Posted by Samer on July 20, 2011 in Internet, Internet Utils, Music Sharing, Remote access / screen sharing, Social Media, System, Utilities, Video Sharing, Web2.0 |
Geographically restricted web services turn up at a seemingly alarming rate. For example, if you are outside of the US you cannot watch programming from Hulu, listen to Pandora or stream Netflix, to name a few examples. Moreover, up until very recently, US residents could not access the Spotify music service, and still cannot access a host of UK or European only services, such as BBC iPlayer film & TV programming for example, or many of the channels on LiveStation.
Wouldn’t it be great if you could just run a free program on your desktop that could give you access to any US or UK restricted service, no matter where in the world you happened to be located? TunnelBear (for PC or Mac) is exactly such a program.
TunnelBear is a consumer Virtual Private Network (VPN) that enables you to access the internet via a US or UK source. It encrypts your communication, granting a layer of security if using the internet from public places. It will also allow you to use blocked websites in your workplace.
There is a catch though: the free version allows for only 500 megs of bandwidth per month, although that is easily instantly increased to 1.5 gigs in return for a single user tweet. Continue reading ..
Posted by Samer on July 19, 2011 in Android, Ebooks, Featured, iPhone / iPad, Kindle, PDF, PDF Readers |
Converting PDFs to the Amazon Kindle is not a straightforward affair. While there are many tools that can do the conversion to another format such as .MOBI, re-casting a typical PDF document into an ebook that works on a small screen requires more than mere change of format.
Formatting a PDF for the kindle can be done in two ways; the first is to CROP a PDF ebook then change it into a Kindle friendly file format. This allows for continuous text, uninterrupted with headers, footers, and page numbers, that is very much Kindle-friendly. You can read a detailed tutorial about this by following this link (henceforth referred to as ‘my first post’).
The second way is to essentially do the same thing as described above, but in an automated way that takes all the manual intervention and decisions out of it, using a free program called K2PDFOpt. This software works by converting your PDF to bitmap images, identifying the viewable areas, then assembling these into smaller pages without excess margins. Not only does this automate the work, but is ideal for multiple column documents. It has both advantages and disadvantages as detailed below. Continue reading ..
Posted by Samer on July 18, 2011 in Audio, Download MP3, Music Sharing, Social Media |
These days, there are many services where you can just type in the name of the song or artist you are interested in and instantly download the mp3. Most people use YouTube (which typically involves converting a video to an Mp3), or even Google.
But in this post I will recommend a better alternative: Groovedown is a tiny app that lets you download music from Grooveshark, a service for listening to free music online.
Groovedown is similar to previously mentioned Grooveshark Windows App in that both are desktop clients for Grooveshark; the difference is that while the latter is concerned with delivering the complete Grooveshark experience on the desktop, Grooveshark is primarily geared towards quick searching and downloading. Groovedown is multiplatform (Windows, Mac, Linux). Continue reading ..
Posted by Samer on July 17, 2011 in Audio, Best of, Desktop Customization, Freewaregenius Picks, Volume tweaks, Windows Enhancements | Tagged Windows 7, Windows Enhancements |
Let’s say you have a program that lets you control system volume via the mouse and/or via user-defined hotkeys. Let’s also say that it can display stylish volume sliders on screen, and lets you choose from many different skins for these. And, moreover, let’s say that it can control volume via hovering over and sliding your mouse over the slide of the screen. And, further, that it can display a system tray balloon notifier that shows the volume.
Well, you might say, all of these seem like nice functions to have. You might think to yourself that this is a fun little app that can be very useful. And you will be right.
And not only is the above precisely what Volume2 offers, it is also 100% free. Continue reading ..
Posted by Samer on July 16, 2011 in Audio, Audio players, Audio Tagging, iTunes |
How would you like to be able to see your song lyrics on-screen in step with your music? Minilyrics is an add-on for a wide range of popular music players that downloads and displays lyrics, and synchronizes them to the music.
Supported music players include: Winamp, Windows Media Player, iTunes, MediaMonkey, Songbird, AIMP2, J. River Media Jukebox, Quintessential Player, XMPlay, VLC, and MusicBee, to name but a few.
Note that while MiniLyrics is technically paid software, it provides a trial version that never expires. Continue reading ..
Posted by Samer on July 14, 2011 in File Management, File Tagging & Organization, HD Utils, System, Utilities, Windows Enhancements |
There is a growing trend to move special folders, such as your “My Documents”, “My Music”, and “My Pictures” folders off the main OS partition to another one. This enables the user to create a ‘perfect’ image of the main partition in it’s smallest form, and to put all of the user data in another partition where it is easier to manage and/or backup.
But wait: before you tell me that it is very easy to move special folders on Windows 7, consider this; Special Folder Manager 2 (Save Me 2) will move all sorts of user folders, some of which you would expect (My Music, My Pictures, User profiles, etc) and others that you would not (e.g. Appdata, Local Appdata, Administrative Tools, Cache, Cookies, etc.) And it will do this in batch, within a single operation.
It even moves some folders which frankly you wouldn’t want to move off the C:\ drive, such as your start menu, your startup folder, and others. Needless to say use this with some caution, and only move those folders that you are familiar with. Continue reading ..
Posted by Samer on July 13, 2011 in Compression / ZIP, System, Utilities |
I’ve been waiting to test a couple of freeware ZIP archive recovery apps for some time. And then, it finally happened (oh joy); I downloaded a zip file from the internet, which for whatever reason turned out to be corrupt. The testing can now begin!
Zip2Fix is a small program that can salvage files from damaged zip archives. It will not ‘fix’ a corrupt zip file, but rather extract any undamaged files that might be within it. It is being featured here, as you may have surmised, on account of having performed well in a real life situation as compared to other free tools that offer the same function. Continue reading ..
Geographically restricted web services turn up at a seemingly alarming rate. For example, if you are outside of the US you cannot watch programming from Hulu, listen to Pandora or stream Netflix, to name a few examples. Moreover, up until very recently, US residents could not access the Spotify music service, and still cannot access a host of UK or European only services, such as BBC iPlayer film & TV programming for example, or many of the channels on LiveStation.
