Nero 9 essential is basic, a very basic burning program, supporting only disc burning and CD/DVD copying operations. It supports only data disc burning. No audio CDs, no video CDs or DVDs. You can’t rip CDs or burn disc image. You can’t access any of the advanced features. Even the burning speed selection is limited. 

There is nothing to review about this program. There is not much to show either.

And what about the bloat? The size of the installer is 55 MB, and upon installation it occupies 130 MB of disk space. 130 goddamn Mega Bytes!! And when it’s running it gobbles up 100 MB of RAM.

Please skip this program and choose any one from these.

Quite obviously, the news didn’t go down well with users, who suddenly found themselves stranded, betrayed. Features such as tags and clippings will no longer work. Say goodbye to authenticated feeds and no sub-folders for you. Paying users however, will continue to enjoy the benefits.

When FeedDemon began supporting online synchronization with Google Reader apart from Newsgator’s online reader, everybody rejoiced for providing a choice. Now I see where this was coming from; Newsgator has been planning the shutdown all along. But for the users it came totally out of the blue.

FeedDemon has been my favorite RSS reader, and the best one in the market. Now if you will excuse me, I have to go migrate my Newsgator account.

Mozilla is also preparing a new site http://www.onebillionplusyou.com/ which isn’t yet live, to celebrate the big moment. You will find more information and banners like the one below at http://www.spreadfirefox.com/fxbillion.

This one billion number is obviously for all the versions of Firefox, since it was launched in 2002, although the Firefox name officially took hold in 2004. It’s still impressive.

Microsoft also owns an open source project hosting website, similar to SourgeForge, called CodePlex. In fact, the open source Wiki engine, WikiPlex, that Microsoft recently released is the underlying engine that runs CodePlex. WikiPlex’s code has been rewritten and released under the MS-PL (Microsoft Public License), allowing developers to use it for their own application.

WikiPlex is a regular expression based wiki engine that allows developers to integrate a wiki experience into an existing .NET application seamlessly and with little effort. WikiPlex is ideal if you are already a .NET developer. As WikiPlex is used by CodePlex, you can rest assured that it has been thoroughly tested in real-world scenarios. CodePlex hosts over 10,000 projects at the time of writing this.

[via Softpedia]

2. How To Hijack 'Every iPhone In The World': If you receive a text message on your iPhone any time after Thursday afternoon containing only a single square character, Charlie Miller would suggest you turn the device off. Quickly.

3. NASA Apollo 11 Manual: This manual looks at the evolution and design of the mighty Saturn V rocket, the Command and Service Modules, and the Lunar Module. It describes the space suits worn by the crew and their special life support and communications systems. We learn about how the Apollo 11 mission was flown - from launch procedures to 'flying' the Saturn V and the 'LEM', and from moon walking to the earth re-entry procedure. Exactly the thing you need to service your very own Apollo rocket. Also see, how to build your own Apollo 11 computer.

4. 419 Eater: A collection of letters exchanged between Nigerian Advanced Fee Fraud scammers and scam baiters. A hilarious collection of stories of scammers getting pwned! Check out the Letters section, the Trophy Room and if you are interested, the scam baiting tips they have.

5. GOUGELLE: Google as in the 19th century.

The monitor supports 300cd/m2 of brightness, 30,000:1 contrast ratio and 5ms response speed.

[via Aving]

Paragon System Backup powerful System Restore can be used in place of the default Windows system restore tool to undo any harmful changes to your computer and restore your computer’s settings to an earlier date On the System Backup 2010 console, both automatic and manual snapshots are available.

For easy management, each snapshot has a label (created date by default) and a sign indicating whether it is standard (contains all on-disk information) or lightweight (a standard snapshot with no media files). 

System Backup 2010 also offers a bootable recovery environment on the on-disk snapshot storage. To activate it you have to press F6 at the system startup. The Recovery Environment can help you recover your data and settings if your computer fails to boot.

The software also includes a Recovery CD that enables you to boot your computer from and recover your valuable data in case of a hard disk malfunction, a virus attack, or a system failure. The Recovery CD image is integrated into the software. You just need to burn it on to a CD. 

Paragon System Backup 2010 is going to be a commercial product. But for a limited time period, Paragon is offering free download of Paragon System Backup 2010 Release Candidate. If you are interested in this, head to the offer page before it expires.

Border Skin requires no installation. Just unzip it and run the executable to transform all window borders to the Aero look. Every effect the software enables on the border can be turned on or off by the user. So you can enable only transparency without reflection, or adjust the blur level to a desired value or simply turn it off. The software also includes a great number of skins with various shades of color.

Be aware, that any eye candy on Windows is heavy on the resources. Border Skin consumes about 50 MB of system memory but the performance is generally smooth and acceptable.

Integrated Desktop Calendar: VueMinder Calendar integrates a monthly Desktop Calendar into the Windows desktop. This isn’t a mere image of the calendar or something but an interactive, simplified version of the Main Window. You can navigate through days and months and view events. You can even create new events, or edit existing ones or delete them right on the integrated calendar. The Desktop Calendar's size, position, and transparency can be adjusted.

Multiple Calendars: On VueMinder you can add multiple public calendars, such as holidays for different countries, BBC Radio schedule, religious calendar, astronomical events calendar, solar eclipse calendar and so on. You can also create your own multiple calendars to categorize your events. For example, create a 'Birthdays' calendar for getting birthday reminders. These calendars can be quickly toggled on and off in the main view so that they don’t clutter.

Subscribing to Calendars: You can subscribe to any online calendar that follows the Standard iCalendar Format. If the calendar requires user authentication, there is provision to enter your login information.

Creating Events: Events can be added without even needing to display the main VueMinder Calendar through Windows system tray icon. You can quickly reschedule events by dragging and dropping them to a different date or time slot. If your event is a recurring one, you can specify a recurrence pattern for the event. The pattern can be either daily, weekly, monthly or even yearly. It can have specific start and stop time, specific date range, occur at a certain weekday etc. The flexibility is wonderful.

Backup and Restore: VueMinder provides automatic daily or manual backups and ability to restore calendar from saved backups.

Fully Customizable Interface: The calendar is fully customizable – change font type, size, color, background color etc. You can change the first day of the week and adjust the number of days or weeks that are displayed in the Calendar View. If your weekends are generally free of tasks, you can “compress” the weekend to save space on the calendar or allow more space for your weekdays. You can also toggle on and off various panes on the program’s main window.

Keyboard Shortcuts: VueMinder supports a number of keyboard shortcuts to create events, go to a date, and other common windows shortcuts like copy/paste and search. Unfortunately, these aren’t customizable.

The Pro version of VueMinder provides even more features like getting reminders by email and SMS, exporting calendar to Excel, syncing with Microsoft Outlook calendar, publishing calendars on the web for sharing with others, themes and more customizability options. If you can afford the 40 odd dollars, it’s worth every penny.

Unfortunately, the horror doesn’t end here. Quoting from the review at DLR,

When I booted into my Hannah Montana desktop I was greeted by two horrific things. The first was some cheesy music with her singing something about “the best of both worlds” or whatever. To me it was the worst of all worlds. Ugh. And the audio didn’t end. It just kept looping, over and over although she did seem to stop singing. But the cheesy pop guitar continued on and on and on…

The second thing I noticed was the color purple. Or perhaps it’s a dark pink. I really can’t tell which. I’d lean toward purple. Or would violet be the right color? Frankly, does anybody really care? Regardless of what the actual color is, it’s a very garish desktop. If I were going to continue using Hannah Montana Linux, I would surely change the heinous wallpaper. But then that would probably defeat the purpose of using this distro in the first place. Never mind.

And just for the information, Hannah Montana Linux is based on Kubuntu. It doesn’t have Gimp or OpenOffice or not even KOffice. It also doesn’t have any special Hannah Montana application, whatever that might be, just Hannah Montana wallpapers and customized Hannah Montana icons in puke-inducing colors.

And if you have kids who are crazy over Hannah, please don’t show this article to them.

ItsHidden provides complete privacy and it’s 128 bit encryption ensures that there is no third party snooping on your activities.

“It has been created to put some rights back in the favor of the user and that includes us. There are so many bodies, mostly unelected that seem to have full access to the most intimate of online details with little or no justification and more importantly, no evidence.”, says David from ItsHidden.

The service encrypts the connection between the user and ItsHidden’s servers and prevents anyone from reading this data as it is sent or received. We were further assured that no data logs are kept of the user’s transfers. The best news is of course that it’s totally free, and they hope to keep it like this in the future.

A service such as this cannot hope to remain free for eternity. When word of this gets out and thousands of news users flood into the network, their bandwidth cost is going to skyrocket and the load on their servers will become unsustainable. ItsHidden is of course, aware of this.

“It is a free service, we will of course have to limit in some way eventually to stop the whole lot collapsing, but we will always have a free account. The paid account would be geared at about $5 and will add port forwarding and other features,” David said.

During the BETA phase the service uses shared IP-addresses, but once they have completed more testing ItsHidden will be able to issue static IPs. The servers are all located in The Netherlands at present, but they will spread to other locations once the service is out of BETA.

Let’s hope for the best.

[via TorrentFreak]

Apparently, they can’t decide whether to keep the tab bar above the address bar like in Opera or below. So they prepared two mockups with both. Below is a mockup with the tab bar at bottom as usual.

0

The second one shows the tab bar below.

Positives

• Save Vertical Space
• Efficiency/Remove Visual Complexity - Right now the tabs have to be connected to something. So we are adding an extra visual element for them to connect to.
• Shorter Mouse Distance to Page Controls

Negatives

• Breaks Consistency/Familiarity - Moving things confuses existing users.
• Title is MIA - With the space removed from the titlebar you only get the truncated version in the tab.
• Longer Mouse Distance to Tabs - Takes longer to mouse to a tab.
• Lost Space - Sandwiched in between the application icon and the window widgets you lose some space.

Firefox 4.0 will also feature a Combo Stop/Refresh/Go Button. Instead of separate buttons these will be combined into one. The button also changes color depending upon your actions.

• It goes green when you start typing
• Blends with the location bar when at rest.
• Turns blue on hover.
• Turns red when a page is loading.

[via Mashable]

Note: Please follow the instructions given on the theme author’s page. Some themes include additional resources like dock application, styler bars, sidebar skins and such, necessary to achieve the complete transformation. General instructions on how to apply Windows Vista visual style is provided at the end of the article.

SteelFlash

Windows Se7en for Vista

Aero Diamond

Aero Blue

Aurorarion Darkside vR2

Clearlooks for Vista

Clearscreen Sharp for Vista

Erubescence

LIM Leopard

Lumen VS

LumenS for Vista

Maxclear

Media Center Theme

PerpetualV2

AeroVG Theme for Windows Vista

ProjectX 2

Snow Leopard

UltimateDark

Vagia's G Revolution

VUbuntu for Vista

Windows 8 Professional Edition

Wood

Indigo for Windows Vista

Illuminatis VisualStyle

Luna -blue for Vista: This isn’t exactly beautiful, but I’m including it because the default Windows XP Luna theme has been accurately ported to Vista. Gives a nostalgic feeling.

How to apply custom visual styles in Windows Vista?

1. Download either NiwradSoft UxTheme Patcher or VistaGlazz and run the application to patch the uxtheme.dll file of Windows Vista.
2. Download the ZIP file containing the theme from the author’s page and unzip the contents.
3. Open the directory C:\Windows\Resources\Themes and copy the extracted folder here. (The copied folder should contain the theme file and the Shell folder.)
4. Now right click on the desktop and click Personalize.
5. Click on the tab Appearance. Under the item Color Schemes you will find all the themes you copied to the “Theme” directory.
6. Select one to apply.

Visikid consist of a client application which runs on a computer running Windows. This application collects information such as websites visited and the amount of time spent on these sites, applications accessed etc and uploads these information to Visikid’s online server. The parent can login to the online account and monitor their child’s computer and online usage, in real time, from their workplace or practically anywhere.

The application is password protected and cannot be disabled by the child. In fact, it’s so paranoid that it prompts for password each time you try to access it’s menu items from the system tray. Tasks like disabling it temporarily, changing preferences or exiting the application requires you to enter the password, each time and every time.

Apart from child monitoring, Visikid is ideal for monitoring oneself and keeping track of one’s computer habits for analysis or self restriction. You can see how much time you spent on each site and the total amount of time you spent on your computer.

The free plan of Visikid is functional but restricts viewing of statistics for just one day. Upgrading to the full version of the program allows you to access data for all time. The cost of upgrading is $39 per year or $5 per month.

Note: The application is in Portuguese, but after installation it prompt you to select the language. Change it to English.

Here are steps in detail:

Copy files using Windows Easy Transfer

1. Insert the Windows 7 DVD while running Windows XP. If the Windows 7 installation window opens automatically, close it.

2. Open Windows Explorer and browse to the DVD drive on your computer and click migsetup.exe in the Support\Migwiz directory.

3. The Windows Easy Transfer window opens. Click Next.

4. Select An external hard disk or USB flash drive.

5. Click “This is my old computer”. Windows Easy Transfer scans the computer.

6. You can also determine which files should be migrated by selecting only the user profiles you want to transfer, or by clicking Customize.

7. Enter a password to protect your Easy Transfer file, or leave the box blank, and then click Save.

8. Browse to the external location on the removable media where you want to save your Easy Transfer file, and then click Save.

Use the Windows 7 DVD to upgrade

9. Start Windows 7 Setup by browsing to the root folder of the DVD in Windows Explorer, and then double clicking setup.exe.

10. Accept the license terms and click Next.

11. Click Custom to perform an upgrade to your existing Windows installation.

Note: When you perform a custom installation of Windows 7, files that were used in the earlier version of Windows are stored in a Windows.old folder.

The folders that are stored in the Windows.old folder contain some files that you used in the earlier version of Windows. The type of files that are stored depends on your computer. We recommend that you always back up any important files before you install a new operating system.

12. Select the partition where you would like to install Windows. To move your existing Windows installation into a Windows.old folder and replace the operating system with Windows 7, select the partition where your current Windows installation is located.

13. Proceed with the installation as usual.

Copy files to the destination computer

14. Insert the removable media where you have copied Windows XP settings.

15. Go to Start > All Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Windows Easy Transfer.

16. The Windows Easy Transfer window opens. Click Next.

17. Click An external hard disk or USB flash drive.

18. Click This is my new computer.

19. Click Yes, browse to the location where the Easy Transfer file was saved and open it.

20. Click Transfer to transfer all files and settings. You can also determine which files should be migrated by selecting only the user profiles you want to transfer, or by clicking Customize.

Post Installation Cleanup

1. To reclaim the disk space, you can delete the Windows.old directory using the Disk Cleanup system tool by following these steps: Click Start >  All Programs >  Accessories > System Tools > Disk Cleanup.

2. Click Clean up system files. Previous installations of Windows are scanned.

3. Select Previous Windows installations and any other categories of files you want to delete.

4. Click OK and then click Delete Files.

[via Microsoft.com]