The first thing you want to do is go about creating an account over at Google Analytics. Why would I want to do that, you ask? Well, in my own experience, the service provides a tremendous amount of data, has a great user interface, is easy to install on any website, and, more importantly, is completely free of charge. It’s undoubtedly the easiest, cheapest and fast way of getting your visitors’ information, including their IP address or hostname.

If you already use any of the Google services, you can easily sign in with your existing credentials. The process of setting up your website with Google couldn’t be easier. You will be prompted to create a profile. A profile is basically a metaphor for a folder, where you can keep track of various aspects of your websites’ traffic. Each different domain will have its own separate profile. Select ‘Add Profile for a new domain‘ and enter your domain’s address and timezone.

The next page will generate a bit of code that you’ll have to insert in the header or footer of your website’s template. You have to do this because you  want to keep track of visitors across your website, not just the homepage. This way, no matter where the user navigates to (eg. mysite.com/secondpage), you will know about the total time spent, the pageview/unique visitor ratio and exit funnels.

How you add the code to your website varies dramatically – and requires the knowledge to manually access and edit your theme files. You probably set your own website up, so you must know how to do this. If you don’t know how, don’t panic, and instead search Google for ‘[service type] + edit theme OR Google Analytics‘. For example, ‘Wordpress edit theme Google Analytics‘. There are plenty of guides out there that will show you how to add this bit of code.

In the latest version of the self-hosted Wordpress, I only need to click on ‘Appearance‘ in the sidebar, ‘Editor‘ and choose from the right side list ‘footer.php‘. As a golden rule, insert the code before the last ‘</body></html>’ tags. They’ve also got a lot of support material over at the help page, which you might want to check out if in doubt.

Twenty-four hours later and you’ve got the first taste of website statistics. Be prepared to spend the rest of the evening looking at various graphs of source locations, connection speed, ISP, browser capabilities, operating systems, browsers, time on site and more. After that, the only problem that could arise is that you’ll wish you could install a tracking code in your girlfriend, in order to be plot the ‘visitor loyalty’ chart.

If you want to view individual IP addresses of your website’s visitors you need to click on Visitors>Network Properties>Hostnames, from the right sidebar, as illustrated in the screenshot above. There you will see a list of IP addresses and how many times each has visited the website. This can prove useful if your site is being attacked (defaced, DDOS-ed, etc.), as you can determine who your attacker is, or at least his proxy.

More views and information is accessible through the sidebar on the right: Visitors, Traffic Sources, Content and Goals. They’re pretty much self explanatory. The Visitors tab will contain information about – you’ve guessed it, the people who accessed your site. Traffic sources will identify who sent you traffic, be it a search engine, a referral or just organic. The Content tab will dutifully tell you how each page is doing when it comes to attracting eyeballs. Finally, Goals is used by e-commerce folks and companies to measure conversions, a fancy word for a sell.

You should definitely spare a minute to check out the quite extensive page of articles about blogging tools.

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The answer, if you’ve read this far, is yes. Yes we can – remove that old hard drive from the laptop or PC. Yes we can – put it in a brand new and extremely cheap dock or simply use a female ATA or SATA connector that plugs in to your regular computer USB port.

I actually know a guy who has a couple of these drives and uses them to back up his computer. Each week he alternates the drive to spread the wear – and because bare drives are quite fragile – he keeps them in those plastic containers used to store food, along with some crumpled sticky notes. They’re actually a great idea because they are airtight, have good thermal and EM(electromagnetic) resistance, while the crumpled sticky notes will absorb a good part of the downward force in the event of an unfortunate drop. Most people would likely just throw away good stuff, but think about it – you’re losing real value as well as stocking the landfills.

First of all, get the hardware in question out of the closet and dust it off with a damp cloth. If it’s a PC, the process is pretty much straightforward. Most PC’s use standard cross-shaped screws to keep the case tight – you don’t need any special tools. Be extra careful about static electricity. I’m not sure of the science behind this – but avoid clothes made out of plastic polymers (such as polyester) as they tend to charge with electrostatic energy. Before handling any internal contents it’s a good idea to touch a bare metal surface.

Once you’re in, unscrew the hard drive from the holder, first on the right and then on the left, while using your other hand to support the weight from underneath. Once it’s free, disconnect the internal connector. Look at it closely in order to see which kind of dock or cable you need to buy.

On laptops, it can be even easier, but usually it’s kind of hard to get to the hard drive (pun intended). The rule of thumb is to search Google for “Laptop Manufacturer” + “Model Number” + “Guide” OR “Manual” OR “Service Manual”. Especially with older models, you might need to painstakingly remove layers of panels and  other components in order to safely remove the hard drive.

Even if you do find the manufacturer’s manual, you should check the MUO guide. Another issue with older drives are the connectors – not all adapters will support those pesky miniaturized ATA or even SATA ports.

Once the patient is safely stored in one of those food containers, it’s time to pull out your credit card and do this search on your favorite tech store: “Connector Type” + “Dock” OR “Adapter” or “Cable” + “USB”. If you live the the US, you’ve got it easy, as Think Geek and Amazon have pretty much got you covered. Less lucky peeps like me would probably opt to order off eBay or annoy the staff at the local computer store.

Once your cable or dock arrives, it’s a simple process of matching the male and female connectors and boom, your old hardware is back to life again. Format it in either NTFS, ext3 or HFS+, depending on your platform of choice and you’re ready to use Time Machine, Back in Time or any other backup solution you might prefer.

Do you recycle your hard drives?   If so, how do you do it?

Photo credits : abdallahh, jeremyfoo, jepoirrier, 少佐

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We’ve reviewed quite a lot of different tools that allow you to be more productive, organized and collaborative, such as Shareflow,Tokbox and Notely, but the search has not ended.  Today we’re going to take a look at Ubidesk, a fresh take on online team collaboration.

Launched just a couple of months ago, Ubidesk has already attracted the attention of the media and presents a solid feature list as well as a good user interface. Leveraging the SaaS (Software as a Service) concept, Ubidesk allows for team collaboration, be it in the same building or another continent, to instantly share and edit documents, upload files, manage both shared and private calendars, and manage tasks easily and efficient.

Ubidesk is definitely one of the most comprehensive solutions available at the moment. The online rich text editor has all the features you need to create complex documents, with formatting, images, tables, spell-checking and most essential – a solid revision tool that enables you to quickly spot changes made by other team members. If you’d rather not have your co-workers mess with your presentation, there is also a feature that locks new edits.

Since tasks and documents are almost always related to each other, you can assign documents to tasks and vice versa. Multiple documents can now be easily bundled for a task – no need to search a massive folder – and you’ve also got useful information such as the due date. Unlike other services, your tasks have different statuses: after a task is assigned, the status becomes “Started” when the assignee clicks the “Start” button. Nifty way to keep the project manager into the loop, isn’t it?

If you need more information about the development of a project or the status of your team collaboration, see who’s not doing their share or assign payment – the Timeline and the task log give a bird’s eye view of the changes. Are you working on the next generation MacBook hardware? Keep only the assigned project members in the loop by creating a hidden project. You’d like anyone to participate – make it public. Want others to see what’s going on, but not interfere, simply choose Protected.

With Ubidesk, you can manage  both your “Space” and personal calendar in one place. Keep your personal appointments private while sharing the work calendar with your colleagues – and see them all in one view, eliminating the possibility of overlapping appointments. Best of all, you can import and export at any time in the standard iCal format. Another aspect worth mentioning is the Sidebar. The Sidebar is a click away when you need to consult another document while writing or jot down notes in the Notepad.

There’s also no need to download files to your computer in order to view them – Ubidesk supports image and document formats such as JPEG, GIF, PDF, Microsoft Word, Excel, Powerpoint and OpenOffice. “Direct Edit” eliminates the need to re-upload documents after editing them in Microsoft Office. We’ve also got a dedicated discussion space – with separate threads for each topic. Security conscious users will surely note the use of 256bit key encrypted HTTPS protocol to transfer data between your computer and Ubidesk. It’s good security, the same your bank uses. They also pledge not screen or filter any data.

Overall, Ubidesk  is a good way to go around online team collaboration – a solid web app with lots of potential and great attention to details. Sign up for free and share your impressions in the comments.

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• You don’t have to worry about security, system maintenance and updates.
• A separate, unprivileged account for your kids makes sure that anything they could possible to to the system is limited to one account; if anything goes wrong just delete it and create another one.
• Call of Duty, zombies, and other modern 3D PC games won’t run without additional emulation software and hackery. Safe to say, if your kid manages to play Crysis on a Ubuntu box using just WINE, his future’s looking bright.

Kanagram mixes up the letters of a word, creating an anagram. You have to guess what the mixed up word is. Kanagram is a great children’s Linux program that features several built-in word lists, hints, and a cheat feature which reveals the original word. Kanagram also has a vocabulary editor, so you can make the game be as hard as you want it to be.

Kanagram is cool, but wait until you hear about GCompris. Designed to be the end-all be-all of children’s Linux educational software suites, it has about 100 activities, and an age recommendation of 2-10. It’s got everything you’d want, from reading practice, to science, algebra, drawing, geography quiz and even chess. There are even activities for discovering the computer’s peripherals. When you start the program, GCompris presents the list of activities, and a control bar at the bottom.

Each icon stands for an activity. When the mouse is hovering over it, more information appears: the name, description and author of the activity are displayed in the description area. A click on the icon will lead you to an activity or a menu of activities. GCompris is translated into more than 50 languages.

We’ve all seen the commercial with the kid who likes drawing on the furniture. Oddly enough, his mother is happy about that because she was anxious to test her new Pronto spray. In real life, I think you’d rather install TuxPaint and let the creativity flow freely on the computer screen. It’s recommended for kids aged 3 through 12, it has easy to use interface and a funny penguin that sits in the bottom left and encourages your efforts.

Finally, we’ve got Earth3D, which is very similar to Google Earth and is a great way to teach your kid about geography. Unlike its Google counterpart, Earth3D taps into various map providers and time stamps. You can watch the ice in Greenland melt away before your eyes,  learn country flags and borders.

You can install any of the Ubuntu software discussed in this article by searching for their name in the Synaptic Package Manager, checking the box on the left of its name and clicking ”Apply Changes”. To launch Synaptic, choose System > Administration > Synaptic Package Manager.

Most children’s Linux educational software is readily available for other distributions such as Fedora or SuSE, in their respective package managers, so try searching for the application name. We describe the installation process for Ubuntu because it’s the most widely used of the bunch.

You might want to check out some other posts related to Linux, Ubuntu or education, here on MakeUseOf. We have also published the “Newbie’s Getting Started Guide to Linux” ebook.

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BKChem is a chemical drawing Ubuntu chemistry software that’s packed with features. It supports, according to the developer team website: bond-by-bond drawing, bond length and angle restrictions to assist with the drawing, ready to use templates of common rings, the ability to expand common groups from abbreviated to structural form, support for linear formulas, radicals & charges, arrows (several types – normal, retro, equilibrium, etc.), rich text, color support, simple vector graphics (rectangles, circles, polygons etc.). Another nice touch is the automatic validity check of the drawings.

Editing is also a breeze with unlimited undo and redo capabilities, aligning, scaling, rotation (2D, 3D), aligning of molecules so that particular bond is horizontal/vertical, rotation of molecular fragments around bonds (conformation changes), definition of personal preferred drawing style (bond lengths, widths, colors).

You’re not locked in if your school uses another software. BKChem has export capabilities for SVG (native data are transparently embedded into SVG file), OpenOffice Draw format, ODF (OpenOffice 2.0), Encapsulated PostScript, PDF, PNG, basic support for both CML1 and CML2, Molfiles and generation of SMILES.It can also import CML1 and CML2, Molfiles, SMILES (subset) and INChI (subset). BkChem is translated in English, French, Czech, Polish, German and Traditional Chinese translations.

Chemical Calculator or GChemCalc is another Ubuntu chemistry software app that’s a simple chemical calculator for determining molecular weights of a formula and their respective percentages, all really fast and easy. There’s not much to be said about it, except I use it all the time – simple is almost always better.

Kalzium provides you with all kinds of information about elements in the Periodic Table of the Elements. You can lookup information about the elements and also use visualizations to show them. It is free and licensed under the GNU Public License.

You can visualize the Periodic Table of the Elements by groups, blocks, and families. You can plot data for a range of elements for properties like the boiling point or the atomic mass and can go back in time and see what elements were known at a given data.

Kalzium is divided in a navigation panel on the left and the table view which shows the elements of the periodic table. The standard menu bar allows you to choose what you want to display and the status bar reports facts. You can hide the navigation panel by using the View->Show Sidebar menu.

When you move the mouse cursor on an element of the table, an overview of the current element in the Overview tab of the navigation panel will be displayed. You can choose  several views for the table: display the elements per families, per groups, per crystal structure, depending on their acidic behavior, etc. You can change all that in the menu bar in the View->Scheme menu. If you want to know facts about a precise element, click on it in the table and the information dialog will be displayed.You can also calculate the molecular mass of molecules with the tool in its sidebar. You can enter linear formulas to calculate their weight.

You can install any of the Ubuntu chemistry software applications discussed in this article by searching for their name in the Synaptic Package Manager, checking the box on the left of its name and clicking ”Apply Changes”. To launch Synaptic, choose System > Administration > Synaptic Package Manager.

Most educational software is readily available for other distributions such as Fedora or SuSE, in their respective package managers, so try searching for the application name. We describe the installation process for Ubuntu because it’s the most widely used of the bunch.

Another aspect worth noting are the custom made distributions, designed from the get-go to be used by students in an educational environment. We’ll get into the details of this in the upcoming eBook, a handy guide for setting up your kids with a computer.

You might want to check out some other posts related to Linux, Ubuntu or education, here on MakeUseOf. We have also published the “Newbie’s Getting Started Guide to Linux” ebook.

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One of its most important features is the seamless integration of real-time collaboration tools. It’s actually fairly complicated to explain what it is, because a proper definition would have to encompass both developer and consumer aspects of the product and we have yet to receive invitations to the service.

I don’t particularly appreciate sensationalistic titles, either in print or online media but today’s title accurately reflects the content of this article. By adding support for Etherpad inside their already comprehensive communication web app, Tokbox just created the ultimate online communication tool.

Let’s take it one step at a time and take a look at Tokbox, a San Francisco start-up with some very smart people at the helm;  Tokbox is an online video chat application that implements basically all the functionality of Skype minus the mobile and landline phone support.

It’s free, it’s got an awesome interface and supports more concurrent video streams than your bandwidth can handle (more than 20 people in a conference call according to the Tokbox homepage). That alone is a great product, but there’s more; it’s got a multi-platform chat client, just type in your Yahoo!, GTalk, MSN or AOL credentials; free video ‘voicemail’ and integration with all the web services you might want: inline YouTube videos, Picasa & Flickr picture slideshows, Slideshare presentations, and notifications for MySpace, Facebook and Twitter.

You’d expect a feature-rich application like that to be destined for your local hard drive, but the fact is that it works amazingly well online. If someone paid attention to past reviews of web applications – it’s these developers. Not only is the interface simple and intuitive, it’s also got power – detailed privacy settings, an Adobe Flash helper for guiding the user to the necessary steps to enable the webcam and microphone and a task list that takes the guessing out and walks the user through the available features.

Etherpad on the other hand, was created by a group of former Google employees with some support from Y Combinator and a couple of fellows from FriendFeed. It started out as “what might be both the ugliest and most useful group productivity app”, at  least that’s how  TechCrunch put it back in November 2008.

Now, Etherpad is all grown-up and its design, while it still remains rugged, is considerably improved. If you’ve seen the Google Wave demo, you’ll immediately catch the grip of Etherpad: collaborative online text editing, all happening live and with different color highlighting for each participant.

Now imagine a video conference call with your friends, planning a vacation and writing down the itinerary; discussing features and design with a client; proofreading an article with your editor; or collaborating on a project with someone from school. That’s what this amazing web app duo achieves.

This functionality is basically what we all expect to see coming from Google Wave. Although you might think the opposite, these two start-ups already have a leg up compared to Google’s vertical solution; they already integrate with existing web services and user habits: pop in a Slideshare, a Flickr slideshow or integrate a chat window in Facebook. If these two have an Achilles heel, it’s the brand awareness and sheer number users Google has in its grasp. Until Google Wave proves me wrong – I’m declaring Tokbox+Etherpad the best web applications of the year.

Check out Tokbox and Etherpad, then remember to come back and share your impressions. For more cool reviews of web applications visit the category page.

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Alternative web browsers are aplenty and have a low barrier of entry even for less technically savvy computer users, but people are generally not keen to change their habits or spending time researching, downloading and installing another application – especially when the one that comes preloaded appears to be working just fine.

1. Firefox is not perfect software, but its vulnerabilities are fixed in a considerably shorter amount of time. Many new users are curious – is Mozilla Firefox safe? Updates are released immediately, not on a monthly schedule, and clock in at fewer than 10 MB. Users are notified automatically and prompted to install the update with a single click. The update process doesn’t take more than a minute on a modern computer.

2. Since Firefox is open source, anyone can look at the source code, anyone can spot a problem and contribute a fix. Would you leave your car keys with a guy that says “trust me” or at a car lot with video surveillance and a logbook?

3. ActiveX applets, the way IE extends the functionality of the browser, are a known highway for malware and viruses. Firefox works with verified and signed add-ons. Even if you choose to install a malicious add-on – and the browser warns you – the damage is limited to the information in the browser whereas ActiveX exploits could be used to take over the whole computer.

4. Conscious users can install NoScript, an add-on that takes care of vulnerabilities that are not yet patched, either in Firefox or other plug-ins such as Java, JavaScript and Adobe’s Flash. It achieves this goal by allowing the user to selectively enable interactive objects that the user decides to trust, automatically blocking the rest.

5.  Security through obscurity; malicious programmers will always target the browser with the largest user base, especially if that user base is less tech savvy.

6.  Firefox uses a service provided by Google that notifies the user before entering a potentially malicious web site. These websites ask for your financial data under false pretenses or contain malicious software often posing as something useful such as codecs or registry fixes.

We check the radiator on the car when the temperature indicator turns red; by the time the computer starts acting up or not starting at all, and by all chances appearing to work just fine, your documents, passwords and financial data might already siphoned half a world away. Most people don’t realize this, there are no clear warnings, but using Internet Explorer is in itself a security threat.

I substantiate that statement by citing the Google Analytics on my blog – there are still people using old, un-patched and therefore vulnerable versions of Internet Explorer. The reasons behind this range from the hassle of dealing with Windows Update, millions of machines without a valid license which cannot access updates and users not realizing the importance of having up to date software.

This is not news, yet there are people unaware of the danger posed. Washington Post’s Brian Krebs reports on the Security Fix blog “Internet Explorer Unsafe for 284 Days in 2006”. Even a fully patched and up-to-date version of IE 6 contains at least 22 discovered vulnerabilities; IE 7 stands at 9 and IE 8 at 2. By comparison, the latest version of Firefox (3.5.1), a free and open source browser, has zero un-patched vulnerabilities; the previous version (3.0.x) also stands at zero.

As always, you’re welcome to leave a comment below. Is Mozilla Firefox much more safe compared to IE? You might also want to check out some MakeUseOf posts on security, Firefox or browsers in general.

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Being a student myself, I’m always looking for ways to improve the way I manage my time, and more importantly, the various array of tasks that seems to grow exponentially with every semester.  Since the statistics say that more than 90% of college students own a computer with an Internet connection, why not take a look at a free, online monthly planner that helps students easily achieve GTD nirvana: Notely.

My first reaction to the idea of a web productivity suite aimed at students was quite skeptical. After all, what can’t you already do with combining existing web applications? You could upload files to the web using Dropbox, write down notes in Google Docs and manage your schedule using a combination of sticky notes, iCal or Google Calendar, use a web dictionary and store links in a special folder on Delicious.

The list can go on, with countless examples of how you can stitch together various web services to fit your needs, but it’s not exactly easy to manage, and while most of these solutions might appear on the radar of a tech-oriented student, what about arts & literature folks?

This is what Notely does; It’s a free online monthly planner that takes all the tools that a student needs to be organized and get stuff done and brings it together in a shrink wrapped package for anyone to use.

Signing up for an account is completely free and takes just seconds – it will even work with an existing OpenID login. After that, you can start adding courses, to do’s, notes – all on a single website. While manually inputting 20 classes doesn’t look that enticing, it’s a one-time only thing and you’re not going to regret it.

After the initial bump, you’ll be gradually adding stuff and the feeling that using Notely is yet another  task will dissipate.

The great thing about Notely is that it was developed by a student – and not by a committee of bored programmers in an office, so all the features actually belong to the application and make sense once you start using it daily. And it’s not one of those ‘roach motels’ – you can easily get your data out of the application, exporting notes  and calendar events is a breeze.

It’s also got a Tools section, which contains a scientific calculator, a comprehensive unit converter and a dictionary that makes use of the Google Translate API.

Another nice touch is the Facebook integration. Once you’ve added friends, you can share notes with them, quite handy if you have the habit of skipping lectures.

But the killer feature is, of course, the iPhone web application. It has most of the functionality of its biggest brother, and is great for checking up on which room you’re supposed to go to for your next class, duration, even taking short notes or adding to do’s. It’s small things like that that can make a big difference, saving you time every day.

To sum everything up, Notely helps students with: a Calendar, To-Do List, Homework organiser, Manage Courses, Write and Save Notes, Organise Links, Contacts and Files.

You can sign up for Notely here, or view a live demo. Don’t forget to share your choice of tools in the comments. Check out more posts on MakeUseOf about GTD by visiting this page or read this round-up by Daniel Pataki.

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Its offerings include full length album previews, an online store with 7 million songs, DRM-free high quality variable bit rate MP3 music downloads, a web-based music jukebox and social network, all in one tightly knit interface.

Lala turns out to be one of those websites that are great, yet somehow aren’t yet gathering the crowds lesser competitors are. With just over 20 people on the staff and consistent funding from Warner Music, you can be sure this service won’t disappear into the mist of the economic recession. While the 500 000+ members don’t stack up to Last.fm or Facebook, it isn’t exactly a niche audience.

Lala’s web designers and coders created an Apple-like experience, everything neatly integrated and in sync. A simple, functional interface reveals the minimalistic approach to the design of the web site. I wonder though if the iTunes interface is the pinnacle of media player design, designers decided to cut some corners or they intentionally opted for a similar layout to make new users feel ‘at home’.

Once you’ve created an account, which doesn’t take more than 30 seconds and doesn’t require a credit card, you can preview whole songs and albums for free (once). Your existing music library can be easily imported using the Lala Music Mover, a small application that matches songs on your computer with the catalog of music downloads available online. It works on Windows as well as on Macs and doesn’t use a lot of resources. Once the upload process is completed, you can listen to all of your songs online, with no additional charge, no restrictions or ads, from any computer with an Internet connection. It will even import playlists and ratings (using the beta version).

Individual tracks can be purchased and downloaded in MP3 format without DRM and a high quality variable bit rate encoding. Downloads are automatically added to your iTunes or Windows Media Player if you installed the Lala Music Mover. For ten cents you can purchase the right to stream a song from the website as many times as desired, a so-called “web song“. Depending on the song popularity and release date, MP3 music downloads range from $0.79 to $1.29, the same pricing scheme of the iTunes Music Store. Lala has strong connections with the music industry and currently indexes over 7 million songs.

The social networking aspect of the service combines different ideas from more general social networks such as Twitter and Facebook and does a good job of serving recommendations, aiding music discovery, while not duplicating unnecessary functionality.

The only caveat to this service is that it only works with United States IP addresses due to music licenses. Of course, you guys know how to get passed that. Go to Lala, give it a try and then come back to share your experiences in the comments. For more posts related to music, you should definitely have a look at MakeUseOf’s music section.

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Linux Mint, a distribution based on Ubuntu, has won a significant share of users, and represents a better Linux experience for both advanced and first time users. Simple yet effective tweaks, like the Mint Menu, might not appear very impressive at first glance but they affect your daily routines in a positive manner. It’s the same principle that makes Apple software better: an uncanny attention to details and yes, elegance.

Gloria, or version 7, was launched by the development team in June and is based on Ubuntu 9.04 ‘Jaunty Jackalope’. The release schedule for new versions of Linux Mint is tightly linked to Ubuntu’s, with updated versions releasing within 3 months of the official Ubuntu launch date.

The Mint tools, a set of applets or small applications, pre-installed extras and a customized theme package are basically what set Linux Mint apart. Support for MP3s, AVI video files, Java, and proprietary hardware drivers come standard. It’s like buying a tuned card straight from the factory, except Linux Mint is completely free.

The theme looks sleek and attractive, with shades of minty green and black, unlike the brown bliss of its father. You’re going to notice the similarity with the Windows taskbar immediately – the ‘Start’ button, quick launch and tray icons are right where they are supposed to be. The same goes for the windows switching area, there’s no separate bar. This makes for a quick and painless switch for those who would prefer the advantage of running Linux without having to spend a great deal of time adjusting to the UI (User Interface).

The Linux Mint Menu works pretty much like its Windows Vista and 7 counterparts, providing quick access to system locations, applications or configuration panels. If you have many applications installed and forget how the one you needed was called, you had to scroll down alphabetically in Windows, which is quite tedious if you have the bad habit of trying stuff all the time. The Mint Menu makes this experience much better by organizing the application by their category: Office, Internet, Administration, etc. The ‘Filter’ search box also has a leg up; it provides various actions related to your keyword automatically, be it a Google  search, an application or a package you want to install.

Linux Mint Install is another cool applet that replaces the standard Add/Remove Applications feature. Neatly organized in categories, featuring descriptions, ratings and reviews, applications couldn’t be easier to locate and install. It’s considerably simpler than on Windows; select the application, click ‘Install’ and you’re set.  Because Linux Mint is based  on Ubuntu, it’s compatible with the same huge repository of applications.

Mint Update keeps all the software updated with the latest patches for security and performance. Forget about checking Windows Update and then each application individually – Mint Update works with all the applications installed using Mint Install as well as the system packages. It even assigns a number to each update so you can quickly assess its importance and compatibility with your system.

The Control Center, a feature that will look familiar to KDE users, is now available in the default Gnome window manager, aggregating all the available configuration applets – complete with a search bar and categories.

A few more tweaks and applets make Linux Mint great, but they are less important and I’m sure you’ll discover them yourself. Linux Mint comes in both 32bit and 64bit, with KDE, GNOME and XFCE flavors available here. Each version includes the standard array of applications such as Gimp, OpenOffice and Rhythmbox. The Live CD image can be burned to a CD or USB stick and can be booted for testing or performing a permanent installation. A quick start guide can be downloaded for free. You might also want to check out our “Getting Started Guide to Linux”.

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But email didn’t evolve much. Sure, we can attach files, sort and store more emails. If you’re using Gmail, you’re probably in love with the threaded conversation view. But email is seriously lacking when you want to collaborate effectively, manage projects and share information across a team.

If you’re lucky, you’re probably getting 20-30 emails every day – work in any public facing environment and you can safely multiply that by 3. The problem is that important emails have a tendency to get lost in the everyday information noise: family, projects, work, friends. Setting up filters, labels and having a good ‘email hygiene’ helps, but you’re missing out on an web application that is built to enhance your productivity and help you collaborate effectively online with your peers: Zenbe’s Shareflow.

Shareflow can be everything for everyone. It’s built for managing projects and sharing information in work/office scenarios – a central hub that everyone can come to upload files, comment and post updates.

But the great thing about Shareflow is that it can scale. From a hockey team discussing their strategy for their next game, uploading sketches, laying out plans, even adding match dates and a maps, to a newsroom discussing article ideas – all editors and writers pitching in transparently; to freelance workers communicating with their clients, discussing aspects and revisions of creative work like web site design.

The Zenbe team has posted an article about their uses of Shareflow here which might help if you’re not sure what Shareflow can do for you.

Setting up and using Shareflow is a breeze when compared to other types of GTD (Getting Things Done) applications that have this kind of functionality (such as a private wiki).  Since it leverages the SaaS (Software as a Service) concept, all the end users or team manager has to do is pick an username, a password and a name for your team (which will appear as the header of every ‘flow’ page).

A ‘flow’ is used to represent a project or a specific activity. Once you’ve set up an account, you can create your first flow and invite peers. Any peer can upload files (documents, pictures, archives, etc.), post plaintext messages and comments, links, add events, maps and even add emails.

Shareflow also leverages the ‘freemium’ revenue model. The free plan includes 5 flows and 25MB of space, enough to work with if you’re not uploading a lot of material or managing an extensive number of projects. To get over the storage limitation you could simply upload the larger files to services like Dropbox or SkyDrive and post the link in the Shareflow interface.

The Basic plan includes 25 flows and 5GB of storage for $20/month which should satisfy the requirements of most people who plan on using this service for work. More plans are available from the Administrator Control Panel which can be accessed using the ‘admin’ link in the top right corner of the web page. From there you can also modify the team name, set the time zone, check quotas for each of the flows and delete unnecessary ones.

Another benefit of using Shareflow is that it keeps you focused. All the information you need to work with is in this sandbox that receives just relevant content.  Say goodbye to checking your email and realizing 3 hours later that you’ve been watching House on Hulu.

If you need a way how to collaborate effectively online, Shareflow is a good way to do it, and gets my recommendation.  If you’re looking for more ways to collaborate online, check out this category page and Sam also wrote about another Zenbe product called Zenbe Mail.

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To the untrained eye, buying Amazon MP3 music downloads might not immediately seem like a bargain – and let’s face it, it’s not as easy as clicking the buy button in iTunes. As with all things Apple, the whole experience of buying music on iTunes is seamless, simple and the catalog is huge, encompassing songs from the most obscure indie bands to mainstream pop.

Apple provides a slightly higher quality music format (DRM-free 256kb/s AAC), they also have variable song pricing, most individual songs costing you $1.29. Less popular songs are priced at $0.99 and $.79 (there are very few), but you can usually get a better deal by purchasing the whole album, with a typical 12 track record running you at $9.99.

There’s some good news though. Various promotions are always available if you visit the music store home, check the Facebook fan page and sign up for the Apple education newsletter. Just the other week, a 30 track sampler full of indie tracks was available for free, in addition to the free songs available every week on Tuesday.

You will also notice that certain bands/singers and genres will go on sale on special occasions, holidays or celebrations. You also have a good chance of getting the album at a lower price if you pre-order or buy it after the dust settles (after 3-4 months of the original release).

Depending on your perspective, as a PC or Mac user, an iPod or another device owner, the AAC format in which the music is available, might or might not suit your needs. The 256Kb/s AAC format is considered to be of higher quality to its MP3 counterpart, but any chance of noticing the difference will require a pretty expensive audio setup. (For more details on difference between audio formats see Audio File Formats Explained in Simple Terms)

Listening in noisy environments, on low quality ear buds (like the ones that come with your iPod) will mask any difference between the formats. You should also consider that not all devices can play the AAC format, especially older MP3 players. For most people, it doesn’t make sense to buy music from the iTunes Store without owning an iPod or iPhone – they probably have another application that syncs their device, and generally, buying Amazon MP3 downloads is cheaper.

Another nail in iTunes’s coffin is the fact that the Amazon downloader application will automatically import the Amazon MP3 songs you buy into iTunes if you choose to. Which means that you can have the songs on your iPod with just a little bit of hassle, as there’s no need to import manually.  Plus since the Amazon MP3 songs come in DRM-free MP3 format, they can be immediately synced to your iPod, without requiring transcoding. If you’re using another MP3 player, like the Sandisk ones, your device most likely syncs with Windows Media Player, which is also compatible with the Amazon Downloader automatic import.

Amazon scores more points for having a lot larger collection of promotional priced albums and songs, and also offers a selection of free ones every day. At the end of the day, there’s no discernible reason that would make a price conscious person opt for buying music on iTunes.

Don’t forget to share your thoughts in the comments. You should also check out Download Free Music, Videos & Movies on iTunes, 7 Sites To Get Free Music Legally, 6 Ways To Sync Music To Your iPhone Without iTunes and 3 Ultra Cheap Alternatives To iTunes Store.

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What does LifeIO bring in the already overcrowded space of web applications? Well, the concept itself is not exactly new, but the implementation is the one of the best I’ve seen so far. Integration is good when it’s done right. Think about Apple products – they all fit together from the hardware to software and support.

It’s much more convenient to have everything you need to manage your online social life in one place, especially if it does a great job at interfacing with all that information; allowing you to sift through stuff that you want to see. Having all the tools you need in a sleek one stop shop – how could you say no to that? LifeIo is the free, complete productivity suite for web 2.0.

LifeIO, like the name suggests, aims to be the bus on which information travels to and from you, hence IO(input/output), by aggregating your email, RSS, contacts, social networking accounts, calendar, tasks and even a basic note taking application. Add another couple of new features and applications in the mix, and you might be on your way to the online operating system.

Even more tech-oriented people will recognize that those types of apps represent 90% of the functionality you need day-to-day. A bit of polish here and there, integration with lightweight OS (Google Chrome OS?) via something like Mozilla Prism and you might have just stumbled on the next paradigm shift in computing.

Now that we’ve built up a bit of excitement about LifeOS, let’s get down to the nitty-gritty. The design is simple and straightforward; Mac OS users will notice that someone has been reading up on the Apple User Interface Development Guidelines. A bar at the top contains the list of available applications:

• Now – aggregates information from all the other applications and brings them together into one window. The user can then glance at the RSS feeds, email, upcoming calendar events and tasks without navigating to the respective application.
• Mail – will import email from the major service providers (Yahoo, Gmail, AOL) as well as standard POP mailboxes, so you can check your email online from anywhere. Unfortunately, the wizard will import your Gmail via POP by default, but you can manually set up IMAP if you wish. The interface is rather barebones at the moment, and represents a downgrade for someone used with Gmail’s filters, labels, add-ons and incredibly fast search function. That being said, Yahoo Mail users will be glad to have a responsive, simple interface to check email anywhere. A big plus is the preview function; just hover the mouse over a message and a (small font) text-only version of the message will pop up like a ‘Tool Tip’ or Growl notification.

  

• Calendar – nothing fancy, just straight-up usability. All the important features are covered. If you’re used to iCal or Google Cal, the switch couldn’t be easier.
• To-do – you’ve guessed it, it’s a task management application. While it certainly doesn’t compete with OmniFocus, it has more functionality than Google Tasks. It’s got Due Date fields, importance and categories.
• Notes – a stepchild of WordPad and TextEdit, it hasn’t got the functionality of Google Docs, but works for quick note taking.
• RSS reader – is essentially a clone of Google Reader, complete with the left sidebar and everything else you could expect. One hiccup though, the actual articles will open in a separate window instead of expanding inside the list.
• Social – a bit underpowered for now, the Social application currently will only integrate with Twitter. It lets you see your contact’s tweets and post your own. A few screenshots I saw of upcoming version include Flickr integration, and I’m sure that they will add more services with time.

  

• Shopping – a search + RSS subscribing features will make sure you’ll be always up to date with prices on Amazon, Craigslist, Yahoo, iTunes and Fandango.
• Settings – another striking resemblance with OS X, this app provides quick access to all available settings.

If you‘re like me, you’re getting worried just about now. LifeIO sounds cool, but can I trust it with my login information for Google, Twitter and maybe more? Bruce Specter is not new to the scene; he’s the guy that made Web Cal – Yahoo’s calendar program. Plus, everything is transferred via https.

How about a surprise? The first 50 users to sign up with this link will get into the private beta right now. For more cool web apps reviews, you should definitely check out this page.

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I’m still debating that issue and I’d sure be glad to hear what you think. Meanwhile, let’s take a look at Moof, the newest attempt at moving your music library to the Internet.

Moof addresses the segment of the market that prefers to stream music from a web-based service rather than storing songs locally and using software like iTunes. The convenience factor cannot be ignored – I’ve noticed many people, and students particularly, would prefer listening to Spotify rather than downloading songs from via P2P or online music stores like iTunes Store and its cheaper alternatives.

It’s easier, just open it and have some background music while your work. Or instantly search and listen to an entire album that a friend recommended.

While similar streaming services, notably Mixtape, incorporates some social networking features, Moof sticks to the basic functionality of playback and playlists creation.  There’s another quite striking difference between Moof and other similar services – it uses YouTube to provide playback. If your song wasn’t uploaded to YouTube, you won’t be able to play it back.

Personally, I think that the API did a great job of retrieving songs – finding even some of my most obscure artists. Unfortunately for hard-core indie music fans, there’s no feature that allows manual uploading of songs, something that the Lala Music Mover does automatically.

To sum it up in a sentence, Moof is basically a front-end to YouTube, with an interface that resembles a desktop media player.

It’s worth mentioning that Moof also allows you to import your iTunes Library XML file – which means you will be have a sort of a backup of your music. You won’t be able to use the service to re-download the songs in case your hard drive crashes, but at least you could listen to them online.

The interface resembles iTunes although it doesn’t provide the same feature set. Some more picky users will notice that there’s no way to rate songs or view track numbers. I do prefer this layout to Groovesharks’s Apple-esque cascading menus.

While Moof doesn’t bring anything groundbreaking to the equation, as the idea of a cloud music library was already implemented some time ago, it’s definitely worth checking out. Visit Moof and don’t forget to tell us what you think in the comments.

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Whereas as little as five years ago, most people still had to rely on obscenely expensive mobile and PSTN (Public Switched Telephone) networks to carry their voice over short and long distances. Today, everyone seems to be using in one way or another VoIP.

As a reader of MakeUseOf and probably a geek, you must have asked yourself at some point – how does Skype work?

Skype, one of the most comprehensive multi-platform VoIP applications, running on a Macintosh

VoIP owes its versatility to another fantastic technology, the Internet. Instead of sending signals via a PSTN network, be it analog or digital, a VoIP application usually uses SIP (a variation of the standard TCP/IP protocols) to create data packets, and sends them on the same network you use for email and web surfing.

By using data packets, the technology can be used to carry more than the standard mono voice your old telephone does; VoIP can carry text, images, live video and high quality stereo sound as well as ’screen sharing’, depending on the speed and reliability of your internet connection.

With the continually expanding broadband users market, more people are able to use VoIP without investing in a separate physical connection or contracts.

A Tesco VoIP phone designated for home use. It connects to an ethernet port on the router and the landline for emergency calls.

The journey starts at the receiver, which can range from specialized hardware appliances like the ‘Skype-phones’ and Cisco VoIP phones to software applications installed on other mobile terminals or computers. All devices must be capable to send and receive data packets via an IPv4 network. Your voice is captured and transcoded from the analog format that the microphone captures, into a digital format, then passed on to a compressor that minimizes the size of the audio stream enabling transfer on slow connections.

An VoIP enabled phone disguised as an old-style PSTN machine. These are becoming more common in businesses as a simple measure to reduce costs of long distance calls and provide improved security via encryption protocols.

The audio stream is then divided into small pieces, each small enough to fit in a packet, which is stamped with the destination address and sent through the network.  Since VoIP uses SIP as the means to spread, it is inherently prone to its negative sides, which are quite a few, since it was never engineered to support live conversations; VoIP is susceptible to stutter and latency.

Gizmo, a multi-platform VoIP application, a worthy competitor to Skype.

The receiving end must reconstruct the packets sequentially for ideal reproduction, which does not happen on most public networks, which are prone to congestions during peak hours. Latency and packet loss can render the receiving end to be unable to reconstruct the complete audio stream resulting in blank audio space for short periods.

Although it’s much more versatile than traditional PSTN communications, VoIP has been criticized by many as being unreliable, especially in emergency situations where electrical power is absent or intermittent. Supporting hardware such as wireless routers need electricity at all times to function properly. Most people in the United States still keep a landline for emergency situations, which can provide enough direct current to power most analog phones without any additional power sources.

Emergency services have strongly objected to the use of VoIP for emergency calls due to the inability to locate the caller within a reasonable area. For example, a user connected to the office VPN network would appear to be in the server building instead of the real location.

A Skype-phone, like the one pictured above, will connect to any available WiFi access point to access the internet. Similar applications will run on select SIP-enabled mobile phones, like the Nokia N70 (it can also use the native mobile carrier data network if available).

In ideal situations, where a broadband connection and electricity are available at all times, VoIP technology provides an incredibly cheap and comprehensive way to communicate, mitigating roaming charges that traditional service providers require for long distance calls. Many consumer VoIP service providers offer free calls within their user base of Internet connected clients (computer-computer, skype-phones and other terminals). They also offer to interconnect with traditional networks for low fees. Some, like Skype, even offer standard telephone numbers than can be dialed from any telephone and which redirect to your Skype enabled device.

There are many VoIP service providers, and reviewing the capabilities of each would take an entire article. Besides Skype and Gizmo, you should also check out Vonage and this comparison list.

Don’t forget to share your favorite applications and services in the comments. You should also check out How To Make Skype a Portable App, How To Get A Skype-In Phone Number For Free and Instant Conference Calling With Gizmo5.

Image Credits : fsse8info, Chung Huang, fsse8info, icherche

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Decision-making is part of our daily lives, and with our increasingly faster lifestyles, there’s not enough time to carefully take into consideration every aspect of the problem.

You ask how can a website help you with making decisions? At first, I wasn’t at all convinced that it would manage to provide any sort of meaningful advice, but after reading up on the technology behind, I was impressed.

Created by very smart geeks from MIT, namely Matt Gattis, Weiyu Zhou, Peter Coles, Will Gaybrick and Tom Pinckney, Hunch uses the concept of ‘machine learning’, a process that analyses patterns in order to predict – in our case, decisions. The service leverages the so-called ‘wisdom of the crowds’ by aggregating answers and information from all the users that complete the various questionnaires available.

Based on the answers you provide, which can range from your computer type to your vacation destination, it matches your profile with other people that gave similar answers. What did these people that took similar decisions to you decide this time? Hunch provides that answer, in 10 questions or less.

Like any computer algorithm, Hunch’s artificial intelligence gets better by time.  Each day, as more and more people answer existing questions and add new topics, the A.I. has more information to relate to your profile. The same goes for your own ‘decision profile’; the more questions you answer, the better Hunch will be at offering advice. Like any A.I. though, Hunch might make some people uneasy.

While the service is based on human input, should you ultimately trust a machine with your next travel destination or camera? The Hunch team have made it clear where the revenue comes from, which represents a plus for credibility, but you can never know for sure without seeing the backend code. Are the affiliate links to stores like Amazon enough to keep a company afloat, especially in this down market?

Hunch is very community oriented – providing users with the ability to comment on questions and advice, adding pros, cons and of course, your own questions on which the community can share its ‘wisdom’. You’re also able to follow questions and other users, in a similar fashion to Twitter or the Facebook newsfeed, directly from your profile page. Hunch also scores high points for the Settings panel which lets you easily delete your account, saved answers and profile privacy.

In tone with the summer beat (and heat for us poor guys in the northern hemisphere), you should definitely check out some of the summer related questions and answers as well as some of the great tech related topics.

Personally, I’ve found that the topics I went through all had relevant questions and perfectly reasonable suggestions. I especially enjoyed the ‘Should I buy a Mac?’ one, which takes you through all the important aspects of making the decision. Even by asking yourself the questions presented, you are able to make a more informed decision.

A site similar to Hunch is Aardvark which also leverages the power of user opinion to help you answer your questions.  David wrote about it here.

Overall, Hunch gets my strong recommendation and a spot in my bookmarks bar. Visit Hunch and don’t forget to share your impressions and favorite topics in the comments.

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Of those type of errors, BSODs (Blue Screen of Death) are the worst and are often caused by poorly written device drivers, kernel extensions or faulty RAM (Random Access Memory). You can’t recover to the normal software environment without either a soft or hard reset. Soft resets are usually the case, as the computer will try to automatically reboot or display the error code and require the user to initiate the restart sequence, the infamous “Ctrl-Alt-Delete” or “Press Any Key” prompts.

Many of you probably have encountered this type of error and know that any files that weren’t saved at the moment of crash have either lost changes or have been corrupted. Personally, as a writer, I consider this to be one of Windows’ greatest flaws. I have lost a lot of work due to this kind of issues and the problems seem to continue in Windows 7, although the frequency appears to be greatly reduced.

WhoCrashed, an application developed by Resplendence Software Projects, aims to demystify the error codes and present you with a likely culprit of the crash. Finding out what caused it can be the first step in eliminating the problem and creating a more stable computing environment. RAM memory, as well as faulty drivers, can be replaced  – but your time can’t be.

With the help of WhoCrashed, an error code like “0×0BJS00341110B12” can point you to a kernel module like “nvlddmkm.sys” which comes most of the time with vendor information. In this case, as the ‘NV’ prefix suggests, an nVidia Miniport driver caused the crash.

Unlike many applications these days, WhoCrashed is presents you with only two buttons and a simple text-oriented interface. The ‘simple is always better’ motto holds true in this case. All you have to do is press the ‘Analyze’ button and scroll down to the date of the computer crash you want to inspect. Most of the times WhoCrashed will identify the module that failed and allow you to fix the problem.

When a driver caused the crash, which happens 99% of the time, a simple and easy way to fix the problem is to identify it and download the latest version from the manufacturer’s website. When a Windows component frequently causes a crashes, the problem will most likely be fixed by running Windows Update.

Overheating can also be responsible for faults in data transfer or processing. If crashes happen while playing intensive 3D games, photo or video editing, check the ventilation system and revert to previous clock speeds if you’re overclocking any of the system’s parameters. Overheating can permanently damage the hardware, so fixing the problem as fast as possible is recommended.

Pressing and holding the F8 key while the systems boots will bring up a screen with various system recovery options including Safe Mode, which only loads the basic drivers and modules, and a RAM verification tool. Various Linux distributions including Ubuntu, have a similar memory check module (memtest) which is presented at boot-time when the live CD is inserted or by the bootloader in multi-boot environments.

You can download WhoCrashed for free. Installation is achieved via a simple and straightforward wizard. A Pro version aimed at tech support staff is also available for $35. The Pro license removes the ‘home-use-only’ restriction and provides more details about the crashes among other features.

At under 1MB, WhoCrashed is a must-have in any geek’s virtual toolbox. Check out more posts related to Windows or RadarSync, an application which automatically keeps your drivers and software up-to-date.

Are you annoyed by BSODs or Windows errors? What’s the most common one and what did you do to fix it? Let us know in the comments.

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So let’s talk about the essentials. An incredibly small installer, clocking in at 5-7 MB depending on the platform, it gives you anti-virus and anti-malware functions, free updates, scan scheduling, all wrapped into an incredibly simple, elegant user interface, that even a 5 year old could manage to use.

The interface is separated into 4 tabs:

1. Home assesses the current safety level by monitoring the real-time protection and updates. On the right, the Scan Now button lets you sweep the computer with a manual scan – either Quick, which only looks at a small number of critical system files and known malware locations, Full which scans every file and Custom which let’s you chose the location.
   
2. Update displays information about the signature database: date of creation and version number. The button on the right labeled ‘Update’ will start the automatic update process. No further input is required from the user.
3. History presents potentially dangerous applications that were either detected, quarantined or manually allowed by the user.
4. Settings will allow you to change various parameters of the application such as default actions, excluded file types and real time scanner options.

Detection rates are on par with OneCare, the now discontinued for-pay security application also developed by Microsoft.

In a Windows 7 virtual machine, MSE detected 17 out of the 23 malware/viruses, preventing their installation. Rootkits and keyloggers scored the poorest marks with 2/5 and 1/4 recognized.

Performance is comparable to other modern security suites, with 40MB of memory used when idle. An additional 3MB is taken when opening the user interface. The full system scan appears to take longer than other products, finishing a 120GB hard drive in 1 hour 32 minutes for a SATA 1.1 hard drive spinning at 5200RPM.

Overall, I noticed a visible increase in the system’s speed when compared to Kaspersky’s Anti-Virus.

Microsoft Security Essentials is currently in beta. The downloads were limited to 75 000 copies – but it is mirrored on many websites and does not require a license key or registration. It does however check to see if the copy of Windows is legitimate.

There’s nothing wrong with the application itself, the concept behind it screams ‘paradox’. It’s created by the same people that made Windows. Releasing a security product is essentially admitting that the operating system you market as ‘the safest’ – is flawed to start with. Otherwise how can you justify its creation? Like O.J. Simpson giving a signed confession.

Secondly, it’s going to kill revenues for all the other security companies like Symantec and Kaspersky from the home and small business users segment. If the European Commission was worried about Windows Media Player and Internet Explorer, how do you think it will react to this, especially if retailers or even Microsoft bundles it with new computers? I can already imagine the headlines: “Microsoft fined $100 million for making Windows secure”. Coupled with a responsible behavior and Windows Defender, Microsoft Security Essentials is the way to go, especially for people on a tighter budget.

What do you think about Microsoft Security Essentials? Do you think it’s a threat for other security companies? Are you ready to ditch your for-pay Antivirus?

Talking about security, you might want to read 10+ Best Firefox Security and Privacy Addons, 10 Free Online Malware and Virus Scanners or articles related to Microsoft or security.

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

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Unite eliminates the need for a third party server that would normally proxy or relay the content, such as Flickr, Twitter or Yahoo Messenger. It’s essentially like setting up a web server on your own computer, without the hassle of manually installing various software, configuring them and getting a DNS (Domain Name System) account. It also makes the installation of new functionality a “point and click” process.

I’m sure we’ll have a review of Opera 10 shortly, but let’s focus on Unite for the moment. Here are the steps you need to take in order to use the various Unite services.

1. Click on the propeller icon on the left sidebar.
2. Click on the icon labeled ‘Home’ and then on ‘Start’. A wizard will appear. Click next.
3. Create an Opera account for free or sign up for a new one. It is extremely simple and fast, just choose an username, a password and enter an email address.
4. Choose a name that would describe the computer. If you install Unite on more than one computer, this will enable you to differentiate between them and enable sharing. A descriptive name could also help a friend who wishes you to send photos, for example – naming one “The home PC” and another “The office laptop” can easily distinguish the two. Using UPnP port forwarding poses some security issues, but it allows access to your files from outside the local network (Internet) without using Opera’s proxy server which provides a speed boost. If you want a direct connection without UPnP, add port (8840) in your router’s ‘Port Forwarding’ list.
5. Click Finish to save the settings and close the wizard.

You will now be able to start any of the services listed in the left sidebar, such as file sharing. They are designed to be extremely easy to use. For example, to enable File Sharing, click on the File Sharing icon and then on Start. To protect your privacy, it will ask you to select the folder that you want to share.

After you click the OK button, a web page will open that will showcase the content you selected in the previous step. On the left, you’ll see your files, on the right the instructions for sharing with your friends and the permissions. All your friend has to do to access the files is to paste the link given in the right sidebar. A regular webpage will appear in your friend’s browser along with download links for all the files.

All the files are hosted on your computer and are never transferred to Opera’s servers. For the duration you wish to allow users to connect to your Unite services, you need to have the computer and browser open. Be aware that transferring unencrypted sensitive information is not recommended, as all transfers are done using HTTP. The Photo, Media and File Sharing use the same underlying technology while adding specific controls for each media type like a Flash music player and photo thumbnails.

This technology is not limited to the 5 bundled applications: Fridge (secure notes), Lounge (instant messaging), Photo and File Sharing, Media Player. It’s open to developers and uses well-known open standards such as HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

Below is a screenshot of the Lounge, a quasi-instant messaging application. To invite other people, the host needs to send a link to the other participants. They can use any modern web browser to join the discussion.  It is similar in functionality to a private IRC channel.

The Fridge application lets you leave notes for friends or yourself, similar to the ‘Wall’ on Facebook or direct messaging in Twitter.

You can write applications — in the form of Opera Unite Services — that use this server to serve content to other Web users. Why is this exciting? Well, it allows you to interact with contacts, sharing data and services without the need for any third-party Web sites/applications to be involved at all. –Opera Developer Blog

Opera lets the geeks get a taste of the next paradigm shift in web browsing, a great way to win hearts, minds and developers. I’ve radically changed my tune about Opera after hearing from tens of fans and Thomas Ford, Communications Manager.

I invite each one of you to give Opera Unite a try. Download the alpha which is available for Windows, Mac and Linux; and let us know what you think in the comments. What applications should the developers start working on to further extend Unite’s functionality?

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What characterizes a strong password? First of all, its length. The longer the password, the stronger it is and the longer it takes to be cracked. Secondly, the entropy or randomness of the generation process. If the attacker can make some statistical assumptions based on the method of generation, even a alphanumerical 8 character password can be cracked within hours. The third characteristic of password generator is trust. Do you trust that the password generator does not keep logs, do you trust that it doesn’t have a backdoor? Lastly, do you have a secure communication channel between the generator and the receiver? Most of the online password generators fail one or more of these guidelines, and even software solutions have problems.

The only completely secure method to generate passwords is to use an open-source generator stored on your computer, preferably running Linux. But even one of the website generated passwords is considerably more secure than any password you can come up with.

Perfect Passwords

Steve Gibson’s Perfect Passwords generator deserves the highest praise of all the solutions tested for this article. Besides the fact that Steve Gibson is a world renowned programmer, the algorithm used ensures a high level of entropy, and although there is no source code available to corroborate tech specs with the notes on the website, I personally trust it. The connection between the GRC server and your computer is secured by a SSL connection and the generator produces three strings at once: 64 random hexadecimal characters (0-9 and A-F), 63 random printable ASCII characters, 63 random alpha-numeric characters (a-z, A-Z, 0-9). The most secure of all is the ASCII string which contains numbers, letters and special characters. You can use any part, the complete string or even mix them to create an unique password. Your password will look something like:

“4q){4′{y]SWt]796Ay|9=

While such a password will work for a web-based service or email account, you aren’t expected to remember it for your Windows account, it’s simply too complicated. I personally use a 12 character hexadecimal string for my user account password, which I can remember without having to write it down, like

FBA4F22489116F11F

This too, can be cracked with Rainbow tables, but it will deter most guys without NSA-level knowledge and processing power.

If you’re asking yourself,”How I can use 12 random ASCII characters for every password I have?” Here’s my system.

1. I have an IronKey, a secure USB thumb drive that itself is protected by a 12 character hexadecimal string. All the data on the drive is hardware-encrypted. It will automatically self-destruct if physically tampered or if the password is entered 10 times wrong.
2. The IronKey has an integrated password manager and a hardened mobile version of Firefox 3. The passwords never pass through the computer’s keyboard or compromised applications.
3. When using my own hardware, which I can vouch is secure, for performance reasons I will use an Excel document which contains a list of services and their assigned passwords, stored on Google Docs. I will never save any passwords into the Firefox password manager. The only way this system can be compromised is by first cracking the computer user account password and hoping that the cookie session is still active.

Editor’s note: IronKey is not free. It starts at $79. If you think that it’s worth the money to protect your privacy and security, then check it out.
The other services I tested were:

PCTools

PCTools – which provides different options for generating passwords: length, punctuation, numbers, letters etc. as well as a SSL secured connection. They also have a freeware, offline version of the generator. It’s not open-source and the technical details are not available for inspection.

GoodPassword

GoodPassword – offers both a random password generator with some customization options and a “Leet” generator that “Leet Passwords are easy to remember acronym passwords generated by combining the first letter of each word, randomly changing the case, and replacing alphanumeric characters with their Leet (1337) equivalents, that is characters that look and/or sound the same”.

Multicians

Multicians – generates ten “pronounceable” passwords using a Java applet. It’s not open-source but the source code is available for inspection. No SSL connection.

For Linux

Linux users can use this command to quickly create a strong password:

% dd if=/dev/urandom count=1 2> /dev/null | uuencode -m – | sed -ne 2p | cut -c-8v1/oVN+S

You might want to read on through:

- How To Create Strong Passwords That You Can Remember Easily
- Securely Synchronize Your Browser Passwords With LastPass

There were also a bunch of other password generators profiled on MakeUseOf directory.

Photo credit: Jelmer.

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Today, you can see that Microsoft has decided to give a lot more attention to the design of its products. Windows 7 is a testament to that endeavor. It does sadden me that the majority of the UI improvements are derivations or adaptations instead of innovations.

Safari 4 hasn’t suffered radical changes since the beta version – except maybe for the tabs issue which generated a considerable amount of uproar – but it did a fantastic job of polishing rough edges. Safari 4 is fast, usable and has taste.

Let’s dig in a little deeper, shall we?

Unlike earlier versions of Safari for Windows, this iteration integrates beautifully with the default themes in Windows XP, Vista and even Windows 7. Whether we believe that “the new Nitro JavaScript engine that executes JavaScript nearly eight times faster than IE 8 and more than four times faster than Firefox 3” or that it “loads HTML web pages more than three times faster than IE 8 and three times faster than Firefox 3” is up to each one of us and the guys who benchmark milliseconds. It does however feel faster than Firefox and IE8 and about the same as Chrome 2.04.

For many of you running Windows 7 (if you aren’t, what are you waiting for? Here’s how to upgrade), Safari 4 has another surprise – it works with the Aero Peek feature the same way IE8 does. The latest stable version of Firefox 3 does not support this capability.

As for the Top Sites view, I can’t really decide what to think about it. It’s not particularly useful – like the integration with Aero Peek – but it does look good and does not impede my usual browsing habits. Use it for a couple of hours, maybe a day, and the most visited websites will be nicely presented when you open a new tab. And, believe it or not, this Minority Report style interface doesn’t take any longer to load than a new blank tab in Firefox. What is useful is the Cover Flow view for History – it makes finding websites a snap for people with good visual memory.

Another aspect that persuaded me to switch to Safari was the layout of the interface elements – compact, streamlined, bare bones – modifications that I did myself in Firefox. Even the menu bar is hidden to save space. However, I didn’t manage to convince the bookmark list to stay on the side in Safari, a perk for wide screen displays.

Thanks to an AdBlock list and a CSS file designed for Opera by Fanboy you can now disable most of ads. All you have to do is download Element Hider CSS file and go to Preferences -> Advanced -> Style Sheet –> Other. Select the CSS file you just downloaded. Remember though that you’re undermining the revenue model for MakeUseOf and the writers behind it as well as other web publications.

The only thing that’s missing from Safari right now is an add-on similar to NoScript. At that point, Safari is just an upgraded version of Firefox (without getting into a technical discussion about the different rendering engines, Gecko versus WebKit).

All the graphical candy takes a toll on the system memory. While I can’t say it’s a memory leak or something else, Safari with 4 tabs open consumed about 200MB of memory repeatedly. Firefox isn’t far behind with a jump from 90Mb to 160MB – one hour staying in idle mode.

You can also read my review of the Safari 4 beta as well as other posts related to Safari. Tell us in the comments what browser you use, why you like it and of course, your impressions on Safari 4.

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

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So what’s a book review? And what makes a book review good or bad? The first question has a simple answer. A book review is a form of literary criticism in which a book is analyzed based on content, style, and originality. Its length can vary from a single paragraph to a substantial essay. But what makes a book review good is totally up to the reader – personal taste. While some may prefer a short plot summary, some may prefer a long essay on the concepts presented in the book, along with the author’s personal opinions.

That’s why the order in which these sites are presented does not matter.

The New York Times

The New York Times, while some critics say it has fallen from the top ranks, still has capable writers which undoubtedly have the skills necessary for writing book reviews. Writing book reviews is actually very hard and requires the utmost attention to detail as well as an encompassing knowledge of other literary works. The reviewer must analyze even the faintest clues, implied meanings provided by the book author, decide on their importance and meaningfulness to the story. He has to address complex issues such as plagiarism and decide on the validity of the ideas and points expressed.

The New York Times presents us with book reviews situated somewhere in the middle, between a plot summary and a ten page essay, with most reviews situated around 1000 words. The quality varies from writer to writer but most of them provide an insightful view for the proto-reader. They have one of the largest number of reviews, which means you’re going to visit them sooner or later. Overall, The New York Times Book section receives a warm recommendation. Visit it here.

Also worth mentioning – capturing almost the same type of writing and quality – are the Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle and The Telegraph.

AllReaders.com

Next up is AllReaders.com, with a design stuck in 1999, the apogee of humanity according to the Matrix. Their library is comprehensive and the search engine highly customizable, but the reviews are generally short and superficial. “Gordon invites readers, authors and publishers to enter books and reviews in a process that takes about 10 minutes,” and that’s exactly the problem with the site. Instead of knowledgeable readers and writers, you will sometimes risk finding a common illiterate species: the internet troll. The advantage of reading through many viewpoints is undeniable so go on and visit it here.

BookPage.com

BookPage gives us a consistent library of well written book reviews, including a section on children’s books, blogs and a newsletter. Nothing remarkable, but still worth a read. Visit it here.

BookReporter.com

Just slightly better organized than the other sites I visited, bookreporter.com hosts reviews about 500 words long, polls, blogs and various contests aimed at the diligent reader.

As always, you’re invited to join the conversation, so post in the comments suggestions on other sites you’d like to read before buying a book as well as impressions on the ones mentioned in this article. You could even recommend us a book!

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

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Recently, they released a desktop application designed specifically take advantage of viewing videos and movies on your large-screen TV. Using this application, aptly named Hulu Desktop, you can now watch all your favourite shows from Hulu without using a browser! Here, at MakeUseOf, we like to properly test applications before writing about them. After three days of testing, I examined how Hulu Desktop compares to other media solutions such as Boxee.

This standalone application offers better integration, including remote control support and a full-screen TV-friendly interface. Although it is still in beta, the application proved to be very reliable in my tests:

• The interface was responsive and fluid even on low-end laptop graphic cards. The frame rate was adequate and stable even for watching, even in close proximity to the screen.
• The stream was not interrupted even when browsing with a video playing in the background. All the thumbnails and descriptions appeared without a glitch.
• Minimizing and restoring the Hulu window did not have any adverse effects on the playback.
• Navigation is simple and intuitive, a slightly better implementation compared to Boxee. Browsing the Hulu catalog on the TV provided an adequate user experience.
• The same selection on the Hulu website is also available in the desktop application, you’re not missing anything.

Overall, I am impressed with the quality of this release – not even a single crash or bug in three days is quite a feat in my book. And believe me, I did my best to make this thing crash. I ran it every night for about 3 hours, testing all the functionality available.

Hulu Desktop is not a complete media center application yet. Unlike Boxee, you can’t use this application to view content stored on your computer, be it music, photos or videos. You’re also limited to Hulu’s catalog: no Jamendo, BBC, Netfllix, YouTube or Revision3. That doesn’t mean that Hulu is not worth having; Family Guy, Stargate, and The Simpsons are just a few of the top notch material available. The best thing you can do at the moment is install both Hulu and Boxee and switch between the two when necessary.

Linux users will have to stick just to Boxee for now because there’s no version available for the penguin lovers. Windows and Mac users can download Hulu Desktop for free from here. You can also choose to sign in to your account and view personalized recommendations and subscriptions. This service is only available in the US. If you are trying to access Hulu from another country, try reading our article on How To Watch Movies and Shows on Hulu & Sling from Abroad.

Hulu Desktop is all about the lean-back experience. It’s adapting the platform to compete directly with old distribution models such as cable. At this point, why would you want to pay $100 monthly for a service you can get for free? Granted your ISP doesn’t implement bandwidth caps, with Boxee and Hulu, you can enjoy more content than was ever available on cable TV, on demand and with less commercials, on your big screen TV in the living room.

I’d love to hear what you think about Hulu Desktop, Boxee and switching for cable TV? Are you happy with the selection and user interfaces? What needs to be changed? Have your say in the comments.

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A rather interesting justification for developing this project is available on the website and for the first time in a long time, I can actually relate to what they’re talking about:

We feel that just like you don’t use a different browser for every web site you visit (Firefox to read the NY Times, IE to stream Hulu, Chrome to browse YouTube, etc) you shouldn’t have to use iTunes for Apple products, Nokia software for Nokia phones, Sony software for Sony products, etc. The typical household today has many such devices and there is a need for a simple and powerful software that connects them.

Indeed, everything these days comes with some sort of social networking features – but doubleTwist actually puts them to good use. After you invite friends to install doubleTwist on their computer, they will appear on the left side sidebar.

After that, sending files to them is just a click away. They instantly receive the file in their doubleTwist feed and it’s downloaded to the computer.

doubleTwist plays all the major audio formats (AAC, MP3 and WMA) as long as the files aren’t digitally protected by DRM (Digital Rights Management). If you have a large library of media files bought from iTunes Store using the old protected format, you’re out of luck – the same goes for Rhapsody or Napster fans. (Thous you may try reading MakeUseOf article on how to remove DRM protcetion from music files.)

The music player is not as developed as iTunes – no EQ, no Sound Check, only two viewing modes. They will surely add more features like this in future releases – after all it’s in beta.

It also plays videos – with upload support for Flickr and YouTube – as well as integrating a barebones photo viewer.

doubleTwists’ strength isn’t in the integrated playback functions, yet. It vastly compensates with the ability to sync with all the iPods, a large number of Blackberry devices, the Sony PSP, Nokia phones and the list goes on. They estimate that the application is compatible with hundreds of devices. I invite you to watch this short video explaining most of the functionality offered by doubleTwist, then grab the beta while it’s fresh from here.

Don’t forget to come back and post your comments and thoughts about the product. You can also check out some other posts related to music here.

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• Synchronize MP3s To Non-Apple Devices with doubleTwist [Mac] (0)
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Unlike Mozy, Carbonite or Jungle Disk, Pure Sync is aimed more at local backups and operations. It’s a useful tool if, for example, you use an external hard drive or a NAS (Network Attached Storage) for backup. Using Pure Sync, you can backup just the files that have changed, instead of manually copying everything over. Windows Vista and 7 have a built-in backup (Windows Backup) and synchronization function (Sync Center) but they’re not as easy to use and have a more limited feature set. Pure Sync is a timesaver and replaces two separate programs.

Pure Sync is a versatile tool – supporting local drives, server volumes such as MyServerfolder, MTP devices and WebDAV. If you are willing to fork out 14,90 € for the Pro version, you’ll get some additional features like copying open/locked files, backing up to a FTP server and synchronization/backup with another user.

Using the wizard, virtually any user, no matter how tech-savvy they are, can set up either a backup, synchronize a folder or automatically download photos from a camera. All the settings are presented in the wizard and are easy to understand.

How to use Pure Sync

1. The first step in setting up a profile is choosing a name for the profile.
2. The second step requires you to select an operation mode for the profile: Synchronization, Backup or Photo mode.
3. The third step is selecting the folders of the origin and destination.
4. You can select criteria for discriminating between files: date, size, file type.
5. Set up synchronization based on a schedule, when a connection is found, when a file is modified or manually.

Pure Sync is available for Windows 2000, XP, Vista and also works with Windows 7. During testing, I did not encounter any bugs.

As always, I’d like to hear what you have to say. What backup or file synchronization tool do you use? Have you tried Pure Sync? You can also check out other articles related to backup here.

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

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Using System Restore assures you that you won’t lose personal data such as documents, e-mail settings and messages. However, keep in mind that data you have stored in My Documents, My Pictures, or My Music folders are not affected by System Restore.

Today, I am going to introduce you one tool that can be used to create Windows System restore point with a single click of a button.

To simply and easily create System Restore points, you can use Single Click Restore Point. Just run SCRP with administrator privileges and it will automatically create a restore point for you – no need to dig through the menus. The only caveat is that you can’t name the restore points yourself, they’re all called “Created by SCRP Tool”. In my experience, SCRP does the job and makes it more convenient for less tech-savvy users. All you need to do is double-click on the application and a resulting window pops up:

To restore your computer to an earlier time in Windows XP, log in as an administrator, and then follow these steps:

1. Click Start>All Programs>Accessories>System Tools, and then click System Restore.
2. On the Welcome screen, click Restore my computer to an earlier time, and then click Next. You can also click on Create Restore Point to manually create a backup of the system files. This backup will appear along with the other automatically generated backups.
3. On the Select a Restore Point page, select the date from the calendar that shows the point you’d like to restore to.
4. On the Confirm Restore Point Selection page, check to see if you selected the right restore point.
5. Click Next if you are ready to continue or click Back to change the restore point.
6. The computer will automatically shut down and reboot. On reboot, you’ll see the Restoration Complete page.

If you’re happy with how the system is behaving after the restore, you don’t have to do anything else. If not, just open System Restore and select Undo my last restoration on the System Restore Welcome page. If your computer doesn’t boot normally, you might have to use Safe Mode to access System Restore. To access Safe Mode, press F8 key during reboot and choose Safe Mode.

In Windows Vista and 7, all you have to do is type System Restore in the search bar within the Start Menu. You’ll will be presented with the most recent restore point in the windows that appears. If you want to choose another restore point made earlier, click Choose Another Restore Point and Next. After you’ve selected the restore point you want, just click Finish. Your computer will automatically restore the required system files and restart.

To manually create a restore point, open Advanced System Settings (by typing this into the Start Menu) and select the System Protection tab. Once there, click on Create.

Did you find this tutorial handy? What other programs do you use to manage your restore points? Let me know in the comments.

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The semantic web, as Wikipedia puts it, is:

an evolving extension of the World Wide Web in which the semantics of information and services on the web is defined, making it possible for the web to understand and satisfy the requests of people and machines to use the web content.

In this case, semantic recognition technology means that Glue can figure out when you are visiting a web page about the same “books, music, movies, wines, stocks, movie stars, recording artists” as your friends, but not necessarily on the same website.

If your friend left a comment on, let’s say, Slumdog Millionaire’s page on IMDB, that comment would also show in the Glue toolbar when you are visiting the Wikipedia page of the same movie. The technology basically aggregates information from across the web and serves it back according to ‘semantics’.

After you go to getglue.com and install the 500KB add-on, you’ll be presented with a bar at the top of the page you’re visiting. This bar shows friends that have liked the same thing you’re looking at as well as their comments. You can add it to your favorites or leave replies/comments.

It’s extremely easy to use Glue, it doesn’t seem to slow down Firefox and it only shows up when it detects one of the aforementioned categories i.e. you won’t see Glue popping up on the Wikipedia page for LHC.

It connects to Facebook – which makes importing friends easy for you and gives them a  great opportunity for exponential growth. They also invite you to give your Twitter, Flickr, Last.fm, Linkedin, FriendConnect and Myspace in order to allow fellow Glue users to “instantly see your books, music, movies, and more!”. However, it’s vey easy to close your account from: Glue For You>Account>Delete Account.

If you’re not sure yet whether to install Glue or not, check out this short video which explains how Glue works:

Glue Overview from AdaptiveBlue on Vimeo.

Glue is definitely a very interesting and useful Firefox add-on, and I invite you to try it and let us know in the comments what you think about it.

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Most uninstallers on Windows don’t remove everything, and often times they leave behind orphaned registry keys, file type associations, icons or even entire folders.

If Mac users have it easy, a simple drag and drop into the AppCleaner, there are lots of alternatives for Windows users which range from ’the good, the bad and the ugly’.

I’ve found two that are – just nice.

Piriform CCleaner

Piriform CCleaner, available as freeware, scores high points all around with a simple interface and a complete set of features. CCleaner will:

• Search the computer and remove obsolete system files.
• Delete browser history, cookies and cache for all the major browsers.
• Search the registry for problems, back it up and fix it.
• Uninstall applications, rename and remove entries from ‘Add/Remove Applications’.
• Remove or disable start-up items.
• Automatically update itself if you allow it.

CCleaner is in my opinion, the best choice at the moment if you’re looking for an application to keep the cruft under control. I run CCleaner on my Windows XP SP3 machine almost weekly and every time I do, it removes at least 50MB of unnecessary files as well as a few registry keys.

Revo Uninstaller

Revo Uninstaller, although it has a more advanced uninstaller routine, comes in second because the interface is slightly clunky when compared to CCleaner. In addition to removing applications and cleaning the registry, Revo Uninstaller also has:

• ‘Browser Cleaner’ that removes traces of web surfing.
• ‘Microsoft Office Cleaner’ that clears the recent documents history.
• ‘Windows Cleaner’ that removes cache and history files from Explorer, such as Recent Documents.
• ‘Evidence Remover’ that overwrites free space to clean tracks of already deleted files and an ‘Unrecoverable Delete’.

The ‘Hunter Mode’, specific to Revo Uninstaller, enables you to choose the application you want to remove with the mouse – which is useful if the program you’re trying to remove doesn’t show up in the Add/Remove Programs list.

In order to write this article, I’ve also tested Absolute Uninstaller, Safarp, Perfect Uninstaller and MyUninstaller. I didn’t include these alternatives in the article because they’re not worth your time – either they’re worse than the integrated Windows application or they require you to upgrade to the so-called premium version.

Not impressed by either apps? At MakeUseOf, there’s always another choice. Check out these articles for other popular uninstallers and security apps:

• Ncleaner – The App That Tells CCleaner To Take A Hike
• 10 Most Downloaded Free Security AND PC Care Programs
• Keeping Under the Radar and Securing Your PC Files

As always, I’d like to hear from you in the comments. Which application do you think is better? None? Suggest one for us then!

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Why would you want to find out the identity of the sender? Well, you may have heard of shady email scams or emails supposedly from Paypal inviting you to re-enter your personal information. Now, you can determine if an email is truly from the authentic source.

Accessing the email header is different for every email provider or email application, and sometimes, it is even hidden. In most of the cases however, the option to reveal the full header will be somewhere in the area where the subject and sender name are provided.

For example, the Yahoo! Mail header is in the upper right corner of the sender box, which is pointed out in the screenshot above. When you click Show Original, a text file will open in a new tab. This file contains all the necessary headers at the start. They are highlighted in screenshots.

And this is how the full email header appears in Yahoo! Mail:

For Gmail, the header is hidden under ‘Show Original’ – which will show you the complete email in plain text, including the header.

The example below is the header from an email I received in GMail.

In order to find out the IP address of the original sender, we need to look closely at the first half of the header. Somewhere in there, you’ll find a domain name and an IP address. Particularly, take a closer look at the term ‘Received: from’:

The first ‘Received: from’ line gives us the IP address of the server which forwarded the email to my Gmail address.

Received: from smtp110.biz.mail.mud.yahoo.com(smtp110.biz.mail.mud.yahoo.com [68.142.201.179])

If we continue our search, the second ‘Received: from’ line gives us the originating IP address.

Received: from unknown (HELO ?192.168.0.100?) (chaz@68.108.204.242 with plain)

This means that Chaz, located at 68.108.204.242 sent me an email.

The next line will only appear if the email was sent using an email application residing on the sender’s computer, like Thunderbird or Apple Mail. In our case:

X-Mailer: Apple Mail (2.753.1)

If the user sent the email using the web interface, the string would have looked like this:

Received: from [158.143.189.83] by web56706.mail.re3.yahoo.com via HTTP

We have the originating IP address 68.108.204.242 . To find out who’s behind that IP address we need to do a reverse DNS lookup using a web service like DomainTools, the command line or from ‘Network Tools’ in Ubuntu.

In our case, we know that someone called Chaz from Atlanta, using Cox Communications – with an IP address 68.108.204.242, depending on the subnet mask, sent that email.

Alternatively, you could use a tool called Email Trace, that does the whole operation for you after inputing the full email header into the text box. It might not always work, so knowing how to do it the old fashion way might come in handy.

This proves useful if you’re trying to report a spammer to your ISP, find out where a certain person is located at the moment, or help you spot phishing emails. For example, PayPal couldn’t have sent an email from an IP address in China.

If you know other good uses for this procedure, please share it with us in the comments.

Image credit: nekto_nektov

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If you choose not to, you risk exposing some intimate aspects to a malicious person, sniffing the internet traffic at a local hub or router. The same thing happens if you use a weak password or security question for your email account.

If that information was encrypted to start with, the sniffer would receive a bunch of seemingly random bits – and even if the person knew that it was encrypted, he still wouldn’t be able to do anything about it. And the guy who guessed your password still won’t have the private/public key combination to decrypt the actual message. Personally, I would sleep better at night knowing that I took this precautions for my own safety.

Now that we did some explaining for writing the article, lets delve into the world of encryption. Using the steps below, you will be able to encrypt any text message, including plain text email. Unfortunately, this tutorial will only cover the steps necessary for a Windows system using GnuPG. So, I invite my colleagues to teach you about encryption for Mac and Linux.

Instead of covering different plugins that interface GnuPG to clients like Thunderbird, I’ll show you how to do it the old fashion way which doesn’t require installing anything else than GnuPG, and is universally compatible.

• Download GnuPG for Windows from this page. Choose the current stable version of the program. The beta runtime is significantly larger, requires a restart, and it may contain bugs.
• From the start menu, choose to open WinPT. WinPT is a program that manages all the encryption/decryption keys you use.

• Generate your private key/public key set by clicking on ‘Generate a GnuPG key pair’. Learn about how this encryption scheme works by reading this article in Wikipedia.
• Select a name for your key pair and an email address that the key pair will be associated to. You will then have to enter a password that will unlock this very long encryption key pair. Remember that the encryption is as strong as the password you choose right now. Entering ‘123456’ is a very very bad idea if you really want to protect data.

• Success! Your initial key will be shown in the WinPT window.



• Open Wordpad.
• Send the receiving party your PGP public key by right-clicking on the key icon in the taskbar and selecting Current Window>Sign.
• Send the text that appears to the person which you wish to communicate with. They will need to send you their public key if they want to reply in encrypted format.
• Save the received PGP key as a .txt document and import it in WinPT by clicking Key>Import.
• Encrypt the message by either copying the text to the clipboard or by selecting Current Window>Encrypt in the taskbar. Paste the encrypted text to a new email and click send.

You can even encrypt files via File Manager>File>Encrypt into ZIP. In the window that appears, select the receiver’s public key. To decrypt, the receiver simply has to drag and drop the file into the File Manager.

And to answer proactively to a question I see coming – yes, I think it is possible that all our current encryption techniques can be broken by an organization such as the NRO or NSA. Come to think about it, during our history as humans, we invented a lot of encryption methods that turned out to be flawed, one of the most notorious being the Enigma machine.

You should also check out how to encrypt Gmail messages with FirePG written by Jorge Sierra and and this how-to on Truecrypt by Mark O’Neil.

What’s your take on encryption? Do you use it? Do you think you’ll ever need it? Have you say in the comments.

Image Credits: Flickr – Ngoc Ha

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

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