Choosing the best laptop for your needs and making sure you get the best price is one of the most common problems I hear about. I use a three step process that helps me figure out the best possible deal. Determine your needs, then your price →
How to use unlimited Spotify in countries where it is not supported
You may have heard about Spotify, the ad-supported music service that will let you listen to almost any music on-demand, and a favorite of mine. Spotify is only supported in a handful of countries though, so what do you do if you go to their site →
How to add thumbnail previews to MKV video files in Windows
Although the MKV video file format is becoming increasingly more popular, most Windows PC’s will not display thumbnails for MKV files by default, a small esthetic detail which can nonetheless potentially make this otherwise excellent video format less preferable in the eyes of many users. If →
How to extract text from images: a comparison of 10 free OCR tools
Printing text to paper is done every day; on some occasions however the reverse is needed – getting the original text back from a scanned image or photograph, for further editing and use. This conversion is named Optical Character Recognition or OCR for short, and it can convert scanned books →
Two tips to make your computer run faster
We all know that sinking feeling… the computer that used to spring to life in a few seconds seems to take forever grinding its way to a reasonable state of usability. No doubt you will have searched for an answer and found the usual tips about →
Convert & manage your media with FreeStudio from DVDVideoSoft
Finally there’s a solid and reliable solution for converting and managing all your media files in one place. It’s called FreeStudio from DVDVideoSoft. I first came across this program when I was trying to find a quick and easy way to convert my .avi files to →
How to easily transcribe audio or video recordings into text
I recently had to transcribe a number of video interviews into text. This turned out to be much more of a labor intensive project than I thought, and it quickly dawned on me that the process can be vastly improved via a few technological tweaks. This →
How to enlarge images with no pixellization and minimal quality degradation (using free software)
Have you experienced a situation where an image you are interested in using is smaller than you would like it to be, whether it might be for printing purposes or for use in illustration projects or even for usage on the web, etc? Typically, straight-enlarging of →
Free Online OCR: web app delivers editable text from scanned images or PDFs
Do you have PDF documents or images (e.g. JPG, PNG, TIFF) that were created using a scanner, and that you wish you could convert to editable text? Free Online OCR is a web service that can perform optical character recognition (OCR) on your scanned images and/or image based →
Optimize PDF’s for reading on your Kindle 3: crop then (optionally) convert to AZW
If you have a Kindle 3 (the one with the 6″ screen) chances are that you love it, as I do. Except that reading most PDF ebooks and documents on Kindle 3 is rather annoying and can be downright impossible, with unreadable, miniscule text and lots of wasted white →
How to run a virtual instance of Windows XP from within Windows 7
There are a handful of free machine virtualization programs out there, such as VirtualBox, VMWare, and of course Microsoft’s Virtual PC. These programs will let you run another instance of an operating system within your current operating system. The only problem is that, unless you’re virtualizing →
How to add a “go up to parent folder” button in explorer for Windows 7 and Vista
If you’ve upgraded to Windows 7 or Vista, you may have noticed that Windows explorer no longer supports a “folder up” button that can take you back up to the parent folder. Instead, Windows 7 and Vista only has a back button. To travel up the folder →
