Tar-Geek: Reviews of Free Tools and Software

Invatations Made Easy - EINVITATION

noreply@blogger.com (Melanie Z.) — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 00:29:00 +0000

Hello everyone, This is Melanie Z., Brian Z's wife. He asked me to do a guest post b/c I came across something that is really awesome, easy to use & free so I thought that it may be helpful to someone out their besides myself this Holiday Season or any occasion really!

Ok so we are having a Holiday Party @ our home in a few weeks & I hate writing addresses on envelopes. Also, I am really bad about getting them into the mail so my guests get them far enough in advance. Not to mention the cost of stamps....yeah that sux too! And if you want Holiday stamps you have go to the post office & standing in long lines once you get to the post office, if you have kids like Brian & I do, can be a nightmare! So if you want to have custom invitations & are having a party they can cost any where from $20-$100 at least and I would much rather spend that money on my actually party & not the cost of invitations! So I came across a great website called Evite.

Your asking what is Evite, well at Evite you can send unlimited free & personalized invitations through email! Evite has hundreds of designs to choose from. Whether it is your baby's 1st Birthday, Holiday Party's, Game Night, whatever you want to have a party for, Evite has the perfect invitation for you! Evite allows you personalize your invitations, they will email you when you get a new RSVP and you can add a map to your invitations w/ just a click of a button, how cool is that! They even have party ideas. Doesn't a Wii party sound awesome? You can add all your email address to a contact list on the website then you just pick the invitation that you want to use for that special occasion, type in the details, add your map ( if you'd like), click send and wait for the RSVP's from your friends & family!

Go to Evite

IM to Your Heart's Content - Meebo

noreply@blogger.com (Brian Z) — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 20:21:00 +0000

IMing or, to be proper, Instant Messaging has become as popular as email or some might say the telephone as a means of communication. Even some cell phones allow you to IM as an alternative to text messages. The major providers include AOL Instant Messenger(AIM), Yahoo!(Y!), Google Talk(GTalk), and MSN(MSN, he he consistency rocks!!). And just about everyone knows someone on just about every network. If this is the case for you and your going hard into an all night IMing session with all your buddies, and yes I know how sad that sounds, you probably have each client open, each logged into their own network, each having 5 different messaging windows open. OK, I'm exaggerating a little but it could happen. If this sort of situation ever happens to you, or some variation, you should try Meebo.

Meebo is a web-based IM client that allows you to connect to all these services and more. You see all your buddies in one window. Here's how it works. Go to Meebo.com and you will see login and password fields for all you favorite networks. If you would like to connect to ICQ or a Jabber protocol based network you can do that as well by clicking their corresponding icons below the login boxes. Enter your login info for all the networks you have a membership to and click the "Sign On" button. That's it. You now have a, sort of, desktop inside your browser. Unfortunately, the windows can't actually leave your browser. One of the downsides I guess. On the plus site, you can hit this sight from any PC with an Internet connection. Basically, where-ever you go, there you are. Suprise!!! I'm deep!!!

Now, I know typing in all your login credentials for all your IM clients is a pain. Just create yourself a Meebo account, for FREE!!, and save all your account info. This also has the benefit of being able to connect to multiple accounts for the same network. So if you have one for home and one for work you can be logged onto both simultaneously.

I, myself, am a Google snob. I swear, if Google made a car I'd probably buy one. Now wouldn't that be awesome. They would probably plaster the outside with text-ads that paid you buy the mile so you could use it for gas. What am I saying?!?!? Gas is evil. Google would probably find a way to power the car with baby poo or something.......... But, I digress. Anyways, I use GTalk and refuse to talk to anyone but someone using GTalk. Except my Mom, ohh and my Grandmother, and....well you get the idea. But, for those special people in my life, Meebo let's me keep in touch.

Go to Meebo

Cut and Paste with Vigor - Ditto

noreply@blogger.com (Brian Z) — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +0000

As a developer, cut and paste is my friend. I would say I probably do the old Ctrl+C/Ctrl+X -> Ctrl+V combination at least two hundred times a day. Well, I recently added Ctrl+~ to my arsenal.

With Ditto, you never have to worry about what's in your clipboard again. Copy 10 things first and then paste them in any order you choose. The Ctrl+~ shortcut brings up a small window with your clipboard history. This includes text, tables, and even thumbnails of the images you copy. You can search for something that you copied yesterday. Ditto remembers it. You can even export your clips to a .dto file and import them on another PC.

Now, for those of you who say, "I hardly ever copy and paste," I bet you never realized how much you did until you tried this tool. And if by chance you are telling the truth this is the perfect tool to get you started. Cut/copy, paste is one of the most useful tools at a computer user's disposal and, thanks to Ditto you have even more reason to. Ditto takes the mystery out of the illusive Clipboard. Forget what's in there? Take a peek.

Ditto what a time saver.

Download Ditto

The Last Anit-Virus You'll Ever Need - AVG Free

noreply@blogger.com (Brian Z) — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 17:13:00 +0000

I don't know about you, but I bought my PC so I could use it, not so that I could spend all my money and all it's resources protecting it. Don't get me wrong. McAfee and Symantec are great (minor over-statement), but they are expensive up front and to maintain. And that's not all. All their bells and whistles take up valuable system resources. Oh, it just hit me. Maybe that's there game. Don't let the user's do anything and they won't get into any trouble.

Well there is an alternative. AVG Free Edition is the perfect anti-virus. It is robust enough to thoroughly protect your system yet small and simple enough not to depleat that which is most precious, memory and disk space. It offer's the full system scan feature, a scheduler for updates and scanning, a resident sheild, and a shell extention for scanning individual files. It even has an email scanner so chain letters beware.

I personally have been using AVG Free for at least four years. I have very little problems with my PCs, virus wise, and when I do AVG takes care of it. That's not all. My entire family looks towards me to fix and maintain their PCs when the worst happens. When ever I do I install AVG and configure it to update and scan nightly. Let's just say I don't get that many calls anymore.

There is one down fall. It does take up a lot of system resources while performing a scan. But like I said, I schedule that for the nights when I'm asleep (and if I'm not asleep and happen to be on my PC I just skip that night). And it's FREE, so quit you whining.

Download AVG Free Edition

"I See You!!!" - Yugma

noreply@blogger.com (Brian Z) — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 17:21:00 +0000

Yugma is a desktop sharing tool. It has a premium version with reasonable prices but since we don't like spending money we're going to talk about the free version.

Yugma is fairly simple to use. Just go to http://www.yugma.com/ and create yourself an account. Once you have done this you can start a session. Once your session is created you can tell others what your Session ID is and tell them to go to yugma.com on their PC's and click "Join Session." From there they will be asked to enter their name and Session ID and, ta da, now they can see your screen. If you want to see their screen just click the "Change Presenter" button and select the user who's screen you would like to see. They will have to allow you to on their end but other than that its simple as pie. You are also not limited to one attendee. With the free version you get up to ten. Use Yugma to hold meetings when no other room is available. "But how do we get 10 people on the phone?", you say. Well Yugma provides a conference line for free. Unfortunatly its not toll free, but hopefully with the use of cell phones, VOIP, or even Skype that won't be to much of an issue.

When you first start using Yugma your "free" version has all the functionality of the Premium version. Most of the features will downgrade after fifteen days but I still believe you are left with enough to make Yugma a valuable tool. Here is the complete list of free features:

Up to 10 attendees
Desktop Sharing
Annotations and Whiteboarding tools
Free Teleconfrencing (only long distance charges apply)
Change Presenter
Public and Private chat (send messages to all attendees or just one)
Cross Operating System compatibility (Windows, Mac, and Linux)
Widgets (for use on your desktop, website, or emails)
MS Outlook and Skype compatibility (Use Action>Invite to Share Desktops to send email invites to your session)

The only feature I wish carried over to the free version is the "Give Mouse and Keyboard Control" feature. This would be great for inviting someone to help fix your computer or to fix someone else's. I use Yugma, as I said, for meetings and to help others with their computer problems (seeing their screen sure does make helping them a tad less frustrating). I don't, however, use Yugma to connect into my many PC's. For that I use LogMeIn but that's another post.

Go to Yumga

Resize Pics Online Free - picresize 2.0

noreply@blogger.com (Brian Z) — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 18:06:00 +0000

How many times did you want to simply make an image smaller? Whether it be for sending a picture to friends via email or posting it to an e-bay auction, this always seems to be something that has to be done. This especially seems to be the case with digital photographs taken from your handy dandy digital camera because your camera assumes that you wanted to print that hilarious picture of the kids picking grandpa's nose as he lay fast asleep in his Lazy Boy in gargantuan movie poster size.

Well why don't you give this a try. Picresize 2.0 is a website that lets you upload an image of any size and resize it to, you guessed it, any size. It also has the ability to crop your images as well as apply some spiffy effects like rotation, grayscale, and even oil paint (sorry no sepia for you wild west old-timey picture fans). There is a limited batch mode which lets you resize multiple photos at the same time and quick mode lets users that are more familiar with Picresize's capabilities upload and download their photos on the same page. If you are having trouble figuring out how the site works, there is a even a handy video tutorial.

And if all of this wasn't enough, there is promise of a Picresize 3.0 right there on the first page. Who knows what fun photo fine-tuning features are coming next?

Go to Picresize 2.0

The New and Improved Winamp 5.5

noreply@blogger.com (Brian Z) — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 15:19:00 +0000

This is my first post anywhere ever. I hope to do more in the beginning and will eventually slow to about 1 or 2 posts a week. Oh well, let's get started.

Winamp has been my media player of choice for quite a long time. It's price point has always been a plus for me (free) and that has always out-weighed its short-comings. Well the good news is its still the same price less all those short-comings. No more are the days of trying to fit the Control, Playlist, Media Library, Video, and Visualization windows onto the same screen. With the new Winamp 5.5 comes the new default skin "Bento." This skin is simplicity at it's best. It is the first of its kind in that its the first SUI (Single User Interface) skin for Winamp. Yup, that's right, the first single window Winamp. The control window is coupled with an "Info" section which can be changed into the Equalizer, a mini-Visualization window, among other things. To the right of that is the playlist section. Below all this is a tabbed-interface with the Media Library, Video, Visualization, and Browser.

I believe that this is the first media player to give iTunes a run for its money. There really isn't anything that iTunes can do that Winamp cannot. It even has built in iPod and Podcast support. The new Auto-Tag feature makes organizing your music a breeze. I personally like the new "Smart Views". "Smart Views" are more of a filter than a playlist. For instance, I have a lot of music for other people in my music collection. Well I don't feel like looking through all those files just to get to my music so I gave all of my music files a specific comment that I filter by in my "Smart View". Its like my own Media Library inside my Media Library.

Bottom line, Winamp is the perfect all-purpose media player. It can basically do everything you need it to do and if it can't well there is probably a plugin to fix that for you too. The only thing I don't use Winamp for is playing High Quality (i.e. HD and DVD quality) movies on my Television. For that I use VideoLAN's VLC Player, but thats another post.

Download Winamp