[Editor’s note: this posting was contributed by Freewaregenius reader Elioz Hefer; to whom I offer my extreme thanks and gratitude].

After a period of using MS Internet Explorer, my computer’s response time has become slower and I have encountered repeated problems of being thrown out from IE8 (especially). I have come to the conclusion that a clutter of addons has caused it, and resetting to default regrettably hasn’t been much help.

I therefore turned to the portable version of Mozilla firefox, with the thought that I would prefer to preserve my PC hygiene as much as possible. I have learned in time that my most valuable asset is the speed and quick response time of a computer, and therefore I try to avoid fixed installations. I also found that virtualizations such as Altiris SVS help but do not completely block remains of programs, and the same goes for programs that monitor or record program installations such as Magical Uninstall.

Firefox Portable Edition is the popular Mozilla Firefox web browser bundled with the PortableApps.com Launcher as a portable app, so you can take your bookmarks, extensions and saved passwords with you. Mozilla Firefox Portable Edition can be copied to a thumb drive so that you can use it whereever you go.

One problem though is that Firefox Portable Edition does not register itself with the system, and
thus cannot be set as the default browser using the GUI. Whenever turning to a new Url (within Portable Firefox or from library links I have previously saved, my PC would continuously opens IE8. Which is why I started looking for a way to set the portable version of Firefox to the default browser without installing the regular non portable version and the least degree of integration with my system.

The solution came in the form of very elegant program called DefaultBrowser written by Ramesh of “Ramesh’s site“, a resource dedicated to troubleshooting windows XP. This small utility can set the default browser according to user preference. What’s more, it is reversible and doesn’t install itself on the system that I could notice. Download it here.

Here is how to set Firefox Portable as the default browser for your user profile in Windows XP.

1. Download DefaultBrowser and unzip to the folder of your choice
2. Run the executable and select Firefox Portable from the list of browsers (see screenshot above) then click Apply.
3. In the Browse dialog box, select the location where the executable FirefoxPortable.exe is located.
4. That’s it. Very quickly and like magic Firefox Portable is now set as the default browser for your user account.

Notes:

1. If your desired browser is not on the list: in this case click browse button in the “for other browsers” section and point to the desired browser executable.
2. DefaultBrowser doesn’t change the IE shortcut in the “Quick Launch” menu which will still open Internet Explorer. Therefore you must manually put a shortcut of the Portable Firefox executable in the quick launch folder. To do that click the quick launch area and then choose Open folder, you can then drag create shortcuts in there or remove the ones you don’t want (I wouldn’t delete the explorer Icon from that folder in case you wish to reverse things).
3. Reversing this process: is done is done very easily by opening the small DefaultBrowser utility and choosing the reset button.
4. Important: If you’re using Mozilla Firefox Portable Edition from a USB disk: whenever the drive-letter for the USB disk changes, you’ll need to re-register FirefoxPortable.exe using the DefaultBrowser utility. For instance, the drive-letter for your USB disk may change when adding additional hardware in your system.

That’s it, enjoy!

Version Tested: 1.8

Compatibility: Windows XP.

Go to the DefaultBrowser page to download the latest version (approx 31K).

I am interested in the larger question of the different ways we request and consume information, and often think about the many different ways that RSS feeds are delivered and read, which is how this post was borne.

1- Using a web-based reader [Google Reader]: probably the most successful of the many free web-based RSS aggregators, Google Reader is the one I use to handle the many dozens of RSS feeds I subscribe to. The advantage of using a web based reader is, of course, the ability to access your RSS feeds from anywhere (say from a computer terminal at your local library), or even from a mobile device such as an iPhone.

Google Reader offers the ability to organize feeds in categories and tags and supports multimedia feeds such as podcasts. But what I like about Google reader is that it will maintain a history of RSS subscriptions that is preserved long after the original feed has moved on (i.e. you can see the backlog/history of an RSS feed previous to the latest 20 stories that a feed will typically display at any one time). Another unique feature is the option to “star” an RSS entry and have Google Reader broadcast your starred items within your very own RSS feed, which is a great way to filter out just the stuff you are interested in (and share your ’starred items’ RSS feed with others or on a widget on your site if you like). Instructions on how create a “starred items” feed in Google reader here. Also note that Google Reader also provides the ability the follow other users that use it and/or to share news items amongst users.

Alternative: Bloglines is another web-based aggregator option that is excellent.

2- Using a desktop aggregator [RSSOwl]: I’ve used many local freeware RSS clients, but the open source and multiplatform RSSOwl is my favorite (available for Windows/Linux/Mac). One feature I particularly like is its sophisticated, multi-criteria searches which you can actually save for later use. For example you could search for the terms “freeware PDF” and specify which feeds you want it to search in (say, only in 4 feeds) as well as where you want it to search (say, in just the headline, or the entire text). Finally you can save the search so it becomes an item in the sidebar alongside all the other feeds, and gets updated with new search results as new feeds are downloaded.

RSSOwl also supports tagging (which it terms adding “labels”) and will let you organize your RSS views using many different criteria (by date, by author, by category, by topic, by state, by “stickiness”, by label, by rating, or by feed). It also supports the so-called “river of news” viewing style where it will aggregate stories bases on date irrespective of the feeds they belong to. The other thing I like about RSSOwl is that it supports ATOM newsfeeds, which some clients strangely miss). It also can display RSS updates as they come in in the system tray area.

Two things I would love to see are (a) better support for Podcasts and multimedia feeds, and (b) an interface that is a little more user friendly; still, RSS Owl is definitely my favorite local RSS client.

3- Using a desktop widget [Klipfolio]: at one time it seemed that everyone was clamoring to put widgets on your desktop, from Google desktop to Yahoo widgets to Microsoft desktop search (and not forgetting Vista’s internal widgets). But my favorite freeware widget engine by far is Klipfolio, which manages to combine an excellent user experience with low resource utilization on your PC (and offers a wide range of powerful widgets to boot). Klipfolio is a winner when it comes to the coolness factor alone. And aside from RSS feeds, its also a great way to put Facebook, stocks, weather, and other information on your desktop (assuming you want all those things to lay claims on your attention bandwidth at all times ).

Klipfolio can dock to the side of your screen or be displayed as a floating window. You can click on an RSS item to view it in the browser or hover over it to view the story, in-place, as a hovering tooltip (see screenshot).

4- As tabs on the edge of your desktop [Stick]: Stick is a nifty freeware app that allows you to place all sorts of information (such as notes, folders, and RSS feeds) within tabs on the side of your screen (see screenshot). It will also optionally display real-time notifications of incoming feeds in the system tray area.

What’s different about tabs, of course, is that unlike say desktop widgets they are less obtrusive and in-your-face, yet instantly and immediately accessible through a simple click. They can, in other words, be used to both organize information and de-clutter your desktop as well as make that information available at your fingertips simultaneously.

5- Inside a dockable area on your desktop [SideSlide]: similar in concept to “Stick” above, SideSlide delivers a sort of virtual desktop that you can dock and undock in the top of your screen, and where you can place many different things including notes, shortcuts, “virtual” containers that point to actual folders, and RSS feeds.

SideSlide’s dockable interface presents another interesting option for making information instantly available within a couple of clicks yet being able to keep it out of your way when you don’t want it. The interface takes a little bit of getting used to and is a little clunky, and the RSS function provides options such as searching and tagging, among others.

6- As post-it sticky notes [Note Mania] : I was considering a review of a freeware sticky notes program a few weeks ago called Note Mania. I didn’t end up writing one (although I probably should have, as it is a really good one), but what struck me as being really unique and original was the option to display RSS feeds as sticky notes on your desktop (see screenshot).

Just imagine: you log into your PC and the RSS feeds you subscribe to are displayed as sticky notes on your desktop. You can then delete the stories you are not interested in and either click on the ones you want to read or simply keep them as desktop sticky notes to remind you to read them later on.

7- Embedded into your wallpaper [Chaos Wallpaper]: this program will embed RSS feed stories into your active desktop. Feed items can be clickable as well as scrollable through the on-screen slider on the right, and will update/refresh your feeds periodically. If you know a bit of HTML you can tweak the CSS stylesheets in order to modify the way that feeds are displayed on the desktop.

Note that aside from this functionality Chaos Wallpaper also functions as a very competent wallpaper changer.

8- As scrolling stock-tickers across your screen [EasyDeskTicker]: EasyDeskTicker displays your RSS feeds as horizontally scrolling news-tickers reminiscent of the scrolling stock and/or news tickers that are displayed on TV and even in some public venues. It allows you to add any number of news-ticker streams, to place them anywhere on screen, and to customize their behavior and speed, their color scheme as well as the size of the fonts, etc.

I would say that this is one of the most versatile and powerful stock-ticker type RSS feed readers out there, and is visually very smooth and problem-free. Note, however, that this program is free for private use only (vs. commercial). Also note that the way it works is each horizontal ticker you add has its own options dialog, which at first I didn’t realize and caused me some confusion.

9- As email in your Inbox [FeedMyInbox]: if you prefer to receive email notifications rather than subscribe to RSS feeds, FeedmyInbox is a free web service that can receive RSS feeds for you and automatically email them to an address you specify. Please note, however, that many sites (such as this one) offer the option to subscribe to both RSS feeds or to email notifications, so in theory for many sites you will not need the FeedMyInbox service. However, if a site does not offer email notifications, or if you like its RSS feed better than the emails that it offers (and I know that for example that for Freewaregenius the emails are very abbreviated) then FeedMyInbox may be for you.

If you know of other interesting ways to access RSS feeds using free software or services please share in the comments section.

This article was borne out of a need to split a large 600 meg CSV file into several pieces that were no longer than 100,000 rows each for uploading into a client’s website. The main problem we faced in doing so was that it was impossible to load the file into tools such as Excel (or course), text editors, or even Access because doing so would invariably cause any of those apps to crash.

In these cases, it was possible to split the file using a freeware program called Gsplit, which processes the file sequentially without loading it into memory all at once. This posting will describe exactly how this is done.

A step by step guide:

• Background: I am going to describe an example whereby I split a file called “chunk.csv” into several pieces that are a maximum of 10,000 rows each. This same process will work on any type of text file (for example TXT, INI, LOG, BAT, DIZ, BAK, and QUE) and you can customize this process to exactly the number of rows you require for your use.

1. Download and install Gsplit. This is the program that will perform the operation and it is 100% freeware, even for commercial use.
2. Run Gsplit.
3. Click “Original file” in the left sidebar. Click on the “browse” button under “file to split”. Browse to and click on the file you want to split.
   
4. Click “Destination folder” in the left sidebar. Click on the “browse” button under “destination path” on the right. Browse to the folder where you would like your output files to be saved.
   
5. Click “Type and Size” in the left sidebar. This is where all the interesting stuff will take place. Click on “Blocked Pieces” icon. Next, from the dropdown select “I want to split after the nth occurrence of a specified pattern”; and from the dropdown under that “Split after the occurrence number”. Enter the number of lines you want to split underneath (10,000 in this case, but you can enter the value that you need). Lastly, make sure that the pattern to use for splitting is “0×0D0×0A” (without quotes). This value is the hex code for a carriage return, and it should be displayed by default.
   
6. Click “Filenames” in the left sidebar. In the “piece name mask” field enter “{ofw}_{num}{ore}”(without quotes). This will generate pieces with the original file extension and the original file names that look like “filename_1.csv”. Alternately, you could leave this alone altogether, go with the default generated names, and simply rename the extension to “.csv” (or whatever your original extension is) in Windows explorer.
   
7. Click “Other Properties” in the left sidebar. check “do not add tags to piece files”, This will ensure that no additional information will be added to your original data.
   
8. You’re now ready to split. Click on the “Split” button in the upper toolbar. Your file should be split within seconds.
   Once the splitting process is finished you will see the “Splitting log” screen. Click on the “Open the folder in Windows Explorer” link to instantly jump to the output folder.
9. Optional: save your splitting profile. If you are going to repeat this splitting process in the future you might consider saving these settings as a “profile” that can be loaded when you need it so that you do not have to go through these process again. To do so select “Save a Profile As” from the “File” Menu.

That’s it. Happy Splitting .

I recently needed to find a way around Vista’s blocking of my favorite desktop search app (Everything) which launches as a startup entry on my Windows XP machine but is perpetually blocked on startup on my wife’s Vista laptop. I was somewhat surprised to find that there was no easy way to simply override this and enable the item on startup. This is because of Windows Vista’s “User Account Control” (UAC) security infrastructure; and although it is possible to disable the UAC, this is not at all recommended. There is, however, a relatively simple method to get any app to launch on startup using Windows’ task scheduling feature. (A number of interventions that are mentioned on the internet that will NOT work, including allowing the program on Windows’ firewall.)

For the purposes of this post I will use the example of the “Everything” app mentioned above. The way we will do this is to remove the app from the startup items and schedule it to launch on log-on using Windows Vista’s task scheduler.

Step by step:

First we will remove the app from the startup items (”everything.exe” in this example). You can do this using some startup items’ management utilities or manually as follows:

1. Click on Vista’s start menu, and type “run” in the search box. Select the “run” program which should appear as the first entry in the set of results:
   
2. In the Run program dialog, type “msconfig” and press enter.
    
3. Once the system configuration program shows up, click on the “startup” tab. Find your app in the list (”everything.exe” in this example) and uncheck the box next to it so it no longer starts with windows. Note the path to the app, as you will need it later. Also note any arguments (”-startup” in this case). Click “Ok” to close; if you are prompted to restart the computer select “exit without restart” and continue with the steps below.
   

Next, we will need to create a scheduled event that will launch the app on logon, as follows:

1. Launch Vista’s “Task Scheduler” app. An easy way to do this is to type “task scheduler” in the search box in Vista’s start menu, then select “task scheduler” which should appear as the first entry in the set of results.
   
2. Once launched, click on “Create Task” in the right pane.
   
3. In the “general” tab, enter a name for your task and (optionally) a description. Click on “Run only when user is logged on” and check “Run with highest privileges”.
4. Next go to the “triggers” tab and click the “new” button to create a new trigger.
5. Once the “new trigger” dialog appears select “At logon” from the dropdown, “any user” in the settings, and “enabled” in the advanced settings.
6. Go to the “Actions” tab and click the “New..” button
7. In the “Edit Action” dialog that appears, select “Start a program” from the actions dropdown. Click “browse” and browse to your desired app, then type in any arguments in the “add arguments” field. Remember that this (the path to your app and any arguments used) is simply re-stating the path and arguments from step #3 above.
   
8. Go to the “Settings” tab. Make sure that the following are checked: “Allow task to be run on demand” , and “Run task as soon as possible after a scheduled start is missed”. If “stop the task if it runs longer than” is checked then uncheck it.
   
9. [This step only relevant on laptops]. Go to the “Conditions” tab and uncheck “Start the task only if the computer is on AC power”. (Unless you want the task to only start if the computer is plugged in, inwhich case keep it checked).
   
10. Click “Ok” then exit the Task Scheduler. Restart the computer or log off/log on.

That’s it! The next time you log on your app will launch without the dreaded (”Windows blocked some startup programs” message).

Finally, a new theme. Although I liked the old Lightbreaker theme, I’d been wanting to move away from it for some time. After researching Wordpress themes for quite a long time (free and paid) I finally decided to go with the this one, Arthemia Premium (there is an excellent free version as well, which can be found here).

It took a lot of customization and a lot of time to get this theme to where I want it to be, and in fact I am using a smaller sub-set of the features that this theme has to offer, but I am happy with it

The main impetus behind the switch is that for some time now I’ve been wanting something that could better make use of all the content that my site has accumulated over the years. Although the “wordiness” and length of my posts is in many ways what makes this blog unique, I always had a suspicion that, assaulted with a wall of words, many (most) readers are generally speaking less likely to engage and less likely to be able to quickly find what they are looking for and/or find content that they actually may be interested in. (I’d also considered changing my format to short, more frequent posts, but decided against it.

The other thing that I wanted was some sort of “featured articles” widget on top, and now I have one!

Let me know what you guys think. If you are interested in buying this theme for your own Wordpress site use the banner below to do so!

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Just imagine: a stream of the latest freeware software updates with links to cool reviews and information about them. Sounds too good to be true? It isn’t. Go on over to Appnews.net and see for yourself. Here are more notes:

• You can subscribe by RSS feed, Email, or Twitter (soon, the RSS feed will be displayed in the Freewaregenius Sidebar).
• The search box on Appnews.net delivers consolidated results from Ghacks.net, Rarst.net, and Freewaregenius.

Not much more to say, except to give some kudos to Andrey of Rarst.net, who singlehandedly conceived and created the amazing and rather impressive engine that powers it. Thanks Andrey!

Go to Appnews.net to check it out.

[Editor’s note: this post was written by Freewaregenius contributor Gaurav Paul, who introduced the idea of a "featured bookmarks" weekly post].

BackupURL: creates instant cached copies of web pages. The site does the same thing that Google Cache, Yahoo Cache and the WayBackMachine do, but the best thing it allows you to create a snapshot copy of desired webpage on-demand and get a BackupURL link to the same. This is very cool if you require the content of a web page to stay the same while you share the link.The cached page can also be used for referencing or even mirroring data. The cached page will always be online (html, CSS, images) no matter whether the original site is up or down .

[Editor’s note: for a good freeware program that takes a snapshot of a site and saves it locally, check out Local Website Archive Lite].

Odee.com: ever wondered why the human mind hones in on what is “odd” amongst all that is “normal”? Whatever the reason, Oddee is a blog that delivers news and stories on some of the weirdest and amazing things that have to do with people/places/science/web/humour.Very entertaining, take a look !

Tagoo: is a media search engine that searches for music, video, and even downloadable software from a number of good sites around the web to fetch you a simplified list of your searched subject. It gives you information such as file type, BitRate, File Size, Duration, etc. It also gives you the option to PLAY or DOWNLOAD (if available) media in the search results.

Keyboardr: is a simple customized search engine that basically uses an AJAX GUI on top of Google search results in order to dynamically provide instant search results with each additional letter that you type into the search box. Its objective, to quote its creators, is to “replacing the feeling of ’searching’ with the feeling of ’launching’.”

The site is designed for mouse-free, all-keyboard browsing using the arrow and enter keys (hence the name “Keyboardr”). In addition to Google results, it also displays results from “Wikipedia”,”Google images” and “Youtube” in same page, which is pretty useful, and it runs pretty fast too!

PhoneArena: as cell phones ownership increases and as they become more and more integral to modern life, “PhoneArena” is a site that is stepping forward to provide the latest news, detailed reviews, specs and info from the mobile world. This frequently updated site covers all the buzz that surrounds cell phones and mobile manufacturers.

AnAppAday

I was searching Google for something (I now forget what) and stumbled on this blog. Needless to say I was immediately intrigued by the apps on offer and started downloading and testing. Check out the apps section here or click on any of the individual app posts in the list below.

My favorite app is probably the “Jedi Window Dock“, a simple tabbed window that can accomodate any open windows or apps that you would like to remove from the Windows taskbar (see screenshot above). Very handy if, say, you have a lot of open folder windows that you would like to cluster together in groups, or you’re working with multiple command line or console windows that you would like to tidy up. You can dock any kind of window from any app, although I found that Internet Explorer windows can behave strangely once they are docked/undocked (e.g. they minimize and might not maximize if you click on them in the taskbar).

Here’s a list of links for all 30 apps:

Note that the source for all of the apps is made available, and that most of them will require that you download the the MS .NET Framework 2.0

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Donationcoder

If you’re not familiar with it, Donationcoder is one of the web’s best sources for high quality, free and donationware software. But’s its more than that: Donationcoder is a community of coders and software enthusiasts, a site that been successful in sustaining an ongoing, intelligent conversation about software for years (including some of the most in-depth and high-quality software reviews on the internet).

Since their inception four years ago, Donationcoder have been a part of a bold experiment in alternative funding based entirely on member donations. Not only have they proved the skeptics wrong by surviving, they have succeeded in thriving and in delivering a constant stream of applications and attaining s deserved reputation for sophisticated, intelligent discourse. Check out their best-of blog here.

One thing I also want to mention are their periodic "coding competitions" that have produced some of the most unique and original ideas for apps that you’ll ever see. And speaking of unique and original, check out Skrommel’s page of one-hour apps.

Click here now to support Donationcoder and to become part of the Donationcoder community. Click here for more about them, their philosophy and history.

Here’s a list of Donationcoder-affiliated programs that were reviewed on Freewaregenius:

• Process Tamer
• Mobysaurus,
• URL Snooper
• OSD Mute
• DesktopCoral
• CFDButton
• ScreamerMenu

Here’s another list for Donationcoder apps not mentioned above that you should not miss!

• Screenshot Captor
• Find and Run Robot
• Clipboard Help and Spell

Did I miss anything?

Note that you may need to register with a valid email and obtain a free registration code for some of the titles listed above

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After being offline for most of the past week, Freewaregenius is finally back online. I am hoping at this point that all the issues are resolved. The site should be running faster than it was before. There is a blank space on the upper right where my Ajax navigation tabs used to be that is not looking too good, but that will be remedied soon. I am looking into new designs/Wordpress themes so the site’s look and feel may change in the coming weeks.

My site first went offline Dec 30th. At first I thought it was a vanilla, run of the mill outage most probably due to a traffic spike (my last posting, “Ten lesser known “must have” free programs, part 1” was generally well-received in the blogosphere and featured on Lifehacker). Alas the problem turned out to be some sort of server “meltdown” where the host computer’s hard drive (and my site data on it) were simply inaccessible. This all was taking place on Dec 30th and 31st, needless to say not the most convenient time. Nonetheless the guy from my previous hosting company (hi Greg), bless his heart, was working late into New Year’s eve trying to get my data out (the last backup we had was taken in October). He finally managed to retrieve a snapshot of my site as it was on Nov 17th, with approx 20 postings and comments wiped out. If you find that a comment that you made is gone, that would be the reason.

My first response was to kick into gear re-creating the missing postings from saved files on my desktop (and at least some comments from cached versions of the pages saved by Google). This was much more time consuming than I thought, but I was thinking that at least its doable and that when all content is recreated the problem would be solved. Alas, this was not to be. Although it was missing some content, my site was now back but it was consuming too much of the shared server’s resources, resulting in it being bumped offline again. This was not a new issue, but we had previously solved it by using Wordpress’s “Super Cache Plugin“. Except this time the caching did not seem to work for some reason. Murphy’s law in action. Most annoying of all, whenever my site was pulled offline it was replaced with a message that said something like “contact billing department”, making it seem like all of this was happening because I hadn’t paid the bills. Grrrr!!!

I therefore needed to go into my site’s code and either optimize it or remove whatever was using so much of the server’s CPU resources – a time consuming task which I am certainly not the best candidate to perform, but I was determined to get the problem fixed. After making the site inaccessible to the outside world I went about disabling unnecessary plugins, but this was not going to solve the problem. I realized that the culprit may be my Ajax navigation (which I had paid someone to implement for me about 6 months ago), and decided to remove it altogether. In any case I had been doubting its usefulness/efficacy since its inception, and was not sad to see it go. Many hours later I was able to take it out, and my site did indeed seem to load up much faster than before. I was certain that there would be no more problems and informed my host company that the problem was 100% solved (the guy had understandable concerns at this point that my site was again going to hog the resources of the shared server and slow down other customers’ sites). Less than 24 hours after the site was re-instated it was pulled down again for the same reason: was still using too much resources.

It was also at this point that my previous host told me that he couldn’t host my site on a shared server anymore. This was not so bad because in actuality I had been researching hosting options for days and had come to the conclusion that I probably needed to move to a host that was better able to deal with traffic spikes like the ones I occasionally got. I chose Media Temple, which in fact was recommended by one of my readers the first time that I switched hosts (thanks Devon). These guys apparently use a “grid” structure where servers are inter-connected and idle servers can chip in and help servers that are in need of resources if the need arises. They also host a lot of high-traffic blogs that were familiar to me and, moreover, I figured that if I ever needed to move to virtual private hosting their package was extremely reasonably priced.

I hope that all the issues are resolved now; during the past few days I have made many changes, including changing hosts, removing inefficient elements from the site (including the Ajax navigation), upgrading Wordpress to the latest version and disabling unnecessary plugins. I realize that a lot more can be done to make it more efficient; hopefully will get there sooner rather than later. Thanks to reader Alfred for recommending Yslow in a previous postings comment section. Yslow is a Firefox plugin that analyses a site’s performance and provides recommendations to make it better; the analysis was very interesting, although it would have been more useful to someone who knows more about building websites than I do.

A part of me still thinks that the problem will somehow manage to reappear and continue to haunt me, but still, I am hopeful. I am also looking to change the site template and to reinstate some sort of navigation widget in that black space in the upper right, but one that was not a resource hog and did not slow the site down. Keeping my fingers crossed!

I figured since I already had a couple of half-written reviews, that I might be able to steal the time here or there (on the 5 hour flight for example, when my two kids might be asleep) to post a couple of reviews. Needless to say it didn’t happen. I didn’t even have the time to check my email. I’m realizing that it takes quite a bit of time effort to find interesting software, test it out, and write about it, etc.

Can you write these reviews? if you think you can write reviews in the format you see here on Freewaregenius, and if you would like to do it, send me an email and let me know. Not only will you become, um.. famous, but I could also offer a monetary compensation and/or link to your site if you have one.

Have you ever been in a situation where you where prevented access to certain sites on the internet because you were behind a company firewall or because of a restriction imposed by your Internet Service Provider? If so, you might be able to use the solutions provided below as a workaround.

Although I’ve been asked variants of the question “how do I surf blocked sites from my job” often enough to decide to investigate some potential solutions, let me begin by saying that I present these without experience in a restricted internet situation myself and therefore can not attest to the efficacy of the solutions below.

1- Use a Proxy service site: such as hidemyass.com, can’t bust me, or anonr.com. Many of these sites in fact all belong to the same network and work in the same way: they will act as a go-between between you and the sites you want to access.

The easiest way to find these is to search Google for “proxy service sites” or a similar keyword. Once you are able to access one of these sites you will find an address box where you can enter the URL for the site you want and the proxy site will grab the content for you and present it within the proxy site URL, allowing you to surf your desired content while its actual URL is being masked by the proxy site. Note that some of these sites will also provide anonymous internet surfing by disguising your IP address and location info.

Click on the image to the right for a list of some proxy service sites. Bear in mind that your corporate firewall or ISP may have already blacklisted some proxy sites, preventing you from accessing them. In this case you might simply search for some new ones that may have not been blacklisted or considering another solution.

2- Web2Mail

As you might imagine, “browsing” your desired site using this service involves receiving the initial email, clicking on a link on that page that most likely be blocked in your browser but that you would use as the subject line in another email to Web2Mail, and repeating. Not the highest quality surfing experience, but will work in a pinch.

One thing I might add: the Web2mail servers are at times unresponsive and there was a point when I was testing it a few days ago and having my emails sent back to me. Since then the issue seems to have been fixed and it is working just fine.

3- Get internet from your home machine via VPN

There are many free VPN software options: OpenVPN (and GUI version, pictured above), UltraVNC, TightVNC, LogMeIn Free, and Windows’ own built in VPN. This post is not intended to be a tutorial on how to set this up, but if you search the internet you will find a lot of further information on this. If you know of a good tutorial or tutorials on this please post them in the comments.

4- Use an internet anonymizer

Aside for TOR, another option is JAP, which I which operates more or less under the same principle.

5- Use Google

• View a cached version of your site. Search for the site and/or webpage you seek in Google and, once you have found it in the search results, click on the “Cached” link which will display a cached version that Google has indexed previously. The drawback: in most cases this will be an earlier version of the site that may not up-to-date, depending on how frequently the site content is updated.
• Use Google reader: if your target site has an RSS feed you can sign up for a Google account and use Google reader to grab the RSS feeds from the site. Google reader presents a couple of advantages (1) you can add a subscription to the site using only the site’s URL, and Google will find the appropriate feed URL for you, and (2) in many cases it will display more than the 10 or so posts that are contained in the feed itself (Google probably caches earlier feeds). A potential drawback is if your site publishes partial feeds rather than the post of page in its entirety, inwhich case an RSS reader will be of limited value.

Do you know of other solutions to this problem? Let us know in the comments.

The problem: say you have a portable app that in a folder on a USB drive with, for example, a path such as “F:\EjectUSB\EjectUSB.exe”. Say, moreover, that you would like to create a shortcut to “EjectUSB.exe” and place it on the root folder of your USB (”F:\”, in this case). You might be tempted to simply copy a shortcut and place it on the root folder; except for one thing: that shortcut will always refer to “F:\EjectUSB\EjectUSB.exe”, and should you plug your USB drive into a computer that assigns a different letter to the USB drive (i.e. a letter than is not “F”) the shortcut will break down and not work. Hence the need for a shortcut with a relative path.

The solution:

• Windows does not support relative paths in shortcuts. Instead, this article will describe a solution based on creating a so-called batch (.BAT) file and converting that into an executable (which nonetheless displays the original program’s icon).
• I will use the example outlined above (”F:\EjectUSB\EjectUSB.exe”).

Step by step:

1. Create a new text document (to create a text document right click anywhere on your desktop, select new, then select “Text Document” from the context menu). Open it and type in the path for the executable, between quotes, without the drive letter and colon (e.g. “\EjectUSB\EjectUSB.exe” – with the quotes). Save and exit. It does not matter what you name the file at this point, but let’s say you named it shortcut.txt for reference.
2. Rename the text file and change the extension to .BAT instead of .TXT.
3. Before we go further we have to extract the icon from the original app and save it as an ICO file. To do this use a program such as “BecyIconGrabber“. Download, extract, and run, then point to the original executable (”F:\EjectUSB\EjectUSB.exe” in this case). Right click on the icon when it appears (it doesn’t matter which size icon you are looking at) and save it as an ICO file.
4. Download and unzip the free “Bat To Exe Converter” and run it. In the program dialog, point to the batch file you created (shortcut.bat) for the”batchfile” field and to the extracted ICO file for the “Iconfile” field. Use the “Compile” button to complete the operation.
5. Two more things left to do (1) rename the new executable if you want to, and (2) move it to the root folder of your USB device.
6. That’s it. You can now run the new exe file from the USB’s root folder to launch your program; it will always preserve the relative path, no matter what letter Windows assigns the USB device.

Its hard for me to wrap my head around this but apparently neither light nor a camera was used to capture the images in Radiohead’s "House of Cards" video, but rather it was created using a combination of technologies that model objects as data. A "Geometric Informatics" scanning system was used to obtain the close-up images of the singer’s head, while a "Velodyne Lidar system" was used to capture the large cityscape environments, apparently by shooting some 64 lasers in a 360 degree radius.

To see the video, go to the bottom of this posting. If you want more information check out "The Making of "House of Cards" video on YouTube. (Where, interestingly, I learned that the distortions seen in the video were not only intentional, they actually had to work hard to create them).

What’s cool here (aside from the inherent coolness of camera-less imaging) is the following:

1. You can play around with the images using the 3D viewer on the Google code page.
2. You can download the data and use it to create your own visualizations.
3. If you do create your own version of the video, you can upload and share it to the House of Cards YouTube group for the world (and the band) to see.

This song is from the famous "In Rainbows" album which the band first released on the internet and allowed people to set their own price and download in MP3 format (I paid $5 and was rather all pleased with myself ). Unfortunately that experiment is no longer available.

Watch the "House of Cards" video:

[Thanks Mraei for tipping me off about this].

Go to the House of Cards 3D viewer on the Google code page.

Not freeware, but a free web service that helps users browse some of the most popular subjects on the net (popular people, popular places, and popular things) and discover connections between them. Evri is a bit of a combination between a recommendation engine of related links and a sort of dynamic, self-creating Wikipedia.

While Evri might look like a news and/or media portal with some nice, flash based links, this startup is based on a robust technology that should raise some eyebrows. Evri is in fact powered by a search technology that scours parts the net (focusing mainly on news, politics, and general media related web pages) and actually understands references within the text to people, places, and things. So, for example, when indexing a news article that talks about Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton campaigning together in Unity, NH, it will “understand” that Barack and Hillary are people and that Unity is a place (and it will do so on its own, without any human intervention). If it sees a lot of texts connecting Obama, Clinton, and Unity on the web, it will be able to gauge the “strength” of these connections, as it were.

What this enables Evri to do is construct a web of links and interrelations that mirrors the flurry of activity (expressed in texts, articles, etc.) that takes place on the internet. It is designed to reveal interconnectedness of the web as expressed linguistically in what is being said/discussed rather than in terms of linked hyperlinks (as, for example, Google does).

What it means to you now: the Evri beta has been launched (at this point you will have to sign up for an invite). Here are some of the things you can do on it right now:

• Browse dynamically generated pages on your favorite topic: whether its a band such as Radiohead, a politician like Barack Obama, or, say, the Seattle International Film Festival. The beauty of looking at these pages rather than, say, the corresponding page on Wikipedia is that they are always up-to-date and dynamically generated to reflect all the latest connections that relate to your topic. You might imagine how valuable this could be if you need to keep abreast of the latest that is going on with a topic that you are following from a holistic perspective rather than the headlines in a news portal (the latest on a company you are following such as Apple, or the latest on the iPhone, etc.)
• Discover connections you didn’t necessarily know about: for example, the connection between Radiohead and Bono of U2 as reflected in latest news stories, but also the connection between your subject and verbs or actions that relate to them (e.g. in the Barack Obama page, click on “meeting with” in the dropdown and you will get a list of the top articles siting Obama meeting or having met with other figures.

What it might mean to you in the future:

• Recommendation engine/widget: the model of interconnectivity that Evri builds can be applied in many places; in news portals or other websites where Evri can be embedded as a widget to act as a recommendation engine (a related links widget on steroids, if you will). I can’t wait to get a widget running on Freewaregenius, although from what I understand they will first start with indexing general news and media content (i.e. household name things), and then work their way down into other more specialized areas.
• Dynamic pages indexed by Google: such that a search for, say, “Seattle Film Festival” will include a dynamic Evri page on the subject.

Wish list or how this service can be even better)

• A search box would be nice. The current lack of one is perplexing but might have something to do with Evri’s stated slogan of “searching less and understanding more”; in my experience, however, not finding what I’m looking for to begin with did not lead to understanding more at all. As I understand it, a search may be coming in the form of Google.

The verdict: while it may look like a news portal with a curious way of browsing content, Evri has some seriously scary technology under the hood that can not only finds linguistic links but evaluate and rate a site’s content in a way that a number of other services employ an editorial staff to perform.

Having said that, I am also hoping that the people over at Evri can figure out a way to do more with this technology than the news portal that is the current beta release. I couldn’t help but wonder about why I, as a user, would care whether the technology knew that a relationship was to a person, a place, or a thing, and why (and how) that might add value to me. It seems to me that Evri can set their sites on a much more wow-inducing first impression that the current beta delivers.

Version Tested: beta release as of 7/2/2008.

Go to the Evri home page.

Please let me know what you think. There are still some tweaks and improvements that need to be implemented (e.g. wasted space in the “featured article” section, as well as a few others). Here’s a list of new functions:

• Featured articles: the left side of the navigation will randomly show one of four featured articles that I have. You can scroll through these using the litte “< >” arrows.
• Tabbed pages: under the Freewaregenius logo. Something that I wanted for a long time.
• Tabbed navigation: bulleted lists of postings, “recent posts”, “popular posts”, “most commented”, etc.
• Category list in the navigation: one that is hierarchical. Note: I will be revamping the category list and adding a “Freewaregenius Pick” category sometime in the future.
• Tags: I don’t have my posts tagged yet, but when I do there will be a tagcloud displayed in the “Tags” tab in the Ajax navigation.
• A subscribe by email formbox: for those of you who want to be notified by email whenever there’s a new post.
• A related posts section at the bottom of a posting: which at the moment is blank because apparently these relationships are bassed on tags, which I do not have at the moment.
• Social bookmarks at the bottom of the page: and a general one at the top near the logo.

Does anyone know of a way to tag and/or categorize postings in Wordpress en-masse without my having to go in and do it for each posting individually? Please let me know.

I do have an opinion on this design, but for now I will withhold it so as not to influence any feedback. Please write with your comments and suggestions.

Thanks!.

One day I will make a film, and it will be fantastic (you’ll see!). When that day comes and I am faced with the issue of finding music to use for my scenes I will go to Mobygratis and check out the growing collection of instrumental/electronic/soundtrack music that might fit the mood. If you are working on your own project you should check it out.

You will have to create an account first, afterwhich you can log in and check out multiple pages of links to music. All of the music is instrumental; you will not find tracks from his albums (or at least I didn’t see any). You can preview the clips on the page through a flash player, and request a license on-the-spot if you want to use it. How cool is that?

See video below of Moby talking about Moby Gratis:

[Thanks Simon for telling me about this]

Go to MobyGratis.

At first when this posting was conceived I was going to put together a list of my favorite freeware games; however, I was thinking why create another list when there are so many out there? Here’s a collection of my favorite freeware games lists:

1. Freewaregenius’ reviewed freeware games category (scroll down, multiple pages).
2. 1UP.com’s 101 Free games 2008
3. 1UP.com’s 101 Free games 2007
4. 1UP.com’s 101 Free games 2006
5. Gamespot: Adrian’s guide to 2007 freeware games
6. Wikipedia’s list of freeware games.
7. Wikipedia’s list of commercial games released as freeware
8. Wikipedia’s list of open source games
9. Wikipedia’s list of free first person shooters
10. Open source games at the Open Directory Project
11. IndieGames.com: best freeware games 2007 and 2006 . Categories include shoot em ups, platformers, arcade games, etc.
12. TIGsource: best freeware games of 2007
13. Indygamer has their own best of lists 2007; whaddyaknowit.
14. GameTap free games: you have to download and install the “GameTap Player”, and you will have to watch an ad before you play, but it’s worth it for some great games. The fantastic Psychonauts is available for free (although it’s a 1.5 gig download).
15. Caiman Games: top 60 ranked freeware games
16. The Random Gnome’s Lair: Our freshly hand-picked free games selection.
17. Another Random Gnome’s: Oh no! More hand-picked free games.
18. Also Gnome’s Lair: 100 excellent free games in bloom
19. Finally Gnome’s: bouquet of hand picked games with dirty commercial pasts
20. Home of the underdogs’: list of freeware [games] recommendations.
21. Ghacks also has an ultimate free games list.
22. Über 100 kostenlose Games!
23. Cnet’s: 10 most addictive flash games ever made.
24. Butterblog: neverending list of best free games
25. MarcoFolio: best freeware first person shooters
26. Last one — I’m going to bed.

I assume there’s a whole bunch of lists that I don’t know about; if there’s a page you know about that absolutely, positively has to be listed please share in the comments.

If, say, you’re going to a conference, going to visit relatives, or for whatever reason will be in an unfamiliar part of town and wondering about the available options for wireless internet check out this neat service. Free Wi-Fi Hotspot Finder allows you to enter an address (e.g. a zip code) and gives you a list of Wi-Fi hotpots in that area. It will also place these venues on a Google map mashup.

Of course, this will only help you if you’re planning ahead, unless you have an internet-enabled mobile phone in which case you can log-on and get this information on the spot when you need it. I tried this with mine and although the Google maps service does not show inside the browser on my iPhone I was still able to get a list of Wi-Fi places.

I tested this service on the two locations which I know the most: my neighborhood where I live, and the downtown area where I work, and I can report that it was able to identify more than 95% of places (in both cases it missed only one place that I knew of, but revealed a number of others that I had not known about previously).

Of course what I really want to know is how this service get this information? I’m not sure what the answer to this question is, but I will report it’s database at the time of this writing includes 86 countries and a total of 17,124 hotspots, although 14,836 of these are US-based (approx 87%).

WiPod: also worth mentioning is this little service that uses the Ipod’s notes functionality to upload a database of Free Wifi locations for the state/country of your choosing onto your Ipod for perusal when you really need it the most.

Visit the Free Wi-Fi Hotspot Finder page.

I must admit to a certain fondness for panoramic photos and 360° views, which is why I found this site so interesting. Aside from the (decidedly brilliant) concept, and the fact that you need to scroll through the image and/or click into it and drag it around to view it, Panoye feels and behaves much like other photo sharing sites such as Flickr: users can rate and leave comments on images or leave tags that point to interesting features or other information within the images.

Images that you like are easily downloadable (click "show image" and the right-click save background as). You can also subscribe to the site’s RSS feed to be instantly informed of new image uploads and/or subscribe to your favorite Photographers’ RSS feeds and be notified when new images by them become available.

Whats even cooler is that for any image that’s uploaded on Panoye (whether you uploaded it yourself or not) you can obtain a code that enables you to embed it on your site. Check out the following Panorama from Venice, Italy.

Wish list: a search box. Strangely abscent.

For freeware programs that can help you create panoramic images check out Autostitch or (my favorite) Hugin. For a good freeware panoramic image viewer check out Wpanorama.

[Via Appscout].

Go to the Panoye website