Record Movies of Video Games on the Computer

you can record online Flash games or DOS games using any screencasting software, the situation gets a bit tricky when playing computer games that use DirectX 3D or OpenGL because they render only a blank footage with regular screen capture programs.

Fortunately, here are some good in-game video recording software that will record motion video in the background while you are playing your favorite PC game. Most of them support still image captures as well:
1. WeGame.com -  Though this is a place for uploading screencasts of video games but they also provide a free Windows software for recording games on the computer. Just start the software, launch your game and hit record.
Wegame is absolutely free and supports Halo, World of Warcraft, Ages of Empire, Half Life, Grand Theft Auto, Wolfenstein, America’s Army and most other popular games.
2. FRAPS – This is probably the best option for recording movies of video game but costs a few bucks. FRAPS saves the video game into AVI format so the recording is smooth as the movie is not getting compressed at the time of recording. You can reduce the video size with VirtualDub or Windows Media Encoder before uploading to YouTube.
FRAPS can record still screenshots or full game movies. Just press F9 to start or pause the recording. You also FRAPS to record Google Earth movies like the one here. The free version will however add a watermark to your game movies.
3. Taksi – Taksi is game recording software similar to FRAPS but it is open source and free. Taksi can capture game screenshots or video clips of running games but without audio.
Taksi also lets you capture gaming sessions in full screen mode with hotkeys.
4. Game Cam – This is another free software for making movies of your favorite games on Windows. It will automatically search for games installed on your computer and will create an individual recording profile of every game. Game Cam can capture game screen shots, videos in AVI as well as audio.
Tips for Recording Computer Games
Recording games will slow down your computer so try to record at a lower frame rate and stop all non-essential processes like spyware, anti-virus and other running software.  Also consider lowering the desktop screen resolution for smooth recordings of game videos.
YouTube will resize videos to 320×240 so maintain the same 4:3 aspect ratio of the game screen before hitting the record button.
Finally, if you have to capture only a small duration video clip or just a quick game screenshot, SnagIT will do the trick since it supports DirectX input. You may have to turn off hardware acceleration during the recording process.

Google Docs: To Compare Two Text Files Online

WinMerge, Beyond Compare, ExamDiff and Altova Diffdog are some popular utilities that help you visually compare differences in two files but a problem with these software is that they work only on the desktop.
Since there are no online file comparison services available yet, we can use our favorite Google Docs to locate differences between two text files or files that contain programming source code.

Here are the step involved for comparing two files with Google Docs:
Step 1. Create a new document in Google Docs and paste the contents of the first text file into this document. Save.
Step 2. Open your second text file in notepad and copy its content to the clipboard. Now open the Google Document created in Step 1 and overwrite everything with content from the clipboard. Save.
Step 3. Go to the Revision tab of Google Docs, select the two file versions and click "Compare Checked". You should see the differences highlighted on the next screen as shown below.

The highlighting may not be as good as the desktop counterparts but still handy. And this Google Docs file comparison trick will work best in situations when you have to compare two text files that contain only minor variations.

Take Your Files Wherever You Go!! Easily....very useful!!!

There are so many ways by which you can remotely access your computer files over the Internet but the service that I am currently in love with is ZumoCast – simple, elegant and it’s free to use without any limitations.
With ZumoCast installed, you don’t ever have to upload your desktop files to the cloud but you’ll still be able to access them from other computers or your iOS devices.
To get started, just install the ZumoCast client on your Windows or Mac computer and select the folders on your desktop that you would like to access remotely. That’s it!
Now open the ZumoCast website on any other computer, log into your account and you’ll have immediate access to all your files and folders. The only condition is that your original computer, where the files are physically stored, should be on and connected to the Internet.

Other than accessing files from a remote computer, you may also use ZumoCast to upload new files from your current (remote) computer to the original computer via the browser.
iPhone and and iPad users may download the native ZumoCast app on their devices as it offers an even better experience and can transcode videos on the fly – that means if you have video on your computer in the format that’s not supported by the iPhone, you can still play it via live streaming.
An Android version of ZumoCast is in the works as well.

                                                                ZumoCast

FilerFrog:Useful menu context

Want a way to put dozens of handy commands within two-click reach? Download FilerFrog and bolt it on to your context menu, and you'll have a wide array of new tools available via your right mouse button as you browse your files and folders in Explorer.

Unlike some context menu multi-tools, FilerFrog installs only a single item on the top level of the context menu -- everything else is tucked neatly into submenus. So what can FillerFrog do?

• print directory contents
• extract, split, and join files
• move files up one level or to a recently accessed folder
• copy the current path to the clipboard
• resize images and swap formats
• encrypt and decrypt files
• quickly jump to favorite folders
• perform bulk file renames

It's a nice assortment of tools in a single package, and it's not cluttering up my context menu the way some apps I've tested do. While I don't need most of these commands on a regular basis, I do like knowing that they're easy to get at when I do need them.

FilerFrog installers are available for both 32 and 64-bit Windows versions of Windows XP, Vista, and Windows 7.
                                                     Download FilerFrog

Send to: Free app to and remove entries from your Send To menu

The Windows Send To menu can be incredibly useful. I most often use it to zap files to a USB flash drive, but it's also handy for emailing files and quickly burning files to CD (say, when I'm helping the RCMP retrieve video footage from surveillance DVRs).

Still, it could be more useful if I was able to remove a few items and add some additional folder locations. Send To Toys is up to the task. Once installed, you can configure entries via the STT's control panel applet. Use it to add additional folder locations, remove unwanted entries (Fax recipient? Gone!), and configure folder and clipboard Send To options.

Send To Toys can also handle a default email recipient (and CC and BCC) and prefill both the subject and message body.

Be sure to pay attention during the install process -- by default, STT adds a number of entries to the Send To menu. You can, of course, always remove them later using the app itself!

Second shell:windows enhancement

SecondShell is a tool that makes window management both less fiddly and more keyboard shortcut oriented. It doesn't actually do a whole lot (it's only 200 kilobytes!), but it adds such handy features that you'll wonder why Windows doesn't include them by default.

First, you can resize windows by holding down Alt+Right click and dragging the mouse anywhere in the window. Alt+Left click moves the window. By Odin's beard, how frickin' awesome is that?! Ctrl+Alt+Arrow key maximizes your window either horizontally or vertically, and Ctrl+Alt+Numpad 1-9 moves the window into the respective corner of your screen. There's a bunch of other keyboard shortcuts, too (but Windows 7 already has most of them built-in, I think).

Netbook and laptop users: if the resize-anywhere bit wasn't enough to get you excited, you can also remap Caps Lock to act as a Middle Mouse button! No longer will it be a struggle to open links in new tabs! It should be noted that Caps Lock remapping (and some other advanced features) will require some .INI file hacking -- the FAQ should have you covered, if you've never done that before, though.

SecondShell is one of those tiny little utilities that you simply must try; it's fast, flawless, and completely portable. It's also Windows-only, I'm afraid.
                                           Download

Make Multiple Wikipedia Articles to a Single PDF without any tools

Do you know that you can directly save any Wikipedia page as a PDF file without requiring any extensions or print drivers. In fact, you can even collect multiple Wikipedia pages in a basket and convert them all to a single PDF document (just like an ebook) with just a few mouse clicks.

For instance, here’s a PDF book on search engines (PDF) that was created from a set of Wikipedia pages using the built-in tools of Wikipedia and nothing else. As you will soon notice, PDF books generated by Wikipedia are perfectly formatted for printing and they even include all references and citations that are found in the original Wikipedia articles.

Download Wikipedia Pages as PDFs

1. Log in to your Wikipedia account and activate the beta interface. This step is no longer required.

1. Start the book creator tool inside Wikipedia.

2. Now open any Wikipedia page that you would like to include in your PDF book and click the “Add this page to your book” link. Repeat this step until all the pages have been added to the print basket.

3. Once you are done collecting Wikipedia articles, click “Show Book”, give your Wikipedia book a title and hit the download button to save your book as a PDF file.

All PDF books created with Wikipedia are available under the Creative Commons License.

And if you have no plans of printing Wikipedia pages, you may still use this trick to quickly download multiple pages from the world’s largest encyclopedia and read them offline on your mobile phone or your iPad.

Wikipedia will store your books collection under your Wikipedia user directory.

If you are not happy with the layout of your PDF book or would like to add some more information to the PDF, just edit the template and save the PDF.

Surf the Web Faster on Slow Internet

If your current Internet speed is very slow and you are living in an area where broadband connections are still not available, here are some ideas to help you download web pages faster on your computer. You may use the same tips to  improve your web browsing experience on a sluggish USB modem.

Surf the Web Faster on Slow Internet

1. Turn off web images, the Adobe Flash plug-in, Java Applets and JavaScript from your browser settings as these files are often the bulkiest elements of any web page.
2. Increase the size of your browser cache. If the static parts of a site (like background graphics, CSS, etc) are stored in the local cache, your browser can safely skip downloading these files when you re-visit the site in future thus improving speed.
3. Sometimes the slow DNS server of your ISP can be a bottleneck so switch to OpenDNS as it can resolve website URLs into IP addresses more quickly. If you aren’t too happy about OpenDNS redirecting your Google queries, follow this simple hack.
4. Finch can serve a light-weight version of any website in real-time that is free of all bells and whistles. For instance, the New York Times homepage with all external resources can weigh more than a MB but Finch trims down the size by 90% so the site loads more quickly on a slow web connection.
5. Flinch (mentioned at #4) is good for reading regular websites but if you just need to check the latest articles published on your favorite blogs, use BareSite. This service will automatically detect the associated feed of a website and render content quickly inside a minimalist interface.
6. The Google Transcoder service at google.com/gwt/n can split large web pages into smaller chunks that will download more quickly on your computer (or mobile phone).
7. Monitor your Internet speed to determine hours when you get the maximum download speed from the ISP. Maybe you can then change your surfing schedule a bit and browse more during these "off peak" hours.
8. You can use a text browser like Lynx or Elinks for even faster browsing. It downloads only the HTML version of web pages thus reducing the overall bandwidth required to render websites.
9. When searching for web pages on Google, you can click the "Cache" link to view the text version of a web page stored in the Google Cache. Alternatively, install this GM script as it adds a "cached text only" link near every "Cached" link on Google Search pages.
10. Move your web activities offline as far as possible. You can send & receive emails, write blogs and even read feeds in an offline environment. Also see: Save Web Pages for offline reading.
11.  You can interact with websites like Flickr, Google Docs, Slideshare, etc. using simple email messages. Uploading a new document to Google Docs via email would require less bandwidth than doing it in the browser because you are avoiding a trip to the Google Docs website.
12. Applying the same logic, you may also consider using tools like Web In Mail or Email The Web as they help you browse websites via email. Just put the URL of a page (e.g., cnn.com) in the subject field of your email message and these services will send you the actual page in the reply.
13. Bookmarklets are like shortcuts to your favorite web services. You neither have to open the Gmail Inbox for composing a new email message nor do you have to visit Google Translate for translating a paragraph of text. Add relevant bookmarklets to your browser bar and reduce the number of steps required to accomplish a task.
14. Use the netstat command to determine processes, other than web browsers, that may be secretly connecting to Internet in the background. Some of these processes could be consuming precious bandwidth but you can block them using the Firewall.
15. Use URL Snooper to determine non-essential host names that a website is trying to connect while downloading a web page. You may block them in future via the hosts file or use Adblock Plus to filter out advertising banners on web pages.
16. If you don’t want to spoil your web surfing experience by stripping images and other graphic elements from  a web page, get Opera Turbo. It will first fetch the requested web page on to its own server and then send it to your machine in a compressed format. Opera Turbo won’t change the layout of a web site but can lower the image resolution so that they load faster on slow Internet.
17. Change the user agent of your desktop browser to that of a mobile phone like Apple’s iPhone or Windows Mobile. This will help you browse certain web sites like Google News, WSJ, etc. much faster because they’ll serve you a light-weight and less cluttered mobile version of their sites thinking you’re on a mobile phone.

Find the Person Behind an Email Address

You get an email from a person with whom you have never interacted before and therefore, before you reply to that message, you would like to know something more about him or her. How do you do this without directly asking the other person?
Web search engines are obviously the most popular place for performing reverse email lookups but if the person you’re trying to research doesn’t have a website or has never interacted with his email address on public forums before, Google will probably be of little help.
No worries, here are few tips and online services that may still help you uncover the identity of that unknown email sender.
#1. Find the sender’s location

Open the header of the email message and look for lines that say “Received: from” followed by an IP address in square brackets. If there are multiple entries, use the IP address mentioned in the last entry.
Now paste the IP address in this trace route tool and you should get a fairly good idea about the location of the email sender.
#2. Reverse email search with Facebook

Facebook has 450 million users worldwide and there’s a high probability that the sender may also have a profile on Facebook.
Unlike LinkedIn and most other social networks, Facebook lets you search users by email address so that should make your job simpler. Just paste the email address of the sender into the Facebook search box and you’ll immediately know if a matching profile exists in the network.
If you are able to locate that person on Facebook, download his profile picture and then upload it to TinEye – it’s a reverse image search engine so you can locate his other social profiles where he may have used the same picture.
#3. Check all the other Social Networks

You can use a service like Knowem to quickly determine if a profile with a particular username exists in any of the social networks.
If the email address of the send is something like green_peas@hotmail.com, there’s a probably that he or she may have created accounts of some other social network using the same alias “green_peas” – put that in knowem.com to confirm.
#4. People Search

Finally, if nothing works, you should try a people search service like Pipl and Spokeo – both services let you perform reverse email lookups but Spokeo has a more comprehensive database than Pipl.
Other than regular web documents, Spoke also scans social networks and even the whois information of domain names to find any bit of information associated with an email address. However, some of the results returned by Spokeo are only available to subscribers.

Easily Sharing large files over net

If you are to share a large file with someone over the Internet, there are generally two options – you can either attach the files to an email message or, if the files are too big to fit in an email program, you can upload them to an online storage service and then share the download links with the recipient.
Let’s now explore some of the popular services that’ll make it easy for you to transfer large files over the Internet without any hassles or costs.

A: Share Large Files over Email

The Gmail service cannot handle email attachments that are larger than 25 MB but the recently-revamped Hotmail service is a much better alternative as it lets you send email messages as large as 10 GB.
The maximum size of an individual file that you can attach to an Hotmail message is only 50 MB but you can use a file-splitting utility like HJ-Split to break a big file into smaller chunks and then attach them all to a single message. The recipient can then join these chunks to restore the original file and he can do without requiring external programs.

B: Share Large Files without Email

The downside with email attachments is obvious – most ISPs and web-based email programs (including Gmail) will reject incoming messages that have big attachments and therefore, if you are sending a bulky file via email, the recipients also have to be on Hotmail as well in order to receive that file.
One of the best options for sharing large files without email is Dropbox. Once you install the the Dropbox utility on your (Windows, Mac or Linux) desktop, you can upload files of virtually any size to the Internet – it’s only limited by the size of your Dropbox storage which is 2GB in the case of free accounts. Alternatively, if you don’t want to install Dropbox, you can upload files straight to the Dropbox website from your browser but the limit in this case is 300 MB per file.
You can even consider using Google Docs to share those big files over the Internet. Google Docs lets you upload files up to 250 MB in size and they can be in any format. You have 1 GB of free storage space for storing all the non-Office files on Google Docs but you can also buy more space for a reasonable fee.
Unlike FTP servers, services like Google Docs and Dropbox don’t support resumable downloads. That means if the connection breaks while the recipient is still trying to download your “huge” file, he or she will have to resume the download from scratch. That can be a deal-breaker for lot of people.
SkyDrive, part of the Windows Live family, can solve this problem in a way.
The service offers 25 GB of free online storage, with individual files limited to 50 MB. To upload a large file, split it into chunks of 50 MB each and then upload them all to a single folder on SkyDrive. The recipient can download the entire folder as a ZIP or, if he’s on a flaky connection, he can download files one by one and then join them all at his end.

C. Share Files without Registration

Finally, if you are looking for something quick and simple that doesn’t even require registration, talk to YouSendIt or WeTransfer (if the file size is really big). Just upload the files via the browser, enter the email address of the recipient and hit send. WeTransfer lets you send files up to 2 GB in size while the maximum allowed limit is 100 MB in the case of YouSendIt (free version).

Chart: Comparison of file sharing services

What to Do When You Cannot Open a Particular Website

Your computer is connected to the Internet but you are unable to open a particular website though all the other sites are loading without issues.
For instance, you can open yahoo.com and bing.com but it takes forever to load www.google.com even though the site is up for everyone else in the world.

How to Troubleshoot your Internet Connection

Step 0: Like with everything else, switch off the modem, restart the computer, and turn on the modem again. Also clear the Internet cookies and browser cache. Problem gone? No, proceed to the next step.
Step 1: Temporarily disable your computer’s firewall and close any anti-virus software that may be running in the background. If you are now able to access the websites that were previously not loading, your security program is causing the problem. As as workaround, you can add that site to the “trusted” zone in Internet Explorer and see if it works.
Step 2: Open your hosts file and see if there are any entries for sites that are currently unreachable from your computer. The hosts file is located in the following folder:

c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts

Step 3: Try a remote screen capture using Aviary. For instance, if the URL of the error site is abc.com, try opening aviary.com/http://abc.com in your browser. This will help you make sure that the site you are trying to access is not down at the source.
Step 4: Clear your DNS cache and run the ping and traceroute commands against the problematic site to make sure that it is not an ISP specific issue.

ipconfig /flushdns
tracert www.error-website.com
ping www.error-website.com

If the DNS server is an issue, you can easily switch to Google DNS or OpenDNS without having to call the ISP’s support. However, if the ping and traceroute connections are successful but the sites remain unreachable, proceed to the next step.
Step 5. Reset the modem to factory defaults and re-configure it with the same username and password that was provided by the ISP. You can reset the modem by pressing a pin inside the hole located at the back of the modem for about 10 seconds. Or you can call your ISP support and let them guide you through the steps over phone.
The last step is very likely to fix your internet connectivity problem.

SPlayer:Really awesome.Replacement to VLC player...

As far as video players go, I'm pretty much a VLC loyalist. (Maybe "hard-core fan" is a better title.) It seems as though VLC's simplicity is the gold standard for players, and its sensible keyboard shortcuts are embedded deep within my muscle memory.
That's why I initially regarded SPlayer with a measure of skepticism. I mean, I don't know this player. I've never heard of it before, and still, it claims to be "Neat! Safe! High Performance!" and boasts "1+ million users." As soon as I figured out it's Japanese, it all made much more sense; it's just a market that I'm not familiar with. And you gotta love the translated marketing copy -- which says, "SmartAmplify: Intelligent sound field balance of technology, sound is even more shocking." I love my videos with "shocking" sound!
Small parts of the program's UI are actually in Japanese (or is that Chinese? Tell me in the comments). But most of the interface is in English, and the player is surprisingly powerful. What you see in the screenshot was done right in the player; you can rotate and skew the video while it is playing, and it just keeps on playing with no noticeable stutter. Granted, that's a bit of a party trick, but it goes to show how powerful this thing is.
The key bindings are customizable, and there are a ton of functions available via keyboard shortcuts. There's a strip of controls both at the bottom and at the top of the window, and they're quite fetching.
I've installed this player on my "real" system (not in the VM that I use to test most of the software for DLS), and I intend to try it out instead of VLC for a while. Yup – it's that compelling!

Download
4.4MB

Connect Two Computers Without a Router

Let’s assume you have two computers at home and you want to connect them together so that you can easily share an internet connection between the two machines or transfer photos, music and other files from one computer to another. How do you do this?

Connect Two Computers Directly

There are two options – you can either buy a router or, if you are looking for something more simple and don’t want to spend money on new networking hardware, you can connect the two computers using a commonly-available cable. The latter method doesn’t involve any complicated network settings and you will still be able to share files, internet connection, and even printers between computers.
Things you need:
To set up this basic wired home network, all you need is an inexpensive Ethernet crossover cable and the other requirement is that network cards* (also known as LAN or Ethernet cards) should be installed on each of you computers.
[*] This should not be an issue because network cards are available on most newer machines by default but if you are working with a very old computer, you can either attach an internal LAN card to your computer’s motherboard or go for a USB Network adapter that will turn a USB port into an Ethernet (RJ45) port.

Also see: How to Identify Computer Cables and Connectors
An Ethernet crossover cable looks like a standard Ethernet cable but the internal wiring is a little different. You can purchase crossover cables at Amazon.com or from your local computer store. If you have trouble finding them, you can purchase an inexpensive crossover adaptor and that will let you use any standard Ethernet cable as a crossover cable.

Connect Computers with an Ethernet Crossover Cable

Before connecting the two computers with a physical cable, make sure that both machine are using the same workgroup*. Here is step-by-step guide that explains how you can change the workgroup of your computers.
Changing workgroup in Windows XP – From the Start menu, right-click “My Computer.” Select Properties in the drop-down menu, and then select the second tab that says “Computer Name” from the System Properties window. Now click the “Change…” button, enter a unique Workgroup name and reboot your computer.

Changing workgroup in Windows 7 or Vista – Open the Control Panel, type “Workgroup” in the search box, and select the entry that says “Change Workgroup Name.” Click the “Change…” button, enter a Workgroup name and restart the computer. Windows 7 users can skip one step; simply type “Workgroup” in the search box in the start menu, and select the first entry, then proceed as above.
   
Now that the workgroups are same for both computers, connect the two computers together using the Ethernet crossover cable. Simply plug-in one end of the crossover cable into the network adapter of Computer A and connect the other end of the cable to the network adapter of Computer B.
Windows will automatically recognize the new network, and you can now easily view files and folder that the other computer has shared. Simply open Networks from the Start Menu (or the Control Panel), and you should see the other computer by its name. You can then browse any shared files on the other computer, and can even utilize shared printers.
Troubleshooting – If you do not see the other computer under Networks, you probably have a prompt at the top of your Network window saying that Network discovery is turned off (screenshots below). Select “Turn on Network Discovery and File Sharing.”  In the next prompt, select “No, make the network I am connected to a private network.”  Now you should see the other computer on the home network.

[*] While it is possible to share files between two computers connected with a crossover cable without making them part of the same workgroup, the method will only work if both computers have this network set as a private network, and may still cause problems. It is therefore advisable to have both computers on the same workgroup before sharing files and printers.

Share an Internet Connection Between Two Computers

There are scenarios where you may want to share the same internet connection between two computers. For instance:
Situation A - You have setup a Wi-Fi network at home but your old desktop computer doesn’t have a wireless network card. In that case, you can use the laptop to connect to the internet wirelessly and then share that same connection with the desktop over a crossover Ethernet cable.
Situation B – You have a netbook with a built-in cellular data connection. You can share that connection with any another computer at home through the crossover Ethernet cable.
Situation C – You use a (slow) Wireless USB modem with your laptop computer while your desktop is connected to an ADSL Broadband line and there’s no router at home. For any bandwidth intensive tasks, like when you want to backup photos from your laptop to an online service, you can connect the laptop to the desktop and things will happen much faster.
OK, let’s look at the steps required for sharing an Internet connection.
First, if you only wish to share internet connection and not files, both computers need not belong to the same workgroup. All you need to do is to connect the two computers with the Ethernet crossover cable, and then turn on Internet connection sharing in the computer that already has an Internet connection. The instructions vary for different versions of Windows:
For Windows XP – Select “Network and Internet Connections” from the Control Panel and click “Network Connections.”
 
Right-click on the network connection you wish to share (the one connected to the internet), select Properties, click on the “Advanced” tab, and then check the box that says “Allow other network users to connect through this computer’s Internet connection.”  Click OK, and the second computer that you have connected to this computer with the Crossover Cable should have internet access now.
For Windows 7 and Vista – Open Control Panel, enter “network connections” in the search box on the top right and select “View Network Connections.”

Right-click on the network connection you wish to share (this must be the one connected to the internet) and select Properties. Select the "Sharing" tab and then check the option that says “Allow other network users to connect through this computer’s Internet connection.” Click OK, and the other computer you have connected to this Windows 7 or Vista computer should have internet access now.

Transmiti:Run your desktop documents through Google Translate

Sure, you can upload documents to Google Translate, but why bother? Transmiti is a small (<700KB download), portable Windows app that can run selected text through Translate without the need to upload.

Just download the standalone .EXE, run it, and Transmiti heads to your system tray. Highlight some text in a Word or OpenOffice Writer document, tap the hotkey, and your translation appears in a movable popup. It's still Google Translate doing the heavy lifting, so the results are generally good -- though you may get the occasional Python-esque "I will not buy this tobacconists, it is scratched."

Now, here's my only gripe with Transmiti. For some reason, the Windows key is the hotkey and there's no way to specify your own combination. Transmiti only kicks in when you have highlighted text and press Win, but still -- I use that key a lot, and it would only rarely be used for translations. It also won't jump in if you use combinations like Win+R or Win+E.

Transmiti is already a very good desktop translation app, so hopefully the developer will add a customizable hotkey option.

      Download

System Ninja: repalcement for CCleaner

System Ninja

System Ninja is a program for cleaning your computer of unwanted junk that constantly slows your entire system down. System Ninja features a fast and powerful file cleaner, Startup Manager, Process Manager and Startup Log Generator, plus several useful tools such as CCEnhancer, FileAnalyzr and MalRunDestroyer.
Screenshot:




 
File Cleaner:
System Ninja features a powerful cleaning application which scans your computer for files that can be deleted to save hard drive space and speed up your computer. Files and directories currently cleaned include:
- Windows Temporary Files.
- .tmp files, in all directories
- Thumbs.db files, and other thumbnail caches.
- Mac icon files, which are unsupported by Windows.
- Game caches, increase the speed of your PC games. Currently supports only The Sims 2 & The Sims 3.
- Windows Logs
- Common Torrent Tags (Those annoying little .txt files that come with many torrents.)
- Recent files
Startup Manager:
The integrated startup manager allows you to dictate what can and can’t run when you turn on your computer. It supports Run, RunOnce and Sheduled Tasks files and registry keys. Removing startup items is a useful way of improving the speed of your computer.
FileAnalyzr:
The FileAnalyzer tool is integrated with System Ninja. It  generates a collection of useful information about any file, specifically the MD5, SHA1 & SHA256 hashes of that file. It also reads file size, access dates and links with web services to determine if the file contains a virus.
Process Manager:
The process manager allows advanced users to quickly end unwanted programs without the hassle of running Task Manager. It does not display as much information as Task Manager, however it allows you to simultaneously end multiple processes with much more force than Task Manager allows. Whats more; process manager automatically highlights processes that are commonly associated with Viruses or Spyware. The Malicious Process feature can detect over 95 of the most common malicious processes.

Current Version: 1.5
Requirments: .NET Framework 3.5
Operating System: XP/Vista/Win7
Downloaded 22163 times.

Converting Images to Text : Best OCR tools..Useful!!

owerful tools and databases for product and process sustainability www.gabi-software.com

OCR software let you easily convert images, such as digital photographs, scanned documents, printed books, etc. into text. Once you perform OCR on an image, you’ll be able to copy-paste or edit the text content of that image without any retyping and it also becomes more searchable.

The Best Web-based OCR Services

Most scanners ship with some sort of OCR software but if you don’t have a scanner, you can simply capture a photograph of the printed text with your digital camera or even your mobile phone and then use an online OCR utility to extract text out of that image.
Meet the best online OCR services that can help you convert images into text.
1. Google Docs – When you upload an image file or a scanned PDF to Google Docs, check the option that says “Convert text to Google Docs format” and Google Docs will automatically perform OCR on the file before saving it to your account.
If the OCR operation is successful, all the extracted text is stored as a new document else Google Docs will store your original image without any modification.

With Google Docs, you can perform OCR on images and PDFs as large as 2 MB, the text recognition accuracy is quite impressive and there are no limits on the number of files that you can process in a day. However, Google Docs won’t retain the original formatting of the document and the OCR engine almost fails with low-resolution images.
2. Abbyy FineReader – FineReader Online is a web-based OCR service that can instantly convert your PDF files and images into corresponding office file formats. This is an Abbyy service and therefore the character recognition accuracy is quite good.
Unlike the OCR engine in Google Docs that can only recognize printed text written Latin characters, FineReader can understand a much wider variety of languages. It even works with multilingual documents that have text written multiple languages.
A free account at FineReader Online will only let you convert a handful of images to text and you’ll have to shell out around $3 per 10 pages for additional conversions.
3. OnlineOCR.net – Online OCR, as the name suggests, is a cloud based OCR service that can handle all common images formats including scanned PDFs. If you have multiple images that you would like to convert to text in one go, you can put them all in a single zip file and upload it to Online OCR.
Of all the OCR services that I have tried so far, Online OCR has impressed me the most. The character recognition accuracy is quite good and the converted documents look like a replica of the original images. In my limited test with three different types of images, Online OCR was able to preserve the structure and formatting after the conversion in all the three case.

Like FineReader, Online OCR offers credits for converting around 5-6  images to text for free and after the limit is over, you’ll have to pay around $4 per 50 pages.
4. FreeOCR.com – If you ever need to extract plain text from an image or a scanned PDF file, Free OCR may be worth a try. The service requires no registration and you can handle up to 10 image uploads per hour.
Free OCR is like a graphical front-end for Google’s Tesseract OCR engine that is often considered as one of the most accurate text recognition engines around. However, Tesseract supports only a limited number of languages and it ignores most of the formatting of the scanned image.
5. OCR Terminal – OCR Terminal is one of the most mature online OCR services out there that not only supports images and scanned PDFs but even software screenshots.
For instance, if you ever get an error message on your computer, capture a screenshot, upload the image to OCR terminal and it will return you the entire error in plain text that you can copy-paste in emails or online forums.
OCR Terminal is internally powered by Abbyy’s OCR engine. A free account with OCR Terminal gets you 20 free conversions every month and you can pay around 7-9 ¢ per additional conversion.
6. OCR Online – Like FreeOCR, OCR Online doesn’t require any registration and you can translate up to 100 images to text in a single day. It also supports a large number of languages.
OCR Online offers good recognition accuracy and preserves most of the original formatting but what you’ll like most about this service is batch processing. You can upload a large number of files in one batch and it will output the results as one document.

Online OCR Software – A Comparison

[*] One obvious downside will all the above mentioned OCR software is that they work only with printed text, they cannot recognize characters from hand-written text.

Sounds coming out of your Hard Disk

Hard disk failure is possibly the worst thing that can happen to your computer and it often occurs without giving any warning signs.

Test Your Hard Drive for Impending Problems

You may however run certain tests on your computer beforehand to get an idea about the current condition of your hard disk. This should in turn help you decide whether a replacement drive is necessary or not.

Step 1: Check your hard disk for errors

All recent versions of Windows include a utility called Chkdsk.exe that can check your hard disk for any bad sectors.
You may either run Chkdsk from the command line (see details) or launch Windows Explorer, right click the drive that you wish to examine and choose Properties. Switch to the Tools tab and click the “Check Now” button under Error checking. Select “Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors” to perform a thorough disk check.

Step 2: Understand the sounds of your disk

Do you sometimes hear strange sounds coming out of the CPU box? Well, if the hard drive is making those sounds, it could be an alarming situation and your best bet would be that you turn off the computer before any further damage is done to the disk.
But how do you distinguish between sounds coming from a hard disk with noise that’s made by the fans or the power supply? Here’s a useful page where you can listen to recorded sounds of various hard drives that have lead to a crash. If your disk is making a similar sound, get a replacement quickly.

Step 3: Catch errors before they happen

Disk Checkup is a free hard disk monitoring utility that displays tons of diagnostic data about your disk. While the level of detail it provides may easily confuse even tech-savvy users, just ignore the numbers and keep the utility running in the background.
It monitors your disk’s temperature, read and write error rate, etc. and will alert you when the values of any of these parameters approach dangerous levels. These may be signs of an impending disk failure. Disk Checkup is free for personal use.

Step 4: Thoroughly test your Hard Disk

SeaTools is free diagnostic tool that can completely test your hard drive regardless of the OS installed on it. The tool is provided by Seagate but it works with non-Seagate  disk drives as well.
To get started, you need to download the ISO image of SeaTools for DOS and create a bootable CD. Now boot the computer with the CD in the drive, accept the license agreement and run a long test (the full scan). If any defects are found, a list will be offered at the end or after aborting the disk scan.
Other computer vendors /disk manufactures including Samsung, Hitachi, Toshiba (Fujitsu), Western Digital, Lenovo, Dell, etc.  too offer diagnostic tools that work only with their own brand of hard drives. If you are having frequent computer problems (like system hangs or fails to boot up), you may run these tools to confirm if the problems are hard drive related.
Important: While these tools can help you diagnose your hard drive’s health, they are still no good substitute for Regular Backups.

Soluto: Make widows start up faster...Very Nice!!!!

Does your Windows computer take really long to start-up?
Well, you are not alone with this problem but fortunately, with some minor tweaks, you can get your sluggish Windows to start much faster without re-installing Windows or adding any new hardware.
The logic is fairly simple. Your computer loads quite a few software programs and services during start-up (look at all the icons in your Windows System tray). If you can trim this list, your computer’s boot time will decrease.
I have been testing a free utility called Soluto and it helped reduce the start-up time of my Windows computer from 3.15 minutes to around 1.25 minutes. All this with a few easy clicks and without confusing the user with any technical jargon.

After you install Soluto, it sorts your start-up programs list into three categories:

• No-brainer – remove these programs from start-up with giving a second thought.
• Potentially removable – another list of start-up programs that may also be removed provided you know what these programs do.
• Required – Certain programs and services are required to run Windows properly and therefore should not be removed.

Depending upon the software app, you may then either choose “Pause” to completely remove that app from the start-up queue or choose “Delay” when you want the app to run automatically but not immediately at start-up. Soluto will launch the “delayed” app once the boot up is over and your system is idle.
You can also hover the mouse over any program name and Soluto will display the number of seconds that the app adds to the start-up time. And don’t bother about making mistakes because Soluto has a useful “Undo all” feature that will restore the start-up list to the original state with a click.

Once you are done classifying your start-up programs list, reboot the computer and you should notice a difference between the start-up time.
Where to download Soluto?
The official site for Soluto is soluto.com but in order to download the program, you should head over to mysoluto.com.
Alternatives to Soluto
If you are tech-savvy, you can also use a utility like Sysinternals Autoruns to manually prevent all the non-essential Windows processes and programs from running at start-up.
Just uncheck all the Autorun entries and Services that you don’t wish to load at startup and reboot your system. You’ll however need a separate program to get the “delay” feature which is so handy in Solute.

Volkswagen Audio Ad in Times of India

s morning, the readers of the Times of India (print edition) newspaper were in for a pleasant surprise. The newspaper carried an advertisement for Volkswagen on the last page that looked like a regular print ad but with a difference. As soon as people turned to the last page of the newspaper, the ad would start talking by itself.

Volkswagen Audio Ad in Times of India

The magic lies in a small speaker that activates itself when you open the last page of the newspaper. Suhel Banerjee, who captured a video of this ad, says that the audio clip goes on to play in an endless loop till you close the paper.
Reading the online reactions, most people seem to have been left impressed by Volkswagen’s marketing though the ad did create some confusion at one of the airports as Lakshmipathy Bhat points out:

That Volkswagen ad with audio chip caused a minor scare among the trolley crew in Bangalore Airport. Unclaimed paper with noise -- staff were nervy.

Update: Here’s a picture of the audio chip that’s fitted inside the newspaper

Gmail: Filter to Find your Most Important Emails

Your Gmail Inbox is overflowing with email messages. Some are newsletters that you are subscribed to, some are messages from friends and colleagues that you would like to read as soon as they arrive while the rest could be spam that managed to trick the built-in Gmail filters.

Focus on the Most Important Emails First!

When you only have a limited amount of time to process that long queue of unread messages, it is important that you prioritize your emails and defer reading stuff that is not very important and can wait (like those newsletters).
Here are two simple Gmail filters that will automatically move out all the low-priority emails out of your Inbox so that you can focus on the important ones. They should also come handy when you are checking emails on the go – the high-priority items will be delivered to your mobile device while everything else will stay in your Gmail account for you to follow up later.

1. Filter out emails that are not addressed to you

If your name is not in the TO: or CC: field of an email message, chances are that you may not have to worry too much about responding to that message.
The following filter will automatically move messages out of your Inbox to another folder that are of less-priority as they are not addressed to your directly.

• From: –you@email.com
• To: –you@email.com
• Has the words: cc:–you@email.com
• Skip the Inbox (Archive It)
• Apply the label: Not for me

If you have more than one active email address, you can either add them all to the above filter separated by the OR operator or setup another similar filter per address.
2. Move Bulk Emails to another folder
Bulk email messages are likely to contain words like “click here” or “unsubscribe” even if those hyperlinks are just a tactic of the spammer to confirm your email address. In either case, the existence of such words in the message can help us easily filter out bulk emails:

• Has the words: unsubscribe OR “click here”
• Skip the Inbox (Archive It)
• Apply the label: Bulk Mail

Not everything under the “bulk mail” folder will be spam as it will also match email newsletters that you are subscribed to. That said, email newsletters never require immediate attention so they safely reside in a folder other than your inbox.

Wolfram Alpha search Engine: Some Questions Can’t Be Answered by Google

Some Questions Can’t Be Answered by Google but done by Wolfram Alpha

1. Your Location

A query like “where am i” will reveal your IP address and your current geographic location. Alternate queries that will get the same information about your computer include “who am i” and “what is my ip.”
2. Date and Time
You would normally need an Excel spreadsheet and may have to learn some formulas to perform basic calculations involving date and time but not with Wolfram Alpha. The tool lets you work with dates using natural English (similar to Outlook Calendar).



If you are to calculate the number of days before your next holiday, use “how many days until <holiday name>”. You can subtract dates  like regular numbers or compute new dates with natural phrases like “second saturday of next month” or “now + 10 days.”
3. Food
Wolfram Alpha can instantly answer most of your food and nutrition related questions like how many calories are present in a bottle of Coke? Which is healthier – the french fries served at Burger King or the ones at McDonald’s?



4. Time Zones
You know that a query like “time in <city>” will display the current time of that city. This works for most search engines but Wolfram has an additional feature that works in reverse.
You can specify the time of any city and it will convert that time into your local timezone. This should be handy when a client suggests a meeting time using his timezone and you have to quickly figure out if that time works out for you.

Also see: A Less Confusing View of World Time Zones
5. Astronomy
If you are a fan of Astronomy, you’ll absolutely love Wolfram Alpha and it can compute the position of stars and planets for any given day.
The tool can tell you the exact dates for astronomical events like when the next solar eclipse will take place while a specific query like “solar eclipse in new york” will show you the date for the next eclipse that will be visible from New York.


6. Finance
Want to know the number of people who are working for a particular company. Wolfram Alpha can get this information and more using simple queries like “market cap of Apple” or “revenue of Google.” You may also use the tool to query past stock prices and indices.


7. Colors
What do you get when you pour some red paint in a bucket of yellow paint? What’s the HTML and RGB equivalent of Purple?

8. Comparisons
Wolfram|Alpha is an excellent tool for performing comparisons and it presents results in a neat table making it easy for you to interpret the data.
You may compare almost anything and everything from airports, universities, size of popular structures (Statue of Liberty vs Eiffel Tower), quantities (10 lb vs 12 kg), stock quotes, sales tax rates in various cities, sports teams, and even standard paper sizes.

9. Weather
Most search engines offer weather forecast for the next 7 or 10 days but with Wolfram Alpha, you can get historic weather conditions of a city as well for any given date.
And unlike Google which will only give you sunrise and sunset times for the next day, Wolfram Alpha can compute that information for any past and future date.


10. Understand Relations
This is one of my favorites. Put it any complex family relationship – like your mother’s sister’s son’s wife’s father – and Wolfram will map it into a genealogical tree making it easier for you make sense of that relation.

These are just some uses of the very-awesome Wolfram|Alpha. Do check this page for more examples and then go here to add Wolfram to your browser’s search box.

Google and Wolfram on the same page :

Firefox users can now use the brilliant Wolfram search engine alongside Google.
Google and Wolfram on the same page

This is possible through a new Firefox add-on that displays search results from Wolfram Alpha in a neat sidebar whenever you perform a search on the main Google website.
You can use this to compare Wolfram Search with Google and the nice part about the add-on is that it auto-hides Wolfram from Google pages where there are no Wolfram results available for a particular search query.
All results pages on Wolfram can be downloaded in PDF format. Give it a shot.
Compare Wolfram with Google