Windows or Mac.

Mozy offers both free and premium accounts (only $4.95/month). The only difference between those two is that free account comes only with 2GBs of storage space. It should be more than enough for backing up important files and documents. On the other hand, if you want to backup your music library, photos, videos or maybe an entire drive then we recommend signing up for a premium account.

(Note: Discount for MakeUseOf users. When signing up for premium account use ‘ MAKEUSEOF’ (all caps) promo code to get 10% off.)

Download Mozy (Free): https://mozy.com/registration/free/
Download Mozy (Unlimited): https://mozy.com/registration/unlimited/

(Platform: Windows / Mac)

12. Digsby (Multi-protocol Instant Messenger)

If you chat on a regular basis and are active on social networks then this is a must-have program for you. There is so much this app does that it’s hard to explain it all in a few lines. Firstly, it’s a universal instant messenger that allows you to chat with your friends on MSN, Yahoo, AIM, Google Talk, Facebook, Myspace, ICQ and Jabber, all from a single messenger.

Secondly, it allows you to read and reply to your emails. That’s right folks, whether you have a Gmail, Yahoo or Hotmail account you can receive and reply to emails all from Digsby’s slick interface. Currently Disgby works with Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, AOL/AIM Mail, POP Email, IMAP Mail accounts.

And that’s not all, you may also monitor alerts and set status message notifications for Facebook, Twitter, Myspace and LinkedIN accounts. Pretty cool, huh!

Other less important but still noteworthy features include:

- chat history (with search option)
- file transfer history to keep a log of sent/received files
- a widget for site owners to chat with visitors

(Note: Pay close attention when installing Digsby on your computer and make sure to deselect (selected on default) the additional components you don’t need. Plus, once the app is installed go to the preferences window and disable Digsby research.)

Download: www.digsby.com

(Platform: Windows / Mac / Linux)

13. VLC Media Player (Video Player)

With over 67 million downloads so far and roughly 7 downloads per second it’s one of the most popular video players around.

VLC is a highly portable multimedia player supporting most audio and video formats and can play pretty much any video files you throw at it, including physical media like DVDs. Plus it doesn’t need any external codec, program or codec pack to work.<

The VLC can be used both by beginners as well as expert users for working with video files.

The player can also play Youtube videos, convert video files, play subtitles, etc.

Download: http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

14. Foobar2000 (Music Player)

The foobar2000 is an advanced audio player for Windows and supports pretty much all popular audio formats. This is an audio player of choice for many audiophiles (the reader polls on MakeUseOf and Lifehacker confirm that). But what’s in it for you? Well, leaving aside its rich feature set, there are two things that make it stand out from the crowd.

First, when it comes to the appearance of the player, it’s HIGHLY customizable. There is NO OTHER audio player out there that can be customized as much. The Foobar2000 lets you change everything starting from buttons, layout, background colors, menus to visualization details.

But the best thing about this gem, it needs very little of your system resources when compared to Windows Media Player, iTunes or Winamp.

The Foobar2000 has also plug-ins for iPod support and things like lyrics and album art. There is also a portable version if you prefer to carry it on your thumbdrive.

Download: http://www.foobar2000.org/download

(Platform: Windows only)

15. ImgBurn (CD / DVD Image Burner)

There are many reasons we need a simple, fast way to burn disks. ImgBurn is a CD/DVD/HD-DVD/Blu-ray burning application that is fast, lightweight, and completely free.

With ImgBurn you can:

- backup your data or media files to DVD.
- backup your DVD movies to your PC.
- create Audio CDs from any music files such as MP3, WAV.
- create a duplicate copy of any DVD or music CD
- create video discs (DVD / HD DVD / Blu-ray) playable in your DVD player

ImgBurn supports a variety of image formats and almost all types of discs, so you don’t need to look any further for your disc burning needs. There is also a portable version that you can carry with you on your USB drive. For additional details see the MakeUseOf ImgBurn review here.

(Platform: Windows / Linux)

Download: http://www.imgburn.com/index.php?act=download

BONUS (+ 5 programs)

16. Revo – Free powerful uninstaller for Windows. It can uninstall programs that you are not able to remove using Windows’ default program manager.

17. OpenOffice – Free alternative to Microsoft Office. Though requires some adjustments to program settings before it can fully replace the Microsoft Office.

18. Foxit – This one is basically a lightweight replacement to Adobe PDF reader. With Foxit you may launch PDF documents as fast as notepad files.

19. Spyware Terminator – A compliment to the above mentioned Malwarebytes. It’s not as comprehensive but comes with real-time malware detection and fast daily scans.

20. Portable Apps – A huge collection of free programs that you can carry on your USB thumbdrive. The suite includes several of the above apps, plus many more. Carry your favorite computer programs along with all of your bookmarks, settings, email and more with you where ever you go. Use them on any Windows computer without leaving any personal data behind.

So there you go, the top 15 that you should have on your system and use on a frequent basis. Since everyone is different with different needs, you will probably disagree with us on some of these choices. If so, head on down to the comments section below and let us know which apps you would put in their place and why.

If you like this article, please spread it around and share it with your friends. It took us us a while to get it done and test all the apps thoroughly.

[Update: This list is continuously updated]

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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This is why we, the neighborhood geeks, prefer wallpaper applications, more specifically wallpaper rotator applications.

There are a multitude of wallpaper applications available – most freeware – but almost none as diverse as Wally.

Wally – The Wallpaper Rotator

Wally is one of those ‘wallpaper applications’. It aggregates pictures and wallpapers from a variety of sources and flips through them while you’re working. If you set it up right, you’ll never have to worry about searching for a fresh wallpaper again. You’ll have one – every new day, hour or even minute.

The wallpaper rotator application is open-sourced and available for all operating systems; it won’t matter to Wally if you’re a Mac, PC or Linux fanatic. I’ve also tested it for Windows 7, and it works like a charm.

Wally beautifully integrates in the dock taskbar. By right-clicking the icon, a list of options will enfold. The ones you’ll want to use is Play/Pause (to initiate and terminate the wallpaper rotations) and Next photo (if you don’t like the sight). If you’re really fond of a certain wallpaper you can also save it to your disk or explore the source.

Wallpaper Sources

But the real power of Wally over other wallpaper rotator applications is its incredibly wide variety of image sources. Where others are often targeted at a single wallpaper database or image search engine, Wally supports no less than ten image sites. You can create custom searches, or load several local image directories.

To add one of those online image searches, open the settings window and navigate to the relevant search engine in the sidebar and press Add. You’ll be asked for a little basic information.

Add the words you want to search for. I simply added ‘widescreen wallpaper’ (without the quotation marks), but you can search for cars, Apple iPhone wallpapers, or whatever you want. At the right of the screen, use the drop-down menu to classify your search (it will search all words as a default).

At the bottom you’ll see another drop-down menu. If you don’t want any pornographic material to appear on your desktop, leave it as be. Otherwise – yeah, I think you’ll figure it out.

Additional Settings

Going down the left sidebar, you’ll see another ’settings’ tab. There are some other options you might like to configure. For instance, if you enjoy using Wally, I suggest you enable ‘Play automatically on application start’ and ’start automatically when system starts’. Other interesting options are ‘Choose in random order’ and ‘Only use landscape-oriented photos’. What these settings will do is self-explanatory.

At the top of the screen, you can also configure the rotation frequency – in other words, how often you want the background to be changed – and the background color. Default is set at 2 minutes, but most people will prefer a little more sporadic rotation.

Did you enjoy Wally? Tell us in the comments if you know of any other wallpaper rotator software!

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So you have the last episode of the Sopranos to watch and no way to get it to play on your DVD player? I will help you learn how to burn mkv files to DVD with a free application!

The application is called E.M. Free MKV Video2Dvd V3.10 (Freeware). It can be downloaded from here. Once you download and install it you will be ready to convert and burn your MKV files to a DVD directly or to an ISO file to burn later on. Either which way you will be on your way to watching your video file in no time.

You will then choose between Easy Mode and Advanced Mode. The easy mode is well um….easy! So that is the way we went. If you need to modify the menus, chapters, subtitles or other good stuff choose the advanced mode option.

Hit OK and you will see the program’s main interface. This is where you will drag and drop your MKV file (or files) to be converted to a DVD. It looks like this:

Locate your MKV file in Windows Explorer and drag and drop the file in the white portion of the window above. Repeat the process for any other files you want in the same compilation. Could it be any easier? Yeah well they could do it for you right! But this is pretty damn easy.

Once you get your files in there can you guess what we do next?

If you said hit the Burn Now button – shame on you Make Use of reader!  We should look at the settings before burning! If you don’t want to hit Burn Now choose your output files as ISO or burn to DVD and you are done.

You will see choices for NTSC and PAL on the TV system pull down menu on the left hand side. And then on the right you will see the display aspect ratio. You can drop that down to choose widescreen or normal old TV options on the aspect ratio. 4:3 is normal for those of you who don’t know. You can also hit the change profile button to see the pre-configured profiles for quality. I left mine on the Automatic adjustment setting. You can choose the best setting for yourself and obviously the worse the quality the more you can fit on the disk.

Now you are ready to burn. Hit OK on the settings screen and Burn Now on the main interface. From there you will see your two options. One for a DVD disk burn and another for a straight ISO image. You can burn the ISO later.

Once you select your burn now preference you will see the progress of the burn. My video was just a sample 5 minute clip and it finished almost instantly.

I saw this and knew I was done. I now had a ISO I could burn. If I had a DVD burner in this machine I would have burned directly.

How do you deal with MKV files? Share your thoughts with us in the comments!

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One of the coolest memories I have as a kid is when my brother and I would copy BASIC programs from the computer magazines of the day (1980’s) into the old Franklin 64 desktop computer with one floppy drive and a whopping 64k of RAM. I’ll never forget when we finished typing the last line of that first program and then entered the command to RUN – how the screen started flashing characters and the miniature speaker beeped through a pathetic rendition of “Dance of the Sugarplum Fairy.”  Pure magic.  I was only 9 years old, but at that moment I was hooked on computers for life.

For anyone who has never created an application, it’s hard to describe the feeling of creating something from nothing. Programming is a lot like any other form of art in that way, except instead of the canvas we’ve got the computer screen, and instead of the paint brushes we have the various programming platforms.

Here at MakeUseOf, we believe in the importance of simple learning tools that can teach complex skills, such as computer programming. For example, Guy covered how you can learn to write a program with SmallBasic, and he also covered a cool application called Scratch that can teach kids how to program. Today, I’d like to cover another innovative software application called Alice that can teach kids how to program in object oriented languages.

Alice 3D Programming – What It Is & What It Isn’t

Alice 3D is a programming environment offered by Carnegie Mellon University. It’s provided for free as a public service, through the funding of various programming  and computer giants, such as Electronic Arts, Sun Microsystems, the National Science Foundation and other major organizations.

Alice is not a scripting tutorial where students will learn about the correct syntax used in various programming languages. It isn’t about developing the best structured For Loop. Instead, Alice provides students with a virtual world – a 3D modeling environment where students can learn how putting together various components, which each individually have their own properties, can create a larger, working project. The 3D environment is meant to show students, in a simple way, how the concept of object-oriented programming works.

The software itself has a built in tutorial, which makes sense because it’s main purpose is to serve as a teaching tool. The first screen allows students to choose from one of the tutorials, open a recent world they created, see examples or open a world they’ve saved on the computer. The option I want to show today is how a student can start from one of the available templates and create their own 3D animation. For this example I’ll go with the space scene.

If you’re a programmer, the first thing you’ll notice are the panes on the left side of the screen where all of the objects and the associated properties, methods and functions are listed. The interface is so intuitive that students don’t even need to understand what objects and methods are, just by adding objects and using the interface to manipulate them, they’ll be slowly learning the concept of object oriented programming. Adding an object to the screen is as simple as pressing the green “Add Objects” button.

In the object gallery, students have dozens of very fun “objects” to choose from. These include characters, machines, vehicles and even special effects like fire and thunderstorms.

In this scene, I’ve added the moon surface, a lunar lander and an astronaut. As you can see in the upper left window, every object is made up of many components, each individual objects with their own properties, methods and functions. You can control any one of these by dragging and dropping the component into the programming area at the bottom of the programming interface.

When you do drag the object in, a pop-up screen shows you all of the available methods and functions you can use to program the behavior of that particular object. This is similar to how, in most object oriented programming languages, the programming platform typically offers this same feature. Once you drill down through the available functions and select the one you want, it gets inserted into the program.

The program itself can be as simple or as complex as you like. As you can see here, it’s possible to create intricate and highly functional programs by using If/Else statements, While loops and other standard conditional statements that are a part of most programming languages today. Within a few minutes of playing around with this addictive learning program, I created a 3D animation where the astronaut moved closer to his lunar lander and waves “goodbye.”  The camera pans in closer, and then as the lunar lander launches without him on board, he says, “Uh-oh.”

The exciting thing about this fantastic free learning tool from Carnegie Mellon University is the fact that it can be a very simple learning tool for very young kids to learn basic programming skills, or it can be a useful tool for even high school kids to generate very intricate and ingenious programmed 3D worlds.

In either case, this is one of the best programs that teach computer programming to kids that encourages children to engage with their computers in ways that they may never have considered – with a depth of understanding kids just never really achieve when all they do is chat on IM and update their status on Twitter and Facebook. Alice helps kids understand the heart and soul of what makes computer technology and programming so cool.

Would you ever consider using Alice in your own school or as part of your curriculum? Is this a learning tool you would consider sharing with your own kids? Share your insight and experiences in the comments section below.

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Personally, I find that hiding the more distracting windows actually increases my efficiency while I use my computer. In fact, having less on the screen at one time means no more absent minded glances at the taskbar, no getting lost on facebook, and a whole lot more concentration.

OuttaSight is an excellent free solution to the common time management or privacy problems that computer users face today. This lightweight application allows users to hide active windows either by the push of a button, or automatically when they are run. While it is only stated as supporting up through Windows 2000, it works perfectly fine on XP and Vista.

OuttaSight is a Windows desktop utility that hides running application windows to un-clutter the desktop, quickly hide private work, or secure your applications while you’re away from your computer.

Features

• Hide running programs with the push of a button
• Set programs to automatically hide when they start up
• Hide OuttaSight from the taskbar
• Password protect OuttaSight to prevent changes
• Hide/Show all windows with a single hotkey
• Ability to hide windows to the system tray (instead of hiding them completely)

Using OuttaSight

The first thing you’ll notice when you download and run OuttaSight is that it’s very simple looking. This is one of my favorite aspects of the software – it’s very clear, lightweight, and efficient.

First, it is important to personalize the utility. Go to “Hot Keys” and decide what you want your shortcuts for different actions to be. My personal set up used F10 as the hide window hotkey, CTRL+F11 to hide all windows, and CTRL+F12 to show them all.  While you are setting things up, keep in mind the reasons you got OuttaSight in the first place. Do you want it to be very easy and intuitive to show and hide windows, or would you like to be the only person that knows how to do it?

Second, you’re going to want to decide how you want programs to hide. Would you like them to disappear altogether (for secrecy) or minimize to the tray instead? If you are tired of your taskbar being cluttered, but do not mind people seeing that the programs are running, you may want to tell OuttaSight to minimize them to the tray as shown below.

To do this, navigate to the Options tab and check off  “Hide windows to system tray“. If this is not checked, the default behavior is to completely hide windows.

Next, you’ll need to decide if there are some programs you would like to automatically hide whenever they start. These programs could consist of automatic virus scans, annoying startup messages, or other things of that nature. If for some reason you like to start up applications with the intention of not viewing them at all, you can do that too .

To set up a list of programs that will hide when they run, simply navigate to the “Auto-Hide” tab and start adding programs.

Note that you can specify whether you would like the program to hide completely, or run in the tray instead. To view a window that has minimized to the tray, simply double click it.

Finally, analyze things with your privacy in mind. You have the option to password protect OuttaSight. That means that even if someone knows it is running, they can’t use it without entering your password. That also means that your hidden programs remain hidden no matter what. To prevent others from seeing OuttaSight you have the option of hiding it from appearing even in the taskbar. If you do this, make sure you remember the hotkey to pull up OuttaSight – otherwise you’ll have to reboot your computer to access it again.

Hopefully this article was informative. I’d love to hear your thoughts. Feel free to post your comments and let me know if you found a better free alternative. Overall I’d like to hear what you have to say about this concept in general – do you use software like this and why?

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We have reviewed quite a few online storage services in the past. Microsoft’s offering Skydrive is right up there with others when it comes to storage space, offering a staggering 25 GB of online space. In addition we also showed you how you can edit your Office documents stored in Windows Live Skydrive with Office Webapps.

One of the most annoying aspects of nearly all online storage solutions is that you have to use a web browser to upload and manage files. Some of them offer Java applets to upload but there are a number of other operations that you may want to perform on the files you have in your account. Doing them in a web browser is generally not the best way to do such things. It would be nicer if you could integrate Skydrive into the Windows shell. Wouldn’t it?

Skydrive Explorer is one such application that lets you do just that. With Skydrive Explorer installed you can easily access your Skydrive account just like any other drive from inside My Computer. A meagre 1.23 MB download, Skydrive Explorer installs in a jiffy. Once installed you will see a Skydrive Explorer System folder listed inside My Computer.

Double click on it and you will be prompted to log into your Skydrive account. You can then view the contents of your Skydrive account just like any other folder without having to use the web browser.

You should note that folders may take some time to load since Skydrive Explorer needs to send a request and then process it before it can display the relevant information to you. You should therefore avoid working directly with files stored in your Skydrive folders. The right way would be create a local copy, edit it and then copy it back to Skydrive. That said, the performance is acceptable and a large part of it would be attributed to your connection speed.

Skydrive Explorer lets you perform almost all the file/folder management tasks that you can need:

• You can create, delete, rename multiple folders in a single go.

• Copy files to Skydrive folders from your hard drive which would then be uploaded to your Skydrive account or copy the contents to your hard drive from the account.

• You can also right click on any folder and then copy its URL to the clipboard. Visiting the URL in any web browser would take you to your Skydrive account, right to where the file is located. You can easily use this functionality to share files with others by adding them to the “Public” folder.
• Create shortcuts to a Skydrive folder on your desktop for quick access

With a little effort you can easily use Skydrive to backup your important files. You can use software like the previously mentioned Directorysync pro or Freefilesync to keep two folder synchronized with each other. Let’s say you synchronize the Documents folder on your Skydrive account with the Documents folder for your user account in Windows. Now changes to any file or folder will be automatically communicated to your Skydrive account – just keep in mind the 50MB file limit!

You can also have a look at previously mentioned Gladinet and see which one would you like to use in case you are looking for a way to access your Skydrive. Which is your favorite online storage service and how do you access it?

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It’s safe to assume that you have more than one browser installed on your system. I have five. Though we may not use more than two, all of us suffer from a bit of browser fancy. As soon as developers announce a launch of a browser that promises to speed up the web for us, we click on the download link. That’s not a problem, but keeping the same set of bookmarks across the browsers is.

Xmarks is a nifty solution to migrate bookmarks across the world. But for now, it supports Firefox and IE (with Safari in Mac OS). The one for Google Chrome is in the works. The browser that’s missing is Opera. That leaves us with a job half done. Bookmark syncing using Delicious and its bookmarklet tool is one roundabout. But it’s public by default and you have to log-in to change it to private. So, it’s still not as easy a click.

Transmute attempts to fill the gap by letting us migrate bookmarks across all the browsers.

Why Is it Such a Headache to Migrate Bookmarks?

Not very much so, but every browser has its own way of storing its bookmarks. Most bookmarks are stored as HTML files. Opera uses an .adr format. Firefox 3.5+ too differs in that respect as it stores its bookmarks in a Places.sqlite file which is a database file. The bookmarks.html files that used to hold all the links in the earlier versions had been discontinued from Firefox 3 onwards.

Does this create problems in migration of your bookmarks to other browsers still using the HTML formats? No, because Firefox, just like all the others has an import export utility under the Bookmarks Library that allows you to convert the database format to the HTML one for it to be picked up by the other browsers.

The imported bookmarks also get added to the existing bookmarks usually in a separate folder with the name of the browser that was the source. For instance, imported Firefox bookmarks get located in a folder that’s marked Netscape. Imported bookmarks in Chrome get added under Other Bookmarks. You can then manually shift the bookmarks around into any other root folder.

Next, you have to manually weed out the duplicates by going through each and every link. This is where the headache can start.

Transmute Offers Better (& Quicker) Control Over Bookmarks

Why such a name? Is it because it does the job of bookmark transfer ‘silently’ and without fuss? Perhaps, because the Transmute interface is hassle free.

1. You have two dropdowns – Source and Target. You can use the path field to select the location of the bookmarks file for the individual browsers in case you ever changed the default location.
2. Use the dropdowns to select the respective source and target browsers. There are 12 supported browsers and I am guessing that should cover most of what the world uses. The 13th placed XBEL format (XML Bookmark Exchange Language) covers a few other browsers like Galeon, Arora and Midori which use this one to store their bookmarks.



3. Transmute gives you two more options to migrate bookmarks – Overwrite Collections and Backup Collections.
   • Duplication can be handled if you select the overwrite option as it will plant a fresh copy of the bookmark links (but will also remove the older but unique bookmarks in the target).
   • Backup collections are a safety net in case something goes wrong with the conversion process and you want your old bookmark collection back. By default Transmute timestamps and backs up your bookmark collections before changes are made, providing extra safety.

   

   • To restore the old order, just browse to the bookmark folder location and rename the time stamped backup file to the default file name.
4. Close the source and target browsers and press Start. An alert box pops up and with your agreement the transfer begins. A preview window is the last stop before the conversion starts.

And finishes! That’s it; you can migrate bookmarks across multiple browsers without the hassle of import and export.

Transmute also comes in a PRO flavor giving some extra bookmark selection controls and co-ordination with services like Google Bookmarks and Delicious. But for the simple task of keeping all my browsers with the same bookmarks, the free version more than stands up. If you hate installing things, then there’s a portable option too.

Having the same bookmarks across all your browsers is such a basic need and keeping them all updated with each other is where Transmute steps in with a speedy click.

Transmute v1.63 is Windows only and requires Microsoft .NET Framework. It may also run on Linux and Mac OS X with Mono Framework 2.0 or higher installed.

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You can turn your portable computer or even your desktop computer into a full featured Kindle. It may not look like a Kindle but it can let you read, bookmark and annotate your eBooks.

Is it sounding too good to be true?

Well it’s not and it is here to stay! Why would Amazon want to limit their sales to only people who have shelled out the dough for a Kindle?

So with out further ado here it is in all it’s glory – the Kindle for PC, with the Mac version on it’s way!

Let’s take a look at how to download, install and start reading eBooks. Your Kindle for PC will also let you download and pay for books as well. But as we cover free software here we will focus on some free eBook downloading and reading.

I started by downloading the software from here. After the download is completed, run the installer and install the application. Then you will see a screen that looks like this:

You will need to give them a email account or your Amazon account’s email address to speed things along. And you will HAVE to have a credit card on the account. You will not need to buy anything but a credit card is required.

Fill in the required information:

Go ahead and click the register button. That will bring you to your Kindle home screen. On it in the upper right hand corner you will see this:

If you already have purchased or have books in your account they will show up here. If not, hit the shop in the Kindle store button next to the Menu button. From here you can buy or download free books. The ones on the home page are their best sellers and cost money!

But let’s search for some free books. Do you see the search box at the top? Go ahead and hit the go button:

That will return all the results in Kindle Land. Then when you have your search results lets sort them by price lowest to highest like so:

If you see something that catches your eye grab it. If not search for your favorite old world authors. I chose Charles Dickens as you can see below:

Then I went ahead and clicked on Oliver Twist, circa mid 1800’s. To download it click on the Buy now with 1 click orange button. It will deliver to your PC version of the Kindle by default. If you have other devices select the appropriate one.

Then you will see a thank you screen. Next go back to your Kindle screen and hit the sync and check for new items (F5) button as you can see below:

That will get the ball rolling…

Yeah! I have a book! Click on it to start reading…

The right and left buttons will turn your pages. And your other options are bookmark and note. Here is what the text looks like:

Hit the bookmark button to store a bookmark. To retrieve it hit the show notes and marks button:

You can add notes by dropping down that box to say notes and type away! Do you love it or hate it?

We would love to hear how you consume eBooks. Let us know in the comments!

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There are some amazing deals to be had through this site. For me, the problem is that I often forget to check the site everyday. It only takes a second and you never know when that must-have item is going to come up and you’ll finally be able to afford it! In trying to find some way to track W00t better, like a Google widget or desktop app, I stumbled across Wootalyzer. But beware, it is free, it is incredibly easy to use AND it tracks far more than W00t’s one day sales. There are other sites that do the same sort of thing – every day!

Let’s get started with Wootalyzer before I get into these other sites. Here’s how it’s done. Go on over and download the Wootalyzer installer. Install is a snap with an ordinary one-click type install. Here’s how it gets weird. It’s even easier to use than it is to install.

Once it’s installed you are presented with all the documentation that you will need to use this application effectively. I’m serious – take a look!

That’s all there is to it! Really, how else could I say that?

Next, you are given the option to choose basic user mode or a power-mode that people who have shopped the one-day-sale sites would find more useful perhaps. I wouldn’t know, since I don’t use them that often. That’s the point of getting the program.

I do know what a woot-off is, however I don’t know what a BOC is and I can only guess that they use the word monkey to mean something other than a real monkey. So I went with the regular mode.

Okay, so that’s a pretty sweet deal at W00t!. I don’t really need a recording studio (or do I?) so I’ll pass on that one. However, this shows you how the thing works. Clicking on the View Item button takes you to the page that has all the details about the equipment. The field that reads In Stock tells you whether they have more of the item or not. As you can see there are still some of these in stock. Clicking on the Buy Item button takes you directly to that item’s checkout page so you can seal the deal. The clock looking area is just that – a countdown clock to let you know how long the deal is valid for.

What I think is amazing is the button that reads Woot! When I clicked on it, my shopping universe expanded!

Did you see that? Under the General/Tech category there are all these other sites with timed deals as well! You should recognize at least 3 or 4 of them, such as eBay, Amazon, Buy.com, and Newegg. I went through and each one has a pretty decent deal on it. Maybe not something I need right now, but I’ll keep checking!

Under Other there are two categories that could really get me into trouble. One is DiamondShark and the other is ChronoShark. As you might guess, the former is for jewelry and the latter is for watches. I like to buy my wife jewelry and I have an unhealthy obsession with watches. Check this out:

See that? A Lucien Picard watch that retails elsewhere for around $900. Is it a knock off? I don’t know. But it would be worth checking out.

With Wootalyzer, you can set alarms with sound for different items, so you know when a new item is on, or when it’s about to run out. This is just a shopaholic’s dream.

At first I thought Wootalyzer would help me to save money, but if I keep spending on all these other great sites as well, it’s a less-than-zero sum game. I’m sure I would overspend. That doesn’t mean you will. You probably have a stronger will than I do. Or will you succumb to the world of low-priced products as well?

Wootalyzer

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The game was Texas Hold ‘Em, without a shadow of doubt the most famous gameplay variant spawned. It is easy to learn, simply addictive but inexplicably difficult to master. I digress.

During the tournament, we faced a minor speed bump. In Texas Hold ‘Em, blinds increase periodically and since this was a tournament, we decided that the blinds would go up every 15 minutes. Sure, that sounded sensible at the time but there wasn’t a clock in the room and none of us was wearing a watch. We had to resort to using our mobile phones to tell us the time. Every so often, one of us yelled, “Time to double the blinds, guys!” Personally, I considered that pretty inconvenient — especially so when you’re in a competition, it was distracting.

At the end of the tournament, one of the players suggested that we should bring a clock to time the blind increments. My mind immediately went, “What? A clock?” My innate geekiness wouldn’t allow myself to succumb to utilizing what I can only describe as “wall art”. I was positive that there was an app, somewhere out there in vastness of the internet, made for this specific purpose.

And there is. It sure took me a rather long time to find it, though.

It’s called Old Timer (a cunning play on words, I have to admit) and it’s available for Mac and PC because it runs on Flash. Ironically, I didn’t actually set out to look for a poker timer, per se — to be brutally honest, I didn’t think that an app like that existed. I initially searched for a timer application that would display a pre-set countdown and play an alarm once it reached zero. That proved much harder to find.

Old Timer is the perfect companion to a self-hosted, homebrew poker game. As soon as I launched the app, it gave me the option of running in full-screen. Instantly, I knew this was the one I was looking for.

The app is immensely simple to use. You are allowed three different modes of gameplay — all day, average or multi-table. Since my tournament consisted of several different tables, that was the mode I selected. Then, I had to enter my customized blind increment levels, the number of players, length of each round before the blinds double, cost of buy-in and rebuys, and finally the starting amount of chips distributed to each player; then hit Play.

Cleverly, Old Timer calculates the total number of chips in play and how much there is in the pot. But what I’m really pleased with is the timer! It’s a gorgeous white on black display with large fonts that everyone can see from across the room. What’s more, it shows how much the blinds should be at any given moment. Oh yes, it pays to be a geek!

In the final minute before the blinds increase, Old Timer plays a short soundclip to indicate that there is less than a minute left. It also displays the values of the blinds in the subsequent round. When the timer reaches zero, there is a wonderfully posh indication that new blinds are in play; and the timer automatically resets itself for the new round. It’s just perfect.

Old Timer will work on both Mac and Windows and there is no other way to say this – it is the perfect blinds timer for a home hold’em game. If you know any better texas hold em blinds timer, I’m all ears; suggest them in the comments.

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Personally I’ve never felt quite at home in Word to write a story. Instead, I’ve always been using creative writing suites or pre-production packages.

That’s right, there is screenwriting software that’s specifically designed to help you formulate ideas and work in a simple, but flexible creative environment.

Celtx

I’ve written an article about yWriter in the past, a tool that would help you with outlining and working on your stories. A creative writing suite, if you will. Celtx is different. Oh sure, Celtx will be able to help you with your creative writing, but it’ll do so much more.

Celtx is screenwriting software that aims to aid in all media pre-production. So what does this mean? Whether you’re working on a novel, a film, a comic, a radio or podcast broadcasting, or even a video game, Celtx will help you put down those ideas and help you plan them in a quick and efficient manner.

With all types of features and support, you won’t have to jump over and through between five different screenwriting software applications anymore (if you even used any). Everything can be written, planned and colaborated from within Celtx.

Below we’ll take a look at some of the most prominent features in the application. Believe me, if you’re in the creative business, this is one application you’ll want to add to your arsenal.

Writing Suite

For the storytellers, Celtx comes equipped with the same basic tools you’d expect and a few more advanced ones as well. With a place to list your characters, locations and the like, you don’t have to worry about losing track again. When outlining a story, you can also use the storyboard feature you’ll be discussing below. One cooks with the ingredients at hand, and in our case there’s a buffet already laid out.

One of the most important aspects of Celtx – and its greatest features – is the ease with which one can embed other types of media. If you feel the need to add a picture, drawing or movie fragment to your work, or even an mp3, you can do so with a few clicks of the mouse. One of the reasons I prefer to use the Celtx screenwriting software sis that it doesn’t try to force you into certain ‘development roads’. You can use your own creative way to get at your destination.

In the writing category, Celtx comes with a few different editor flavors: Screenplay, stageplay,  AV scripts, audio play, comic book and text. It doesn’t matter in what branch you’re working, Celtx does not discriminate.

Storyboards

I have already mentioned the storyboards. Although you can indeed use them when you’re writing a novel, they’re much more commonly used in film production.

Create different sequences and easily add individual pictures and drawings, or even do a batch import. Label and narrate your pictures to create a detailed and intricate storyline. If you want, you can even specify the camera shot you intend to use.

Drag and drop groups of images to change the order of events. When you’re done (for the moment), print the pages or share them with your partners. If you want you can even play them in a full screen diashow.

Download Celtx for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux at Celtx

Believe me, this doesn’t even begin to describe what Celtx can do. I’ve been using a lot of software, but this is certainly one of the most amazing screenwriting software suites I’ve ever seen. If you’ve got something to add, or are left with an unanswered question, head for the comments section below.

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But that’s not all – no sir re bob! QMMAnder is not a one hit wonder! You can also have two separate listing types going on at the same time. Qmmander is written in C++ and uses Qt, a cross-platform application and GUI framework from Nokia. The Google Code page says that the application is buggy but I have not run into any issues yet.

You can have one window preview showing a detail listing so you can sort by file size, while in the right pane you have big icons so you can easily recognize the file icons you are looking for. The software is also portable and can (should) be run from a USB or thumb drive.

A person’s Explorer tells a lot about them. If you are using the built in Windows Explorer it shows that you do not like to tweak but if you are using something like this – it shows you think outside the box. That’s not just because I am a geek right?

Let’s see what QMMAnder can do! When you first launch the application you will be seeing double – the same thing on both sides, as you can see below:

Let’s fix that and make them two different drives You can see this view below:

Yeah yeah, we all know you can sort by each column by simply clicking on the headers but let’s check out the program’s other options. As we said before, you can change each view. Here is an example:

You change the view on each item by selecting a pane and then clicking on one of these buttons in your toolbar:

The buttons are as follows: details, list, little symbols, big symbols, directory tree or split horizontally instead of vertically (respectively). You can also change these from the options menu as you can see below:

You can also swap the left side with the right or vice versa as well as refresh or switch which side is active. Let’s check out how the horizontal split looks. This seems like it would be a better view for me:

And that is my view! Wow I love it – the detailed listing on top and the tree view on the bottom. This Windows explorer alternative is very versatile and uses very little memory.

What do you guys use for a file browser? I know that Make Use of readers aren’t using Explorer – are you? We would love to hear about what you are using in the comments – so leave us a comment!

Oh and if you do hit any bugs leave them in the comments as well so we can all bombard the author with them! Karl Gechlik over and out.

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But for argument’s sake, let’s say you are the Human Resources manager and you have an Excel chart of everyone’s salary – that should not be stored on the network and if the file falls in the wrong hands, the consequences could be severe. But if you were able to hide that drive from prying eyes even if they are able to circumvent your security, you will be safe.

Let us take a look at No Drives Manager, an application you can use to hide drives. You can grab the download from this link on SourceForge directly or from the users page on SourceForge here.

The application does not need to be installed and can be run from a memory stick. What the application does is modify the registry so you don’t have to! Take a look at the GUI.

The interface is very intuitive and easy to use. There are drive letters listed along the top drives A: through Z:. If the drive has been hidden, it will have a check box next to it. Chances are starting out no drives will be selected. You can hit the Hide all drives button to hide all your drives. But more likely you will want to hide a single drive. Let’s see how to do that.

Here is what my Explorer has to say about my current drives on my system:

Let’s say, I want to hide my D: drive aka WhosYourDaddy. I simply check the box next to the letter D. The Binary and decimal settings will be auto-populated and you will not need to mess with them. If you want to use this application to teach yourself how to hide drives manually – you can use this data to do so.

After you choose the drive you want to hide, you have to hit the Write current setting to the registry button. That will tell you that you need to log off and back on to see your changes.

I am logging off to complete my task. OK, I am back and logged back in. Now let us take a look at my Windows Explorer – My Computer again:

I feel like a cheap magician! Wow, look it has disappeared! And with a wave of my magic stick I can make it re-appear. Well, a click of the Run button that is…

This exercise will show you that the drive is hidden but shortcuts and typing in a path or direct file path will take you to where you need to go as you can see below.

Un-doing it is just as easy concealing the drive. Bring the application back up, then uncheck the box next to the drive letter you hid – the D: drive in my case. And write your modifications back to the registry using the Write current setting to the registry button. After you log out and back in again your drive will be magically restored. We have tried doing this with the Windows tool diskpart – but we wound up corrupting data so this is far less risky!

Do you have an easier way of doing this? We would love to hear about it in the comments, come on don’t be shy!

No Drives Manager.

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Go ahead and download the plug-in files and either upload them via FTP or use the automatic plug-in uploader via your Wordpress wp-admin console. You can see my experience below. I logged in to WP-admin, I hit the plug-ins menu option on the left hand side. Then I clicked Add. I choose the upload option and pushed the browse button. After navigating to my plugins directory where I downloaded the Wordpress exploit scanner plugin to, I was able to hit the Install now button.

While it is installing you can see it’s progress on your screen like so.

Hit the ‘Activate plugin’ button and you are ready to go. You can verify that the plugin is actually active by scrolling through the active plugin list. It should look like this:

Once it is successfully active, you will have a new menu item listed directly under your Dashboard menu item. Click on it to get down to business.

Once you click on the link for the Wordpress exploit scanner, it will start querying your database for all of your files. What it checks is as follows:

1. Modified Core Wordpress File – this is when a hacker modifies system files to have Wordpress do their bidding like injecting code into posts or even serving up malware. You need to be very cautious about this. Thankfully, this came up as Hooray! None of your core wordpress files have been modified! I am thankful for things like this as I will not have to reinstall Wordpress!
2. Suspicious strings. It searches for iFrames – unfortunately I use iFrames on my site for various reasons so I had to scrutinize the entries below. Hackers use iFrames to inject content or ads into your site.

I read through the 1500 entries or so with iFrames and thankfully they were all pointing right back at my site. The attack that I corrected before actually injected these iFrames into my site to show my users Viagra ads! Freaking hackers! It actually got me unlised briefly from Google Searches. But after going over my results with a fine-tooth comb, I am at ease.

Did your search result in any unexpected modified files or some nasty code injected? We would love to hear about it and I would love to lend my expertise in helping out hacked Wordpress owners.

Hit us up in the comments, bloggers – We are here for ya! The plugin author’s website can be found at here.

Wordpress Exploit Scanner

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How do you offer such a service for these Internet latecomers? It’s easy, you offer online tech support that’s available whenever you’re online (and you and I both know that’s pretty much all the time.) Here at MakeUseOf, we love chat services. Tim offered a few cool ways to add chat to your website, and MUO also covered Olark, a live chat widget for your website.

Today, in the spirit of my usual theme of ways to earn extra income, I would like to offer another easy business idea – using the free LiveZilla chat system in combination with Paypal to sell your expertise in the form of online PC support. Excited?  I know I am – and it’s so easy you’ll be asking yourself why you didn’t think of doing this before now!

Using LiveZilla to Sell Online PC Support

LiveZilla is a freeware live support software package that you install on both your web host and your PC. Note that you don’t have to install any software on the web server itself, you only need to copy files over to your web hosting account – so there’s no need to set up your own web server to make it work. If you have a web hosting account, you’re good to go. There is one drawback to the software for our particular use. While it’s the best free software available for offering online PC support, it doesn’t provide any way to process payment for that service. That’s okay, because I’ll show you how you can integrate Paypal into the process so your website visitors can pay for the online PC support before the chat takes place. But first, you need to set up LiveZilla on your blog or website.

When you first download and install the LiveZilla software to your PC or laptop, it will initially launch the admin software. This is where you can set up and configure the LiveZilla service. The first step is to install LiveZilla Server on your web host. The process is made simple by the fact that LiveZilla will FTP the files up to your host automatically – all you have to do is select “Create new LiveZilla Server.”

On the next screen, create your administrator ID and password. Write it down or do whatever you have to do to remember it, because this is the account that you’ll use to create all other IDs that can use your LiveZilla Server – such as members of a technical support team. When you click next, you’ll be faced with a choice to FTP files or copy to your local server. If you’re setting up LiveZilla on your local machine, go ahead and select the local option. Most users will want to click on FTP.

Most of you who have used FTP before know the drill – enter your web host FTP user name and FTP address. If you don’t know it, contact your web host service and find out. The best setup for LiveZilla is to place the files in it’s own subdirectory on your hosting account. Here, I’m setting the software to FTP the files to a folder named “livezilla”.

This next step should be pretty straightforward for anyone who has ever set up a Wordpress blog on their own web hosting account. The software requires the use of a MySQL database. Before you can get through this step, you need to go into your hosting account and create a new empty database. Then, come back to this screen and click “Validate Database” to provide the software with the database name and details. Then click “Create Tables,” and this step is done! You’ll be directed to the online LiveZilla page on your web server.

Visit this page using every PC or laptop that you plan to use to interact with your website visitors. From each PC, click on the “Add Server Profile” button. This will download all of the files to that PC so that you can connect to the server to monitor website visitors, initiate chats or receive chat requests. Now, back at the admin screen (LiveZilla Sevrer Admin), you’ll notice another button for “Link Generator/Script Generator” under Integration. Now, if you want to offer simply free chat to your visitors – this is where you’ll go. When you click on it, you’ll see the following screen.

When you highlight the script and insert it into your blog or website, the status image that’s shown on the left will appear on your site. Select “Add Visitor Monitoring Script” if you want the ability to see when new visitors come to your site, or even interact with them if you want to. The “Live Support” button shows your online or offline status. As I mentioned, this is perfect if you’re offering free support, but in this case we want to integrate a payment system. So let’s go over to Paypal (my online payment processing option of choice), go into the “Merchant Services” tab, and create a new “Buy Now” button.

The last step of creating your button is where you’re provided the script for it. In my case, I configured the button with multiple options so that visitors can choose to purchase a 10 minute, 20 minute or 30 minute tech support session. Once they successfully submit payment, they are redirected to the chat link. There’s one trick here you’ll need to remember – when the button asks what image you want to use, go back to the LiveZilla button script and extract the “image src” link that has “image.php” in it. This will ensure that your new Paypal purchase button appears like the LiveZilla status button. This is what it looked like once I installed the new Paypal script on my blog.

Visitors can see that you’re available, and they can click the button to purchase an online support session with you, where they can ask you for help. This provides your visitors with a live person who’s always available to help them – a service that’s not always easy to find online. It also provides you with a valuable way to offer a more interactive experience for your readers.

Also, you can use your new LiveZilla chat service for more than earning income. Include the special link (see the script generator) into your email, and the recipient can click on it and instantly chat with you live – they don’t need to install any IM software at all! Post the link on your Facebook account and offer your friends and family with a place they can chat with you for free outside of the Facebook system. Provide your link as a way for work colleagues to meet up with you and collaborate on projects together. The uses for your own private chat system are limited only by your imagination.

Can you think of any other creative ways to use the LiveZilla chat service? Do you know of any other hosted services that are any better? Share your insight in the comments section below.

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Copyright and DRM issues notwithstanding, downloading music off the net is one of the most popular web trend. As Google says, two of the top 10 queries in the U.S. are music-related. That’s probably the same around the world. So where do you go in search of your music?

Do you carry out a generic search using one of the search engines? Do you use a specific MP3 search engine? Maybe you picked out one from our Free MP3 Downloads: 7 Websites That Make It Really Easy post. Or you just like to stream it over the waves using the online music players. Thank God, there are options galore for the music lover.

Songr is a desktop search software that will not only search out the right song for you but also downloads it for you.

But why a desktop alternative to download songs, I ask?

Music can be downloaded via P2P software too and you can also use MP3 search engines on the web. P2P software to download a single off the cuff track is bit of overkill and MP3 search engines are great but they might have a bad server day. Also, Songr offers some features that bump up its appeal in my ears. Songr has three noteworthy features which make downloading a single click affair.

1. Meta-search with 10 online MP3 search engines

Give Songr a song title in its search box placed on the top right and the software taps into 10 MP3 search engines to get the song. It gathers the results, removes duplicates and displays it all on its frugal interface.

Take your fine-tooth comb and go through the results which can be bracketed according to Duration, Bitrate, Size and Relevance (just click the column heads to arrange). The low bitrate results are grayed out and usually, you will find the songs with a higher relevance on top of the heap. If you choose to buy the tracks, you can check them out at Amazon and Rhapsody using the shortcut from the menu.

The search engines used by Songr are displayed in the screenshot below taken from the Songr features page.

2. YouTube audio extraction

Songr plucks out audio tracks as MP3 from YouTube videos using some sort of a FFmpeg converter. Songr uses JusthearIt.com’s engine to tap into YouTube’s resources. You can see it in the results as a little video icon. You get two options with a right click – Play it as a video directly on YouTube or download it as an MP3 audio track, an AVI video or a MPEG video to your computer.

You also get to choose between the HQ version and the slower but better HD version (if available).

3. Search by lyrics

Songr uses Bing as a search service to get you the songs when you type in a few words from the songs. According to the software’s FAQ – Songr searches the words you typed in Bing plus adding “lyrics” to the query, reads the titles of the results, filters those using heuristic techniques and tries to restore the original case.

Well as long as I get the results! I got some hits and misses with this one. I guess it boils down to Bing’s penetration and the lyrics with the song’s search engine indexed existence.

If I could add a number four, it would be its simple ad-free interface. That’s what I liked – no glitz, no glamour but just focused on the job. There isn’t anything by way of settings. It uses the system’s default music player to play the track. Such basic software should be light on resources, which it is – consuming about 3.5MB of memory at its peak YouTube conversion job.

We had covered a desktop app for searching MP3 ditties before too. You might like to try out Clickster and look at it against Songr’s performance.

Does this simple software deserve an encore?

Songr (v1.2) is a measly 452KB download and it plays along with Windows XP, Vista and 7. It only asks for the Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5.

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All of my files come from different locations or methods of ripping, so they are all different. One day, I will have some time on my hands (one day I hope!). With that time, I would fix up and normalize my MP3 collection – why, what would you do with that free time?

So I downloaded an application from Sourceforge called MP3 Diags – a one-stop shop to analyzing and fixing up your MP3 music tracks. Check out the application here. It is a 6.4MB installer which sets up pretty quickly.

Once you get the application installed you will see this screen:

Navigate to where your music is stored. You can have the application create backups of the files it is modifying in a different directory with the backup option. You can point the program to a different settings file as well from this screen.

I selected my folder and hit the OK button. I am a “fly by the seat of my pants” kind of guy so I didn’t opt for a backup. I would recommend that you do opt for a backup – just to be safe.

You will see MP3 Diags running through your files one at a time like so:

When it is complete, you will see all your music tracks listed and the problems each track contains:

On the right hand side, is a series of check marks denoting issues like so:

Checking out the issue, it turns out it is that the MP3 does not have a APIC frame to hold it’s image. Lots of my MP3s suffer from this issue and others. By highlighting a music track, you can see all of the associated issues.

Now even though the application lets you fix the problems, it is by no way automatic. You have to use the buttons at the top of the screen to fix your problems.

Each of those buttons has a function which I will go through here but beforehand, remember the application is in beta so you should run a backup. Also if you simply left-click, all the visible files get processed. However, it is possible to process only the selected files. To do that, either keep SHIFT pressed down while clicking or use the right button, as described in its user guide.

The first button has lots of functionality as you can see below. Choose one and run with it:

The buttons labeled 1 through 4 each have custom tasks associated with them that you can see by mouse hovering them. I did this for the first option below:

Then I ran it:

I hit ‘Yes’ and it did it’s thing. It worked awesome, not as quick as I might have liked but this baby really does work. And it can fix any issues with your music files.

Next up, Normalization:
Normalization needs to be run in album mode on a single album. Or you will see this error:

Next up, tags – and the MP3 Diags tag editor. Hit the Tag button and off you go:

This is a console for editing and downloading tags. It has multiple sites to grab your tags from.

All in all, this a really comprehensive MP3 fixer for any music lover who really wants full control over their files. What do you use for fixing up your music files or their tags? Let us know in the comments!

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