Google Earth has always been a great tool to explore the world. But now you can use it to explore weather patterns around the globe too. A new update for Google Earth has just been released that projects images of rain, snow and other weather patterns over the areas as it’s actually happening. Unlike the imagery, weather reports are real time. Of course, it wouldn’t make sense to show stale weather information.
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Comodo Programs Manager is the latest free software to join the ever growing Comodo’s product family. Comodo Programs Manager is designed to help you manage your Windows operating system by providing you invaluable tools for program and drivers uninstallation, windows tweaker, malware scanner, and Windows updates manager.
Lifextender is a free, open source application that can remove advertisements from recorded TV shows that were recorded either through Windows Media Center or any TV recording software. Lifeextender can be used both as a standalone application and as a plug-in for Windows Vista and Windows 7 Media Center.
KernelEx is a fascinating open source project that aims to resurrect a dead operating system. KernelEx enables machines running Windows 98 and Me to run applications designed to be used on Windows XP and 2000. The software “patch” adds a compatibility layer to the older operating system that implements missing API calls used by newer applications that are absent from Windows 98 and Windows ME.
Kludget Engine is a widget engine for the Windows platform that enables Windows users to run MacOS’s Dashboard widgets. Although Kludgets Engine draws inspiration from MacOS’s Dashboard it brings some of the better features from Yahoo’s Widget Engine, Microsoft Gadget, Google Desktop, and Opera Widgets .
Still struggling your way around the Office Ribbon interface that was introduced in Office 2007 and continued to Office 2010? Microsoft is here is help. A new resource has been made available for free download by Microsoft that is designed to help customers upgrading from Office 2003 or earlier to Office 2010, to get familiarized with the new Office interface.
System Silencer is a helpful little utility that can perform a multitude of different actions after your computer goes idle. On a typical modern operating system, usually the only actions a computer can perform when it’s idling are turning off monitor and hard disk to save power or launching the screensaver. System Silencer goes beyond that.
Sometime ago Google introduced a new way to read Google Reader – Google Reader Play. On Google Reader Play you can browse the news in slideshows, view pictures and videos and read popular stories in comforting white text over black. Unfortunately, you can’t use Google Reader Play to read your subscription, only stories recommended by some algorithm which limits it’s usefulness, if any.
CleverPrint is a printing application that enables users to control how and what they want to print. It’s smarter than your average printer software and offers a handful of tools to customize and clean up your documents before sending them to the printer. CleverPrint can reduce your printing costs by up to 50%, they claim.
Did you know you can embed images in HTML pages or blogs, right there within the page, without linking them to an external server? That means no uploading to any file server. The image data can be embedded right into the page. This is possible using data URI.
Google allows you to download reports from your Analytics account as CSV sheets which you can open in any spreadsheet program like Microsoft Excel. This is useful when you wish to keep an offline record or carry trend analysis upon the data. If you do that quite often, there is a way by which you can skip the entire step of logging into your Analytics account from a browser, generating a report and downloading it to your computer. Instead, you can import that data directly into Excel from within Excel.
Latvian programmer and geek Peteris Krumins along with his American partner James Halliday are working on an pretty neat project called StackVM. Using StackVM users will be able to access and run virtual machines right within their browser, something like Microsoft is doing on their Windows 7 test drive site, only much more accessible and without requiring special plug-ins. StackVM will even let people embed virtual machines in their blogs!
Microsoft is offering users plenty of resources and guides for their latest Office product – Microsoft Office 2010. Most of them are online, but two of them are available as ebooks and available free of cost. First Look Microsoft Office 2010 by Katherine Murray was released back in January. Somehow, I missed the story. So here it – download in PDF or XPS .
SpeedCrunch is an open source, cross platform calculator designed for power users who struggle with formulas like volume of sphere and surface area of a cone. SpeedCrunch’s built in help system containing mathematical formulas, physical constants and functions ensures that you arrive at the correct result each time you hit Enter without having to memorize any 18 digit number.
Forget personal cell phone towers . Forget even laser guns . If you have the moolah you can now launch your very own satellite. Price: $8000 only. The age of Personal Satellite is here. Planet Earth’s Interorbital's TubeSat Personal Satellite (PS) Kit is a low-cost alternative to the CubeSat, another private satellite project started in 1999 to help universities, companies and even government organization to perform space science and exploration at fraction of the cost. CubeSats could each be made and launched for an estimated $65,000 – $80,000 dollars, a price tag far lower than most satellite launches. Planet Earth does it for even lower - $8000.
Security experts and fanboys can argue as long as they want upon the question of the most vulnerable (or secure) operating system in the world. But here, we have a clear winner. Damn Vulnerable Linux (DVL) is a Linux distribution that is riddled with security holes. It is everything a good Linux distribution isn't, the developers explain. Its developers have spent hours stuffing it with broken, ill-configured, outdated, and exploitable software that makes it vulnerable to attacks. That’s because DVL isn't built to run on your desktop - it's a learning tool for security students.
System Nucleus is an all-in-one, all powerful Windows administration software that serves as the “nucleus” of your entire computer system. System Nucleus packs more than 10 different system utilities such as system audit, backup, disk management, startup manager and more. The aim of the software is to provide all essential Windows maintenance tool under a single roof.
When you create a Word document or a PowerPoint presentation on a computer that uses a particular set of fonts, those fonts may not look the same when you open the same document on another computer that has different fonts installed. You can solve this problem by embedding the fonts in the Word document or PowerPoint presentation. Microsoft Word and PowerPoint supports embedding of fonts that do not have license restrictions that prevent embedding.
The Indian Rupee Symbol was finalized a few days ago by the Union Cabinet. The country didn’t have an international symbol until now. Previously the Indian currency was typed as INR which is an abbreviation of “Indian Rupees”. The new symbol for the Indian Rupee, which was designed by a postgraduate at Indian Institute of Technology, looks like this:
Send to Dropbox is a new service that allows you to upload files to your Dropbox account via email from any computer. A major advantage of using Send to Dropbox, over other services ( MailDrop , for example) is you don’t require to install the Dropbox client or any other software to use it. This lets you quickly send files to Dropbox from any public computer without having to spend time setting up the computer.
Early this week we teamed up with Daniusoft to giveaway 5 licenses of Daniusoft Video Converter Ultimate . We received 66 entries. Thanks to each one of you who participated. And the 5 winners chosen by Random.org are:
Paragon Go Virtual is a brand new software from the popular Paragon Software Group, that lets users migrate a physical computer into a virtual environment. The software allows the user to convert a physical system running a Windows operating system later than Windows 2000, with all application, settings and user files intact, into a virtual system.
Since I haven’t posted a link collection in a while, I will try to make up by publishing 10 links in place of the usual 5. 1. Apollo Images : 20,000 high-resolution scans of original film from the Apollo missions – from Apollo 9 through Apollo 17. The total size of the collection is reported to be in excess of 12 GB. 2. Video card troubleshooting : This page has a collection of screen grabs of corrupted screens which are results of specific video card problems. You can diagnose your video card by comparing your screen with the example corrupted screens.
BlackBox Security Monitor is a kind of spy application software that allows administrators to monitor and oversee user activities on other computers on a network. The software guides the administrator through a short wizard type program via which the administrator adds computers and users to monitor on BlackBox Security Monitor. It’s possible to monitor activities of only specific users. The program than monitors the following activities and events on the computers:
Creating video slideshows from your images is not a big deal. You can easily do that with even rudimentary tools like Windows Movie Maker or Virtual Dub. But to make your slideshow appealing and standout from the crowd you have to add few distinctive touches to it, and what’s better than the good ol’ Ken Burns effect?
Daniusoft Video Converter Ultimate, formerly called Daniusoft Media Converter, is a software application that carries a spectacular set of tools under an average sounding name. Daniusoft Video Converter Ultimate, as the publisher puts it, “cuts in the scope of multimedia decoding & encoding, legitimate copyright circumventing, DVD decrypting & authoring and media file transferring for personal use.”
PowerArchiver 2010 Free is the latest version of the powerful file compression utility that comes free of cost for personal use. Many of the advanced features found on the Pro version are disabled in the free edition. But most of these are peripheral like CD burning and FTP client. The core features related to file archiving and compression remain untouched.
Got tired of 1080p videos already? Listen to what Google did today – they added support for playing videos all the way to 4096p on YouTube. "Today at the VidCon 2010 conference, we announced support for videos shot in 4K (a reference resolution of 4096 x 3072), meaning that now we support original video resolution from 360p all the way up to 4096p.”, they announced .
Stop press! A Reddit user has discovered a way to watch streaming content on Hulu from outside US without resorting to any of the typical methods users employ – proxy connection or VPN network. Rather, he has invented an indigenous method that involves an addon for Firefox and blocking of a few ports. Sounds unbelievable, right? So lets get this thing working. Ready?
Some of you like open source software and many of you prefer open source over anything. So here you are, an open source hard sensor monitor for Windows. The Open Hardware Monitor is a free open source application that monitors temperature sensors, fan speeds, voltages, load and clock speeds of a computer. It supports most hardware monitoring chips found on today's mainboards like the ITE, Winbond and Fintek families. The CPU temperature can be monitored by reading the core temperature sensors of Intel and AMD processors. The sensors of ATI and Nvidia video cards as well as SMART hard drive temperature can be displayed.
A new update was made available by Microsoft for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 operating system that is designed to advance the backward compatibility capability of the two platforms. The backward compatibility feature of Windows 7 allows running of older application that doesn’t play nice with the new operating system. Although not a one-hundred percent fool proof solution, the backward compatibility feature has worked for me on a number of occasions in the past.
Shotwell is a photo organizer and viewer that runs on both Windows and Linux operating system. It comes with a photo manager that allows you to import photos from disk or camera, organize them in various ways, tag them, do basic image enhancing and view them in slideshows. The Linux version comes with an additional option that allows publishing of photos on Facebook, Flickr and Picasa Web album.
Microsoft has just launched a totally awesome free web development suite called WebMatrix that provides an all-in-one solution for building websites on Windows. WebMatrix has all the components needed to build both static and dynamic - a web server, a database, a web framework, and a development environment.
NASA has debuted its first game Moonbase Alpha that allows players to assume the role of an astronaut and part of an exploration team in a futuristic 3D lunar settlement. The game is available on Steam as a free download and includes both single player capability and LAN or internet multiplayer gameplay.
If your computer has multiple users, like those on family PCs, you can display messages or what is known as “legal notices” to each user when they login. This can be done by adding a simple registry key as explained in this Microsoft support page . This is an old trick and I’m pretty sure a majority of Windows users are aware of it.
Style Jukebox is a new media player for Windows, the beta version of which became available just the other day. The application is designed to be used as a full featured media managing solution with support for major audio and video formats, media library and support for portable media devices like the iPod.
The Libraries feature on Windows 7 is useful but not enough, because it doesn’t give me access to the most recently used folders. When I was on Windows XP, FlashFolder used to help me with this. It attached a toolbar to the File Open and Save dialog box that gave me options to access the recently opened folders, favorite folders and so on. Unfortunately, FlashFolder doesn’t work on Windows 7. But Buzz Folders do.
There are several open source and actively developed, wireless router firmware projects created by people not affiliated with the manufacturers. Many of these are based on source code that some vendors have been forced to release to the public as part of it was based on software licensed under the GNU General Public License. Specifically the Linksys WRT54G series, which was the starting point for many of these projects.
Do you have a hard time deciding what to wear when you go out? Which shirt to wear and which trousers, tie and shoes will go along with it? Then you should try one of these wardrobe managing solutions. Grab a camera, take pictures of your clothes and create a virtual wardrobe of your actual clothes on your computer. Whenever you need to make a match, instead of rummaging through a physical closet, browse through the virtual closet and pick the most appropriate dress to wear in record time.
Windows 2000 introduced a new security feature called ‘account lockout’ that disables a user account when a certain number of failed logons occur due to wrong passwords within a certain interval of time. The purpose behind it is to foil any attempt by attackers to brute-force into a user account by guessing the password. If the attacker enters too many bad guesses the account gets locked.