BlackHole is a simple application that can help you clear out any sensitive information that you have on your Mac.

Think about this, you use your Mac and in that process you leave quite a lot of sensitive information, either on the clipboards or on your browsing history or on the recent items list etc. What would happen if someone else get a hold of your Mac or if you let others use your Mac. These sensitive information would then be available to them as well.

One thing you can do is to run through a list of tasks you have to do at the end of day and that would include quitting some of the applications, clearing out your clipboards, your recent items list, your browsing history, emptying your trash etc. But that’s not practical. Instead, you can just use a simple tool like BlackHole to do those tasks for you automatically.

BlackHole is a simple tool that takes care of doing some of the more mundane tasks related to your personal information security. BlackHole can,

• Quit applications for you. If the app won’t quit after a certain amount of time BlackHole can Force Quit them for you.
• Clear out the File > Recent Items list that most Mac applications support.
• Empty the trash even if the files inside are locked.
• Unmount volumes, let it be a Mac or Windows share, a USB key, an external hard drive or a mounted disk image file etc.
• Clear the Clipboard.
• Delete files and folders. It can even bypass the trash.
• Close Safari tabs. It even let you close tabs or windows based on the keyword that’s on the title of the window.

Download BlackHole.

If you are willing to pay a little bit you can easily purchase some nice ringtones using iTunes on your iPhone.

Earlier we have mentioned about how to add your own ringtones to your iPhone. We even walked you through how to add multiple ringtones to your iPhone. To add to that mix we listed a list of useful applications to create your own custom ringtone. But there are so many comments that paint a picture that for some of you it’s not that easy to add your own custom ringtones to your iPhone. If you are one of those few and if you don’t want to go through the process of creating your own custom ringtones then iTunes on your iPhone can help you.

With iTunes on your iPhone you can easily purchase professional ringtones for your iPhone. The price is not that expensive, comparatively but it’s not free. If you are willing to spend a couple of dollars for your favorite ringtone then using iTunes on your iPhone to purchase ringtone is the easiest way to get custom ringtones to your iPhone.

If you are not familiar with iTunes on your iPhone just launch the iTunes app on your iPhone. Search for it if you couldn’t find it.

Once launched tap on the “Ringtones” tab at the bottom. You should be able to see all the featured ringtones for that day.

You can also view the Top 10 ringtones or you can see the ringtones based on genre.

Once you locate the appropriate ringtone that you like iTunes app on iPhone allows you to listen to the tone before you buy.

Just tap on the ringtone name to listen to the ringtone.

Once you decide to buy a ringtone tap on the price and it turns into “Buy Now” that allows you to buy the ringtone.

It is as simple as that, browse, listen and buy. If you don’t want to mess with adding a custom ringtone to your iPhone you can use the iTunes app on your iPhone to purchase ringtones easily. Enjoy your newly found ringtones!

Some nice high definition wallpapers for your Zune player.

If you still have a Zune media player with you then these wallpapers might spruce up the Zune player a little bit.

Hope you liked a few of these.

Learn how to display Administrative Tools menu option on Windows 7 Start Menu.

Administrative Tools in Windows hosts some of the system level tools that a normal user won’t need in their day-to-day usage. But if you are a power user or you know what you are doing with your computer you might need to get to the Administrative Tools to accomplish certain tasks like viewing system events, configuring data source, performance monitoring, task scheduling etc. If you are a power user you might already know this trick but if you are someone who is following a guide to accomplish certain tasks and would like to learn more about Windows in that process, this tip is for you.

Since these are tasks for advanced users Windows 7 does not come with the Administrative Tools option turned on. You have to do that manually and it’s pretty simple to do.

Right-click on the Windows “Start” button and click on the “Properties” menu option. Windows will open the Taskbar and Start Menu Properties dialog, click on the “Start Menu” tab and then click on the “Customize” button.

When the “Customize Start Menu” dialog comes up scroll down to locate the “System Administrative Tools” section. Click on either the “Display on the All Programs menu” option or the “Display on the All Programs menu and the Start menu” option depending where you see fit. Once enabled Windows will now display an “Administrative Tools” menu option on the Windows Start Menu which is a simpler way to get to the administrative tools.

Increase or decrease your Mac’s speaker volume more precisely with this simple trick.

When you increase or decrease your Mac’s speaker volume using the Volume Up or Down keyboard buttons, by default your Mac will increment or decrement the volume in a fixed block size.

For example, as you can see above there are the standard 16 blocks and when you increase or decrease volume each block of volume gets incremented or decremented.

If you are not comfortable with the standard block of volume increments and would rather prefer to have better control you are in luck. When you hold down the “Shift” and the “Option” keys together while you increment or decrement your Mac’s volume your Mac will increment or decrement the volume in much smaller blocks. To be precise each of the standard volume blocks will be further sliced to 4 blocks each and so you’ll get 4 increments or decrements per standard volume block. That effectively gives you a total of 64 volume control blocks instead of the standard 16 blocks.

Keep in mind that having more volume control blocks doesn’t physically increase the volume of your Mac to a super crazy level but rather you get more control of controlling your Mac’s volume.

Use these simple Gmail search queries to find all the unread emails in your Gmail Inbox.

Do you have hundreds of thousands of emails in your Gmail Inbox but a few of them, dated way back, are still unread? Going back one page at a time is not practical to locate those unread emails. Even worst if those unread emails are spread over a period of time. How do you get to those emails that are still unread?

Well, since Gmail is a product of the search giant Google you can obviously expect Gmail to support some nifty search features, didn’t you? Gmail has got some simple search query operators that can help you locate your emails a lot easier than you’ve thought.

To display only those emails that are still unread in your Inbox use the search query “label:unread in:inbox“. That would only display those emails that are still unread in your Gmail Inbox. You can substitute the word “label” in place of the word “in” to find all unread emails within a specific label.

That’s a quick tip to help you locate only those unread emails in Gmail.

Google Alarm Add-on can notify you when a website pings any of Google’s web properties.

Have you ever had a feel that the mighty Google might be tracking what you are doing on the web? Given the fact that majority of the websites these days use one form or the other of Google’s web properties including Analytics, Adsense, Maps, YouTube Videos and the list goes on and on…you got the point. 

Have you ever thought you might change your browsing behavior a little bit if you know a website is informing Google passively about you browsing their website? If that’s the case then Google Alarm, a simple Firefox and Chrome add-on, can help you find out if a site is informing Google about you being there on their website.

Google Alarm is a very simple plug-in that pops-up a red color Growl type notification indicating the Google’s web properties the site is communicating with for various purposes. Realize this, these are not those websites fault or Google’s; but a way for Google to track your IP address, the time you’ve spent on the site, the links you’ve clicked, the videos you’ve watched etc. If you think that’s passively invading your privacy you can leverage Google Alarm add-on to get a feel of what is being communicated to Google.

When Google Alarm warns you of the communication that’s happening between Google and the website you are on it plays a weird alarm audio. If you are in a workplace and don’t want to hear the audio you can install an audio-less version of the Firefox and Chrome extensions.

Learn more about Google Alarm.

Use these techniques to stop your Windows 7 computer from automatically waking up from sleep which can be quite dangerous sometimes.

Windows 7’s Sleep Mode is pretty slick and useful especially when you are on the move with your laptop. It comes off of sleep pretty quick and restore itself to an earlier stage without much fuzz. If you have been actively using Windows 7’s Sleep mode you would have faced this annoying problem where your Windows 7 computer automatically wakes up from sleep without you doing anything.

That’s no big deal,  let it wake up…what’s wrong? Right? Well, if your laptop (this problem is more annoying on laptops, BTW) wakes up by itself and drains the battery by itself unnecessarily then that’s a problem, especially if you expect your laptop to be ready for use when you ask it to wake up. You’d be clearly surprised to see that your battery is all drained out by the unnecessary wake up.

The good news is that you can easily stop this behavior. Most of the time it’s your network card that wakes up your computer from sleep. To stop your network card from waking your computer up you need to tweak a few settings.

Start by searching for “Device” on your Windows Start menu Search Bar. Under the Control Panel section you should be able to see “Device Manager” listed. Click on it to launch Device Manager. Alternatively you can use the Control Panel to navigate into Device Manager.

Once Device Manager launches navigate to the “Network Adapters” node and expand and right-click on your network card and click on “Properties”.

When the network card Properties window launch navigate to the “Power Management” tab and make sure to uncheck the “Allow this device to wake the computer” option. Once done dismiss all the open dialogs to accept the settings.

Sometimes automatic Windows Update can wake up your computer from sleep. This is not the majority of the case but could be a culprit and wouldn’t hurt to check and make sure.

On Windows Start menu search for “Update” and click on “Windows Update”. When Windows Update screen comes up click on the “Change Settings” option on the left side of the screen.

When the Windows Update Settings page opens up make sure you have a reasonable time set for Windows to install new updates. You don’t want to pick a time when you are sleeping or when you are driving. Pick a time when you can either be on the computer or could get to the computer in case if you notice the computer being turned on.

If you are curious to know what device woke your computer up from sleep the last time you can run this command to find out,

powercfg -lastwake

You can also use the command

powercfg –devicequery wake_armed

to find out the list of devices that are capable of waking your computer up from sleep. Once you have the list of devices you can use Device Manager to disable those devices from waking up your computer from sleep.

If you are experiencing this automatic wake up issue you need to focus a little bit to get this fixed especially if you are using your laptop. When you keep them in the bag and when it get woke up your laptop could heat up pretty quick and pretty bad. So do focus on this issue to resolve it if you are experiencing automatic wakeup from your Windows 7 computer.

Adjusting the Virtual Memory settings could literally speed-up your computer.

Virtual Memory is a medium that doesn’t exist as a physical memory but rather it’s a technique to mimic a storage device as physical memory. Physical Memory is the RAM module that comes with your computer and are limited in size even though those modules are getting cheaper and cheaper these days. To make things perform faster your Windows PC leverages virtual memory where in a portion of your hard disk would be used as a volatile memory. By leveraging this extra space your computer can perform things faster than it can with just the physical memory.

If for some reason you started experiencing slower computer performance but there is no way for you to either spend on expanding the memory module or if you have maxed out on your system memory capacity you can tap into adjusting your computer’s virtual memory setting to see if you can squeeze out a little more performance juice out of your computer. Adjusting your computer’s virtual memory setting is easy.

Start by typing “System” into the Search Bar. Click on the “System” link under Control Panel. Alternatively you can launch Control Panel and open up the System applet.

It would give you a screen where it displays basic information about your computer. Click on the “Advanced system settings” link on the left side of the dialog.

You’ll then get the System Properties dialog. Click on the “Advanced” tab and then click on the “Settings” button under the “Performance” section.

Windows will open up the “Performance Options” dialog. Navigate to the “Advanced” tab and click on the “Change…” button on the “Virtual Memory” section.

You are then presented with the Virtual Memory dialog where you can adjust couple of things to specify a custom virtual memory size that you feel comfortable. If the “Automatically manage paging file size for all drives” is checked make sure to uncheck the option. Everything else will enable by now and change from “System managed size” to the “Custom Size” choice. You’d then need to specify the initial and maximum sizes for the virtual memory. If you know what you are doing you can pick your number but if you don’t then a range of 3,000 for the Initial size and 6,000 for the Maximum size would be a safer bet. This is more important, once done make sure to click on the “Set” button to set this new size. Otherwise things wouldn’t work. Once done click on the “OK” button to dismiss the dialog (make sure to do it only after you click the “Set” button). You might want to restart your computer for the settings to take effect.

Now your system should be on the extra gear to give you the maximum performance possible.

Leave a comment and tweet about the free software giveaway to enter for a chance to win 1 of the 5 free TidySongs licenses.

Earlier we have written in detail about TidySongs and how you can use TidySongs to easily and nicely organize your music collection. As your music library grows TidySongs will help you keep full control of your music collection by removing duplicate songs, finding album artwork, fix misspelled song information, fill-in missing artists and genre information and much more. And TidySongs does all these for you automatically without you getting involved much.

If you try it once then you’ll realize the potential of having a software like TidySongs in your computer, be it a Mac or a PC. If you’ve been following DemoGeek.com you must have realized that we don’t promote any software by giving it free unless it really helped us and worked for us. TidySongs is something that really worked for us manage our huge music collection in a lot better way and we want you to experience the same.

In that regard DemoGeek.com is giving away 5 free licenses of TidySongs software. All you have to do to enter for a chance to win a copy of TidySongs is to leave a comment here at DemoGeek.com on why you need a software like TidySongs. We have 5 free TidySongs licenses to giveaway. Here is how we are going to give these free licenses,

• 2 licenses would go to the commenters with the most compelling reasons
• 1 license would go to one of the tweeters who tweet about this free software giveaway (make sure to include #demogeek and #freesoftware hashtags)
• 2 licenses would go to those of you who just leave a comment here in general

You have until August 6, 2010 to enter for a chance to win a free license of TidySongs. On August 7, 2010 we will announce the winners. So, don’t wait…download the trial version of TidySongs and give it a try and leave a comment here and tweet about it for a chance to win a full license of TidySongs for free. Good Luck!

Download TidySongs and give it a try.

————————————————–

And the winners are,

@milandroid – a DM has been sent to you

Garth

Swiftman

Lloyd Mullican

Paul

Congratulations to the winners! You were all notified with the appropriate license code. Thanks everyone for participating in this giveaway. Keep checking DemoGeek.com for free software giveaway like this in the future.

Writing an Audio CD with the free ImgBurn software is a bit trickier than the more traditional CD burning software.

ImgBurn is a totally free and a great CD burning software. It has got a whole bunch of features that many of the leading free CD burning software doesn’t have. Even though it boasts a lot of useful features, burning an Audio CD using ImgBurn is not a straight-forward thing. Even though it’s not that complicated you certainly need to follow certain steps to burn Audio CDs using ImgBurn.

Once you launch ImgBurn you need to switch to the Write mode. For that click on the “Mode” menu and click on the “Write” option.

Once in the write mode you then need to create a CUE file. According to Wikipedia “A cue file is a metadata file which describes how the tracks of a CD or DVD are laid out”. To create the CUE file click on the “CD-like” icon as shown in the above screenshot.

You’ll then be presented with the “Create CUE File” dialog. Now you need to browse for the audio files that wanted to write to the Audio CD. Click on the “Explorer” like icon to browse for the files. Add as many files as it can fit into a CD. ImgBurn will inform you if you overrun the CD space. Once added you can then use the up/down arrows to organize the tracks the way you want to go into the Audio CD. Once done click on the “OK” button to dismiss this dialog.

Now you are all set to write the audio files to an Audio CD. As you can notice on the above screenshot the sectors, size and time information has been calculated to indicate that it’s ready to be written. Click on the big button as indicated above to write the tracks to an Audio CD. Let ImgBurn do its job and in a matter of minutes you’ll have all your audio songs written into an Audio CD.

Even though it’s not straight-forward certainly writing Audio CD with ImgBurn is not that complicated, especially when you get used to it couple of times. If you have any other ways of writing Audio CD with ImgBurn please let us know.

Follow these simple steps to learn how to add rich text email signatures with images on to your Gmail messages.

With the announcement of Rich Text Signatures in Gmail Google has brought Gmail one step closer to the mainstream email clients. You can now have a custom email signature in Gmail with rich text and images.

Creating rich text signatures in Gmail is very simple and straight-forward. Just go into “Settings” and on the “General” tab scroll down to locate the “Signature” section. Choose the email account to which you want to add rich text signature.

Gmail will display the rich text editor and on that type the signature as you wish and format it using the toolbar buttons. If you would like to insert images to your Gmail signature you have to click on the little “Insert Image” icon that looks like a photo frame.

Currently Gmail only supports images from the web which means your image needs to be hosted somewhere and you need to provide Gmail with the URL to the image. Once done make sure to save changes.

Now, when you try to compile new email messages you should be able to see the rich text signature being added to your email message.

The ability to add images and rich text to Gmail messages is a really sought after feature. I hope Google improves on this to allow us to upload the images from our computers and help us define a custom size to the image being used  in the signature. In the mean time enjoy images and rich text in your Gmail messages.

Google Maps Labs has got some nice features that would certainly improve your Google Maps experience.

Google Maps has revolutionized the way JavaScript has been used in web development. Apart from the technicality improvements it certainly has improved the way we looked at maps and directions. Even though Google Maps currently has features that would make you use it comfortably without complaining too much there are certainly room for improvements.

Have you ever faced a situation where you zoomed into a map location a bit too much where it said “we don’t have imagery at this zoom level”? Instead of displaying that message to disappoint/annoy us how about if it zoomed only to a level where there are images available and stopped us zooming in any further? Wouldn’t that be a good thing?

That and many other features are what Google Maps team is working on and they have put out some of the features for the public to test on their Labs section. Some of these features that I handpicked would certainly improve the way you’ve used Google Maps.

Distance Measurement Tool

With this feature you can easily measure distance between two points on the map. You don’t have to get to the Directions tab anymore to find out about the distance between two places on the map. With the Distance Measurement Tool, just a simple drag and drop would give you the distance between the two places.

Short URL

Ever wanted to share a map with your friends and don’t want to send them that lengthy, garbage URL that you normally would? Try this feature and you can send a lot tiny URL that your friends can even remember (in most cases). This feature uses Google’s own URL shortener Goo.gl to shorten the URL.

Drag and Zoom

If you are annoyed with using the zoom sliders or double-clicking on the map forever to zoom in to a place in Google Maps you would love this feature which lets you zoom in to any section of the map with just a drag. Click on the Drag and Zoom button and start dragging and Google Maps will automatically zoom into the place without you doing much.

What’s Around Here?

If you are travelling to a place and ever wanted to know in advance what that place has to offer in terms of interesting places around that place? With What’s Around Here feature you can easily find out some of the interesting and useful places around any place in the map.

Smart Zoom

Many times when you zoom in too much into a place in Google Maps and when there are no images available Google Maps annoys you with the message that there are no images available at that zoom level. With Smart Zoom feature enabled you won’t get that message anymore instead you would only be able to zoom in to a level where images are available.

I’m sure you must have realized by now how much of a better experience you would get out of Google Maps when you enable these Labs features. Keep in mind that you would have to click on the “Labs” icon at the top right hand corner of the Google Maps page and then have to “Enable” the above features to make use of them.

These Gmail Notifiers can help you keep an eye on your Gmail account without keeping it open all day.

If you ever wanted to conserve some memory or a tab in your browser which usually was dedicated to Gmail then you should try some of these Gmail notifiers that would certainly help you keep an eye on your Gmail account without having it open all day in a browser.

1. Gmail Notifier for Mac

Apart from notifying new Gmail messages with a quick preview of the message subject Google Notifier for Mac also gives you timely reminder of your upcoming Google Calendar events. It stays in your menu bar and tells you of any new message arrivals.

2. Gmail Notifier for Windows

Similar to the Gmail Notifier for Mac but for Windows with one less feature; that is Gmail Notifier for Windows won’t give you timely reminder about your upcoming Google Calendar events. It stays in Windows System Tray and notifies of new message arrivals.

3. Notify

Notify is a tiny little (~15MB) Mac OSX application that stays on your OSX Menu Bar and tells you of any unread emails in your Gmail Inbox. It goes one step further to show a glimpse of those unread emails so you can decide if you want to open Gmail or just focus on what you are doing. It uses Growl to notify you of any new messages as it arrives in your Gmail Inbox.

4. GAlert

GAlert (Google Alert) is an easy to use and high performance skinnable Google notifier supports Google News, multiple GMail accounts, label filters and automatic login. It brings clean, easy and elegant look to the way people check their new message.

5. Gee!

Gee! is a nice little Atom Feeds notifier that sits in your OSX menubar. It was specifically written to read the Atom feed provided by Google for their Gmail service. Their feed lists the number of new emails a user has in their inbox. The icon in the menubar displays the number of unread messages inside a cool blue icon. Gee! will not only work with Gmail’s atom feed but with any atom feed.

6. Google + Growl

If you are annoyed with the “new message” pop-ups of other Gmail Notifiers then you would love this nonintrusive Growl notification provided by Google + Growl.

7. Mail Checker

Mail Checker is a simple OSX Dashboard widget that displays the number of unread messages in your Gmail or Yahoo accounts. If you have more than one email account you can add each widget for each account.

8. GmailGeiger

GmailGeiger is a lightweight and customizable mail notifier Yahoo Widget for the Gmail service. It supports multiple Gmail accounts, custom themes, themeable icons, adjustable check times etc.

9. Gmail Notifier Browser Extension

Allows checking for new Gmail messages for multiple Gmail accounts directly from the browser’s UI. A status bar item will show once installed, and a toolbar item can be added by customizing the toolbar. Supports Mozilla 1.4+ (all platforms), Firefox 1.0+ (all platforms), Firefox 1.0+ (all platforms) and Flock 0.7+ (all platforms).

10. Gmail Counter

Gmail Counter is a Windows Sidebar Gadget that checks your Gmail account or Google Apps email account and displays the number of new mails you have. Clicking on the gadget then takes you to your inbox. If you have more than one account you can use multiple copies of the gadget and use a different colour per account.

I hope you find some of these Gmail Notifiers useful to your needs. Please let us know in comments if you know of a Gmail notifier that’s better in terms of use but not listed here.

Use this simple trick to add all your favorite PDF files to iBooks on your iPhone or iPad.

With iOS4 comes a handy little application called iBooks. With iBooks you can read all your favorite eBooks at the comfort of your iPhone or iPad. But you would be surprised to know that can also read all your favorite PDF files using iBooks on your iPhone or iPad.

Adding PDF files to iBooks is relatively simple and straight-forward.

First, make sure you click on the Books folder on iTunes so it is selected. You might see the sample eBook on your Books folder. Keep it or you can delete it, your choice.

Find the PDF file that you wanted to add to your iPhone. Drag and Drop the file into the Books folder on iTunes.

If you wish to add some metadata about the PDF file you can do so by using the “Get Info” option when you right-click on the PDF file in iTunes. It’s an optional step but would certainly help if you have a lot of books on iBooks and wanted to identify them quickly.

Now that’s been added to Books on iTunes you need to make sure that new PDF get synced into your iPhone or iPad. Go into your iPhone folder and click on the “Books” tab. Make sure “Sync Books” is checked. If “Selected Books” is checked then make sure to check the PDF file that you wanted to get into your iPhone. Once done, hit the Sync button.

Your new PDF should show up on your iPhone. You might be surprised to see that it’s not showing up by default. Once in iBooks you need to tap on the “PDFs” tab to see your PDFs.

Now that you know how to load all you favorite PDFs in to your iTunes you might need to make sure couple of things,

• Do not load PDFs that are huge in size.
• Do not load PDFs that are in violation to any copyrights.
• Do not load PDFs that would be hard to read on the tiny screen of your iPhone.

I hope this helps you make use of all the valuable PDF files that you have in your computer. I certainly started reading a bunch of my favorite PDFs otherwise would have never bothered to read.

TrashMe helps you do a complete uninstall of applications on your Mac with just a few clicks.

Earlier we have mentioned about a simple uninstall software for your Mac, AppCleaner. Along the same lines of AppCleaner comes another useful little software TrashMe.

With TrashMe you are guaranteed pretty much when you uninstall a software from your Mac you are truly removing the software from your Mac. TrashMe figures out all the related files for the software that you are trying to uninstall and after you acknowledge will trash all those files as part of the uninstallation process.

When you launch TrashMe it shows you the home screen where you can drag an application from the dock or from a folder to uninstall the application.

If you are not sure about the application and wanted to find the application you can use the “Applications” link on the sidebar.

Apart from completely uninstalling applications (softwares) TrashMe can also uninstall or remove widgets without any traces. Along the same lines you can use the “Plugins” link to uninstall or remove any installed browser plugins.

If you’ve uninstalled applications before using TrashMe to uninstall applications you can use TrashMe to remove the orphan files that you’ve must have got by uninstalling it manually.

If you ever wanted to see the history of applications that you’ve uninstalled using TrashMe it keeps a nice little history log.

There are 2 advantages that I could see TrashMe has over AppCleaner, the ability to show the complete history of what has been uninstalled through TrashMe. And also the multi-language support. TrashMe currently support English, French, German, Spanish, Chinese, Italian and more.

Download TrashMe for all your uninstallation needs on your Mac.

Handy Backup is one of the most stable, effective and easy-to-use data backup and disaster recovery software.

Those of you who have gone through it would certainly realize the importance of having a consistent data backup plan in place. For those of you who take it easy on putting a decent backup plan in place it’s just a matter of time when your computer’s hard disk crashes or you accidentally purge important files or your computer gets infected by viruses or for the worst you lose your computer. You would then realize that it is one of the worst procrastinations that you have ever did.

Either if you are already using a backup solution or you are on the look for one Handy Backup from Novosoft could be a fantastic backup solution that you should certainly consider. It’s a really useful data backup and synchronization software for home and small to mid size businesses.

Handy Backup provides ability to perform full, incremental and mirror backup types, in addition it allows you to synchronize data between computers including computers in remote locations.

It has no limitations on quantity of files which you can backup and restore with it in one task. It claims that some developers and users have successfully tested the program to backup more than 1 million files in one task. Again it’s a claim that I couldn’t validate but given the feature-set and the quality of the product I can trust their claim.

Handy Backup also supports such necessary features for up-to-date backup such as backup scheduling, backup data compression and encryption, as well as time stamps, email notifications and much more.

Handy Backup can backup files and folders, Desktop, Windows registry, backup email clients such as Outlook, Outlook Express and others, backup program settings and other simple things, which importance couldn’t be overestimated, when it comes to make our everyday life a bit more comfortable.

Advanced users can use a rich set of features including disk image backup and database backup. Database backup is the salt that makes Handy Backup software unique. The program can easily handle advanced database management system backup and restore operations. Graphical user interface is simple even novice PC user can backup and restore MySQL, MS SQL, Oracle, DB2, PostgreSQL, or any other ODBC-compatible databases with all tables, indexes, triggers, settings, passwords and other elements.

One of the cool things about Handy Backup is the fact that it not only allows you to backup your hard disk but also helps you backup preferences and settings of a wide variety of applications using plug-ins. Free plug-ins are available to backup Outlook, Photoshop, Winamp, Windows Media Player, Sykpe, Yahoo Messenger and much more. If you are an application provider and you want your users to backup your applications settings and preferences using Handy Backup you can support Handy Backup in your application by writing your own plug-in for your application.

Handy Backup supports virtually every type of storage devices, media and data transferring protocols. It can:

• Copy backup to external drives (including all types of USB backup and FireWire backup)
• Record backup to CD discs with the options of data spanning and backup verification
• Burn backup to DVD, Blu-ray, HD DVD discs (with a separate engine and the same options as CD)
• Transfer backup to FTP, SFTP (in Professional edition), or place backup to network share.
• Use Novosoft Remote Backup Service and store your data to a reliable online backup server located in an underground shelter in the USA.

It works with a variety of Windows platforms including Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP and Windows 2000 on the home and personal use side to Windows 2003 Server and Windows 2008 Server on the business and server side.

Handy Backup comes in 3 flavors,

• Standard – costs $39 – for home and small office environments
• Professional – costs $99 – for small and medium size businesses
• Server – costs $599 – for network backup including emails and databases

With the latest release of Handy Backup 6.7 version you can create data backup tasks using Windows Explorer’s context menu (the menu that comes up when you right-click on a file or folder). That would surely make it even more easier for you to blend your data backup tasks with your every day Windows use.

If you ever get stuck with a problem in Handy Backup you can get in touch with the support personals as all customers of Handy Backup are entitled to unlimited free support via phone, Skype, email or IM.

Download a free 30-days trial version of Handy Backup and give it a try and I’m sure you’ll realize the importance of having Handy Backup as part of your data backup plan.

iOS4 for iPhone 3GS doesn’t come with the increasingly popular iBooks app. Follow these simple steps to get iBooks on your iPhone 3GS running iOS4.

iOS4 for iPhone has quite a lot of feature enhancements that makes it worth upgrading. Even though the feature set becomes miniscule if you are not using it on iPhone 4 it still is worth upgrading.

Part of iOS4 is a new app for iPhones called iBooks. iBooks is your mobile bookshelf where you can stack all your favorite eBooks from iTunes book store and can read them wherever you are. Certainly a pretty handy app to have on your iPhone.

Even though it’s advertised that iOS4 comes with iBooks, it’s not really unless you have iPhone 4. For iPhone 3GS and 3G users you have to download the app on your own. Getting iBooks manually is not that hard.

All you need to do is search for iBooks on AppStore and install it the regular way (it is a top featured app as of now).

Once installed you can shop for eBooks on iTunes bookstore. Keep in mind that iBooks comes by default with only one sample eBook and so you might want to stack up your iBooks shelf with the books that you like. Just tap on the “Store” button at the top and that will take you to the iTunes bookstore.

Similar to apps, once you pick a book you’ll be presented with the details where you can get the eBook for whatever the price listed.

If you are not sure about the book you can try a sample of the book. Sample books are marked with the word “Sample” in your bookshelf.

The above is a screenshot of a sample book when opened to read. Initial observation is that the font and text and clear and comfortable enough to read on the small device.

If you are ever wondering where iBooks is after you’ve upgraded your iPhone 3GS to iOS4 I hope this guides you in the right direction. Feel free to leave your comments below.

NewsMap makes it a lot more interesting to see what’s breaking the news in the places of your interest.

Traditional news sites serve the purpose but most of the time the news, because of the way they present, become so boring that many times we tend to ignore. It’s the presentation that makes it less attractive to keep a tab on.

NewsMap is an Adobe Flash based website that tries to present the news with a slight twist. It presents the news headlines of your interest with big bold letters so you can visualize what’s happening in the news media.

When you visit NewsMap home page you are presented with a nice layout of top news of the day. The most breaking news are visually enlarged to make it stand out. The news are color coded based on various categories including World, National, Business, Technology, Sports, Entertainment and Health. Countries are listed along the top of the news page. The cool thing about NewsMap is the fact that most of these are customizable which means you see what you really wanted to see.

If you are just happy with the default settings, by all means, go for it. But if you prefer to preserve the custom settings just register your email and password with one of the simplest of the registration forms out there.

Once registered and signed in you can customize the way news is presented to you in NewsMap. Click on the “Settings” link at the top left side of the page. You can set a home view so when NewsMap starts it uses your home view to present you with the news that matters to you.

You can also customize fonts and colors. You can choose to hide the clicked articles which means more fresh content. You can also choose to preview popups.

You can also customize the sources of news that you want to show on your home view. Choose the countries you want to see the news from.

Once customized the home view news will be tailored to fit your needs. In my testing even though the tailored news approach was not much reliable it was working for the most part.

One of the best uses of NewsMap could be to present news on a big screen TV on a living room or reception or lobby halls. NewsMap can really make viewing the news more interesting.

Give NewsMap a try.

Even though it’s slightly different than other browsers Google Chrome does have a simpler way to handle pop-up windows.

Everyone agrees, pop-up windows are one of the annoyances of the world wide web and that’s the reason all modern day browsers come with the default setting to not allow pop-up windows, which is a good thing. But at times you might visit a site that intentionally wanted to pop-up a legitimate window. For these circumstances you would have to configure your browser to allow pop-up windows.

Handling pop-up windows in Google Chrome is slightly different than other browsers, you would have to look in a different place to set this up.

Go to Chrome “Preferences” (“Options” if you are on Windows).

Click on the “Under the Hood” tab. Under “Privacy” click on the “Content settings…” button.

Then on the Content Settings dialog click on the “Allow all sites to show pop-ups” option. If you leave this option open to all the sites then just be careful to turn it off once you are done.

On the other hand if you wish to allow pop-up windows for just one or few websites then you can use the “Do not allow any site to show pop-ups” option and then click on the “Exceptions…” button to add websites that you wanted to allow pop-up windows.

Even though the settings are slightly different Google Chrome has a simple way to handle pop-up windows. Make use of it.

Learn how to setup your HP Photosmart printer to scan your documents directly to Evernote.

One of the coolest features of Evernote is its ability to recognize the characters on images (using the OCR technology). To put this feature to good use you can scan all your paper documents to Evernote and search for keywords in your documents when you need to find them. If you have one of the HP Photosmart series printers that has the scan capability then you are half way there. All you need to do is to configure your printer’s scan destinations to scan to Evernote directly.

Before setting up your HP printer to scan directly to Evernote make sure you have,

• one of HP’s Photosmart printers with Scan capability
• an Evernote account (premium account is preferred)
• a Mac
• wireless network

Setting up your HP printer to scan directly to your Evernote notebook is easy.

Download and install the software for your printer. You might wanted to be careful to follow the instructions to not connect your printer until prompted, otherwise things might not work the way you expect, I’m a victim of it.

Once installed, launch the “HP Scan Destinations” application.

Click on the “+” button at the bottom of the screen to add a new destination.

When prompted to add a new destination choose the “Picture Editing Application” choice and hit the “Next >>” button.

We wanted to setup our printer to scan single and multiple sheets. Let’s start with single sheets.

Type in a name (for example, Evernote – Single Sheet) and choose the “Evernote” application for “Select Application:” box. Choose “JPEG” for document format and click the “Finish” button.

Next, we’ll setup our printer to scan multiple sheets.

Hit the “+” button again to add a new destination.

Enter a name (for example, Evernote – Multiple Sheets, this time) and choose the “Evernote” application. This time choose “PDF” for document format and click on the “Finish” button.

Once done, move the newly added “Evernote” destinations to the top of the list so you don’t have to scroll down to select it when you scan the document.

Dismiss any open dialogs by saving the changes when prompted. That’s it, you are all set to utilize your printer’s scan capability to scan documents directly to Evernote.

The next time when you use your printer to scan your documents choose to scan to your MacBook (or your Mac computer where you have configured HP Scan Destinations) and then choose “Evernote – Single Sheet” or “Evernote – Multiple Sheets” based on what you are scanning and your document will be scanned directly to your Evernote account.

I hope you find these instructions easy setup your printer to scan your documents directly to Evernote. If you have any questions on this please ask in comments.

Camouflage makes it a lot easier to show or hide the desktop icons on your Mac desktop.

If you have been using your Mac for a while I’m sure your desktop must be as cluttered as mine and many times that’s inevitable. If the clutter is preventing you from enjoying the beautiful wallpaper that you have on your desktop or you wanted to take a screenshot of your desktop without that clutter then you should definitely try Camouflage.

Camouflage is a little Mac menu-bar application that allows you to easily hide your desktop icons.

You can either use Camouflage’s menu to “Hide Icons” or you can use your preferred hotkey to show or hide the desktop icons.

To set the hotkey go into Camouflage preferences and hit the “Change” button to set the hotkey. While there you can also configure to launch Finder with a single-click or double-click on your desktop.

Camouflage takes around 10 MB of memory but given the usefulness of the application it is going to stay on my Mac menu-bar. Would you keep it on yours?

Download Camouflage.

Use this simple trick to restore Visual Voicemail on your iPhone.

If you are using the internet tethering hack on your iPhone or if you have tried to tether your iPhone you must have ended up with a broken Visual Voicemail on your iPhone. Since Visual Voicemail is one of coolest features of your iPhone, many times you don’t want to sacrifice that.

If you are willing to trade-in internet tethering for Visual Voicemail then follow these simple steps to recover Visual Voicemail on your iPhone.

Go into your iPhone Settings. Scroll down to locate the “General” settings item and tap into that.

Once on the General settings page scroll all the way down to locate the “Profiles” item. Tap on that to open up your iPhone network profiles.

If you’ve tried internet tethering or have been using it you should be able to see multiple profiles. The focus here is to remove any profiles other than the carrier profile, in this case “US AT&T“. Go ahead and tap into the “Enable Tethering” profile in this case, if you have the same profile listed.

When you see the detail about the profile you can hit the “Remove” button to remove the profile. You might be prompted to confirm the removal.

Once you remove all the hacked profiles from your iPhone, your Visual Voicemail should start to work again. Leave your iPhone for a couple of minutes for it to restore the Visual Voicemail capability. If it doesn’t restore automatically go ahead and restart your iPhone. Visual Voicemail capability on your iPhone should be working by now.

Windows 7 provides a comprehensive set of tools to restrict and keep an eye on the computer usage of your kids.

Earlier we have mentioned about how to make use of Windows Vista’s Parental Controls and also a little primer on Mac OSX Parental Controls. It’s time to take a look at what Windows 7 has to offer in this regard.

Before you setup parental controls on your Windows 7 machine you need to make sure you create appropriate user accounts for each user of your computer. And also make sure you grant the Administrative access to a trusted account.

Once you have these setup you can then move on with implementing parental control setting for your family computer. With Windows 7’s Parental Control capabilities you can set limits on the hours your children can use the computer, the types of games they can play and also the applications they can run on a computer. Implementing parental controls on Windows 7 is easy and straight-forward.

On the Control Panel click on “Set up parental controls for any user” link under “User Accounts and Family Safety”.

You can also get to Windows 7’s Parental Controls if you go into Internet Explorer Options and then on the “Content” tab you can see “Parental Controls” button.

Once in there, choose the user you want to set parental controls for. The user cannot be an Administrator of the machine, as a kid account is not supposed to have Administrator privileges.

On the User Controls dialog enable Parental Controls by checking the “On, enforce current settings” option under Parental Controls. Once you enable it you should be able to see 3 different settings that you can use to restrict how your kid can use the computer,

• Time limit – this option allows you to set time limits on when your children can use the computer
• Games – this option allows you to set  the type of games your children can play on a computer
• Allow or block specific programs – this option allows you to restrict the programs your kid can use on a computer

Start by trying to set time limits on when your kid can use the computer.

You can “left-click and drag” your mouse over the time columns across the days to block the time when your kid can’t use the computer. The cells would turn blue to indicate that those time are blocked from usage. White cells indicate the time the computer usage is allowed. Make sure to hit the “OK” button.

On the Game Controls section you can indicate whether your kid can play games on this computer or not. If you allow your kid to play games then there are some more restrictions that you can use to block the type of games your kid can play. Either you can restrict the games based on ratings or by specific games.

If you choose to set restrictions based on ratings you can set to allow or block games with no rating. Also you can set a wide variety of ratings to allow or restrict the type of games your kid can play on this computer.

You can also restrict the games by the type of content like animated blood, comic mischief, drug reference etc. There are a whole bunch of options out there for you to consider.

If you want to restrict specific games you can do so by setting the “Always Allow” or “Always Block” options next to the game name. Keep in mind that this might not be a great option if your kid installs new games or when you don’t actively maintain this parental control setting.

Lastly, you can also choose to restrict usage of certain programs/applications. This would be a handy thing to have as in most cases you might have an application that you don’t want your children to get to for various reasons. By allowing your kid to use only certain applications you can keep your computer stable.

Even though parental controls on Windows 7 provides some decent control it is certainly not the most extensive. For most of day to day computer usage of your children this would provide a decent way to keep a tab on them.

Bodega helps you find interesting and useful applications for your Mac OSX.

Ever wonder where to find those gorgeous applications for your Mac? Bodega could be the best answer. It helps you find paid and free applications for your Mac as easy as browsing through a bookshelf of apps.

It categorizes applications into a wide variety of categories, I mean a truly large category of apps so you can drill down easily to the app you were looking for.

If those categories are too much for you, you can use the many filters available to keep up with the flood of apps it lists. You can filter it by “New Releases”, “Shopper’s Picks”, “Top Free Downloads” and “Top Paid Downloads”.

If you browse through the categories the apps are listed alphabetically.

If you choose a free app it allows you to download the app right with Bodega itself. If you choose a paid app it allows you to try the app before buying it or if you are convinced it allows you to buy the app right from Bodega itself.

When you download or buy apps through Bodega it keeps track of the app updates and lists any new available updates for those applications. If you’d like to update an app all you have to do is to hit the “Get” button to get the update. It just makes managing installed apps so much easier.

Hopefully, by now, you would have realized the potential of Bodega and the numerous ways you can find new and interesting Mac apps with minimal effort. Give Bodega a try and I’m sure you’ll love to get back to it once in a while.

Download Bodega.

Learn how easy it is to add multiple custom ringtones to your iPhone.

Earlier we have walked you through how to add custom ringtones to your iPhone. On that post we demonstrated adding just one ringtone to your iPhone. It was not intentional but happened to show only one ringtone as an example. From the many comments on that post it’s clear that many of you have trouble adding multiple ringtones to your iPhone.

In this post I’ll walk you through how to add multiple ringtones to your iPhone. The process is quite simple and is pretty closer to the way you add single ringtone. There are couple of things that you might need to make sure (which I’ll mention later).

First, follow the instructions on the how to add a custom ringtone to your iPhone post to add the second ringtone to your iPhone. Do as many as you want but make sure you can see multiple ringtones on the Ringtones section of your iTunes application. Follow the steps on that post until it asks you to Sync. Before you sync your iPhone you need to make sure couple of things.

Click on the iPhone item on the left side of iTunes and make sure the “Manually mange music and videos” option is unchecked.

Then on the “Ringtones” tab, make sure the “Sync Ringtones” option is checked and then the “Selected ringtones” option is selected. Also, make sure to choose more than one ringtones that you would like to sync.

Also, one another thing to make sure might be to keep your ringtones music length to less than 30 seconds. Apple claims to allow up to 30 seconds but I would try to keep it as small as possible. The sample ringtones used for this demonstration are 9 seconds and 12 seconds.

At this point of time, you are good to sync your iPhone. Once sync completes you should be able to see multiple ringtones on your iPhone if you go into “Settings” > “Sounds” > “Ringtone”.

As you must have realized adding multiple ringtones to your iPhone is not that complicated. There are couple of things that you need to make sure and follow the above instructions. I’m sure some of you might run into issues doing this, if you do please let us know in comments.

Windows can suggest preferred settings based on your physical condition so you see, hear and use your computer with ease.

If you have a physical condition that demands some special needs when using your computer you’ll certainly love to hear that Windows can recommend optimal settings for you so you can see, hear and use your computer better.

Getting Windows recommended settings is a lot easier than you think. Just answer 5 simple questions and follow the recommendations.

To get started, launch Control Panel.

Click on the “Let Windows suggest settings” link under “Ease of Access”.

Windows will start to ask 5 simple questions starting with “Eyesight” related questions. Answer the one that’s most appropriate to you.

In the next screen you’ll be asked about “Dexterity” related questions.

In the following screen you’ll be asked questions related to “Hearing”. Again answer the ones that are most appropriate to your condition.

In the 4th step you’ll be asked about your “Speech” related questions. Answer the ones that apply to you.

In the last and final step you’ll be asked “Reasoning” related questions. Answer the ones that’s appropriate to you and hit the “Next” button.

Windows will then reveal an elaborate report detailing what could be done to improve your computer so you can see, hear and use it in ease. All these recommendations are optional and so if you don’t like to turn on a recommendation you can feel free to do so. But if you have a physical condition that you answered yes to some of the questions it is highly recommended to follow the suggested settings.

Basket Buster can help you find the best price for the product you are shopping for.

Earlier we’ve mentioned about InvisibleHand, a very helpful browser extension that helps you find the best shopping deals without you doing much. Along the same lines but with a slight twist, Basket Buster informs you about better shopping deals available than the one that you are currently looking at. In simple visual indication Basket Buster notifies you of any available better shopping deals.

Basket Buster comes in as an add-on for both Firefox and Internet Explorer. Once installed you’ll see an icon that turns colors when you visit product sites.

– indicates that the site you are currently viewing has offers available

– indicates that the current site don’t have any offers but similar sites do

– indicates no offer available for the product you are viewing

When the icon changes to Amber color and when you click on it a sidebar opens up to reveal the deals that are available for the product. This way you don’t have to leave the site you are on but still be aware of the better deals available.

If this looks a bit vague to you here is a video that can visualize it better.

Basket Buster is in closed beta testing as of now. You need a password to install the plugin. If you really really want to try Basket Buster send them an email and they will set things up for you.

Note: I apologize for the slow posting schedule for the last week and a half. Still things are quite busy but should get better and so you can expect a better posting schedule. Thanks for your patience and understanding. Special thanks to those who emailed and asked.

Use this simple trick to find out more information about what is occupying your iPhone or iPod Touch.

I’m sure you might be familiar with the above iTunes section. When you use iTunes to sync your iPhone or iPod Touch we all know that iTunes reveals some really useful information about the space your media files are occupying on your iPhone or iPod Touch. By default iTunes displays this information in terms of size (MB/GB).

But if you find it hard to digest these sizes you can use this simple trick to get the same information visualized a bit different. All you have to do is to click anywhere on these blocks. With each click iTunes cycle through 2 other display formats, one revealing audio and video occupancy in terms of days and hours and the other revealing information in terms of the number of items.

This is a simple trick that help you visualize the stuff that occupies your iPhone or iPod Touch a little better.

These 5 useful Safari plugins would certainly enhance your browsing experience using Apple Safari.

Firefox is the king when it comes to browser extensibility, no doubt about that. But the bloated feel of Firefox always make me stay away from it as much as I can. And I’m sure people have preference for other browsers too. My next best browser is Apple Safari. Even though it is not the most extendable browser out there it is certainly slick and quick enough to get me the page.

I was on the lookout to find some plugins that could enhance the browsing experience with Safari. And I did find these 5 plugins really help enhance the experience.

Glims

Glims is a very powerful plugin that does quite a lot of interesting things in one package. Instead of me going over each one here is a list of features that Glims support (from the plugin site),

• Adds thumbnails to Google.com search results
• Adds thumbnails to Yahoo.com search results
• Adds search engines to the default Google search tab
• Adds full-screen browsing capability
• Adds Favicons to tab labels
• Adds keyword search from address bar
• Undo “Close Tab” (cmd-z)
• Re-opens last session when Safari starts
• Auto-Closes download window
• Adds new tab position option (right/left/leftmost/rightmost)
• Adds tab closing using middle mouse button
• Focus last selected tab
• Always open links in a new tab
• Type-ahead support (auto cmd-f)
• Sets the focus on the search field when opening a new window
• Adds Amazon’s information banner on Google.com search results
• Adds Amazon’s information banner on Yahoo.com search results
• Adds a “Max Window Size” menu item to resize the Safari window
• Forms autocomplete always on
• Autocomplete search phrase
• Adds bookmark separator
• Adds bookmark actions
• Dated download folders
• Localized to Japanese, French, Polish, German, Spanish, Italian, and Korean

Cooliris

Cooliris is a plugin that brings a whole different experience when it comes to browsing photos and videos from the web or your desktop. Instead of navigating photos page by page Cooliris makes it a seamless experience scrolling through the stream of photos from Facebook, Google Images, YouTube, Flickr, Picasa, Kodak Gallery, or any supported site. It’s a gorgeous plugin to slideshow the pictures from your desktop or the web.

Greasekit

One of the beloved Firefox extension was the ability to extend custom page behaviors using custom scripts (mostly from GreaseMonkey). If you dearly miss the capability in Safari Greasekit is for you. It fills the user scripting hole in Safari.

ClickToFlash

We all know by now that iPad was not well received because of its lack of support for Adobe Flash. That’s at least one of the reasons. Even though Flash is useful in many instances it ruins the browsing experience many times and it’s a resource hog. I dread watching YouTube videos these days as I get scared of seeing the CPU usage graph shoot up and my remaining physical memory goes down to the lower 3 digits. Many people agree to the reason given my one of the iPad engineer for not supporting Flash technology in iPad. If you are one of those who would love to have a way Flash can be disabled on Apple Safari ClickToFlash is for you.

TabExposé

Dealing with many tabs on the browser is always a nightmare. Many times we have to take a guess to look around for the correct tab we wanted to navigate to. At the same time we all love the handiness of Mac’s Exposé feature which displays a great thumbnail preview collage of all open windows. TabExposé does the same for all the open tabs in your Safari browser. If you can’t get rid of the habit of keeping at least 20 tabs open then TabExposé is your best rescue.

I hope these 5 plugins help you have a better browsing experience using Apple Safari browser.

Note: I apologize for the slow week last week here at DemoGeek.com. Got caught up with many other things and don’t want to write something just for the sake of writing that may not be useful to you. So until things settle back, DemoGeek.com would go through a slow posting schedule for the next week or two. Thanks for your understanding.

Use this simple trick to reveal hidden files and folders in Windows.

Windows, by default, hides system files and some other important files for security reasons. Which means you won’t be able to see those hidden files using Windows Explorer. That doesn’t mean you cannot see those files forever. All you have to do is to tweak a Folder setting to reveal those hidden files.

Launch Windows Explorer and click on the “Organize” menu. Then click on the “Folder and search options” item. If you are using Windows XP then you might want to use the “Tools”  menu “Folder Options” item.

Navigate to the “View” tab and locate the “Hidden files and folders” item under “Advanced Settings”. Choose the “Show hidden files, folders and drives” option and hit the OK button.

From now on you should be able to see all hidden files and folders using Windows Explorer. If you are looking for a file that you know it exists for sure but couldn’t locate it then you might want to turn this option on and see if you can locate it in your computer. Make sure to turn this off when you are not using it. If you leave this option on forever you might accidentally delete files that are important to your system. So use this option only when needed.

Use these simple tricks to base your search on different countries using Google, Bing and Yahoo.

It is a very simple and straight-forward thing to do search on the country you are in. In other words, by default, all the leading search engines try to present you with search results that are specific to the country you are in. But what if you wanted to search stuffs on different countries? What if you do those searches quite frequently and wanted to keep a shortcut to get to it quickly?

Here are some tricks that you can use on the 3 leading search engines, Google, Yahoo and Bing to base your search on different countries.

Google

There are 2 ways to do country specific search in Google. If you know the 2 letter country code you wanted to base your search on then you can use the URL hack to get to the results quickly.

Search as usual using Google.com. Once you are on the search results page you can append &gl= and the 2 letter country code to the URL to get to the country specific search results. Try to remember the parameter “gl” as “geo-location” and “&” is of course needed to append any parameters to the URL.

If you don’t know the country code you can use Google’s “Language Tools” link on the home page (next to the search box) to choose the country you wanted to base your search on. Here is the URL in case you couldn’t find it, http://www.google.com/language_tools?hl=en. Scroll down to the “Visit Google’s Site in Your Local Domain” section.

Bing

Again, there are 2 ways to do a country specific search on Bing.com. If you know the 2 letter country code you can append ?cc= to the home page URL to do a country specific search.

Visit Bing.com and append ?cc= to the URL along with the 2 letter country code. Try to remember “cc” as “country code” for example. Once you do the search you can notice a new option next to the search box like “Only from Australia” to include results only from Australia for example.

If you don’t know the country code you can click on the country link at the top of the Bing.com page. You’ll be presented with a list of countries Bing.com supports and you can easily choose from the list.

Yahoo

Yahoo does things slightly different. You have to use their “Advanced Search” options to search on a different country.

Do a Yahoo search as usual. On the search results page click on the “Options” button next to the “Search” button and choose “Advanced Search“.

Scroll down to locate the “Country” section and choose the country you want your search to be based on.

If you ever wonder what those 2 letter country codes that I’ve been talking about, here is a list of country codes http://www.iso.org/iso/english_country_names_and_code_elements.

As I said, these tricks would be really helpful if you do a fair amount search outside your country repeatedly. I hope you find it useful.

AlternativeTo can suggest you applications that you may not know otherwise.

Finding it hard to find some great applications for your Windows, Mac or Linux computers? AlternativeTo could be your answer.

AlternativeTo is a service that lists some of the best and useful softwares for your computer based on popularity. It uses a voting system similar to Digg to find out about the popularity of those applications. You can use AlternativeTo to find applications for all 3 of the major platforms, Windows, Mac and Linux. It also has a “Online” tab where you can find some useful web apps.

On the home page you can sort applications based on most viewed, most liked and recently added applications which gives you enough choices to drill-down the long list of applications.

You can click on the app name to see more details about the app including screenshots if available.

You can use the “Find alternatives to…” link to find applications of similar nature. The details would include a description, screenshots, delicious bookmarks about that app, statistics on how well the main app stack against some of those alternatives etc. These information would certainly give you an idea of whether the app is worth occupying your hard disk real-estate.

If you know an app that’s not listed at AlternativeTo, you can suggest applications to AlternativeTo so others can benefit out of.

I’ve discovered couple of useful applications using AlternativeTo, both for my Mac and Windows computers and thought of sharing it with you. I hope you find it useful as well.

Find new applications with AlternativeTo.

Logitech’s Touch Mouse iPhone app can make your iPhone be utilized as a wireless mouse and keyboard for your computer.

Here is a new way of putting your iPhone to another good use. Given the form factor of iPhone it perfectly fits in as a mouse for your computer. Logitech jumped in to leverage the iPhone form factor so it can be used as a mouse and keyboard. All you have to do is, download the iPhone app to your iPhone and an equivalent server app to your computer. Let them establish a connection over Wi-fi and there you have a wireless mouse and a keyboard.

First, download and install the “Logitech Touch Mouse Server” app from Logitech’s website. It supports the Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP and Mac OSX platforms. Download and install the appropriate version. Launch the app on your computer and leave it open.

Then, download and install Logitech “Touch Mouse” app on your iPhone (iTunes link).

Launch Touch Mouse and wait for it to identify the devices on the network. If it doesn’t identify your computer (it didn’t identify my Windows laptop!) you can enter your computer’s IP address to let it connect. Tap on the computer name and wait for it to establish the connection. Once done, your iPhone can now be used as a keyboard and mouse.

Even though I like the idea of using iPhone as a mouse it really is a not a great idea to use it as a keyboard. But a common use case is that if you connect your computer to your TV then you don’t have to worry about keeping an external mouse and keyboard. You can just leverage your iPhone as an input device. Good idea!

(some images from Logitech)

Diagnose system issues that are not explicitly visible with these built-in Mac OSX system tools.

Mac’s are famous for its stability. It won’t crash as often as Windows do. It doesn’t have a BSOD (Blue-Screen-Of-Death). But at times it might run into issues with the third-party software that you install. Most of the time Mac OSX tends to not bother you with pop-ups after pop-ups. But rather it writes to system logs and continues to do its job the best it can.

So, if you suspect your system of not performing as it used to or if you see a software or an operating system feature not working as expected there are tools that Mac OSX comes with that can help you get some understanding of the issue behind.

The first tool that you should turn to if you run into system issues is the Console tool. Console is a system tool that helps you view system and application logs in a more readable way. You can access Console from “Applications” > “Utilities”. Once launched Console shows you log files that are found in the system. You can view the messages that are directed to the Console, the System Log or any of the application/service related logs. If you suspect a program of causing the instability then you can choose to view only the application’s log which would be a lot simpler to look at than the full message list.

If you can’t find a log in the list on the left side you can also open a log file to view with Console by going into the “File” > “Open” menu. You’ll be shown the Log folder under your Library folder. Choose the log file that you’d like to diagnose.

Console would be the first tool that you should turn to if you see any instability with your Mac OSX. But at times, the system might not be really unstable but rather little sluggish or you notice a lot of disk activity and such and you suspect something going on. The quick way to find out would be to use the “Activity Monitor“.

Activity Monitor is kind of like the “Task Manager” in the Windows world. It tells you some information about the processes that are running in your system along with the overall CPU, memory and disk usage. The information the Activity Monitor provides would be sufficient enough for you to clarify some of the basic suspicions that you have about your Mac OSX. You can also use Activity Monitor to kill a process that you suspect is causing your system to use its CPU to the fullest. If killing a process is too dangerous to you then you can also suspend a Mac OSX process temporarily until you find the root cause.

Console and Activity Monitor are two great tools that should be in your arsenal when you are out in the field to diagnose your Mac OSX system issues on your own.

Quix is an extensible bookmarklet for your browser that makes it easier to do the many tasks that you do everyday using your web browser.

Imagine having a whole bunch of browser bookmarks that you use everyday to do the many mundane tasks that you do using your web browser. At times it would be overwhelming, especially if you don’t have those bookmarks well organized and handy.

Imagine forgetting about all the places in your browser that you have to jump to do the tasks that you have to do and instead imagine a single browser bookmarklet that can take your commands and execute it for you so you can get things done a lot quicker on your browser. That’s exactly what Quix does.

Quix is a simple browser bookmarklet that when invoked can execute simple commands to do the many tasks that you do with your web browser. It understands commands like “g” to search the web using Google, “e” to email a link, “d” to define a word etc.

To start using Quix, first you drag the “Qiux App” bookmarklet to your browser bookmarks (visit their site to see the bookmarklet). If you’d prefer to customize the way your browser handles the bookmarklet you can read more from this page for your particular browser. Quix supports Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Internet Explorer, Opera and Safari on your iPhone.

Once you click (or use your browser shortcut keys) on the bookmarklet it’ll launch a small popup window that takes Quix commands. The commands ranges from,

• Basic Commands
• Social Commands
• WordPress Commands
• SEO Commands
• Webmaster Commands
• Quix Commands
• Analytics Commands
• URL Shortening Commands
• App Integration Commands
• Mac Integration Commands

There is a comprehensive list of commands that Quix understands on this page. Here are some interesting commands that I thought is worth mentioning,

• d – define a word using Google
• e – email a link
• f – Flickr search
• g – Google search
• tr – translate the page
• w – Wikipedia search
• db – bookmark the current page in Delicious
• fb – share the current page on Facebook
• tn – tweet the current page
• yt – YouTube search
• plugin – WordPress plugin search
• wp – WordPress function search
• h – header info for the current URL
• seo – quick SEO checkup for the current page
• host – host info for the current domain
• ruler – show a ruler to measure elements in a page
• help – Quix help
• bitly – shorten the URL with Bit.ly
• evernote – clip current page with Evernote

Many of the commands you’ve seen above would involve multiple steps if done manually. With Quix it takes out couple of those repetitive steps and make you get the job done quicker. If you think your needs are not met with the commands that Quix supports (as of now) you can extend Quix commands by following the instructions on this page.

If you’d rather like to watch a video of Quix in action, here is a video that explains in detail.

Overall, Quix looks interesting but the adoption of it will be completely based on the wide variety of commands that Quix can understand. Since we cannot expect everyone to write their own Quix extensions I hope the Quix team pushes out as much commands as they possibly can imagine. Setting up a page to get those command ideas wouldn’t be a bad idea too.

I know Quix will be most loved by those of you who use Terminal or Command window to get anything done on your Mac or PC. For the rest of us if you still find any better usage of Quix please share with us in comments.

Windows 7 allows you to change the way the power button on your computer behaves.

Power button is meant to power up and down your computer. Sort of. But if you have a little son or daughter at home you know that they want to be all over your laptop when you are at your laptop. I don’t know about you but it happens in many of our households. Most of the time we are okay to let them have a hand on the laptop but it would be terribly annoying if you are in the middle of doing something and they accidentally press the power button and your laptop shuts down all of a sudden.

Well, if we can’t control the kids pressing the power button on your laptop at least we can control the way the power button behaves on your laptop. That’s possible! Windows 7 let you customize the power button behavior of your computer in a couple of simple steps.

Launch Control Panel.

Click on the “System and Security” option.

Click on the “Power Options” item.

On the list of Power Plans choose the appropriate plan (or it must have been chosen for you already). For this walk-thru we are using the “Balanced” power plan. Click on the “Change plan settings” link.

Click on the “Change advanced power settings” link.

In the “Power Options” dialog scroll down to locate the “Power button and lid” item. Expand the “Power button action” item. On the “Plugged in” choice choose “Do nothing”.

Hit OK buttons all along to dismiss all the open dialogs. That’s it. From now on when you (or your little son or daughter) press the power button, nothing will happen.

Your laptop will continue to operate and the only way to shutdown the laptop is to use the “Start” menu options.

I hope this is a simple enough tweak to make the power button on your laptop do nothing so you won’t accidentally shutdown your computer.

DON’T MISS THE CHANCE! Leave a comment for a chance to win 1 of 3 TidySongs software licenses.

This contest has ended on Feb 7, 2010. Congrats to the winners! Even if you didn’t win you can still get a 50% discount of TidySongs software. Scroll down for details.

Have a large library of music files on your computer? Quite possibly, are those files littered around your hard disk? Notice a lot of duplicate songs in your library? Missing artwork and the many useful information about the songs? Would like to get your music collection organized without spending days and months trying to figure out?

Sure, that’s a lot of questions but I have a simple answer for you. Try TidySongs. To describe it in one sentence…TidySongs is a fantastically functional software that comes to your rescue if you are lost in the world of organizing your music collection.

Let’s accept it, we all have an enormous amount of digital music on our computers these days. We don’t have a choice but to organize it within folders which tends to lead us to duplicate songs if you are not careful. And many of us have SmartPhones or Portable Music Players where we spend our lone times for the most part. And we all know that those devices are not intuitive enough to help you navigate through the hundreds and thousands of songs they hold. It would be even tougher if you are missing the album artwork or artist name or genre information on many of those songs. Imagine that!

TidySongs makes it a lot easier for you to,

• Remove duplicate songs
• Fix misspelled song details
• Fill-in missing artists and genre information
• Add missing album artwork

And it does all these for you automatically. As of this writing, TidySongs has a smart online music database with information on more than 4 million songs that it uses to automatically download the correct details for each of your songs so you don’t have to type it in. That, surely, is a lifesaver if you know what I mean…fixing hundreds of thousands of songs manually otherwise.

You might think it’s a one time job to fix all these songs but if you realize it, it is not! As you buy or download new songs the core problem would still exist and you would need TidySongs help at some point to get through the collection of songs you have.

TidySongs normally costs you $39 but I can tell you that once you realize the usefulness of TidySongs (once you’ve used it for couple of times practically) you’d soon realize that those are $39 that’s well spent, considering the time, effort and frustration that TidySongs have saved you. Since TidySongs works across platforms (Mac OSX, Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7) you don’t have to worry about the operating system that you use, you’ll have TidySongs to your rescue.

If you are convinced that TidySongs is one of the software that you should proudly own for a long time, head over to TidySongs website and buy the product by all means.

If you want to take a chance we have you covered as well. Demo Geek has got 3 full-licenses of TidySongs software and we wanted to giveaway the licenses to our wonderful readers. All we ask for is that you leave a comment on this post with your honest opinion about TidySongs and if you have tried the product already, how you like the product and what features you would like to see, if any, and tweet the following,

Win a free license of TidySongs software at DemoGeek.com http://bit.ly/bWKvry

The giveaway promotion will run until February 7, 2010. After the promotion ends, on Feb 8th, we’ll randomly pick 3 lucky winners using Random.org. The content of your comment won’t influence the chance of winning the license. So, please be honest in your opinion about TidySongs in your comments and remember you have only until February 7, 2010 to leave a comment for a chance to win one of the 3 TidySongs licences.

Good Luck!

If you’d like to see it action, Demo Geek has an in-depth demonstration of how you can use TidySongs to cleanup your iTunes library.

The winners are Jake, Brian and Patrick. Congratulations! The winners were notified by email with the free license code. Thank you everyone for your great participation! To appreciate the interest and participation you’ve shown we are giving away a 50% off TidySongs discount code for everyone else (and that includes me as well). Use the coupon code “DGDISCOUNT” (without the quotes) to get yourself a generous 50% off of TidySongs. Make use of the discount code soon before it runs out and give TidySongs a try. I’m sure you won’t be disappointed. Congrats again to the winners and thanks again for your participation!

Enhance your experience using Windows Explorer on your Windows XP computer with these 5 really useful add-ons.

Everyone agrees that Windows Explorer is one of the most important piece of software without which browsing for the files would be a nightmare (imagine using the Command Prompt and DOS commands!). These days with Windows 7 and Windows Vista the Windows Explorer functionality has been enhanced a lot but the Windows Explorer that comes with Windows XP is very minimal in terms of features that makes it plain blank to use. If you are still stuck with Windows XP (for various reasons) then here are 5 very useful add-ons that make using Windows Explorer on Windows XP a fun and useful experience.

QTTabBar

QTTabBar brings tabbed browsing to Windows Explorer. Wouldn’t it be nice to open multiple tabs of the folders that you are working on instead of going back and forth? This add-on truly enhances the Windows Explorer experience. None of the latest enhancements to Windows Explorer brought tabbed-viewing capabilities and to the good news, QTTabBar works on Windows XP and Windows Vista (32-bit).

QTAddressBar

This comes from the same developer of QTTabBar. Windows Vista brought a nice breadcrumb navigation to Windows Explorer and indeed it was really useful to get back to folders very easily than jumping into those folders with the Back/Up button. If you really like Windows Vista’s (and Windows 7′s) breadcrumb navigation you’ll love to have this add-on on your Windows XP machine.

Folder Size

One major drawback with Windows Explorer on Windows XP is the fact that it doesn’t show the size of the folder but rather only shows the size of each files. If you really need to know the size of a folder you have to get to the Properties dialog. Sometimes it would come in handy to see the folder size just as a column in Windows Explorer so you can sort by folder size. Folder Size add-on brings the folder size to a column in your Windows Explorer, very handy!

Vista Drive Icon

Windows Explorer on Windows XP only shows the drive names without much visual indication of the size of those drives. Windows Vista brought a nice icon and a capacity bar to those drives. If you quickly want to glance at the size of those drives on your Windows Explorer look no further than Vista Drive Icon.

File Menu Tools

You can only do a few things with the default actions provided by the Windows Explorer’s context menu (when you right-click). File Menu Tools adds quite a lot useful functionalities as shortcuts to the context menu and so when you right-click on a folder or a file you can do a lot more to get things done quickly.

I hope you find these 5 Windows Explorer add-ons very useful. If you have been using an add-on that you think is helping you a lot please share with us on comments.

DomainTyper makes searching for a domain name a lot easier and fun.

There are many ways you can search for a domain name. We have even mentioned about a great service “Bust A Name” that makes it easier to find a domain. It allowed you to enter words and it mix-and-match for you to come up with a combination of domain names so you can pick and choose what you want.

DomainTyper‘s approach to this problem is slightly different. Apart from letting you know about the availability of a domain it lets you search for domain names with quite a lot of different extensions (TLDs). It also let you generate a list of Web 2.0 domain names which comes in handy if you are tired of searching for a meaningful domain name to find out that it’s long gone.

As with many other services, DomainTyper instantly finds out about the domain as you type it in. If the domain is available it allows you to register that domain with GoDaddy, Netfirms or 1&1. If the domain name is taken already it let you find out more information about the domain along with the website traffic level (provided by Statsaholic) and the PageRank.

If the three choices, .com, .net and .org are not enough for you then you can add extra extensions. There is a huge list of extensions that you can choose from.

If that’s not enough DomainTyper shows you domain hacks that are basically a combination of the domain names with different TLD’s in play. If you can’t find the major TLD’s like .com, .net etc you might be surprised to find a decent name with a different TLD. That’s very handy.

If you are searching for hundreds of domain names you might want to keep some of the interesting domains that you come across. You can use the favorites feature of DomainTyper (click on the star icon) to mark some of the domain names as your favorites.

If you still think that’s not enough DomainTyper let you generate some cool Web 2.0 domain names. Every time you hit the “Generate” button you’ll get a new list of some of the cool Web 2.0 domain names.

On top of everything else, DomainTyper also has a little iPhone app so you can search for a domain name on the go.

Overall, DomainTyper feels like a full-suite app to search for domain names. It covers pretty much all the aspects of domain search. Some of the features that I would like to see to make this my most favorite domain search tool would be to let us key in words and let DomainTyper find domain names that are a combination of those words. I would also like to see a more functional Domain Hacks section where not just DomainTyper notifies of the availability of a domain hack but also makes sure the domain hack can be registered as well.

Give DomainTyper a try and I’m sure you’ll also convert.

Itsy consumes very little system resources and the simplicity of the interface makes using Itsy a fun experience.

There are way too many Twitter clients out there for any platform, be it Windows, Mac or Linux. But there are only a few that catches people’s attention. Some catches people’s attention for its feature-set while others are liked for its simplicity.

One Twitter client that well deserves a space on the simplicity side of the Twitter clients is Itsy. It does few things and does it pretty well. You can use Itsy to watch your Twitter timeline, mentions, and direct messages. You can use the search feature to do Twitter search. And of course you can use Itsy to tweet.

Adjust the preferences to include Mentions in the Home timeline and to show Twitpic and yfrog images inline.

Itsy is the best Twitter client that I’ve used so far. I’ve tried quite a few but nothing comes as simple and functional as Itsy. I hope you like it too. Give Itsy a try.

Even though it’s just past the New Year celebration time I hope these wallpapers still deserve a place on your desktop. It is still January 2010!

Every week ROUNDUP brings you quick updates on some interesting news and tips around the web from the past week that we didn’t get the time to elaborate. It also brings you what happened at DemoGeek.com in the last week, in case if you missed the updates.

NEWS

Facebook officially launches “Reply By Email”

Now you can use your email to reply to email notifications such as comments and wall posts without having to visit Facebook itself.

Yahoo turns-off Shopping API

Yahoo keeps turning-off its services and the latest being its Shopping API.

Looks like Twitter’s traffic is flattening

According to Compete’s report, Twitter.com’s US traffic reached 22.81 million unique visitors in December, up 1.45% from November. This is still below its peak in June.

350 iPhone App downloads per second

Apple might be serving ~350 app downloads per second after they hit the 2 billion download mark.

CBS and The Wall Street Journal teams up with Digg for more traffic

The WSJ and CBS are now teaming up with Digg, by integrating the popular story widget in their websites.

Followbase does customer service via Twitter

Followbase is a simple Twitter client that does customer service and support via Twitter.

Facebook offers free McAfee software

Facebook will begin handing out free McAfee security software to its 350 million users in order to combat spam on the site.

Google Docs now allows uploading of files up too 250 MB in size

With the maximum upload limit raised up to 250 MB it looks like Google Docs would be used more as for storage than collaboration.

Apple snatched 16 domain names in one swoop

Apple filed a complaint to UDRP in November and won the rights to domains related to iPods, iPod accessories, iPhones, iPhone accessories, Macs, and MacBooks.

Apple Tablet is the “iPhone on steroids”

With its out-of-control multi-touch controls, faster ARM CPU and the usage of the iPhone kernel it looks like Apple Tablet would be “the iPhone on steroids”.

Desktop PC calculates Pi to a whopping 2.7 trillion digits

With nothing but a desktop PC “Pi” got a whopping 2.7 trillion digits accuracy.

Extension support comes to Google Chrome for Mac

The Dev Release versions of Google Chrome for Mac has finally received support for extensions.

Office 2010 pricing revealed

Looks like Office 2010 prices will range from $99 to $499.

Ford introduces MyFord Touch

Ford took the SYNC technology a step further to encompass navigation, climate control and audio options — in addition to connecting with your phone and the Internet. The geeks now have a reason to spend more time on the road. Atlanta traffic seem like a breeze all of a sudden!

TIPS

Complete  list of Verified Twitter Accounts

Amit reveals a simple trick to find out about all the Verified Accounts on Twitter.

Free System Backups with Comodo Time Machine

Comodo’s free app, Time Machine, helps you schedule free system backups.

Sneak Peak – Photoshop CS5

Graphic designers will really enjoy the capabilities of Photoshop CS5

Use multiple Exchange accounts on a jail-broken iPhone

Modify a config file on your jail-broken iPhone to use multiple Exchange accounts.

Make extensions work in Firefox 3.6 RC

Use this trick to make extensions work on the pre-release versions of Firefox.

Xint Text Editor – another Notepad replacement

On the market for a notepad replacement? Try Xint Text Editor, it boasts some nice features.

Create fonts from your own handwriting

Use your own handwriting to create fonts on a Windows Tablet PC.

CATCHUP

Prevent Mac from automatically dimming the display

Use this simple trick to stop your Mac from automatically dimming the display after a period of inactivity.

Get things done quicker on your Mac with Dropzone

Dropzone makes it easier to do repetitive tasks on your Mac.

How to clear specific items from Mac OSX Recent Items menu?

Use this simple trick to clear specific items from Recent Items menu on Mac OSX

Find out who is talking about a certain topic on Twitter with Twendly

Twendly makes it easy for you to find out who is talking about a certain topic on Twitter.

Download O&O Defrag 10 Professional Edition for free

Download one of the best disk defragmentation application for free.

Free applications that help you create custom iPhone ringtones

These free applications helps you create custom iPhone ringtones for free and easy.

How to connect your MacBook to an external monitor?

Learn the many ways how you can connect your MacBook to an external monitor.

Note taking within your browser got easier with QuickNote

QuickNote makes it easier to take notes while you browse without leaving the browser.

Top 10 iPhone apps to help you find interesting iPhone apps

These are some of the 10 best iPhone apps that makes it easy for you to find useful iPhone apps.

Use this simple trick to stop your Mac from dimming the display automatically.

I keep getting emails from Demo Geek readers about one major annoyance with Mac’s, the display gets dimmed automatically after couple of minutes, way before the screensaver kicks-in. Of course, this feature is there to conserve power but on many instances we don’t want the display to dim automatically as we might be reading or watching something so there might not be any keyboard/mouse activity. So how do prevent our Mac’s from dimming the display automatically?

If you don’t mind running a little freeware like Caffeine that takes care of preventing your Mac from dimming the screen, by all means, go for it. With Caffeine you can even turn on and turn off this behavior which is kind of nice.

But if you do mind running a freeware just for this purpose you can use your Mac’s built-in settings to turn off this behavior.

Go to “System Preferences” > “Energy Saver“. Click on the “Power Adapter” tab. Scroll down to locate the “Automatically reduce the display brightness before display sleep” option and uncheck it.

You can do the same on the “Battery” tab as well but it would make more sense to leave the checkbox checked on the Battery tab because you do really want to conserve power as much as possible when you are operating with the battery. So I would leave that decision to you.

That’s all it would take to stop your Mac from automatically dimming the display. Use whatever method is convenient to you.

Dropzone makes it a lot easier and simpler to do repetitive tasks on your Mac.

There are few tasks on your Mac is pretty trivial like for example launching an app. You just click an icon on the Dock (if you have the app added to the Dock) and the app would launch. Pretty simple and straight-forward. Now imagine a task like installing an app.

That would involve mounting the disk image, finding the application inside the disk image, copying it to your Applications folder, launching the app (optionally), ejecting the disk image and then finally (yes, finally!) moving the disk image file to the trash. That, for many of us, is not simple and straight-forward. Imagine tasks like these, for example, sending an email with attachments, uploading pictures to Flickr, shortening an URL etc. These involve multiple steps and are error prone.

Dropzone is a simple Mac app that helps ease this pain and makes doing these tasks a lot simpler and easier. All you do is drop the items to the Dropzone icon (on your Dock) and choose the action you wanted to perform and Dropzone will take care of the rest of the business. It is one of the apps that well deserves a place on your Mac Dock.

Dropzone comes with some pre-defined actions that everyone of us do normally (for the most part),

• Launch Applications
• Install Applications
• Upload to Flickr
• Upload to an FTP site
• Save text to a text file
• Zip and send emails with attachments

Most of these actions involve multiple steps and Dropzone makes it easy to do these in very few steps. If you think these actions are pretty basic you would love to hear that Dropzone can be extended with custom actions. It has a powerful Ruby based API that allows you to extend Dropzone’s capability so it can do a lot more.

There are already quite a few Dropzone extensions out there. Few of the interesting extensions would be,

• Share photos on Twitter via TwitPic
• Share documents on Twitter via TwitDoc
• Upload images to ImageShack
• Share photos and documents on Posterous
• Share files via DropBox
• Zip files to Desktop
• Print files that are dropped to Dropzone
• Put your Mac to sleep
• Shorten an URL using bit.ly

Dropzone is a very simple app that makes it simpler to do things on our Mac, especially the things that you do repeatedly.

You might think an app with these goodies would make a dent on your wallet. Well, it’s not. It is just $10 and I think that would be a $10 that’s well spent.

Give Dropzone a try.

Remove only specific items from the Recent Items menu on Mac OSX with this simple trick.

Mac OSX (as other main-stream operating systems do) keeps track of the recent items that you have used so you can get back to them easily. It shows you 10 of the most recently used applications, documents and servers by default. You can configure it to show different number of items if you want to see more or less.

To do that go into “System Preferences” > “Appearance“. You can see a “Number of Recent Items” with choices for Applications, Documents and Servers. Adjust the numbers accordingly to your preference.

At times we don’t want the recently used items to show up, for privacy reasons, especially if your Mac can be used by persons other than you. To clear the items you can use the “Clear Menu” option on your Apple menu. That will take care of clearing the entire list. But what if we wanted to keep all the recent applications but wanted to clear only the documents?

Well, it quite simple to clear only a certain group of items from the list. Just go back into the “Appearance” settings and on the “Number of Recent Items” set “None” to the category you want to clear. All the entries on that category will be cleared now. Reset it back to the number of items you want to show up on the list if you want to keep track of your recently used items again.

As you can see above, only the Documents list is cleared out and the Applications list still shows the list of recently used applications.

Even though it’s a simple tip, it might come in handy when in need. I hope you find it useful.

Twendly helps you find out who is tweeting about a certain topic on Twitter.

We all know that we can use Twitter’s (limited) search capability to search for a topic of interest on Twitter. We can use the #hashtags to keep up on a topic that we are interested or the topic that’s trending. But what if we wanted to find out just who is talking about the topic instead of the tweets on the topic itself?

The answer is Twendly. Twendly takes-in a keyword and let you know who is best at talking about that topic. The advantage of knowing who is talking about the topic is that you can follow the person and be updated with their tweets that would include the topic that you were initially interested in. It kind of gives you a nice way to find people on Twitter with the same interest on a topic as yours.

Twendly is a very simple service and so don’t expect complex steps to jump through. Simply type-in the keyword and you then get a list of people who are good at talking about that topic. You can then directly follow those people without jumping to a different app. It’s just that simple.

You can enter,

• a #hashtag
• a @handle
• any keyword of your interest, like mac, iphone, tennis etc.

The above picture gives you an idea of how you can leverage some of the supported search operators to get what you exactly want.

Search results are sorted based on relevancy and the number of tweets on the topic from the person.

Clicking on a search result will bring you a list of tweets related to the topic with so much extra information to give you an idea of how frequent the person is tweeting about that topic so you can make the right decision to follow the person or not.

You don’t need to sign-in to use the service. But you can optionally sign-in so Twendly can index you and the people you are following.

Overall, Twendly seems to be a useful service to to find out about people who are tweeting about a certain topic. Give it a try!

Grab a free copy of a very useful disk defragmentation software, O&O Defrag 10 Professional.

I don’t know about you but I’m convinced that when my PC slows down (for whatever reason) defragmenting my hard disks helped a lot in gaining those performance back. At least, defragmentation should be in your toolbox if you are to investigate and resolve a sluggishly performing PC.

The disk defragmentation tools that come with Windows are mostly very minimal in terms of functionalities and really a terrible performer when it comes performance. Sometimes I have experienced overnight defragmentation for a 360 GB hard disk. Many 3rd party software tend to do a decent job in overcoming the shortcomings of the Windows supplied defragmentation application.

O&O Defrag is a professional tool that does a very decent job of defragmenting your hard disks. The latest version (v12) costs $49.95. But if you don’t mind a slightly older version (v10) you can get it for free. Just enter your name and email address to receive a free serial number for O&O Defrag 10 Professional version. Even though it is a bit older version it still does the job decently and best of all it works on all flavors of Windows including Windows 7.

Even if you are not comfortable with any older software versions you can still download O&O Defrag 10 for free and then go for an upgrade to the latest version with around 40% off.

So, what are you waiting for? Go grab the free version of O&O Defrag 10 Professional Edition.

Use any of these 8 applications to create custom iPhone ringtones.

Earlier we saw how you can easily add custom ringtones to your iPhone using iTunes. It would make more sense to see how you can create those custom ringtones so you can add them to your iPhone. Here are some 8 different apps that help you create free ringtones from various audio formats including MP3, WAV, WMA, MP4 etc.

Garage Band

Garage Band is part of the iLife software package that normally ships with Macs these days. If you are using an older Mac you can also buy it from Apple for $79 single user pack. It is a very powerful application with quite a lot of bells-and-whistles for a free application. It gives you fine control on how you want to slice and dice the audio file so you can get the best ringtone possible. Since it’s an Apple product it plays nice with other Mac applications, particularly iTunes.

Audacity

Audacity is one of the most famous free application to edit your audio files. It is an open-source, cross-platform application that makes it a lot easier to edit your audio files to create ringtones out of it. Essentially you will be creating a trimmed version of your audio clip which you can export into different formats using plugins. Once exported you can use iTunes to sync it to your iPhone.

iTunes

If you don’t want to mess with any third party software then you will be surprised to hear that the (Mac) native iTunes is capable of letting you extract a portion of an audio file as a ringtone and then use the same iTunes to sync that to your iPhone. I have written an earlier post that explains in detail on how to use iTunes to add custom iPhone ringtones.

Fission

Fission is a great application that makes life easier when you want to create custom ringtones. You can easily crop audio to the exact size you want and you can fade the ends of the audio clip if you like it that way. Once you are happy you can easily add the audio clip to any phone that accepts MP3 or AAC files for ringtones. You can also use Fission to edit AAC and MP3 files without any loss in clarity.

ImTOO

ImTOO provides a simplistic way of creating iPhone ringtones from video or music files and let you transfer it to iPhone directly instead of using iTunes. ImTOO can convert almost all video/audio formats and can trim the video/audio file precisely to help you make the most audible clip as your iPhone ringtone. It costs you $14.95

ToneShop

ToneShop is a very simple application that let you create free ringtones quite easily. Creating a ringtone using ToneShop is as simple as selecting the input file, defining the piece of audio you want as ringtone and selecting the desired output format. It even allows you to create ringtones in MP3, WAV and AAC formats. ToneShop Works on all flavors of Windows including the 64 bit versions.

iRinger

iRinger is a free application that runs on all the versions of Microsoft Windows including Windows 7. It requires iPhone firmware version 1.1.2 or newer, iTunes software 7.5 or newer. It allows you to use audio effects such as delay, flanger, boost, reverse etc. It’s a handy ringtone maker solution that doesn’t require you to jailbreak your iPhone.

Xilisoft

Another great ringtone maker for Mac. There is a Windows version also available. It supports quite a lot of input file formats including WMA, RA, WAV, M4A, MP3 etc. It even allows you to convert file formats like AVI, WMV, DivX, MP4, AVCHD, MKV, RM, MOV and MPEG to M4R if you wanted to use background music as your iPhone ringtone. That means you can create ringtones from any video/audio clips. Also, this software allows you to transfer ringtones to your iPhone directly. The good part is that Xilisoft comes in 4 different languages including English, German, Japanese and Chinese.

I’m sure this is not a comprehensive list of applications to create beautiful iPhone ringtones. If you know or use any other applications that you think are helping you create iPhone ringtones a lot better way please share with us on comments.

Follow these simple steps to configure your Mac to connect to an external monitor.

Given the affordable price of external monitors these days people are moving towards connecting their MacBooks to an external monitor so they can see things in a bigger, better scale. Hooking up an external monitor to your Mac is very easy. Just buy the right connectors and connect the monitor to your MacBook and you are ready to go. There are very minimal changes that you’d need to make if you need some fine control over extending your screen real estate to the external monitor and such.

Cables needed

MacBook uses Mini-DisplayPort to connect to an external monitor. Mini-DisplayPorts are smaller in size to comfortably fit on the MacBook side panels but need a special cable to establish a connection with your external monitor. You’d need either of these 2 connectors.

Mini-DisplayPort to DVI Adapter – If you have a monitor that supports DVI connections then your best bet would be to make use of the DVI port as it gives better display quality. It costs $29.00 at the Apple Store.

Mini-DisplayPort to VGA Adapter – If your monitor doesn’t support a DVI connection then you don’t have a choice but to tap into the default VGA ports. Apple Store has this cable for $29.00.

Different ways of using the external monitor

Once you connect the cable to bridge the monitor and your MacBook the first thing you would notice is that now you have 2 displays, the MacBook display and the external monitor display. There are 3 ways to go with using the displays.

One way is to use the external monitor as a mirrored display, which means whatever you see in your MacBook display will get replicated on to the bigger monitor display. This would be the default setting if you don’t want to mess with fine-tuning the display settings.

Second way would be use the external monitor as an extension to your MacBook display. Imagine that as one really wide MacBook display. You can move windows to the external wide space and see it all in one shot even if you have Spaces enabled. This would be the best way to make use of that monitor investment.

Finally, you can also use your external monitor as the only display source and turn off the MacBook display completely. This would be particularly useful to those of you who are very used to the one-display-to-rule-all model.

Now, we’ll see how Mac OSX settings can be tweaked to use one of these display models.

Use the external monitor as a mirrored display

This would be the default setting if you don’t do anything to your Display settings. As soon as your Mac senses there are multiple displays you can go into “System Preferences” > “Display“. You’ll be able to see 2 display preferences dialog, one for your prime MacBook display and one for the external monitor. You can use the settings in these dialogs to adjust the screen resolution, color intensity and if you have a monitor that can be swiveled (rotated) you can tell Mac OSX to rotate the display to a certain angle for that particular display.

The main setting to note to get the (default) mirrored display is to go into the “Arrangement” tab. Once you are in there you should be able to see the “Mirror Displays” checkbox. Check the box (checked by default) to have what’s displayed on the MacBook display to be replicated to the external monitor.

Use the external monitor as an extension to your MacBook display

As you’ve seen above, the real trick in making the external display either as a mirrored display or an extension to your current display is a matter of checking/unchecking the “Mirror Displays” checkbox at the “Arrangement” tab on Display Preferences. Uncheck (clear) the “Mirror Displays” box to make the external monitor as an extension to your MacBook display.

Now, by default, your external monitor would act as a secondary display. What that means is that you’d be working on your MacBook as the prime display and drag windows to the external monitor. All your menus and dock will show up on your MacBook display. Human eye is used to the bigger-smaller display model than the other way around. So we’d definitely prefer our external monitor as the main display and use the MacBook display as a secondary display to keep an eye on certain tasks like email, chat, Twitter etc.

To do that all you have to do is drag the bigger display (which is your monitor display) as the first display on the above dialog. Your menu bar will stick with the smaller display and you want the menu bar and the dock to come to your primary display which is the monitor display. No problem, just drag the menu bar to the bigger primary display and you are all set.

Use the external monitor as the only display

This would be convenient for those of you who are used to one-display model. This is a bit tricky as there are no explicit ways to turn off your MacBook’s display and keep it open. You might need an external keyboard and an external mouse because we’d need to keep the lid closed on your MacBook to achieve this.

Once you connect the external monitor to your MacBook follow the instructions as if like mirroring the external display (check the “Mirror Displays” checkbox). Once done, close the lid on your MacBook. It will go into the Sleep mode.

Now, awake your MacBook from sleep using the external keyboard or the mouse. Your MacBook will sense that its display is not turned on and so will direct all the outputs to your external monitor. Since the lid is closed all the time it would be smart thing to have your MacBook lifted up a little bit for proper ventilation. From now on, you can use the keyboard and the mouse to put your Mac to sleep and to awake it from sleep.

I hope this is comprehensive enough to give you an understanding of the many ways you can connect an external monitor to your MacBook. If you have any questions/comments on this topic please ask/share over at comments.