DNS is playing a pivotal role in the Internet. However, every coin has two sides, your Internet service provider (ISP) or other organizations may use DNS hijacking (DNS redirection) or even DNS cache poisoning to push advertisements or block specific contents…

This article will guide you resolve the issue, switch to the famous secure DNS resolution services – they are all free.

First of all, you need to know the way to Change Windows 7 DNS Settings or Change DNS Settings in Windows XP.

Then, there are several free secure DNS resolution services for you to choose from.

• OpenDNS
  

OpenDNS is a free DNS resolution service. An opt-in service, OpenDNS offers faster resolution and advanced features, such as misspelling correction, phishing protection, and optional filtering.

OpenDNS Blocks Phishing Sites

To Use OpenDNS, just switch DNS Server Addresses to 208.67.222.222 or 208.67.220.220.

What’s more, you can sign up free or paid OpenDNS account to get advanced features like Web content filtering, Detailed reports and stats or even Whitelist-only mode.

• Google Public DNS
  

Google Public DNS is a free, global resolution service that you can use as an alternative to your current DNS provider. The provider – Google, is the biggest highlight of this DNS resolution service, which means secure, fast and reliable.

Google Public DNS

To Use Google Public DNS, you need to switch DNS Server Addresses to 8.8.8.8 or 8.8.4.4, easy to remember, isn’t it

• Comodo Secure DNS
  

Comodo Secure DNS is a domain name resolution service that resolves your DNS requests through our worldwide network of redundant DNS servers. It is provided by Comodo – a leading security company that offers Antivirus Firewall Software and SSL Certificate.

Comodo Secure DNS

To Use Comodo Secure DNS, you need to switch DNS Server Addresses to 156.154.70.22 or 156.154.71.22.

You can also try its free Comodo Internet Security to enhance your PC and network safety, with advanced HIPS (Host-based Intrusion Prevention System) features, for free.

• Norton DNS Public
  

Symantec published Norton DNS Public days ago, provides alternative DNS servers that can be used by any Internet-connected device for a faster and more secure surfing experience.

Norton DNS Public

To Use Norton DNS Public, you need to switch DNS Server Addresses to 198.153.192.1 or 198.153.194.1.

At last, you may need to pick the fastest DNS resolution service for your network, and Domain Name Speed Benchmark can do the speed test for you. It is recommended to set “Preferred DNS server” and “Alternative DNS server” addresses to different DNS resolution services in case service failure (for example, 8.8.8.8 as preferred, 208.67.222.222 as alternative).

The tiny software program is simple, but powerful. It can wipe away your tracks from Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, and Google Chrome from various Windows system areas, and from some third-party applications, such as Nero Burning ROM, Adobe Flash Player, WinRAR and more. The recent version even adds support for Microsoft Office 2010, RealPlayer SP and Opera search field history cleaning.

Besides common functions of CCleaner, there are many useful advanced tips to employ CCleaner as your system cleaner and disk wiper.

• More than deletion – Wipe traces and history

I discussed this topic months ago – Top Excellent Software Programs to Perform Disk Wipe for Free. In fact, CCleaner can do the job, too.

First, switch to “Settings” in “Options” tab, select “Secure file deletion” and the erase method, the larger number the better, but higher value will consume lots of time. For example, “Gutmann(35 passes)” means 35 times of data rewriting.

Secure Deletion function in CCleaner

Then, you can specify files and folders to wipe out in addition to pre-defined system or application areas.

You can include custom paths to be wiped out

At last, check all the items you want to wipe out, especially “Custom Files and Folders” and “Wipe Free Space” (you can configure drives to be wiped in the first step). Click “Analyze” and then “Run Cleaner”.

• Clean your system after startup and before shutdown

If you rarely shutdown even restart your computer, there will be lots of junk files need to clean up. You can now let CCleaner do them for you silently and automatically.

First of all, you need to configure CCleaner in Cleanup Areas and Options.

Then, create a shortcut to CCleaner. Add /AUTO /SHUTDOWN parameters after the target path.

For example “C:\Program Files\CCleaner\CCleaner.exe” /AUTO /SHUTDOWN

Shortcut to CCleaner

AUTO parameter means run CCleaner to clean up pre-defined areas silently; SHUTDOWN parameter means shutdown computer after processing cleanup. That means, if you want to clean your system after startup, you can drag the shortcut (with AUTO parameter ONLY) to “Startup” in Windows Start Menu; if you want to do the job before system shutting down, just double click the shortcut (with AUTO and SHUTDOWN parameter). Rather easy.

• Remove unused MSConfig startup items

Many of you may like to manage system startup items with Microsoft Windows MSConfig utility. However, sometimes even if you have uninstalled a software application, the program’s startup item in MSConfig still exists.

Clean up MSConfig startup items in CCleaner

CCleaner can remove these used MSConfig startup items. Just switch to “Startup” in “Tools” tab, select the specific startup programs, and then click “Delete”.

Haven’t used CCleaner before? Download CCleaner and try it now – totally free!

Have more tips or suggestions to share with us? Comments are welcome

The rise of YouTube hardened the dominance of .flv format in the web video service, and lots of flv players mushroomed. Most popular opensource players including VLC Media Player and KMplayer also began to support .flv format. Undoubtedly, .vp8’s release will also trigger a butterfly effect in the video tools software.

For it, Google gets a competitive position in this codec war. The next day after vp8 was released, the first webm converter(Miro Video Converter) was born, so whatever, now users can make webm videos from other video file formats by themselves. There are actually only a handful of solutions currently available to play webm videos on the local computer system. The VLC Media Player 1.1.0 Pre-Release supports the webm video format, but this version currently is only offered for Windows.

However, we users should not expect Windows Media Player or QuickTime Player will support webm, since the two monsters are controllers of some H.264 licenses. In addition, WMP has componentized download of codecs which are directly written by Mirosoft, and many other codecs can be added to the player.  The on2 decoder has always been included in K-Lite Codec Pack (developed by Microsoft). Its beta version is one of the first to include a webm video decoder.

Apple applies QuickTime framework to all its products, player and brewers.With proper QuikTime codec, users can play anything they want. Otherwise, If authentic, a new e-mail from Steve Jobs indicates that Apple and Microsoft–of all bedfellows–could be preparing to challenge the validity of open-source video codecs.

Nitro PDF Reader is not just a PDF reader, it also install a virtual PDF printer (Nitro PDF Creator) that can convert your files to PDF and open it in Nitro PDF Reader.

Nitro PDF Reader keeps the standard PDF reader features, such as Add Note (click on the document where you would like the sticky note to appear), Hightlight Text (Hightlight text and type a comment in its pop-up note), Type Text (Add text onto the page using a text box annotation) and Stamp Signature (Add a stamp of your signature).

In addition, with Nitro PDF Reader, you could convert all text from your PDF files into easy-to-edit plain text, automatically removing all the formatting and layout properties or extract all images from your PDF files into individual BMP, JPG, PNG or TIF files.

You can also apply digital IDs in Nitro PDF Reader, create, view, add, edit and delete your security profiles.

Download Nitro Reader 1 (beta) for Windows xp, Vista, 7.

Download Nitro Reader 1 (beta) for Windows (64-bit).

Nitro PDF Reader Website

Nitro PDF Reader Download & Review

PDF How to, Tutorial & Troubleshooting

Although the Microsoft new brand Windows 7 is much more reliable than any previous versions of Windows desktop family, mistakes are bound to occur. So, it is necessary to prepare some knowledge as well as useful tools for troubleshooting.

• Error Messages for Windows
  

Error Messages for Windows

Error Messages for Windows is a small utility that will allow you to look up MS Windows error code numbers and display a descriptive message explaining what the numeric code actually means. If you have software programs that produce numeric error codes now you can find out what they really mean.

• BlueScreenView
  

BlueScreenView

BlueScreenView scans all your minidump files created during ‘blue screen of death’ crashes, and displays the information about all crashes in one table. For each crash, BlueScreenView displays the minidump filename, the date/time of the crash, the basic crash information displayed in the blue screen (Bug Check Code and 4 parameters), and the details of the driver or module that possibly caused the crash (filename, product name, file description, and file version).

• What’s More…

MSDN also provides a detailed System Error Codes list. It doesn’t matter if you are not a programmer. Simply refer the Description besides Constant/value, and you may find a proper way for troubleshooting. Good lock.

MusicIndiaOnline provides kinda kinds of music, including Classical, Hindi, Punjabi, Bhangra, Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, Urdu, Bengali, Sanskrit, Fusion, World Music, Konkani, Sindhi, Oriya, Rajasthani, Bhojpuri, Bihari, Haryanavi, Kashmiri, Gujarati, Marathi, Assamese. You don’t need to download and install any software, just listen within your web browser!

Before you begin listening on the website, you may consider register as a member. Users who had logged in can add up to 100 songs to the playlist and the playlist will be saved so that the next time you can continue enjoy them after logged in. But the unregistered users can only add 10 songs.

How to Sign Up?

Step One: Open MusicIndiaOnline on your web browser, click “Register” and enter your name, Email address and your password. Then, an Email contains an activation link will be sent to you.

Step Two: Go to your Email Inbox, open the Email and click the activation link. You will be brought to the activation page, click “Activate Account” to finish register.

How to Listen the Music?

Login to MusicIndiaOnline with your account.

Choose music by categories or artists or albums.

On the album page, you will see an “Play all” button on the right side of the album cover, click the button to add all of the songs in the current album to your playlist.

Or, if you just want to listen to one or two songs of the album, you can click “Add to Playlist” button on the right side of each song to add it to your playlist.

Check out your playlist, you will see the songs you’ve added and it will show the album cover of the song being playing.

You can control the music player on the bottom of the browser. The music won’t stop while you are browsing other web pages of MusicIndiaOnline, and you can freely add other songs to your playlist(Only if the total number of the songs on your playlist less than 100).

The MusicIndiaOnline Website: http://www.musicindiaonline.com/

Speech synthesis is the artificial production of human speech. A computer system used for this purpose is called a speech synthesizer, and can be implemented in software or hardware. A text-to-speech (TTS) system converts normal language text into speech; other systems render symbolic linguistic representations like phonetic transcriptions into speech.

Back to the days of Windows XP, Microsoft merely included Microsoft Sam as system default voice; other languages have to be downloaded individually. Unfortunately, the sound quality of them are rather poor, or say, disgusting – from my point of view. Of course, you can purchase and install excellent third-party voices, but they usually expensive.

In Windows 7, things are a little different. There are usually two voices built into system – Microsoft Anna for English, and a localized voice for the current language. You will obviously find that the quality is much better than before.

After having the proper voices, you are ready to use the TTS technology to convert text to speech. Now the task is, installing suitable TTS software.

In fact, both Windows XP (English Version Only) and Windows 7 has Microsoft Narrator to read the screen, but it’s too simple in functions. You can read this article How to read text from dialog box for more information about it.

Windows Narrator

In this article, I will introduce two more powerful TTS converters. I’m sure they will cover almost all your needs, hope you like them.

• TextAloud

TextAloud is Text to Speech software that converts your text from MS Word Documents, Emails, Web Pages and PDF Files into natural-sounding speech. You can listen on your PC or create audio files for use on portable devices like iPods, PocketPCs and CD players. TextAloud even has automatic iTunes/iPod syncing.

TextAloud

There are already many articles in Recipester about TextAloud. At first, you can use TextAloud to read text from a file or read text from a webpage. Then, you may need to convert documents to MP3 speech for use on portable devices. The whole story is too long? You can also split and convert text while converting text to audio files. What’s more, it’s easy to insert Pause and Voice Change while reading text file to speech…

Don’t you think it’s awfully powerful? But a slight disadvantage of TextAloud is, the excellent program is not free…

• NVDA
  

While TextAloud reads only text files and webpages, NVDA reads your entire screen.

NonVisual Desktop Access (NVDA) is a free and open source screen reader for the Microsoft Windows operating system. Providing feedback via synthetic speech and Braille, it enables blind or vision impaired people to access computers running Windows for no more cost than a sighted person. Major features include support for over 20 languages and the ability to run entirely from a USB drive with no installation.

NVDA

Although NVDA is awesome freeware, many people does not know it at all, so there seems no more tutorials about the program, except the official NVDA Documentations.

Want to know more about funny and useful software applications? Please comment this post to let me know

• Fast: making Firefox super-duper fast
• Powerful: enabling new open, standard Web technologies (HTML5 and beyond!),
• Empowering: putting users in full control of their browser, data, and Web experience

Undoubtedly, supporting html5 is a great news for Firefox users. As YouTube and Vimeo pushing out HTML video, flash is dying while a new browser war flares up: to get support HTML5 Video.

It seems that Firefox has been inferior in this competition, because at present, YouTube and Vimeo html 5 videos only allow Chrome, Safari and Internet-Explorer-using-Chrome-Frame browsers to play a few HTML5 videos. Other browsers will simply not show the HTML5 link, so Firefox 4 will be Mozilla’s ace in the updated browser war.

Well, there comes another codec war: H.264 vs. Ogg. H.264 codec has gained dominance in the html 5 codec war due to its excellent compression and broad support in the consumer electronics ecosystem. It is used by Google Chrome and Internet Explorer 9. But Firefox, an open source stuff, is likely to support Ogg Theora codec which is believed to be unencumbered by patents.

As we all know, using a pirated Windows copy comes with continually problems or risks including (and not restricted to) security, legal issues, and constant notifications from WGA (Windows Genuine Advantage). But there are still a significant number of people using pirated Windows 7. So Microsoft released a WAT update package KB971033 to disable “Windows 7 activation crack” like RemoveWAT, Chew-WGA or other Windows 7 Loaders, and then display WGA Notification screens to remind users to pay for genuine software products.

However, if you confident with your genuine Windows 7 copy, then KB971033 hotfix will be dispensable for you. In fact, the WAT update adds many unnecessary files and system components to Windows 7, send some of your personal data to Microsoft (although MS announced that users information will NOT be abused). What’s more, KB971033 will check your system for illegal use every 90 days…

Sounds terrible? Don’t worry, you of course have the right to stop it! You can manually uninstall KB971033 if the hotfix has been installed automatically. And the second choice to fix the issue is the tiny tool – RemoveWGA.

RemoveWGA

RemoveWGA will enable you to easily remove the Microsoft “Windows Genuine Advantage Notifications” tool, which is calling home and connect to MS servers every time you boot. But notice that, RemoveWGA only removes the notification part, phoning home, and does not touch the Validation part.

For pirated software users: As many 0day crackers say, “If you like it, just buy it!” Do you think so?