Monthly Archives: April 2009

How To Test Anti-Keylogger Tools In Windows

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Many viruses, spywares, and trojans that infect your computer contain Keylogger functionalities. Which means that everything that you type is logged by them and passed forward to the spammers and hackers who can then steal your confidential information such as credit cards, social security number, etc.

If you are working in a bank or other sensitive corporate field then there is 95% chance that anti-keylogger software are installed in your computer. Such software prevent keyloggers from logging every keystroke and thus keep all confidential information secure. But wait, there is not only one way to log keystrokes, there are actually different hidden ways to monitor your keyboard. So how exactly would you know that the anti-keylogger software installed in your computer by the corporate staff actually works against all such keylogging methods?

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Change Language In Facebook To English(Pirate) Mode

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Since facebook relies on it’s users for translation, a bunch of Pirate fans have created a language dubbed English(Pirate). It adds an overall fun to the facebook profile by changing the words such as Home to Home Port, Friends to Mates Y'might Know, etc. Below is the screenshot showing the new language in action. Click the image above to enlarge. Read More

Convert Any URL To Charlie Dickens’s Quote With DickensURL

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With hundreds of URL shortner services popping up every now and then. And complains of why newspapers should stop using shortened URLs. One Reddit user nicknamed ‘highwind’ got inspired by another redditor’s comment and coded away a new URL service called DickensURL.

Unlike other link shortner services, DickensURL does not actually shorten the original URL. Instead, it converts links to passages from the works of Charles Dickens. Just enter the URL, hit Convert, and share the inspiring quote filled links with your friends.

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How To GeoTag Your Photos Or Edit GeoData In Images

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Did you take a photo and would like to Geotag it so that you can remember the exact place the photo was taken? Or maybe you took a photo with a geotag enabled device and would like to re-check where every photo was taken? Since geotagging is relatively a new phenomenon, Windows and Linux OS do not have a build-in feature to geotag the photos. GeoSetter is a free tool for Windows that lets you add geotag to the photos and also lets you edit geodata in the image files. You can add geotag to the photos by entering the coordinates or by browsing via the build-in Google Maps(requires good internet connection). Geotagging basically helps a person know where exactly the photo was taken. Read More

Import All Images And Videos From Your Email Account

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Email is a great way to share photos and stories, but all email providers lack a build-in photo browser. To find photos you will have to manually search the specific email and then browse the photo attachments. Are you looking for a simple place where you can view photos from all email attachments and share them easily?

2Pad is a free online service that lets you import all photos and videos from any email account and store them in one location. The email services it directly supports are, Hotmail, Yahoo! , GMail, AOL Mail, and Mobile Me. It can work with any mail server with IMAP support.

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Remove Quiz And Application Messages From Facebook Homepage

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Facebook is a social network to connect with friends, family, and co-workers. It was not build to connect with hundreds of junk 3rd party applications. My main homepage feed, at the moment of writing, is half full of useless application messages which has made it quite difficult to check friends’ real activities. To make the matters worse, there is no way in facebook to permanently remove application messages from appearing in the main feed.

Facebook Purity is a GreaseMonkey script for Firefox that automatically removes all junk 3rd party quizzes and application messages from the main feed. It would however keep all messages from original facebook apps, such as status updates, wall posts, links, notes, photos, etc behind.

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How To Create A Bootable Live Ubuntu 9.04 USB Drive

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Ubuntu 9.04 is the latest in line of Ubuntu Linux operating system, which is faster and has a more improved user experience. I have only 3 partitions on my hard disk, one for Windows Vista, one for Windows 7 beta, and one for my local files. I am used to 3 partitions maximum, since it looks less cluttered this way. Instead of creating a fourth partition, why not try installing it on a USB drive? Obviously, doing a proper install is better than doing a installation on USB, but since I don’t use Ubuntu much creating a fourth partition doesn’t make sense either.

For those having problems with bootable live CD, they can try creating a bootable live USB.

UNetbootin is a free portable tool for both Windows and Linux that lets you create bootable live USB drives for a variety of Linux distributions. It also lets you do a quick ‘frugal install’, but we will only cover the procedures for creating a bootable live Ubuntu USB in this post.

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Pictomio Is An Image Viewer That Lets You Organize And Tag Photos

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Do you want to organize your photos by albums, category, rating, etc? Perhaps you want to tag your friends in the photo just like you do it on Facebook? Or maybe you want to mark the position on the map where you took the photo? The default Windows Image Viewer can neither organize the photos properly, nor can it tag or geo-tag them. Most people rely on 3rd party tools, such as Picasa to organize their photos. One reason why Picasa is popular is that it allows you to upload your photos, which makes it more easy to save images on the web.

Pictomio is a free photo and video organizer for Windows that makes organizing more simple. It allows you to edit your photo’s metadata by adding geo-tags, annotations, etc. One of thing you will notice about this app is the eye-candy look, it lets you browse your photos in different slideshow effects which makes it overall appealing.

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How To Download Lyrics For iTunes Music In Windows

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Do you want to import lyrics to your iTunes, so that you can listen to the song and enjoy the lyrics at the same time? iTunes Lyrics Importer is a free add-on for iTunes that can download lyrics for every song in your iTunes playlist. It imports the lyrics from a single source and is developed in C#. Note: This app has doesn't work anymore due to broken LyricsWiki API, you can check out LyricToy. To install it, first close iTunes, run the installer, and then click iLyrics from the Program menu to launch iTunes with this add-on. You will see iTunes Lyrics Importer dialog box in iTunes. Now select the songs whose lyrics you want to download, check the Update Automatically checkbox, and click Get Lyrics. It will then automatically find the lyrics and add them to the songs. Read More

How To Tag Your Documents, Files, Music, And Bookmarks In Windows

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Do you have tons of software, documents, music, and website links(bookmarks) on your computer? Finding them is a difficult task since they are cluttered all over your hard disk. So, what would you do? Wouldn’t it be better if you could tag all your files and later access them simply by entering a keyword? I have found two tools that can help you tag your files and make them more easier to search.

TaggedFrog

TaggedFrog is a free file organizer for Windows that allows a user to add and organize the documents, files, music, and bookmarks simply by tagging them with a keyword. Once all your important files are tagged, you don’t need to worry anymore about where they are located on the hard disk. To access the files later, simply enter the keyword and all files tagged with that keyword will be shown.

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How To Scan A Document Or Photo With Windows Fax And Scan

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Recently, I had to scan some photos for my brother, he has an HP all-in-one DeskJet connected to the Sony Vaio laptop. The All-in-one DeskJet from HP contains scanner, copier and printer all in one box. Since he is not a computer expert, he only installed the drivers that came in the CD and did not bother to install other software from HP. And to make matters worse, he even lost the CD.

It is not surprising, since such cases take place almost daily. I too, never bother to install 3rd party apps that come with the product since they are always a piece of crap. So how would you scan documents or photos in Windows Vista without even installing a 3rd party scanning tools? Meet Windows Fax and Scan.

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GeoGreeting – Send Greeting Message With Letters Made From Aerial View Of Buildings

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geoGreeting is an interesting website that lets you send any message with letters made up from aerial view of buildings. Most buildings that you will find are located in the US, since the author has focused on one country. Finding a building that represent a letter when seen from an aerial view with Google Earth is not an easy task. A small community of users now help find the buildings for this website.

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Fix WinSock LSP Issues And Reset TCP/IP Stack To Repair Internet Connectivity

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Has your internet connection slowed down a bit? Or does your internet lag when connecting to a website or server? Maybe you just tried an Internet Optimizer and it slowed down your internet instead of increasing the speed? If yes, then there could be two possibilities, either you have a malformed LSP installed inside the TCP/IP handler or you have a corrupt TCP/IP and/or Winsock registry entries.

But what exactly is LSP? Layered Service Providers(LSPs) are small bits of software that use Winsock APIs to insert itself into the TCP/IP stack. Once in the stack, they can intercept and modify inbound and outbound Internet traffic, thus slowing down the internet is some cases. According to Wikipedia, it allows processing all the TCP/IP traffic taking place between the Internet and the applications that are accessing the Internet (such as a web browser, the email client, etc).

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Start Panicking Shows Which Websites You Have Visited – [Privacy]

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When you visit a website, it is stored in History of the web browser you are using. Some important information are also stored as Cookies. To remove all private data, you will have to clear the history, cookies, and cache from your web browsers. But wait, even this won’t remove the data completely. There is a huge privacy vulnerabilities which can be found in every web browsers including, Firefox, IE, Opera, and Safari. This vulnerability can show almost any hacker(if he knows your IP address) the websites you have visited, thus breaching your very basic and one of the most fundamental privacy rights.

Start Panicking takes full use of this privacy vulnerability, simply click Let’s Start and it will show you the list of all websites you have visited in no specific order. You will be stunned to know that this list can be seen by almost any hacker or security expert, thanks to the critical privacy vulnerability.

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Free PDF Viewer Is An Awesome Cross-Platform PDF Reader And Converter

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There are so many 3rd party PDF readers that I have almost lost track of them all. One of my favorite is Foxit Reader because of it’s speed. Most PDF readers are made for a specific operating system. In some cases support for new operating systems are added over time.

Free PDF Reader is a free, cross-platform, portable PDF Viewer that is both a reader and a converter. Since it is a Java application it requires Java Runtime Engine version 1.4 or higher to run. Unlike other readers, it includes all files inside an archive and can be launched on any operating system, no installation is required.

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WinSCP – Alternative to FileZilla

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FileZilla is the most popular free open source cross-platform FTP client. It is available for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. It supports FTP, SFTP, and FTPS. After using it for years, I have never given another FTP client a try, until a month back when I needed to edit my Apache configuration files which was impossible to do in FileZilla.

WinSCP is an open source FTP and SFTP client for Windows only. It main functionality is secure transfer of files between local and remote computer. Apart from this, it has a build-in file manager and file synchronization functionality. It addition to SFTP, it supports SCP protocol and uses SSH(Secure Shell) for secure transfers. What makes it unique is the fact that it is based on the implementation of FTP protocol from FileZilla and SSH protocol from PuTTY.

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Find Files And Folders That Take Up Most Space In Your Hard Disk

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To free up some hard disk space you need to delete the files and folders that take up most space. But how would you find such files and folders? Since there is no build-in tool in Windows, the only way is to manually check the properties of every file and folder. This process is obviously very tiresome. We reviewed a software last year called JDiskReport that lets you analyze the hard disk space, but the downside is that it requires java runtime and is also not portable.

SpaceSniffer is a recently launched free portable tool for Windows that analyzes your hard disk and loads a visual map which shows the files and folder structured in your hard disk along with the space they are taking. Just run the tool(no installation required), select the drive or path that you want to analyze, and click Start.

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Find And Subscribe To Various RSS Feeds With FeedMil Search Engine

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If you want to subscribe to technology news, what will you do? You definitely try your luck searching for technology blogs and news sites at Google and other search engines. But Google, Yahoo, and other search engines are not build for searching RSS feeds, they are build for searching the content inside the websites.

Feedmil is a search engine build specifically for searching feeds of various topic-based websites and blogs. It has a large database of blogs and websites that focus on a specific niche. Just type the keyword that interests you, such as Technology, Software, Google, Windows, Food, etc and it will list all blogs and websites that come under that keyword.

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Dear Outlaw Bloggers, Please Use Common Sense!

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Editor’s Note: This is not a computer tip, all views expressed in this post are my personal opinion. The original intention of this post is to foster debate among readers and webmasters.

Suppose you discover a new fish species(let’s name it X) and tell your friend about it. Your friend goes to a group of people and tell them about a new fish called X without stating that it was discovered by you. Will you like it? Is this fair? Does it make a bit of sense? The answers is NO.

Now suppose another situation where you discover a new software and review it on your blog. Now your readers(both Direct visitors and those coming from RSS feeds) which include plenty of bloggers, will read about this new software and write about it in their respective blogs without mentioning that it was discovered by you. Will you like it? Is this fair? Does it make a bit of sense? The answer again is NO.

So what is this all about? It’s about using a bit of common sense. I have always tried to find the reasons why bloggers fail to credit the original discoverer and here is what I found.

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Monitor The Total Time Spend On Computer With Counter

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Do you want to monitor the total time your server was ON? Or maybe you just want to keep track of the time you spend on the computer daily. So far Windows does not have any build-in feature to count the total time the computer remained on.

Counter is a free tool for Windows that counts the total time spend on the computer. It also counts the total time spend after restart, in the current day, in the current month, and the total overall time spend. It can also show a detailed view of time spend every day and every month, so that you can keep track of your computer activity. If you are a server administrator, this can be a good tool to track the uptime of your servers too.

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