LostInTechnology

Weekly Tech Links: November 8, 2009

Kyle Judkins — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 10:31:03 +0000

This is my weekly round up of the links I have followed over the past week. You can get this list every week by subscribing to my RSS feed or subscribing through email. You may also follow me on Twitter or FriendFeed to get some of these links throughout the week. As usual, catch the links after the break.

How To

How To: Download TV Torrents Automatically With uTorrent | WillINeedIt.com

How to Setup Dual Monitors in Windows 7

[How to] Improve Windows Vista and Windows 7 Boot Speed

How to Really Browse Without Leaving a Trace – Windows – Lifehacker

Use Flickr Photos as Windows 7 Screensaver

How to Edit PDF Files – Free Tools for Manipulating PDF Documents

Turn Your Desktop into a Picture Slideshow in Windows 7 :: the How-To Geek

Internet

7 Google services you have never tried | Castellini on Computers – Computer help for beginners

10 Useful GMail Search Tips – Make Tech Easier

Three things that would make Google Voice dominate | Tech Hacker

Locate the URL of Audio/Video Files on the Internet with URL Snooper

Software

8 common Video formats & software to open them

Fix common Windows XP errors with portable XP Quick Fix Plus

All My Apps: The Easy Way To Install Software on Your PC or Mac

SnowChecker Determines If Your Applications Are Snow-Leopard Compatible – Snow leopard – Lifehacker

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The Quickest Way to Save Notes Online: rmber it

Aminul Islam Sajib — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 15:00:12 +0000

Do you find yourself always writing on post it notes and then forgetting where you put them? Post it notes are great for capturing that idea or thought you just had shooting through your head, but they can be a pain to keep up with. Recently, I found a great online service called rmber it that lets you make quick notes about things you see online and keeps them organized and easy to find.

The idea of the name obviously comes from the words “remember it.” The name also clues you in to what it obviously does. Let’s have a look at this great little web tool that will help you save time and work faster.

Homepage

On its homepage, you get a text box where you can write down anything you need to have saved for future reference or necessity; that can be one or more links, phone numbers, addresses, etc. You can also make your note private so that it can’t be seen directly without a password.

The site has got a simple and neat look.

Visit rmber it and write whatever you need to be preserved for future necessity. Once you are done, click the yellow button that reads “drop it!”. Your note will be saved in the database and you will be given a link to that note that you can access from anywhere.

There are two features you can take advantage of before hitting the drop it button. You can:

Email the Note: You can simply Email the link of the note to anyone you wish.
Make it Private: You surely don’t want to take risk of leaving confidential information such as phone number or Email addresses on a site publicly. That’s why rmber it comes with a password protection feature which enables you to protect your note with a password.

Get an Account

By default, you don’t really need an account to drop/save notes. You can create as many notes as you like. But if you frequently need to create and save codes, you may want to keep a record of all of the notes you drop. In rmber it, you can sign up for a free account. You don’t even need to have an Email address to sign up. Just choose a username and set your password, and you’re done.

After that, all of the notes saved by you will be recorded under your account, just as shown below.

So, let’s get started! You now don’t need that notebook you’re holding, do you?

(By) Aminul Islam Sajib is a 16-years-old young enthusiastic blogger and technology writer from Dhaka, Bangladesh who usually blogs in his technology blog Life with Technology . He is a technology reporter of a national daily newspaper and an online news agency of Bangladesh. You can also connect with Aminul on Twitter or Facebook.

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Replace Your Office Suite with Google Docs

Anthony Crognale — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 15:00:03 +0000

Most of us are chained to our work computer in order to get any work done. Some of us are lucky enough to have a way to remotely login, but you still need a work computer. Then, there are the few that can log into their work from any place and any computer. These people are more than likely using an online office suite like Google Docs.

In this article, we are going to discuss the reasons you might want to make the switch to an online office suite and the ways to do it.

Reasons

The very first reason I’m going to draw your attention to is that hard drives fail, and if you don’t have the back ups for that data, you can really be out of luck depending on what was on the hard drive. If you switch over to a web based system though, you’re data is going to be protected by a team of industry professionals who know what they’re doing more than anyone else.

Another fabulous reason to make the jump is that you’ll have a much wider range of ability when it comes to being able to pick up your work and continue working at a different location on a different computer as you please. Using the power of robust databases, you’ll be able to save data and access it from any computer at anytime without having to worry about hard drive failure or other related issues.

The best part about all of this is that you won’t lack in the quality of the tools you’ll now be using and (for the most part) will have all the same functions as you’re current office suite, but online.

One of the ways to make this transition is to use Google Docs.

Google Docs

Google Docs will allow you to keep all your documents in one location with the ability to allow friends, co-workers, or colleagues to edit the documents, thus making a very collaborative environment. The next question though is “how do you completely switch?” Follow my outline below for a simple transition process.

Back up all your office data. Find all those pesky little documents that you’re about to give a new life to. I’d recommend putting them on a flash drive or CD so you can have a copy of them if something happens later on.
Sign up for Google Docs. You can use your Google account or make a new one by going to Google Docs.
Getting started
Now you see the main screen, the holy grail, your lifeline. It will look something like this.
(Had to shrink image to fit on page)
As you can already see, there’s many wonderful features you’re probably itching to try out, but I’d recommend that you start uploading your data. In order to upload all the data you have at once, put all the data you backed up into a folder, go to the main Google Docs screen, press upload, and select the folder by ctrl + left clicking on the folder all your data is in so that everything will be uploaded at once.

What Now?

Well, anything you want really. You can go out for Starbucks, grab a coffee, bring your laptop with you, connect to their free wi-fi, go to Google Docs, and begin working on whatever document you left off on. If you’ve read this guide and still don’t believe me, just give it a go and see what happens. You’ll be amazed at how much this can actually improve productivity.

By Anthony Crognale, founder of Pluble.net, helping you get your freelance writing projects done on time in a very cost effective manner. Need a freelance writer? Check out Anthony’s freelance writing portfolio.

Image by Travis Isaacs

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FeedDemon: The Best Offline Feed Reader

Chinmoy.Kanjilal — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 15:00:51 +0000

Reading feeds is an integral part of keeping up to date with the latest happenings on the Internet. Almost all blogs provide their users with an option to subscribe to their feeds.

Now, feeds are a powerful medium of compact knowledge, but if you start reading too many of them, you have every chance of missing out the important news on time. Reading just a few of them might make you miss out on certain other perspectives of an event. In these situations, you run into a problem either way.

Another thing that can be a challenge with feed readers is that they don’t all provide offline reading options. This isn’t a big deal for everyone, but it can be for some users.

A feed reader goes a long way in making life easier. I have tried out a lot of feed readers but none of them could attract me as much as FeedDemon.

FeedDemon has lots of great features that we need to cover in order to give you an idea of what it brings to the table, so lets just get right into them.

Features

Feed Prefetch

feeddemon-prefetch-options

Feed Prefetch allows you to prefetch feeds in order to read them later and offline. The prefetch location can be selected and the items to be prefetched can also be defined. Prefetching of embedded content can be turned off if not required. The maximum number of feeds to be prefetched and the age of the feeds to be prefetched can be customized heavily.

This highly customizable prefetch option helps a lot in reading feeds offline. The feed prefetch can be backed up and restored as well. Options for compacting the prefetch database are also available.

Informative Homepage

The homepage of the FeedDemon UI has a lot of information. It shows a quick list of popular content, and a sidebar with the number of unread feeds to check your inactivity, your tagged feeds, and all the folders on the left hand side of the display.

Folder Organization

feeddemon-folders

With FeedDemon , organizing feeds into folders is much more than just putting them there. Clicking on a folder will show you the latest feeds. So if your folders are arranged with a certain category, you get the latest news from that category. Also, the feeds which have been updated today, yesterday and before that are shown under separate headers.

Themes

FeedDemon provides many different color themes for reading through the feeds. This improves readability and soothes the eye for hours of reading. I prefer using the blue theme.

Managing Subscriptions

The subscription list of FeedDemon can be exported and imported into/from any other application. On exporting the existing subscription list, the folder view remains intact, even when you synchronize FeedDemon with Google reader.

Dinosaurs and Panic Button

The Dinosaur feature allows us to check the feeds which have not been updated in 60 days. This lets you chose which feeds to ignore with the next prefetch to save network usage as well as disk space. The panic button tells us when the feed database gets bloated with unread items. This deletes feeds which are older than a certain number of days, which we can specify.

Other than this, FeedDemon has an extremely light and user friendly UI which is amazingly smooth in spite of handling so many threads all together. Tagging and analysis of feeds helps us reduce effort to search through all the contents to read all the important news. A keyword search feature is also available which returns all feeds with a certain text in the feed body.

FeedDemon is one of the most popular feed readers. Know more and try out FeedDemon here.

(By) Chinmoy Kanjilal is a technology, web2.0 and Linux enthusiast and evangelist. He has an in depth knowledge of working of Softwares, Operating Systems, Hardwares and Computer Networks. Blogging is his favourite pasttime. He blogs primarily at Techarraz. You can find him on Twitter @chinmoykanjilal.

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Discover New Websites with iWeavr

Aminul Islam Sajib — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 15:00:57 +0000

Every Internet surfer has their own preferences. For instance, I don’t really go to websites or blogs related to cars, pets, churches or religions. What I’m interested in is technology, gadgets, fictitious stories, news and a few other topics.

Most of us enjoy finding new websites and articles about the things we are interested in, but it can be hard to find these new articles. We often get stuck in the rut of going to the same websites over and over. What if you had a handy tool that would allow you to find some similar websites to the page you’re currently browsing?

Well, here comes today’s topic: iWeavr. iWeavr is a nice browser-bookmarklet that will help you find similar websites to the one you are currently browsing.

Add iWeavr

Simply visit the iWeavr homepage and drag the bookmarklet from the upper right corner of the screen and drop it in your bookmarks toolbar which by default sits right below the address/location bar in Firefox.

You will click the button when needed.

Use iWeavr

While visiting a page of your interest, simply click the “iWeavr” button from the bookmarks toolbar and you will see a box at the right side of the screen.

The box from iWeavr will contain four different tabs. They are:

Similar – This will search Google for some similar websites.
Referrer – Sites linking to the web page being viewed currently will be shown under this tab.
RSS Feeds – Feeds of the current page. This will help you get the most recent posts of any blog you are viewing.
Share – This tab will let you share the page with your friends on Twitter, Facebook, as well as Email.

Here’s a screenshot of what we’ve got from iWeavr while on the frong page of LostInTechnology.com:

iWeavr active on Lost in Technology front page.

Conclusion

This is a great bookmarklet that helps you discover more of the web in a fast way. What methods or tools do you use to find new content around the Internet?

Image by mikebaird

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Weekly Tech Links: November 1, 2009

Kyle Judkins — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 10:31:07 +0000

Internet

SkyDrive Explorer adds 25gb of free cloud storage to Windows Explorer

How To

How to Carry Your Office on a Stick (USB Flash Drive)

How to Create a Video Channel From Different Video Sharing Sites – Make Tech Easier

Turn your laptop into a WiFi Hotspot with Connectify

Software

Power Tools for Windows 7

Keep USB Data Encrypted With SafeHouse Explorer

Ditch the RealPlayer Bloat with Real Alternative :: the How-To Geek

Set latest Bing image as desktop wallpaper with BingPaper

5 Awesome Ways to Capture Screenshots

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3 Best Tools to Ask a Question Online

Guest Post — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 15:00:00 +0000

This is a guest post is by Ann Smarty, an SEO blogger and social media enthusiast.

No matter how good you might be at searching, there’s always a chance you can’t find the answers to some question. Very often you need to ask a question yourself. This post lists the best ways and tools to ask a question online.

1. Twitter

Twitter is the most popular way to ask questions and get instant answers today. If you would like to know how to ask questions that get many answers on Twitter, here’s a good post about that. And here are a couple of more advanced tips:

There are a few Twitter apps that make your question visible to a broader base of Twitter users (not only your followers). Check out LazyTweet, TweetBrain, IKnowTweet and TweetQA for example.
Search who already asked the same / similar questions on Twitter: go to Twitter search, provide your search term and then add ? to the query. This will tell Twitter search to restrict the search results to only Tweeted questions.

2. Online Forums

While forums come from the web 1.0 era (so some people may call this way old-fashioned), to me it has long been by far the most effective way to find real experts in any niche. The main thing is to never be afraid to look like a newbie (that seems to be the main reason why most people shy away from asking questions on forums). Here are my personal favorites of best niche forums I am often using (please share yours in the comments!):

Topic	Forum
Web development		WebmasterWorld
Affiliate marketing		ABestWeb
Online shopping / saving		Buxr
Security / scams		Scam.com

3. Aardvark

Aardvark is a cool IM bot (as well as Facebook application) that allows you to ask questions and get answers from real people by sending them to the world right from your IM. Here’s how it works:

Connect the app to your Facebook account
Provide your IM account name
Add Aardvark to your IM buddy list
Send questions right to the Aardvark ia IM and the tool will match you to the expert who will answer your question

Alternatively, you can just ask questions online via the web form.

And how do you ask questions online? Please share your tips!

Image by Margaret Anne Clarke

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How To Lock Folders and Files with My Lockbox

Will Mueller — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 15:37:09 +0000

Have you ever needed to keep a certain folder out of view and safe from prying eyes? Maybe financial documents, birthday presents for family members on a public computer, etc? Enter My Lockbox; a free, easy to use, security application for Windows that allows anyone the ability to very simply lock a folder (and its contents) from anyone on your computer or network for good. No exceptions. Let me explain.

My Lockbox not only hides the locked folder from view, but goes the extra yard and safely encrypts all the data so the folder literally no longer exists in its previous path. Furthermore, by doing this, My Lockbox safely keeps folders from ever even being discovered accidentally and suspiciously.

Getting Started

Start by downloading My Lockbox (Windows Only). Now, installing My Lockbox is relatively easy, except for one essential part:

Simply enter a well encrypted, well devised password and enter a hint that does not give away the password (of course). The rest of the installation is quite standard; accept the agreement, select an install location, then double-click the “My Lockbox” icon on the desktop.

(Note: For some good password generators, check out this article on LostInTechnology.)

What you should see is something similar to the following:

Locking a File

Obviously, enter your highly secure password and My Lockbox should load with a successful dashboard. To begin by locking a folder, browse for a folder on your computer, and click “Lock.” The status message on the left of the window should change from “Unlocked” to “Locked.”

Furthermore, if one were to look for the folder in the original directory, e.g. C:\Users\will\Downloads\Documents, no folder labeled secret_folder will appear or be accessible to anyone using the computer. (Note: To unlock, simply load My Lockbox and click “Unlock.”) The following is what My Lockbox should display after locking a folder:

My Lockbox can be set up to load with a hotkey, which is, by default, Ctrl+Shift+P. This can allow for even more secrecy by not showing any icon on your taskbar, quick launch bar, or open whatsoever.

If you would like to make absolutely sure no one learns about your locked folder, you can delete the My Lockbox icon from the desktop and access the application from the C:\Program Files\My Lockbox\ directory, or even install My Lockbox on your flash drive.

(Note: There is also an optional upgrade for My Lockbox (for $29.95) which allows users the ability to hide and lock an unlimited number of folders and files unlike the free option which allows only for the locking of one folder.)

(By) Will Mueller spends far too much time on the computer. Check out his website at willm.me.

(Image Credit: tijszwinkels.)

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3 Awesome Sites to Download Videos From

Aminul Islam Sajib — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 15:00:34 +0000

These days the Internet is chock-full of multimedia. You can upload or watch just about any video right in your browser from a number of different sites. But, what if you want to download and store a copy of any video you like? Almost all of the video sharing sites don’t give you a link to download the video.

However, there are some third-party services who will let you download any video you want. All they need is the URL/link of the desired video. They will take care of the rest. Today, we will introduce you to some of the best video downloaders available on the net.

ClipNabber

ClipNabber is a nice-looking and user-friendly video downloader which supports video downloads from several different origins. It is great because of its wide range of supported websites. You can download videos in two different formats, .flv and .mp4 (for iPods). Supported video sharing sites include YouTube, Google Video, MetaCafe and lots more.

Video Downloader

Video Downloader is another neat and clean video downloader that works with popular video sharing websites including Google Videos, TinyPic, and iFilms. Many of the features are the same as the previous one, but this one provides a Firefox Plugin.

If you use Firefox as your web browser, you have the advantage of downloading videos while you are watching using a simple addon provided by Video Downloader. The plugin’s usefulness is incredible, and it’s very user-friendly. Download it from here.

Zamzar

*My Favorite*

Zamzar is something that you have been wanting for a long time. Other video downloaders let you download the file in the original format (.flv – Flash Video), and this could cause you to have to download an additional media

player to play the video. Zamzar makes everything whole lot easier by letting you choose the format of the video.

You can convert the file to your preferred format before downloading. You can also choose Zamzar to convert video file formats from your hard drive.

Have Your Say

Got any other services that are cooler than the abovementioned ones? We are curious to know about that. Kick the discussion off by filling out the form below.

Image by Will Foster

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Zotero Helps You Easily Manage All of Your Internet Research

Prasanth Chandra — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 15:00:56 +0000

Finding the required information from Internet for a research project is never as irritating and time consuming as collecting and managing all the information you find. Suppose that you are looking for some information on the Egyptian Pyramids. Then how would you collect and catalog your information?

You would follow the conventional way of copying it and pasting it into a document or text editor. This whole activity can get confusing and isn’t always the best way to manage your research if you are working on a large project. Under such situations, Zotero proves to be a very useful tool and its offerings seems to be incomparable.

What is Zotero?

Zotero is actually a Mozilla Firefox extension which enables you to collect, save and manage your research material from the browser itself. Zotero changes the whole procedure of Internet research. Once you start using Zotero, you need not remember the web sites where you found your required information. You do not even need to have a text editor open in parallel to copy the required information.

Why is Zotero Useful?

Zotero enables you to move away from this conventional way of information gathering, copying and pasting to your open document. With Zotero, you can save the complete web pages from all the sites around the Internet. Just a few clicks and the whole web page will be saved in its library. Zotero is capable of capturing bibliographic information from all the saved web sites as well.

Now, you could say that capturing information is not a big deal, because its management is the toughest task. Zotero neutralizes this difficulty and provides amazing features that make the whole process very simple. The user interface of the Zotero library is simple and easy to use.

Managing web pages in Zotero is very easy. It enables you to create numerous collections that allow you to save related information in the same place. And once you save web pages using Zotero, you can simply select and drag those pages and drop them into the proper collection. It’s basically your own little filing system that’s built into the extension.

You can further enhance and categorize your information storage by adding notes, attachments and tags to them. Once you save your web page, you can attach all the extra information you want, so you will know exactly what that webpage was for. Zotero also allows you to save your web pages as PDFs and easily search through all of your saved pages.

Conclusion

Now, you can spend a whole day on the Internet, but you won’t be able to find a comparable program that’s free as well. If you use internet for educational purpose or information gathering, then Zotero is highly recommended to you.

Get Zotero

By Prasanth Chandra from PCs Place which has articles about Firefox, recently started Review Unit , a blog about Gadgets, Software, Web apps. Catch him on Twitter @pcsbox

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