Movie Explorer is a handy tool that will help you build a database or a kind of overview of what movies are available on a specific source. It’s really meant for those of us who have a large collection of movies, most likely in a number of digital locations like various hard drives or external storage, but it could be useful to nearly anyone who has a collection they want to keep track of.

I have a huge collection of movies. I have been a film lover for as long as I can remember, and many of my earliest memories are of watching one thing or another on the screen. Therefore, I have more movies than the average person probably does, in both DVD and digital format, and I am always on the lookout for good ways to keep track of my collection, what’s in it, and other kinds of organizational tools I can use to keep my collection straight and easily navigated. Now, Movie Explorer really does appeal more to people like me, that have a large collection of movies on digital storage of some kind, but it also has a lot to offer the average user that just wants to be more organized, or that might be looking at building a larger collection.

The first and biggest thing to describe Movie Explorer as an application is “easy” in my opinion. To begin with, it doesn’t require any installation. It is designed to be run as a standalone .exe file so you can put it on a flash drive or other portable device for quick and easy access to it from anywhere, no matter if you have internet access at the time. Once you’ve downloaded and run the program for the first time, it will automatically scan the drive it is running from, and display results in the open window.

The first thing you will likely want to do is to open the Options menu (via the little wrench in the upper left corner) and change a couple of things to suit your own needs. For example, as a search engine and database, it has imdb.com as the default. While there’s nothing wrong with the imdb source, there is also another and a third option to combine the two. I personally use the combination option, as it offers the best coverage and method to get accurate results, in my opinion. What it does, specifically, is to let you assign either imdb or moviemeter as the database to pull relevant information for each tag section like genre and year of production. After you have made your changes in that area, including the option to have Instant Search turned on or off, you’ll want to move on the to Categories tab. This is where you’ll be able to add different directories for the program to scan. Once given a complete list of locations, Movie Explorer will offer a pretty accurate view of the movies on your system.

The main view in Movie Explorer is the explorer window, where you’ll see relevant information for each of your movie or other video titles. The only major downfall I found in this whole program was the fact that incorrectly tagged or titled files don’t come up accurately, since the database of imdb as well as moviemeter are based on tag comparison. This means that, as opposed to fileprint recognition (like that used to identify audio programs on some popular software) you will have to make sure you have things, at least, labeled properly. If your files are labeled incorrectly, you’re bound to get incorrect info from the database but since that is a problem most other programs of this type suffer from as well, I don’t count it as much of a downside.
Fast, easy to use, no frills, basic and effective and all for free. These things combine to make Movie Explorer one of the solid programs on my list of excellent freeware. If you’re looking for another way to organize your movie collection on your storage devices, this is a great way to do it at no cost. Until next time, my friends.

Get Movie Explorer here.

Freemake, makers of our absolute favorite free video conversion program and many other excellent free software titles, have just launched a tech blog of their own. One of the first articles is an interview with me, conducted via email, which was just published. Read it here.

They say everyone will have their 15 minutes of fame during their lifetime; I guess I’ve finally had mine

Actually, there was another interview on the Appaholic site back in 2007. You can read that one here.

Unsubscribr is a free tool that scans your email inbox and tries to sort out the junk and bulk mail it finds to make it easier for you to deal with it. It also allows you to quickly and easily unsubscribe from most email lists, in batches as well as one by one.

First came email. People were hesitant to use it at first, but then the advert folks heard about this nifty new way to send and get mail that costs nothing compared to snail mail. No matter what anyone else says, I still believe that this was the beginning of the digital explosion that has brought computers, email, and the internet in general, into our homes as a modern, everyday convenience rather than a strange and frightening new technology. Yes, you heard me right. I think that spam is the first culprit to really begin moving email forward as an acceptable form of common communication. See, before the advertisers started using email to send ‘unsolicited’ (and more often unwanted, whether it was technically signed up for or solicited at all) electronic mail to possible consumers, email was mostly used by technophiles of one kind or another. Scientists, computer engineers, software engineers, even just the enthusiastic tech hobbyist were all using email before the rest of us, but when the concept of advertising in email was pushed forth, the advertisers also began pushing the medium itself. After all, the more people they convinced to use email, the more people the could send spam to. Seems odd, but there it is.

In any case, as soon as people discovered that they could get junk mail in their email boxes, they began looking for ways to get rid of it. Just as the first unwanted ad in a snail mail box was thrown into the fireplace to help with the winter heating bill, so too go the electronic counterparts. Now, as time has gone by, more and more ways to avoid spam have come out, but more and more ways to send spam have come out, as well. Every time I look in my spam folder, I wonder at where and how I supposedly signed up to get half of these things. Little boxes that stay checked or don’t get checked, when installing a program or signing up for a web site, are the usual culprit but there are as many sources of spam as there are email addresses. That is to say, an infinite amount.

So, as time goes on we keep coming up with new ways to get rid of, or handle spam. In my own personal experience, Gmail is pretty darn good about filtering spam and also decent at letting you manage it. Additionally, Gmail will even offer an option to unsubscribe automatically when a spam message is first marked. All of that is very nice, but it doesn’t really help you if you’re not using Gmail. So, assuming that there are people out there using other things, and presuming that they aren’t going to switch to Gmail just to make me happy, I am pleased to say that Unsubscribr is a great free tool I can tell them about.

Unsubscribr works much the same way that Gmail’s anti-spam system works, in so far as the fact that it will let you manage and unsubscribe from spam lists that you find in your email. It’s interface is supremely simple to use, and while I didn’t find a whole lot of in depth documentation, I felt that it was easy enough to figure out without much help. This is always a big bonus point for any free program or software solution, to me, because there are so many out there that are very useful but require mammoth efforts and learning curves to figure out how to use them effectively. Unsubscribr doesn’t suffer from this particular dysfunction, thankfully.

So, as a test of it’s function rather than it’s form, I decided to try it out on my Gmail account. Whether it is Gmail or another service, the first thing you will need to do is put your email address in the box on the front page of Unsubscribr’s site. Afterwards, you may need to provide some permissions (like Gmail, for example) but relatively quickly you will be up and running, so to speak. Unsubscribr will automatically search the most common folders on your email service for a limited number of days into the past. There is also an option to pay a small one time fee of two whole dollars to get unlimited functionality, like up to 30 days of history scanned, or adding more folders to the scan process, but this option is not in any way required. Unsubscribr works quite well without ever paying a dime, and I would recommend it to anyone at all looking for a good, free way to get their bulk emails or spam under control.

[Thanks to reader Panzer for tip about this service]

Get started with Unsubscribr here.

If you are an expert Photoshop user then this post may not be  for you; for the rest of us, however, the 3 tools presented here will provide high level functionality that will delight and deliver. Smilla Enlarger uses an algorithmic approach to enlarge images without pixellization, Seam Carving GUI performs ‘content aware’ resizing or cropping, that can crop elements or resize elements within your image while keeping the image visually plausible and cohesive, and ShiftN can fix skewed, converging perspectives in photographs in a single click.

The three tools are as follows:

1. Smilla Enlarger: enlarge images without pixellization
2. Seam Carving GUI: selectively resize or crop elements in images
3. ShiftN: fix converging line perspectives for upright objects

1. Smilla Enlarger: enlarge images without pixellization

We’ve mentioned this program before (here and here). Smilla is a simple free tool that can process and enlarge images using a number of enlargement profiles.

There’s nothing magical about what this program does, of course; it merely applies filters and you could in theory do the same using your favorite image editor; however, over the years I have found it extremely useful, and have been going back to it over and over again.

See examples of Smilla’s processing above and below.

2. Seam Carving GUI: selectively resize or crop elements in images

Imagine being able to resize an image, yet keep an element or elements within the image from being affected by the resize. Conversely, imagine cropping only an element while maintaining the way all the other elements around it relate to each other (see the screenshot on the top of this post for an example of the latter).

The video below does a good job showing how Seam Carving GUI works.

More on content aware resizing in this Wikipedia article.

3. ShiftN: fix converging line perspectives for upright objects

If you’ve ever tried to take a head-on picture of an object, such as, say, a building, a painting, a bureau of drawers, or any other object, you know how difficult it is to get a perfectly aligned, 90-degree straight shot that showed it as being upright. Not to worry, though; ShiftN can fix converging line perspectives in images at the click of a button.

The cost? Your resulting image will be slightly cropped at the edges compared with the original.

Examples: (all processed using automatic correction)

Before	After ShiftN

That’s it. If you know of any similar freeware tools please let us know in the comments section.

Kaseya is a free toolkit that allows you to provide remote assistance to another system via Internet connection. It’s free to use, and there’s a wealth of information and support available at no cost as well.

Kaseya is the kind of program that speaks for itself in how it works as well as what it can do. The interface, mostly online, is pretty simple and easy to figure out, even if you haven’t had much experience with this sort of thing before.

The first thing you will need to do is sign up for an account, which takes about a minute or two.  Once you’ve signed into the site the first time, you’ll be able to explore the different areas that are on offer. There’s the main page that lists the computers connected to your network, which you can provide support to, as well as an area for Training on how to use Kaseya. There’s a support page for the program itself, a handy guide to the different Features of Kaseya, as well as a robust wiki and forum section to delve even deeper into the possibilities of the Kaseya system.

Programs like this are nothing special these days, in that you can find at least a dozen possible solutions per search engine used to find them, but Kaseya did strike me as elegantly set up for novices in the area of remote assistance. It would provide a nice doorway into some of the deeper aspects of IT support as well. When first logging in, you’re not really directed much but it’s simple to find the Training section and get started. The first thing you want to do is to add computers to your network, however, and that process was fairly easy to initiate. There’s a giant Add Computers button staring you in the face as soon as you log in, so I couldn’t help but press it. It’s a compulsion. You’ll be given options to install locally, on the computer you’re using to view the site, as well as sending IM instructions or email invitations to join the network. This helps to cut down on the amount of leg work one tech has to do and many people I know in the IT industry would be glad of that.

Each computer you want to install on the system and provide support to will have to install a small bit of software that will allow the interface between systems. I started by adding my laptop to the network. The antivirus software I use immediately pointed the suspicious finger at the Kaseya module, which tells me that my antivirus software is working and that the Kaseya module will probably allow a decent amount of control over a remote system. After adding the systems you want to be able to provide remote access to, you can divide them into different groups and add other users that can access the Kaseya system. All of this is done through simple interfaces that offer decent descriptions for the most part. The program is obviously intended for as wide an audience as possible. While many people will find it easy to use and understand, I couldn’t help feeling it was a bit limited for a large scale corporate IT structure or anything of that magnitude. Smaller organizations may find it ideal, however.

While I didn’t have the chance to test a large network on Kaseya, I was able to check out its features through a smaller number of computers and it worked without a hitch. While I am sure that there is more to the experience, on the surface Kaseya seems to be a viable solution for remote assistance if you’re looking for one. It’s notable that there is also a professional kit of tools and services you can get to go along with Kaseya for a price but if you’re confident in your abilities and don’t need to have any support, Kaseya might provide the answer you need. Until next time, my friends.

Check out Kaseya here.

We recently got access to a new extra screen at the office, so we did the natural thing, and started testing all sorts of free multiple monitor software that we’ve always wanted to try. If you use more than one monitor then this post is for you; it lists 7 programs and resources that add some excellent functionality to your multi-monitor setup, such as extending the taskbar into multiple screens, controlling windows via hotkeys, spanning wallpaper images across different screens, etc.

The programs are: MultiWall, Dual Monitor Taskbar, Swap Screen, SoftTH, Dual Display Mouse Manager, GridMove, as well as some good multiple monitor wallpaper sources.

Here’s the list.

1. MultiWall: powerful tool for downloading and displaying multi-monitor wallpaper
2. Dual Monitor Taskbar: extend the taskbar to additional monitors
3. Swap Screen: send the active window to various locations on different screens, via hotkey
4. SoftTH: span DirectX games across multiple monitors
5. Dual Display Mouse Manager: prevent the mouse from accidentally moving across screens (or ‘teleport’ it to other screens on demand)
6. GridMove: snap your windows to pre-defined regions on any screen
7. Multiple Monitor Wallpaper sources

1. MultiWall: powerful tool for downloading and displaying multi-monitor wallpaper

This program will automatically span wallpaper images onto multiple screens, but what makes it special is that it provides a large range of images that you can download and use with a single click (you can upload your own images too, if so inclined). Simply fantastic.

There are many, many wallpaper managers for multiple monitors, but I opted to exclude all of them from this post in favor of this one.

2. Dual Monitor Taskbar: extend the taskbar to additional monitors

Every wished that your additional monitors would show a taskbar and taskbar buttons just like your main screen? Dual Monitor Taskbar does exactly that. (Note: I like this one better than Zbar and the free version of MultiMon, because it is simple to use and maintains Windows 7 Aero look and feel, which the latter does not).

3. Swap Screen: send the active window to various locations on different screens, via hotkey

The hotkeys are customizable, as shown above. Swap Screen also allows maximize a single window across multiple screen (so-called ‘supersize’ it).

Note on downloading: this program is a part of ‘Dual Monitor Tools’,  a collection of portable multi-monitor apps that come in a single zipped archive. Other tools I likes in the same pack: Dual Wallpaper and DisMon.

Note that DisplayFusion free includes the same functionality as this one.

4. SoftTH: span DirectX games across multiple monitors

This one for gamers who would like a more powerful gaming experience. SoftTH will span your game display across your multiple monitors, creating an immersive visual environment.

This program is one of those rare occasions where we haven’t tested this ourselves (we did not have access to any of the games on the ‘working correctly’ list), but I just couldn’t resist including it here.

5. Dual Display Mouse Manager: prevent the mouse from accidentally moving across screens (or ‘teleport’ it to other screens on demand)

For those who do not want the mouse to accidentally move across screens, this one will lock it into the current screen unless ‘ctrl’ is pushed or unless the mouse is pressed onto the edge of the screen for a certain amount of time (in milliseconds). It also has a ‘region jump’ option via hotkey, whereby the mouse is teleported into the exact same relative location across different screens.

Also check out Multi Monitor Mouse, which does something very similar.

6. GridMove: snap your windows to pre-defined regions on any screen

This program lets you slice your screen into pre-set or user-defined grids, and to send windows to these on-demand, via hotkey. It is absolutely a great program and it also supports multiple screens.

7. Multiple Monitor Wallpaper sources

We’re a little obsessed with these images. Sorry

• 70+ Beautiful Dual Monitors Desktop Wallpapers
• 2xBG dual monitor wallpapers
• dmb
• Deviant Art (dual monitor search)
• eWallpapers dual monitor (different sizes: 2560×1024; 3200×1200, 5120×1600)
• Wallpaper Abyss dual monitor
• Dual-Display.com
• Widewall
• Princeton-affiliated dual monitor desktop backgrounds site
• Dualscreenwallpaper.com

Credits: thanks go to Alaa K for doing most of the testing and screenshots for this article. Illustration credit: we used this wallpaper image to do the illustration on top of this article.

Did we miss anything? Please write your thoughts, ideas, questions, etc. in the comments section below.

Windows 7 is quite good, but there are certain things that can be better about it. For example, you may have tried to rearrange the icons in a folder manually and found, to your surprise, that you can’t. Or perhaps you tried to filter your files by size or by date in icon or tile folder view, but was unable to. Folder Options X is a free program that can remedy both of these issues; it can also disable full row select, which can be quite useful.

AniExplorer, on the other hand, is for those who like to change the way things behave by default, and/or like to add a little twist. It adds custom animations to Windows in the way icons are displayed in folders. The effect is surprisingly pleasant (and can be seen in the video below).

Note, though, that ironically these two programs are incompatible and do not seem to work on the same system together.

Folder Options X: offers 3 tweaks

(1) Enable dragging and dropping to arrange icons.

Open a Windows 7 or 8 folder similar to the one below. Now grab one of the objects and try to re-arrange them; you will find that you cannot. Once you apply the tweak, you will find that the functionality is miraculously restored. The screenshot below left shows the files ordered as Windows 7 wants to order them, while the screenshot below right shows them reordered as per my drag and drop.

(2) Enable filtering in all views, not just ‘Details’ view.

Windows 7 has some nice filtering options, but strangely these are only available in ‘Details’ view. Not to worry though, Folder Options X will let you enable these for all views (see below).

(3) Disable full row select (in ‘Details’ view)

This can be beneficial for a number of reasons. For example, it can prevent you from accidentally dragging and dropping an object onto a subfolder, etc. The new behavior is illustrated in the screenshot below. Notice my rectangle below is not selecting the files; to do that I would have

AniExplorer: adds customizable animation to folder icons

The best way to illustrate the effect is to show in action, in the below video.

Note that if your PC is resource-challenged, then you might want to opt out of adding this sort of eye candy.

Compatibility: these tweaks work on both Windows 7 and Windows 8, 32 bit and 64 bit.

• Download Folder Options X.
• Download AniExplorer. [Thanks to reader Panzer for the tip about this program].

As mentioned above, do not install both of these simultaneously, as they seem to not want to coexist on the same machine.

For one or two jobs and an occasional personal instance, I have had to sign documents electronically. There are a few ways to do so online, for little or even no cost at all so I decided to take a look at a couple of them: DigiSigner and SignNow.

This subject has always been an interest for me, as it is a point of change for humans to be able to sign things, legally, from far away. It sounds odd, at first, certainly, but once taken in the context of moving into a technologically driven and supported society, it’s a big deal. I’ve always been a proponent of technology in general and the advancement of it is a measure of society as well. Looking into the possible or even probably future, where tech is king, software will presumably be far more advanced both in terms of complexity as well as common use, so being able to sign a legal document from the other side of the planet could easily become the standard. In fact, signing documents electronically has been possible for a long time, especially if you count earlier technologies like fax machines or even pneumatic tubes.

All of that is a far flung fancy and may not seem like it has much to do with life today, but signing documents remotely is still a valid and convenient option. There are two sites, specifically, that I looked at for this article. The first is DigiSigner and I attempted to compare it to SignNow and possibly decide between them.

DigiSigner is certainly easy to use, even though I found the splash page to be, somehow, intimidating. Perhaps it was all the text grouped the way it was, I don’t know. What did I expect from a site dealing with legal things? It wasn’t a big deal and didn’t detract from the site’s usefulness, it was just something discordant I felt at the way the page looked. Since I couldn’t put my finger on what it was, however, I moved on into using the site to give it a fair shake. I chose the “DigiSigner Online” option near the bottom of the page and away I went. After verifying that I trusted the page’s own electronic signature, I was taken to a flash page with instructions on signing a PDF format document using the DigiSigner software. It was three steps, simple and easy, but since I didn’t have a legal document to actually sign I can’t testify as to how such a signature would hold up legally, although the site promises it will. in categories of how easy and simple it was, I’d rate it as chimp doable. Not a problem for anyone with the skills of literacy and mouse clicking.

The second site I check out, SignNow, was much nicer, visually speaking, on the splash page. Again, this is an opinion here, but I found it to be much ‘friendlier’ than the somewhat stuffy DigiSigner front page.  The aesthetics notwithstanding, I moved into the site to check out how it worked. I immediately noticed that there are mobile apps for Android and iOS available to interact with SignNow on the go. Also of note on the front page was the promise that I could sign a document right now with no registration needed. Comparatively, I don’t recall DigiSigner asking me to register for anything either. Once I pressed the Open Document button, I was taken straight to the Windows Explorer browsing window to find a document to sign. Fast, simple, easy just like DigiSigner. If you do decide to create a free account, you can do things like saving your documents online and let others sign them later.

The Verdict: I’d honestly have to say that while DigiSigner is a decent site, SignNow has a few points up on it. Most notably the mobile apps, and the overall ‘feel’ of the site and how it works. This is based on the idea that all you want to do is sign a PDF document electronically. If you’re looking for more integrated functionality like embedding the option into some kind of applet or other program, DigiSigner is going to be your better option but that kind of thing has a cost attached to it. The balance means that in the end, for my readers, I would recommend SignNow over DigiSigner. Until next time, my friends!

TrueCrypt is the world’s foremost free/open source encryption program, but running it portably can be a bit of a hassle. In this posting, we will show you an extremely easy and fast method to run TrueCrypt portably from your hard drive or from a portable USB drive. You could also put it in your Dropbox folder, giving you instant access to the same encrypted volume across multiple Windows PCs.

We will use a free, third party program called ‘Launcher for TrueCrypt’.

Follow the steps below:

Step 1. Download, install, and run Truecrypt. If you already have TruCrypt installed go to step 2.

Step 2. Create an encrypted volume.

Note: the steps below will show how to do that. If you are familiar with the process or if you already have an encrypted volume you would like to use, skip to step 3.

• Click ‘create volume’ to create a new volume
• Select ‘Create an encrypted file container’ and then ‘Standard TrueCrypt volume’.

• For volume location, click select file, then create a volume anywhere. In the example below, we created a volume called ‘Test Freewaregenius’ on the desktop.

• Next choose your Encryption Algorithm; the default (AES) is good enough. Click next.

• Choose volume size as needed. For this tutorial we choose 100 megs.

• Choose a password, enter it twice, click ‘Next’

• Finally, select the filesystem and cluster (if in doubt, use the default values), and click ‘Format’

Step 3. Download Launcher for TrueCrypt (TC_launcher.zip). This program will let you access your TrueCrypt volumes without having TrueCrypt installed on your machine.

• Extract TC_launcher.zip in an appropriate location. It doesn’t really matter where, since eventually you will be able to move it around your hard drive or onto a portable drive.
• *Important, pay attention* Next go to your installed TrueCrypt folder, which typically is in ‘C:\Program Files\TrueCrypt\’ (see screenshot below left). COPY this folder to the extracted folder ‘TrueCrypt Launcher\Program Files’ (see screenshot below right. Note that there is already a ‘TrueCrypt’ folder there, overwrite it).

• Next MOVE your TrueCrypt encrypted volume created in ‘Step 2’ above to the same place (the ‘Program Files’ folder inside the extracted TC_launcher folder). Again see screenshot above right).

Step 4. Run TC_Loader.exe from your TC_Launcher folder

• Select your encryption file and select a drive letter. Make sure to choose something like ‘U’ or ‘Y’ that is unlikely to be used on a machine where you might use TrueCrypt from a USB.

• Enter your password in the next screen.

• Your volume should now be mounted (see screenshot below). TrueCrypt should be running in the system tray. Note that this is the portable and not the installed version that is running.

Note that you can dismount the TrueCrypt volume via TrueCrypt in the system tray menu or by double clicking TC_Loader.exe.

Step 5. ** Important final settings **

In the TC_launcher folder (see screenshot below), go to ‘TC_launcher\Data\settings.ini\’, and open it with a text editor such as notepad.

Change the ‘Imagepath’ field such that anything before the actual folder where the portable application resides is removed. For example, in the example below, I removed the ‘desktop’ part from the path.

This will allow the application to run successfully no matter where you move the folder. If you want to rename the folder (i.e. not TC_Launcher but something else) make sure that the new name is reflected in the settings file. Save and exit

Step 6. Final steps

You can now uninstall TrueCrypt from your machine (optional), and move the TC_Launcher to a USB or to some other location on your hard drive.

If you want to use it with Dropbox simply move the folder into your Dropbox folder and share appropriately.

Questions, ideas, thoughts? Please share them in the comments section below.

The internet offers the modern human a multitude of options that previous generations didn’t have. According to a friend of mine, one of those things is the ability to immediately convert almost anything to anything, online, at one site or using one program or another. While this is probably most useful to people who need it on a daily basis, like students, engineers, scientists and computer programmers, there’s also a lot of conversions that the average computer owner can find useful. I took a ‘walk’ on the info super highway and while I got a lot of odd looks from drivers for walking on it, I also found some pretty interesting conversion tools I thought I would share.

The first place I stumbled on was to convert kilobytes to megabytes. It has always been a wonder that the computer still occasionally shows me how big something is in kilobytes. This doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense because so much of what we manipulate on our systems now is in much larger sizes. I do have a decent idea of how many kilobytes are in a megabyte and how many megabytes are in a gigabyte, but sometimes I want to know a bit more accurately, and since I am not a genius I don’t have a conversion calculator in my head. That’s where the site Unitconversion.org comes in handy. You can input a specific number of kilobytes and see how many gigabytes it is, or vice versa. Simple, quick, easy. This type of utility page is the heart of the free and useful internet, in my opinion, and it’s always nice to discover another one to add to my internal database of bookmarks.

After leaving that page I wandered around looking for something more whimsical and interesting on a lighter side. That’s when I almost surfed right passed Converticon.com before noticing it and stopping. While I have reviewed other conversion software for video and audio, one of the things I haven’t done much with is my playlists. I have a lot of them, normally somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty or so which means that my desktop is often a blur of the same VLC orange road cone over and over again. While this can be mesmerizing while I’m awake at 4am trying to finish a project, it’s not as pleasing to the eye as having separate and distinct icons for each of my playlists. This idea had occurred to me a while ago, but I hadn’t done much about it until I saw this page, which allows me to take nearly any standard image file, and convert it to a multi-size icon file, which I can then use as the custom icon for a shortcut to the playlist. It seems a complex way to do things, perhaps, but it winds up having a customized picture for each of the playlists, and when using medium or large icons on the Windows 7 desktop, gives a nice tiled feel to the workspace. I moved on, happy with the new look to my desktop.

One of the nice things about the third site, Onlineconversion.com, is that the only ads I noticed were ones for the site itself in one way or another, mostly mentions of donations. I know that some people frown on this but some people frown on drinking coffee too. Personally, I feel that a site that avoids selling ad space in favor of asking for donations is brave and filling a specific niche in the software and online worlds. I guess it’s sort of like only eating locally grown organic foods. It just feels more … satisfying, traditional. While that kind of thing won’t work for just any website, it’s nice to see it being done when the site does have that option. The site itself is chock-full of different conversion options, from things like electric current measurements to ASCII engine conversions. Almost anything you can imagine is available to be converted on this site. This is a site that I don’t see myself visiting all the time but it’s like that one special phone number in your cell, that you’re always glad you know it when you do need it.

So the conclusion of my little jaunt into free conversion (sounds like a new age religious movement) on the Internet showed me that you really can convert pretty much anything to anything else on there. It’s just a matter of how much time you’re willing to put into looking. As I said before, I think that sites like these, devoted to a very specific use, are an important but often overlooked part  of the Internet, beneath the slick veneer of e-commerce and advertising that we see more regularly. One could not exist without the other, but it’s nice to know your way around both ends of the street, so to speak.

Until next time, my friends.

OpenStudy is a free web site that helps you connect with other people on the Internet to help you study online via Q&A. It is possibly one of the coolest things I have seen in a long time, because it is so simple and powerful in both concept and design. There’s a lot of free web sites out there for education and many of them are great, but this one truly stands out to my eye as an excellent achievement in sense and usefulness.

OpenStudy.com is a website that, essentially, allows people to connect with each other with the purpose of teaching and learning. From writing to physics, chemistry to history, OpenStudy probably has some people on there who can help you learn about it, and what’s better, they can help you in specific ways with direct answers to questions you might have. Just as, ideally, a teacher would do, if you were in the same room with them. When you’re in a classroom, you can raise your hand, ask the teacher a question, and get an answer, presumably and usually. Well OpenStudy is much like that in some ways.

You’ll need to start by registering for your free account, which can take two minutes or much longer, depending on how much time you want to spend filling out your bio/profile information. That’s up to you, but you can easily be done in just a couple of minutes if you don’t go into a lot of depth on that particular section. Also, you can register using your Facebook account if you’d like, as so many sites are now doing. Once your account is created, you’ll be able to jump right in and start asking and answering questions of the other people on OpenStudy. You can even connect those questions to a Tweet and/or Facebook post.

To start with, you’ll choose a subject you want to study. Don’t worry, you can study as many as you want and it costs nothing, ever, so pick whatever you want to learn about without reservation. This is truly, in my eyes, one of the best reasons the Internet was created in the first place. Science fiction writers like Heinlein and Bradbury, Gibson and Asimov and more I am sure, had all predicted something like the Internet and, moreover, predicted the future would be a better place because of them, in essence. That may sound a bit high-minded or lofty wishing, but if you take a moment to think about it, you may see that the easier it is for each of us to become educated and ‘smart’, then the better our society in general will advance and the overall quality of life will improve. Isn’t that what drives us all? So, to me, this website is a great representative of why the Internet is important to the human race.

So, once you’ve chosen a subject, you’re given two columns that take up most of the screen. These consist of Questions, on the left hand side, and You can ask your own question, like you see I did in the screen shots. On the right hand side is a listing of members currently online who are also studying the same subject you’re currently in. At the bottom of that you can see tabs for the other subjects you’re studying. That’s the screen, basically. You can pick a question on the left side and offer your own answer for it, as well as read previous answers, or you can post your very own question and get answers from other people. There’s a round robin kind of time system they use to ‘bump’ questions, but it works out quite well, from what I could see.

That’s the heart of OpenStudy. There’s not much more to it than that, but that is what makes it so good. It is simple and powerful if people decide to use it. We can all take a few minutes a day to help someone else learn something, and that’s a thing we can all feel good about at the end of that day.The central methodology is almost Socratic. Ask questions, get answers, and ponder them. OK, so not all questions are deep thinking marvels, like “What is the difference between effect and affect?” but those are still very important to answer because whoever asked it, presumably, genuinely wants to know the answer, to further his or her understanding of that subject, and perhaps ultimately, the universe in general. As my father always said: “There are no stupid questions.” Until next time, my friends.

• Learn more about OpenStudy’s mission here
• Check out OpenStudy here.

Why would you want to run multiple Dropbox instances on the same machine? We could think of two reasons (1) you’ve maxed out on the 16 gigs or so that each free Dropbox account can give you as a ceiling, and would like to use another account (or accounts) to add more, or (2) you would like to access another Dropbox account for whatever reason, such as a disposable account used by members of your team or that of someone else (such an ex employee of your company) or somesuch.

In this posting, we will describe how to run another Dropbox account to your WINDOWS machine using a third party freeware program (i.e. to install two Dropbox accounts running simultaneously on one PC).

The application used: DropboxPortableAHK is a free program that can create portable instances of Dropbox, which can be carried on a USB drive, etc. Or it can be run locally alongside your existing Dropbox installation, which is what this post assumes.

Note before starting: the second instance of Dropbox will involve a process (DropboxPortableAHK.exe) running in the background. I have found that this process can use up 2-10 percentage points of CPU usage intermittently, depending on the settings used in the setup. This on my high spec PC was no big deal, but may be somewhat annoying on a resource-challenged machine. The good news is that you can opt to run this (i.e. the second instance of Dropbox) when you need it rather than having it in the background at all times. Or you can reduce or eliminate this if you uncheck ‘Dropbox folder protection’ in step 6 below.

First things first, download the free program:

Get a free program called DropboxPortableAHK  from it’s program page. Extract the zip volume into an appropriate place on your hard drive. Note: the instructions below assume that your new Dropbox folder will be INSIDE this folder, so take that into consideration when placing this folder. Next run “DropboxPortableAHK.exe” to start the setup process.

Setting up:

01- Welcome: the setup process Consists of 9 steps, as seen in the screenshot below on the left sidebar. Many of these are self explanatory, but we will briefly go over a few.

02- Connection profiles  -  click on the “+” sign to add the Dropbox credentials for the account you want to use. You should see the screen below. Enter your Dropbox account email in the ‘Username’ slot, and the password underneath it. This should be all you need to input, unless you use an internet proxy, in which case you need to fill in the other fields.

03 – Dropbox folder location: here, you can specify where you want your new Dropbox folder to be. My advice, leave it as is (“.\Dropbox”, which indicates that you want it to be in the same folder as the DropboxPortableAHK.exe executable). Note that this is a portable application, meaning that wherever you move the DropboxPortableAHK folder, the Dropbox folder will move with it.

04 – Previous Dropbox configuration: do NOT do anythingon this screen; just click next. I am assuming that you are reading this post to ADD another Dropbox account to your machine; this step is only necessary if you are converting your already installed Dropbox account to a portable installation using DropboxPortableAHK. Otherwise, click NEXT.

05 – Update notification: self explanatory. If you want update notifications from DropboxPortableAHK or Dropbox, check the appropriate boxes. My advice: leave as is and click ‘Next’.

06 – Addons: the settings on this page are important.

Consider the following options. You will need to make some decisions. Note that I am assuming that you are reading this post because you want to run another instance of Dropbox on your hard drive, rather than running a portable Dropbox instance from a USB. You can assume that settings not explained below should be left as is.

Create autorun.inf: For our purposes, do not check. This is not necessary unless you (a) are planning to use this Dropbox install on a USB, and (b) you do not run Windows 7.

Dropbox folder protection: *important* if you plan to keep your second Dropbox instance in the same folder location on your hard drive, uncheck this. (The advantage = significantly less of a drain on your PC’s CPU resources). Otherwise, keep it checked, especially if the folder is on a removable volume that could accidentally have a different drive letter associated with it across sessions.

If you think you may want to MOVE your second Dropbox folder and/or use it portably, keep this checked. This option will keep Dropbox from deleting all of your folder contents on the server if it cannot find the folder anymore (because you moved it) and therefore thinks it is blank.  If you do check folder protection, you can change the checking interval value if you want, although it is not necessary (lower=more CPU usage but less chance of deletion, higher=less CPU usage but more chance of deletion).

Notification about workaround on restricted user accounts: keep this checked.

Make SyncAndGo the default behavior: SyncAndGo is a usage mode whereby you can run DropboxPortableAHK, have it sync your local folder and the remote Dropbox server, and then immediately exit. Check this if that sounds like what you want.

Save Dropbox configuration files for each PC: keep this checked.

For more information on these options, go to the instructions page on the program website, scroll to about the middle of the page.

07- User applications: in this screen, you can tell DropboxPortableAHK to run certain applications before and after it starts and closes Dropbox. For our purposes, leave these blank and click ‘Next’.

08- Dropbox application files: click ‘Download Dropbox files’ to download the latest Dropbox local installation file.

Also in this screen: choose a color for the Dropbox icon to differentiate it from your original Dropbox icon in your system tray, in order to tell which is which.

09- Dropbox setup: click ‘Start Dropbox setup’, keep ‘Start Dropbox after setup has finished’ checked.

Click ‘Next’. The Dropbox desktop client setup will run. * Importantly*, note the following:

• The location of the Dropbox folder that you will specify in the Dropbox setup process will NOT be the actual location used. Remember that you specified a location in step  ‘03’ above. That location will end up being the actual folder location.
• Make sure not to make the default Dropbox folder location in the setup the same as your Dropbox instance already installed on your machine.
• Here’s a step by  step

1.  Click ‘I already have a Dropbox account’	2. Enter your credentials for the 2nd account. Give the computer name a name that identifies it for you	3. Click the free 2GB (it will say 2GB regardless of whether or not you earned more).

4.  Click advanced.	5. You want to make sure that you do not choose the Dropbox folder location to be the same as the folder location of the already running instance of Dropbox.Below, I chose “C:\Dropbox” as the location. Later, I will go back and delete that folder	6. In this step, you can choose whether you want all of the folders in the account to sync, or some of them. It’s up to you.

That’s it. In the remaining screens, skip the tour and click finish.

The DropboxPortableAHK Setup screen will be displayed again. Click ‘finish’

Last steps:

• If you get an error screen like the one below, click Yes, and it should go away.

• Open your DropboxPortableAHK folder. You will see that, as specified in step 03 above, the Dropbox folder is indeed there.

• Go to the location that you specified in the Dropbox setup (C:\Dropbox as per the example shown here) and delete that folder. It is not needed.

Finally, go to your system tray. You will find a new Dropbox icon alongside the original one that was initially installed on your machine. See the screenshot, top of this post.

Questions? Issues? Comments? Please use the comments section below.

Would you like to learn to type faster? Do you believe that you can do so while playing a game? If your answer to the first question is yes, then let me answer the second one for you: yes, you can learn to be a much better typer while playing a game. But what if I told you that the game is such a nice, casual game that you will be coming back just to play, whether or not you are interested in typing. Enter: Z-Type

Z-Type is a fun, fast paced browser-based top-scrolling shooter that is controlled via the keyboard, by typing words to blast aliens.

I found this game while researching my ‘Ten must-see Chrome Experiments’ post, and although I was impressed with it, I passed it over for that post, opting to use something else instead. However, when I found myself coming back to this game a couple of days afterwards, it started to dawn on me that Z-Type was something special.

The concept is pretty self explanatory. Each alien ship has it’s own keyword that you need to type to destroy it. Some ships are motherships which fire missiles and generate other ships. Note that once you start typing a word, you cannot switch to another alien until you finish, which can really trip you.

The verdict: a great little casual game. Easy to get into for a quick game (games tend to be very quick). AND it will enhance your typing skills. If you think you are a generally fast typer then skip ‘normal’ and jump right into ‘expert’ mode.

Go here to play Z-Type (browser based).

There is something that makes sense about seeing the weather forecast displayed on a big map, which may be related to the fact that we are all used to seeing forecasts superimposed on big maps on TV. In any case, Full Screen Weather is a free service that will display a detailed map with annotated weather information pulled from the ‘Weather Underground’ website. It also displays a 4 day forecast, weather alerts, and other relevant information. You can also get this service on your Android or iOS device via free apps.

This service is fairly self explanatory; it will autodetect your location or offer you the option to search for the location you seek.

iOS and Android: apps are available. See the screenshot to the right.

The verdict: really nice. Check it out for yourself. You could either use ‘Full Screen Weather’ as:

• A web service for any browser
• Install as a Chrome App
• Install the ‘Weather Underground’ Android app and iPhone/iPad app (which are from the same developers and the do the same thing).

Webnode is a web site and program that allows you to create, manage, and easily control your personal website totally for free. It has a very simple drag and drop interface, loads of customization options for your site, and even a smart tutorial that will offer help when and where you need it.

I can remember when the world wide web was so brand new, and finding out that I could one day have my very own web site out there was a major thrill as a young man looking to make an indelible mark on the world. At the time, however, it wasn’t so easy to just create and publish and connect a new web site, but that has changed over the years along with almost everything else as our information technology makes leaps and bounds every year. Moore’s law may not apply directly to building web pages, but the principle could be called similar, and the end result of that supposition is nearly the same: web pages and sites have become more and more easy to create, edit, publish and maintain. In fact, it has become so easy in recent years that many programs say things like, “It’s so easy even your grandma can do it!” and Webnode says that right on their splash page.

They are correct. There are so many great, easy, free ways to create a web site out there now, one is nearly overwhelmed with the different choices on offer. In particular, if you are creating a personal web page, for your own blog or photo galleries or whatnot, there are metaphoric tons of different programs and sites out there that will help you do so at no cost. Webnode is, in my opinion, one of the best in this arena.

Webnode allows you to sign up for a free account with them, and then create a web site, publish and maintain it, and all at no cost to you other than your regular ISP costs. The process is pretty simple, and it is actually one of the more user friendly web building platforms I have personally tried. However, that is not all that Webnode really has to offer. In addition to making a personal site, Webnode also allows you some free options for business sites, which is pretty unusual for this kind of thing. Most of the web building platforms that have a zero cost out there won’t let you do anything for a business site that is actually useful without paying something at some point. Webnode differs from the pack in that way as follows: You can create a free personal or free business website, and maintain it as long as you want, at no cost. An E-Commerce website is free to set up and free to maintain for 30 days but after that they will make you get a premium account.

So, for personal or basic business use, Webnode is near perfect but if you want any further abilities, like E-Commerce for example, you will either have to get a premium account or find another program. The business site option does offer a premium account too, with some extras added, but the free version is perfectly useful and appropriate if all you want to really do is set up and maintain a presence online for your business. They’ll even help you to use your own domain name if you have one, or help you go purchase one if you don’t, but they don’t demand that you do so either. Another great point worth mentioning about Webnode that sets them apart from other free web building platforms is the fact that they don’t place mandatory ads on your site, and they promise that they never will.

You’ll need to sign up with a name for your site (freewaretest.Webnode.com in this case) and your email address, as well as creating a password. Once you have done so, you’ll get an email asking you to verify your email address, click the link in it and you’re all done with the sign up process. Once the sign up is done, you’ll be led through the basic process of creating your site.

The Webnode system is just great at teaching you how to use it, as well. Tutorial notes and directives will appear from time to time on an as-needed basis, but unlike the horrid PaperClip of Doom that bugs you every ten seconds, even when it’s not useful or appropriate (Hi! It looks like you’re trying to write a steamy letter to your girlfriend. Would you like some help with that?) the Webnode tutorial notes really do only show up as needed. Once cleared, they can be recalled by going to the help section. The whole system is based on drag and drop functionality, so it really is WYSIWYG in the most literal sense. Pick a template for an overall look, specify what generic pages you want created, and then edit them to your heart’s content. Once done, hit publish and POOF! your web site magically appears on the interwebs. This is as simple and easy as it gets, and given the price tag it’s a no-brainer to use Webnode for your personal or basic business page. Until next time, my friends!

Check out Webnode here.

We recently published a big comparison of free ZIP archiving and compression programs on Freewaregenius that looked at many of the more well known (and some not so well known) free ZIP programs out there. The conclusion: we liked HaoZip, 7-Zip, and PeaZip best, in that order.

Since then, some readers have alerted us to two new programs that are worth considering: Bandizip and Bitser, both of which provide a good range of features and functions (see below).

The following table provides a quick feature overview:

	Bandizip	Bitser
screenshot
Interface	Nice interface, supports drag and drop, a good-looking, customizable context menu. Very cool ‘preview archive’ option in the context menu.	Nice interface, supports drag and drop, a good-looking context menu (which however is not customizable).
Interesting features	High speed archiving/ multi core compression, unicode filenames, can extract multiple archives into multiple folders, ZIPX format support (packing and upacking), multiple icon packs.	Calculate folder size and delete empty folders via context menu, provides AES-256 encryption, the ability to create or extract multiple archives from the context menu, a checksum calculator.
Packs	ZIP (z01), ZipX (zx01), TAR, TGZ, 7Z (7z.001), and EXE (e01)	ZIP, 7Z, Exe
Unpacks	ZIP (z01), ZipX (zx01), TAR, TGZ, 7Z (7z.001), EXE (e01), RAR (part1.rar, r01), ACE, ALZ, APK, ARJ, BH, BZ, BZ2, CAB, EGG, GZ, J2J, JAR, IMG, IPA, ISO, LHA, LZH, LZMA, PMA, TBZ, TBZ2, TGZ, TLZ, TXZ, UDF, WAR, WIM, XZ, and Z	ZIP, 7Z, RAR, ISO, MSI, VHD, GZIP, BZIP2,TAR, LZMA, LZMA2, NTFS, FAT, MBR, SquashFS, CramFS, MSLZ, CAB, CPIO, DEB, LZH, NSIS, RPM, UDF, WIM, XAR, XZ, and Z
Versions supported	32 bit and 64 bit	32 bit and 64 bit
Platforms	Windows, Mac, Portable version available	Windows

This is not meant to be a comparison as such, but an overview. BandiZip is definitely the more serious contender of the two, and I am eager to test it in a head to head comparison with Haozip, which is my favorite compression/archiving program.

In any case both of these will be included in the next update of our Zip Archivers Comparison article.

• Go to the Bandzip website.
• Go to the Bitser website.

XMouse Button Control is a great freeware program that allows you to change what each button on your mouse does. It works with nearly any type of mouse, no matter how many buttons it has, and is very easy to use.

Anyone who knows me even slightly will know that I am an avid gamer. I may not spend the hours upon hours of gaming that the really serious gamers do, these days, but I still make time to enjoy a good gaming session as often as I can. One of the things that is always important in any game, as well as other (nongaming) situations is control. Most games for the PC these days will have a menu that allows you to modify the controls of the game, such as changing what the keyboard keys do or changing the mouse sensitivity. The best games also carry a menu option to change what the various buttons on the mouse do within the game. What happens, however, when you come across a game that does not have these menus, but you still want to make changes to how the mouse works within it? What about using your mouse within other programs besides games and customizing the mouse button functions for that program? That’s where XMouse Button Control (XMBC) comes into play, no pun intended.

Some mice, or other “Human Interface Devices” have software built in to let you remap the buttons and their functions. Some mice have programs that you can download from the manufacturer that will do the same kind of thing. Logitech, for example, has great software for that very purpose. However, if you happen to have a mouse that doesn’t have any software built in, and isn’t a Logitech product, then you’re going to need a third party program, and that what XMBC is for. There are also many programs and games that will allow you to remap the mouse button functions but, for whatever reason, do not recognize the extra buttons on your mouse besides the left and right standard buttons.

The first thing you will need to do is to download the XMBC program and install it. Once you have done so, just run the program and a small mouse icon with a tiny x on it will appear on your system tray. Right clicking on the icon will bring up the quick menu which will let you bring up the settings for your mouse.

The options to customize your mouse are surprisingly extensive and easy to use. You can change any button to mimic another button, which is handy for folks who are left-handed. Additionally, you can also have the mouse buttons mimic keystrokes from your keyboard. You can, for instance, have the middle mouse button mimic pressing Enter on your keyboard, instead of sending a button click to the operating system. This particular option is the one I have found most useful for games, since it allows you to, essentially, have much more control by putting keyboard functions into the mouse buttons. Personally, I use a five button mouse that is pretty generic, and doesn’t have any native options so XMBC is my way to go to customize the buttons. Given that most games, even newer ones, don’t seem to recognize the extra thumb buttons on my mouse, XMBC is an invaluable tool to make sure I get the most out of my mouse while playing. For example, if a game lets me fire a missile using the \ key on the keyboard, I can map that key to the first thumb button on my mouse and have missile control right there, rather than having to move my hand across the keyboard to hit the right key. That may not sound very useful, or may sound incredibly lazy, but in the case of gaming (especially any kind of action in a game), those precious milliseconds that it takes to move my whole hand versus the one millisecond it takes to click the thumb button on the mouse, are invaluable. Those tiny short milliseconds can be the difference between living and dying, as far as the game goes.

In addition to the basic functions of changing which mouse buttons do what, or mimicking keystrokes, XMBC also has some really great advanced options that make it a better bit of freeware, in my opinion. For one thing, you can set up multiple layers of programming, so the mouse will activate a different ‘layer’ (essentially a mouse button profile) automatically, depending on the situation. This kind of conditional programming, along with the ability to recognize different windows and activate different layers just by placing your mouse cursor over the particular window, seriously raises the intelligence of your mouse and expands its usefulness beyond games and into everyday use on your OS. I would recommend XMBC for pretty much anyone who isn’t a complete novice at using a mouse and computer, since it can be useful in so many different ways and in so many different programs. Until next time, my friends!

Compatibility: X-Mouse Button Control supports Windows 2000, XP, 2003, 2003 R2, Vista, 2008, 2008 R2, 7. It was originally designed to run natively on x64 editions of Windows but it is fully supported on 32bit editions too!

Get XMouse Button Control here. Check out the User Forums here and the FAQ here.

What are Chrome Experiments? Simply put, they are interesting bits of coding that use some of the latest open technologies (e.g. HTML5, Canvas, SVG, and especially WebGL) in a browser setting (not necessarily Chrome). The Google Chrome connection comes from the fact that Google have set up a website to showcase these coding ‘experiments’.

This post will feature 10 Chrome Experiments that we loved here at Freewaregenius. Check them out and consider that you may  be looking at the art form of the next century.

Note on WebGL: it is a web based graphics language that utilizes JavaScript to implement 3D graphics in the browser. The experiments below all have a significant 3D graphics component, and some will require a capable graphics card to run.

Here’s the list:

1. The WebGL Globes

Animated globes for data visualization. Two globes are offered by default, although you could make your own

Google Search Volume by Language

Displays search volumes in each language as bars on an interactive globe. If you’ve ever wondered what three cities generate the most Google English searches, or whether more Spanish language searches are generated in Madrid vs. Mexico city. Actually, its more of a toy than anything else, but is very cool.

Google Population Globe

2. WebGL Bookcase

For those who miss the days when you went to an actual, physical bookstore to browse books, a ‘virtual bookcase’ in 3D, that will, incidentally, link you to Google books for the book itself, or if not available there to Amazon or Google Play.

3. Google Gravity

You can think of this as a  glimpse of what the Google search page would look like in Krypton (Superman’s home planet), where gravity is much stronger

4. Cube

We mentioned this one previously on this site (see here). Cube is an game that creates playable levels out of Google Maps data. Check it out!

5. Ctrl Paper

This site will let you ‘populate’ its 3D environment with your personal 3D character that you create, and that you could subsequently print to PDF to transform into an actual paper model.

If you have kids you (and they) will enjoy this one.

6. The Wilderness Downtown

This is an interactive music video for The Arcade Fire’s “We Used to Wait” (reminiscent of another interactive music video previously mentioned on this site), and it’s totally awesome.  It integrates with your desktop and will ask for the address of the house where you grew up, and will then integrate Google Maps images of your neighborhood into the video. Is this is a glimpse of the future of the music videos as a genre?

7. WebGL Aquarium

It must be something in the human psyche, that we cannot resist looking at fish doing their thing, which is why I am adding this one to the list. It’s nothing you haven’t seen before, but a great way to showcase WebGL 3D graphics in the browser.

8. 3 Dreams of Black

Another interactive music video style experiment. This one combines modeled 3D environments with 2D animation and video (hence the 3 dreams), and lets you have some degree of control over the vantage point throughout. Most of what you see is being rendered, and is not video. Overall very cool.

9. Streetview Sterographic

A dual Google Map view with a slightly different approach: the ‘streetview’ images are strung together in a 360-degree bird’s eye view, which despite being somewhat odd is strangely appealing.

10. Toki Toki digital clock

This one makes it on the list for originality alone. Such a simple concept.

• Check out the Chrome Experiments site for more amazing code.

I’ve always enjoyed multiplayer gaming experiences far more than single player ones, with some few notable exceptions. It is therefore my custom to try and stay aware of the current gaming community, especially on the net, since that is where the best gossip eventually becomes information. So, when I heard that there was going to be a second Defense of the Ancients (DotA)installment, I was very excited to try it out. Sadly, I was not able to get ahold of a playable version yet, but there’s a wellspring of news on it and I set forth on the internet to scour and devour whatever I could find on the subject. Was it just a rumor or was it, in fact, something real in the works? I had to find out.

You may be sitting there, scratching your proverbial head and wondering why you should care about this DotA thing, whatever it is. That’s easy to understand, especially if you’re not much into playing games in general or PC games in particular. Perhaps you are a gamer and just, somehow, never played Defense of the Ancients. In either case, I will fill you in a bit on it before talking about its sequel. There’s actually a rich and detailed history behind it, as with anything worth one’s time and attention, but I will try to make this the short version…

Long ago, in the dark ages of gaming, a great new era began when a game called “Warcraft: Orcs & Humans” hit the gaming world  and the general populace alike with a massive force. Many of the concepts in this game were new, many were polished versions of long held traditions, but the end result was an undeniable success, and the Blizzard gaming empire rose on the backs of the various characters and creatures featured in their slam hit game. It was a somewhat new thing, called a “Real Time Strategy” in which the player took the role of managing resources, troops, combat tactics, etc. All of this was wrapped in a neat, almost cute package that had just the right amount of gore represented (we gamers were far less voracious in our demands for blood n gore in our games back then) along with some very amusing points. There was even a well written story and a whole world’s history and mythology. It was, in short, a revolutionary success in the gaming world.

Warcraft spawned a sequel, then a spin-off called StarCraft that satisfied the gamer’s need for sci-fi alongside the fantasy slot fulfilled by Warcraft. Then, another sequel, “Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos” and there were expansions for that as well. A host of other games, like World of Warcraft for example, were also big hits for Blizzard. The rich world in which Warcraft’s games were played out allowed for great storytelling and this was a big pull for me, at least. The world was so rich, detailed and popular with more than the average gamer, that a South Park episode was devoted to the World of Warcraft game. With such a success, there was bound to be a big fan response, and the gaming community did not disappoint. A user-created level, scenario or “map” was eventually created, called “Defense of the Ancients” and it was a near-immediate underground hit. It gathered more and more fans and followers, and eventually was even recognized by Blizzard officially as a good thing, not an infringement (as so many user-made mods or additions can be with some companies). Defense of the Ancients was so popular, in fact, that the highly successful free MMO called “League of Legends” was inspired by it, and has been wildly popular to this day, relatively speaking. Both DotA and LoL have a way of mixing RPG and RTS elements, with a touch of tower defense type play as well, such that it is a delicate balance that works brilliantly, in the end result. DotA 2 can be expected to be similar, one would think, without even doing any research.

So, now you have a general idea of where this DotA thing started, and what this Warcraft thing meant to the gaming community. All of that taken into account, Defense of the Ancients II (working title?) has the power and promise to be a great and wonderfully fun success, or an equally abysmal and disappointing failure. It’s not one of those things that will fly in under the radar, it’s going to make a big splash one way or another.

So what can we look forward to in the DotA sequel? Well, the original DotA was created by the players and users of the Warcraft III game, by the sequel is being developed by the famed Valve company. Valve has brought us such major gaming gems as, “Half-Life” and “Team Fortress Classic”. As well as being big supporters of the online multiplayer world, valve is well known for bringing great stories to life in a unique way. This bodes well for the DotA sequel, in terms of the quality and playability we might expect to see. While the first DotA was basically a Frankenstein’s monster of a  map, stitched and cobbled together, changed, edited and re-edited over and over again by the users (also called modders in this case), the sequel will be coming from a very experienced, successful, and talented professional company and will be available for both Windows and Mac based computers.

From what I can see in screenshots and other available media, the game looks quite nice, graphically. The images are sharply rendered without being overly complex and are pleasing to the eye. Not much else I can say about it visually, just yet, though. I am dying to get into the game, especially so I can see what the other aspects are like, but that will have to wait. At first, the news I found for DotA 2 seemed to indicate it is in a closed Beta testing phase, which means there aren’t any invites being given out, but the announcement of the project in 2010 was accompanied by a scheduled release date sometime in 2012. So, I kept digging. One site showed me a series of announcements about updates to DotA2 and news about tournaments as late as April 20 2012. This meant, to me, that the game must be available somehow, right? So, finally, on a much more official DotA 2 web site, I found the words: “DotA 2 is expanding constantly, fill out the DotA 2 Survey in Steam to secure your place in the upcoming invitations.” So, without an invitation, I wasn’t able to do an in-depth investigation… yet. However, given the news I have seen, along with the screenshots, I can safely believe that the overall game mechanic will be very close to DotA or League of Legends, right down to much of the details. This will change, obviously, over time but it is what we can expect, I think, initially.

So, It would seem that Steam must be installed before you can play or even be invited to play DotA 2. So I downloaded and installed Steam, since it didn’t cost anything to do so. Given that Steam is merely the platform for Valve games, I didn’t expect the final installation to be a as large a file as it was but the .msi opened and the download went at a decent pace with broadband, and was followed by an automatic update that took only a couple minutes. The account creation was quick and free, as well. Now, this is where it got a bit trickier. Currently, they don’t just let you click a link and automatically download DotA 2, from what I can tell. According to the quote, above and in the screenshot, you have to take the survey about your experiences playing the first DotA, and then, hopefully, get and eventual invitation to join.

They are looking, they say, for a wide range of people to invite and will be sending out more and more of them in the coming months, so get on the ball, and check out the survey. Just answer honestly, and you could very well get and invitation to the current version. It’s not technically listed as a Beta, as near as I could tell, especially since they are holding tournaments, but it’s not open to just jump in and play like League of Legends is, either. Of course, all of that is as of the time and date of this posting, and could be subject to change without notice. I will make updates, on this post, including as many screenshots as possible, as more news comes my way, and in the meantime I have a survey to fill out! Below, I have included the relevant link to get you there as quickly as possible.

Until next time, my friends, keep watching for DotA 2 updates!

• Get the DotA 2 Invitation Survey here
• Get more DotA 2 information at the official blog site here.

Imagine the scene: You’re visiting family and watching YouTube videos (naturally- isn’t this what all families do?) and your mother/brother/father wants to download the video. What to do? Do you hunt around the internet for a YouTube downloader type software? Do you start trying to remember the name of an online service that can do the job?

Here’s the easiest thing you can do: add “pwn” to the beginning of the URL in the address box, and watch as a number of downloading options appear for you to choose from.  “pwnyoutube” is a service that can use the YouTube URL structure to identify your desired video and subsequently offer you a slew of possible video-related services to choose from, including downloading, downloading to MP3, video sharing, etc.

How to use:

(1) Browse to the video you want on YouTube, on any browser.

(2) Click into your browser’s address bar, and insert the letter ‘pwn’ (without the quotes) before ‘YouTube’ and right after the ‘www’, and then press enter. See screenshot below.

(3) A list of services will appear that can be applied to your video. You have your pick of online video downloading services, online download-to-mp3 services, and others. In the screenshot below, we are choosing ‘keepvid’ as the service to use to download.

(4) Once the downloading service page opens, select the quality/format of the video you would like to download, and you’re done. Note: you may be required to allow JavaScript to run on the page.

The verdict: what an awesome, simple. idea. The developers behind this didn’t even bother creating their own downloading service, opting instead to serve a menu of existing download services (which, as far as I am concerned, is brilliant!).

This service is actually called ‘DetUrl’, and if you want another way to check it out aside from adding pwn to a YouTube URL, go here.