Bonkey is an open source, Java based backup application that can backup data to FTP, network drives and most storage devices, but it is specifically designed to be used with cloud storage solutions like Amazon S3 and Rackspace CloudFiles.

Paragon Net Burner is a software application that allows you to share optical drives such as CD/DVD or Blu-Ray drive over a network and remotely make the device available for use by other networked computers. Paragon Net Burner gives users the ability to not only read from the drive but also record CDs/DVDs/Blu-Ray without having a local burner device.

When something as big as the next edition of Windows is in the making and involves hundreds - probably thousands - of developers, information leaks are inevitable.

One Microsoft Journal blog owned by Francisco Martin Garcia, a Microsoft VIP tester, got hold of several slides stamped "Microsoft Confidential" that discuss key features of the next operating system. The slides, purported to be for hardware manufactures, reveals some key points:

Don’t like green? Then download Se7en Task Manager Modder, a portable application that allows you to change the color scheme of the graph, grid, CPU line, Memory Line, bar and digits in the Task Manager.

Here is a scenario: Say you want to write an email but rather than typing directly into the text box in your browser, you prefer to compose the message in a text editor and then copy the typed message back to the browser.

Want your text editor to look good while you code? Try Bend, an open source, text editor “dressed up to look sharp.”

Bend exploits XAML / WPF to render beautiful hardware accelerated text. The seamless tabbed bar at the top and the min/max/quit text in place of the regular buttons add to the beauty.

Early this month Google announced that they were going to move encrypted search from https://www.google.com to a new hostname because school authorities were having trouble keeping students off adult content. The transfer was completed last Friday.

Last Friday, history happened on Court 18 at Wimbledon tennis ground. The match that will never be forgotten from Wimbledon 2010 between American John Isner and Frenchman Nicolas Mahut, lasted 11 hours and 5 minutes and stretched over a period of 3 days. It was eventually concluded with John Isner winning the match and the fifth set at 70-68.

Why is Google the most popular search engine? Because of things like this: type “world cup” in Google and see what it brings.

uTFilterManager is an open source, standalone application that works in conjunction with uTorrent and allows setting up of pre-configured RSS feed filters and managing the same with ease.

The CyberLink DVD Suite 7 Centra combines 13 multi-media solutions for your surround-sound home theatre and entertainment centre. Enjoy full control with the CyberLink Power Ensemble: PowerDVD, Power Director, Power Producer and ten more high-grade tools let you play, author, edit, re-mix, manage, and burn high-definition videos, photos and music.

StudioLine Photo Classic Plus is an easy-to-use yet powerful management and editing application for digital photos. Images can be imported from camera, scanner and all popular file formats.

Massively popular photo sharing website Flickr has introduced a new option which allows photographers to publicly nominate their images for licensing by Getty Images, opening doors for new revenue opportunities for photographers.

In early 2009 we looked at some of the options we had for creating mobile version of a website. Back then we had quite a few different and good players operating.  They still do, but their terms have changed: Mofuse has closed the doors to free seekers, Swift is no longer accepting new signups and Wirenode started pushing ads to free accounts. Some odd new services that sprang up during the past few months aren’t even worth mentioning.

Skype is celebrating world cup football by offering free calls to any of the 32 playing nations. The offer is available for a month, during which you can call any mobile and landline numbers to the supported countries for no charges. After the first month, you’ll be charged the normal subscription rate.

Microsoft wants to make Bing your new entertainment hub. On Tuesday, the company hosted a Hollywood style, celebrity-laden event at the Soho House on Sunset Boulevard, California, to announce a variety of new entertainment features added to Bing.

Firefox 3.6.4 was released yesterday, and as already published, brought added stability to the browser with the so called “out of process plugin” (OOP) architecture that allows plugins to run on their own process. This improve the overall Firefox stability and security.

Microsoft is determined to leave the ghost of the past behind with Internet Explorer 9, and they are damn serious about it. Earlier this year the Redmond company demonstrated some awesome capabilities in the upcoming browser loaded with hardware acceleration, HTML5 and some big tweaks in the JavaScript engine. Today the third release of IE9 preview is out.

Terrible news for SHOUTcast lovers who use VLC to stream music from their favorite stations. The SHOUTcast module is no longer available in the recently released VLC media player 1.1.0. If you have upgraded, you must have already noticed this. The company has blamed AOL Corporation for “hindering Open Source Software”.

After the epic failure of Do Not Disturb (DND) and National Do Not Call (NDNC) Registry, subscribers have only one route to respite – spam SMS blockers. While this wouldn’t block telemarketers from calling you it will certainly help prevent them from inundating your inbox with spam messages.

The Mozilla Blog reports that a new version of Firefox – version 3.6.4 has been released and can be downloaded from the Firefox website. Firefox 3.6.4 has an interesting feature built into it – crash protection.

Anti piracy witch hunt took a new turn this week when the search giant Google was served with a cease-and-desist order by the British Phonographic Industry (BPI), Britain's biggest recording industry association and one of the forerunners of copyright enforcement and lobbying in Britain. The order demanded the search engine to take down links to nine "one-click hosting" sites, each of which hosts thousands of illegal songs.

Stardocks, in collaboration with the Centre for Digital Music at Queen Mary, University of London, has developed a vuvuzela killer to filter out the annoying buzz from world cup matches, if you happen to watch the game on your computer.

Software publisher Ashampoo has been regularly carrying out promotional campaigns where they make products available to the public for free, a move that has turned them into a ‘household’ name. In their latest promotional drive customers are able to acquire a free license of their new screen capture software Ashampoo Snap 3.

The word is out in the blogosphere that Google is readying to launch a paid content service to be called "Newspass" by year end. The news was reported in an Italian daily La Repubblica last week.

Private BitTorrent trackers are very popular among file sharers usually because users in these networks get better download speeds and occasionally carry rare collections not found on public torrent trackers.

I love simple games. Games that are short and easy to play yet throw in enough challenges to make it engrossing and entertaining at the same time. The “Dismantling” game series is right up my alley.

1. 9 New Uses For Your Old iPhone: Plan on upgrading to the latest iPhone 4? Great, but what do you do with your old iPhone or iPod Touch that now looks old, useless, and outdated? You could sell it or you could use it as a universal remote, a secondary storage device, or turn it into a Wifi phone. Tom’s Hardware tells you how to get the most out of your old iPhone.

Want to watch YouTube videos in the best available quality? There is an option for that. As Alex Chitu showed, you can just click on the drop-down menu for switching between formats, click on "Settings" and enable "Always play HD when switching to full screen (when available)". You can also change playback quality settings from this page.

Removing an object from a photo is never an easy task. It depends a lot on the content of the photograph, the object you want to remove and its surroundings, and of course, the skill of the user.

With mounting pressure from anti-piracy outfits on governments to implement stricter copyright laws and record labels suing people left and right, millions of file-sharers have decided to protect their privacy by going anonymous. In Sweden alone an estimated 500,000 Internet subscribers are hiding their identities. Many of these use PPTP-based VPNs such as The Pirate Bay’s Ipredator or Relakks.

SSD Tweaker is a portable, open source software gives you centralized access to all the popular SSD configuration points for both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7. Users can tweak various options including Windows Defrag, the indexing service, prefetching, and more without the need to dig through various menus.

Inspired by Google’s encrypted search option, EFF and the Tor Project today  launched a public beta of a new Firefox extension called HTTPS Everywhere that redirects all HTTP traffic to HTTPS for supported sites.

The Chromium blog announced that the latest Google Chrome developer build for Windows and Mac includes a plugin that allows viewing of PDF files without Adobe Reader plugin. Google says it has decided to dump the traditional Adobe plugin due to issues in compatibility, performance, and security.

A major but rarely advertised feature of Internet Explorer 8 is the way the browser handles creation of new tabs. Most browsers, including Opera, Firefox and IE version prior to IE8, consolidates all tabs under a single browser process. Because of this a single rogue website or a buggy code on a page can bring down the entire browser, which happens all too often.

I hate restarting my computer. It is not because of the time wasted or the interruption; it’s because of inconvenience. With 30 to 40 browser tabs opened, articles half written, a download in progress, and dozens of other things that I’m juggling around, I can’t afford to restart my computer. It’s too much trouble to save every window, session and work and start all over again.

Windows Vista and its successor has some great tools that give users and administrators the power to troubleshoot system stability issues and monitor performance. One of these tools is the Reliability Monitor.

The recently launched Google encrypted search is causing problems for school authorities. Schools are no longer able to block queries for adult content as the secure channel makes it impossible to monitor traffic to Google on school networks and make content blockers ineffective. Apparently students are having a time of their lives.

A breathtaking new image taken by astronauts on the International Space Station clearly shows the various layers of Earth's atmosphere during sunset over the Indian Ocean.

Google is testing out a new feature that will enable netizens to get breaking news stories in the form of user uploaded videos on YouTube, and in the process turn the biggest video sharing site into a crowd-sourced video news library.

Once in a while I stumble across an application software that is pure genius. OnTopReplica is one.

Sometime you need to monitor the progress of some job the computer is doing, but you have other tasks to keep you busy – write an article, code, draft a presentation etc. You can keep the job that needs to be monitored “always on top”. But if the job window is big you can’t stick it on top because it will keep getting in your way. So what you do? You use OnTopReplica.

Hiding jokes, goofs and gags in programs, commonly known as Easter eggs, is a popular form of ‘entertainment’ programmers like to indulge themselves in. Google is pretty good in this department. Little tricks are found aplenty on Google’s various products and subtle jokes show up when performing search on innocent keywords.

Microsoft Bing Map has an awesome set of ‘Map Apps’ that offers more conventional functionality to simple driving directions. Among these include a Gas Prices App that shows how much gas costs at nearby stations, a Parking Finder App that shows where parking spots are available, traffic on streets and even a Roadside Sculptures and Urban Graffiti App that shows weird things you can see on roadside along your way.

When you delete files on a Windows PC using the command line, the files bypass the Recycle Bin and get permanently deleted from the disk. Now I don’t have a problem with that because I’m a Shift+Delete person and I don’t use the command line very often either. But system administrators who regularly use the text interface to manage computers on a network would love to have this feature.

Acronis, a provider of HDD backup, disaster recovery and security solutions for Windows, has announced the release of a new free disk monitoring tool called Acronis Drive Monitor.

We have seen application launchers of all shapes and sizes. Here is a new launcher with a new shape.

Radian is a radial application launcher. The launcher is triggered by holding down the right mouse button for a few seconds to reveal a small circular ring. The ring is divided into four sections – each section slides open a radial shaped slice.

Musicy is an open source Internet radio station player that allows you to listen and rip streaming station at the same time, perfect for those moments when the radio starts playing a beautiful song and you wish to have it in your collection.

iSkysoft FLV Converter for Windows can convert popular video formats to FLV or vice versa and extract audio from video files. FLV Video Converter is capable of converting most standard videos files and gives a full support to High Definition videos. It also empowers you to crop, clip, adjust video effect, add watermark and add subtitle.

1. Everyone on TV reads the same newspaper: Everybody on TV and in movies reads the same newspaper, it seems. And they've been reading that standard newspaper prop for decades. At a guess: paranoid studio lawyers don't want to use real newspapers because they think that they might get a copyright complaint from the paper (despite this incidental use being clearly fair use), so they insist that set-dressers all use the same prop that's fully rights-cleared. [via BoingBoing]

TriX is a one of a kind productivity tool for Windows which brings dozens of commands to your fingertips and performs several simple tasks with a click of a mouse button.

X-Setup Pro is a tweaking application for Windows that allows you to easily change over 2,000 settings that are normally hidden inside configuration files and registry seetings. Beside these hidden settings, it also allows you to easily change different settings in a consistent way, which are normally scattered across Windows.

Adobe Flash Player 10.1 final is now officially available for Windows, Mac, and Linux operating systems. Those who are running the Release Candidate of Flash 10.1 that Adobe made available on April can now upgrade to the “stable” release (yes, an oxymoron, I know) from the download page.

Palringo is a multi platform, multi protocol-supporting Instant Messaging client for mobile phones and desktops. With Palringo you can login to several IM networks simultaneously and chat with your buddies under a single program window.

ISOBuddy is a software that can convert almost any image file format to the universally accepted and standard ISO format. Like the previously featured AnyToISO, ISOBuddy can handle proprietary and obscure file formats like GI, NRG, CDI, MDF, IMG, B5I, B6I, DMG, PDI, BIN and CCD and convert them to ISO. The software can also erase re-writable optical disks and burn ISO image files to CD/DVD.

Getting Started with Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) is a comprehensive beginners guide for the Ubuntu operating system. It features comprehensive guides, How Tos and information on anything you need to know after first installing Ubuntu.

GreenForce-Player is a portable media player that borrows its looks from VLC media player. Unfortunately, the similarity doesn’t go far. The player offers very limited functionality when it comes to playing files. So why did I, you may ask, chose to write about this player? That’s because of a very unique feature this media player has: you are able to password protect any media file.

Google has announced the completion of a new and improved way of indexing the web called Caffeine. You may have heard the term because Google revealed it back in August 2009. Today, Caffeine is live on Google servers.

On May last, the producers of the Oscar Award winner "The Hurt Locker" had filed a suit in the Columbia District Court, against 5000 BitTorrent users for illegally downloading the movie. Voltage Pictures, the company that produced ‘Hurt Locker’ doesn't know the names of the defendants yet, who have been identified only by their IP addresses.

Soon you will be able to snap pictures with your cell phone and mail them to your printer and have the printouts waiting for you when you get home. This is how HP envisions the future with their new ePrint technology.

Microsoft Office Web Apps, the online office suite, which was under beta for a while has finally opened its doors to users all over the world. Office Web Apps is posed to become the biggest threat to Google Docs, and its killer feature could be the integration with Microsoft’s cloud storage service Skydrive which comes with a staggering 25GB of free disk space.

AnyBizSoft PDF to Word Converter is an efficient application to convert Adobe PDF files to well-formatted Microsoft Word documents. I have used this software before and I’m impressed with it’s looks, quality and speed. It’s definitely one of the better PDF to Word converter I have tried. The best part of AnyBizSoft PDF to Word Converter is that it retains the original text, layouts, images, tables and hyperlinks in the generated Word documents.

NASA wants to send a picture of you to space. No, seriously. If you upload a head shot of yourself to their Face in Space website, your picture will be flown to the International Space Station in one of the last two remaining space shuttle flights.

If you love airplanes and have a fascination for aviation you will love the image section on FlighGlobal.com.

Have you tried changing the default program association for a particular file type in Windows 7? If you have, you must have noticed that the “File Type Association” tab under “Folder Options” in Windows Explorer Tools menu is missing. Those who are aware know that it has been relocated to Control Panel > Programs >Default Programs > Make a file type always open in a specific program.

RecycleBinEx is a software that adds great functionality to the simple designed, poor and neglected Recycle bin of Windows. It extends and enhances the Windows recycle bin, and let you use many extra features that Microsoft never put in.

With constant privacy policy changes, murky details and entangled information sharing settings, Privacy Defender might just be the solution users are looking for.

VMware Guest Console is an incredibly powerful application from VMWare Labs that allows you to control the Guest operating system running on multiple virtual machines simultaneously. You can manage their processes, files, snapshots, run programs and so on, all remotely from the host.

Do you open large number of tabs in the background, so many that the page you are viewing starts to crawl because your Internet connection is unable keep up with simultaneously loading web pages?

Those who haven’t tried Google Docs before, can give the cloud based office suite a trial run over at Google Docs Demo. Google launched this new site today which allows users to try full-fledged versions of its word processor, spreadsheet, and drawing tool without a Google account.

When Partition Magic was under PowerQuest it was under active development – it was regularly updated and new and useful features were added with every release. Then Symantec purchased the application in 2003, and since then there has not been a new release. On December 2009 Symantec officially announced that it has no plans on continuing the product, not that anybody was expecting the company to revive the project after 6 years.

Ever wondered how much power is required to run a desktop computer or laptop? Freeware software Microsoft Joulemeter will give you the answer.

Xilisoft HD Video Converter is a commercial video converter tool that can handle HD video formats such as AVCHD (mts, m2ts), H.264/AVC, MKV, MPEG-2 (ts), DivX, HD WMV, MPEG-4 and Quick Time. Besides converting among HD video formats, the Video Converter can also extract and convert audio files, capture pictures from various videos, make videos out of pictures with JPG, GIF, BMP or PNG extensions and even set the output file size.

SAP Crystal Presentation Design, formerly known as Xcelsius Present software, is an easy to use data visualization software that can create eye catching interactive Flash based presentations from ordinary spreadsheets.

What is Partition Alignment?

To understand what partition alignment is we should first see how disk clusters and sectors are arranged on a hard drive. Here you can see a simplified scheme of partitioning.

A lot of people seem to find the default Opera theme ugly. This was true for Opera 9.x but the latest skin on Opera 10.x is pretty sleek. So if you are a Firefox user and wish to skin your browser to give it the looks of Opera, you have two choices.

Google is know for it’s minimalist design and clean homepage. But that’s about to change. Taking a cue from Bing, Google today rolled out a new feature that allows users to add their own background wallpaper image to the search homepage.

Symantec Corp recently unveiled a new initiative called Norton Everywhere that attempts to take Norton beyond the PC and extend trust to new devices and consumer applications. The initiative spans the areas of mobile safety, web safety across any device and embedded services on smart devices. A part of this initiative is Norton DNS, a new public DNS provider service.

WinUtilities Pro is yet another commercial system cleaning/tweaking application for Windows that is currently up for grabs. This application is a comprehensive suite of tools that help you optimize your system performance, remove unneeded files and delete internet tracks. Additionally, WinUtilities Pro has a startup manager, secure file deletion, Application Protect, Parent Control and Monitoring, Files Tools and more.

VMWare is a popular virtualization software for Windows. When you create a virtual machine on VMWare, the application saves all the settings associated with the VM on a plain text configuration file having the extension .VMX. The various settings on this configuration file can be edited through the ‘Edit virtual machine settings’ option on VMMare products like VMWare Player and VMWare Workstation.

GiMeSpace Desktop Extender is a sort of virtual desktop manager. I use the words ‘sort of’ because unlike typical virtual desktop applications that create alternate desktop environment, GiMeSpace Desktop Extender creates a horizontally scrolling desktop that give you seamless unlimited desktop space, so to speak.

XBMC Media Center, which we reviewed earlier, recently announced that they will be no longer supporting the Xbox platform.

Last week I showed you an old trick using which you can hide one image inside another image in such a way that the hidden image is revealed only when you select the image on Internet Explorer. Today I’m going to show you another trick.

The developers at Opera Software pushed out a new version of their flagship product just months after they publicly released Opera 10.50. While not a significant milestone, the new Opera 10.60 alpha 1 boasts 50% speedier performance over their last release, version 10.53, among numerous other fixes and UI improvements.

If you use Google Image Search to download the full sized version of images from the results page, you must have noticed that Google makes it a two-click process. The first click take you to the original web page from where the image comes. Only on the second click you get to download the full sized image as it appears on the page.