Usman Javaid

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Secure Untrusted/Public Internet Connections On Mac Using Cloak VPN

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Want to secure your Mac OS X from external data theft and online profiling services that surreptitiously steal the information you enter while filling forms, and sell the gathered data to spammers? Although there are numerous kind of applications and web extensions available out there to secure the communication between your PC and connected system server, most tools deploy security systems only for web browsers to prevent data theft and other like attacks. What if you use multiple applications that connect to their online servers to perform the required function? How would you add an extra layer of data security to protect your entire system, including web browsers and desktop applications from unauthorized system usage? Cloak is an overly simple, yet powerful application that keeps you safe from prying eyes on all types of untrusted wireless networks. It’s basically a VPN tool that provides highly secured channels for all online communication. Read past the jump for details. Read More

TinkerTool: Tweak Mac Lion Default Tools, UI Elements & Overall Usage [Review]

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Just like previous Mac OS X versions, Mac OS X Lion doesn’t allow users to modify native utilities' behaviors, tweak with system settings, and make changes to its UI elements. For this reason, many power Mac users opt in for third-party system tweaking applications,, such as Lion Tweaks, OnyX, Deeper, Lion Designer, Lion Secrets, to customize their Mac. If you’re looking for an application that lets you easily access advance system preferences to change OS user interface elements, tweak desktop environment, edit advance Finder settings, view and configure hidden Safari features etc., then TinkerTool is worth a shot. The application is primarily developed to let users easily access the hidden advance system preferences built into Mac OS X Lion. While It comes packed with a sheer number of system tweaking features, you don’t need to gain administrative privileges to change system core settings. The application doesn’t make any system-wide level modifications, and therefore, the changes you make to Mac OS X via this application will not change anything for other user accounts. Details to follow after the jump. Read More

How To Install Lyrics Plugin For Windows 8 Media Player [Tip]

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Windows Media Player is widely used to not only manage huge music collection, but also to create and share music playlists across the Homegroup users. Although Windows Media Player provides an easy way to organize music playlists, share media files with network users and automatically manage music files in pre-defined categories, it doesn't come with an option to automatically download and display lyrics of songs. If you've been looking for a lyrics plugin for Windows 8 Media Player, give Lyrics Plugin a try. It's lightweight lyrics plugin for Windows Media Player that also supports the latest version - Windows Media Player 12. Unlike other media player lyrics plugins, it doesn’t require following a lengthy process to integrate the plugin; just run the installer and it will automatically add the plugin to Windows Media Player. Read More

How To Hide Specific Windows 8 Control Panel Tools Or Applets [Tip]

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Windows 8, just like previous versions of Windows, displays all the installed system tools and default applets in Control Panel, and doesn’t provide a convenient option for system administrator to hide/remove Control Panel applets for standard users. Although Windows implements strict security policies to prevent standard and guest users from gaining access to system utilities and changing default settings, it doesn’t secure some Control Panel applets, which can be used to make system-wide level changes. For instance, Windows native uninstaller may be used to uninstall almost any application or system program. Likewise, Personalization applet can be used to modify default Window Aero theme file. In this post, we will use Local Group Policy Editor to hide some Control Panel applets from Windows 8 Control Panel. This will hide all the specified tools from Control Panel, restricting standard and guest from accessing them. Read More

SMARTReporter: Get Alerts For Impending Hard Disk Failures [Mac]

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If your Mac suddenly stops responding while performing a read and write operation, then you may need to put your hard drive through a series of read and write tests to identify the root cause of the slow read/write operation. One of the reasons why hard disk starts experiencing read/write issues is frequent use of low-level hard disk utilities and data recovery tools. Although Mac OS X native disk utility lets you apply both basic and advance fixes to prevent hard disk damages, it doesn’t notify you about imminent hard drive failures. SMARTReporter is a tiny app for Mac OS X that deploys an efficient S.M.A.R.T-based monitoring system to keep you updated about your hard disk health as well as, performance. The workability of this hard drive monitoring tool is based on consistent polling the S.M.A.R.T status of hard disk. You can set it to perform S.M.A.R.T tests silently in the background, and send email to specified recipient, display warning message or launch an application when an impending hard drive failure is anticipated. Details to follow after the jump. Read More

How To Disable Windows 8 Lock Screen

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In the past, we covered a guide on Windows 8 Lock Screen and discussed some of its features. The newly added Lock Screen is basically designed for tablet PCs, allowing users to quickly view the applications notifications, battery status, date and time, WiFi status/dynamic network icon etc. Although Windows 8 lets you tweak both Start and Lock Screen UI elements, it doesn’t provide an option to permanently disable it. You may know that Microsoft Management Console snap-in called Local Group Policy Editor allows system administrator(s) to tweak system core components and change default behavior of native utilities. Using the LGPE, you can easily disable the Lock Screen for all PC users. By default, Windows 8 shows Lock Screen at startup, but when it’s disabled, it takes you directly to Logon screen to choose the user account to log in to Windows. Read More

How To Create Wireless Ad Hoc Internet Connection In Windows 8 [Tip]

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Apart from Start Orb and classic Start Menu, what most Windows 7 users, who decided to take Windows 8 for a spin, miss in Windows 8 is ability to create ad-hoc network. If you’re a power users, you might’ve noticed that Windows 8 doesn’t include an option to create and setup ad hoc network connection to share files and internet with Wi-Fi enabled computers and devices. Windows 7 ad hoc connection feature does nothing except creating a shared connection with separate IP address to register the device on the virtual network. This allows users to use router’s default or specified DNS server address to easily connect to internet. Even though Windows 8 comes with ICS (Internet Connection Sharing) feature to allow devices  to connect to yours PC internet connection, it doesn’t allow creating a wireless network connection to share the internet. In this post, we will look at some tools that let you easily create and manage ad-hoc connections in Windows 8. Read More

Analyze Email Header To Find Sender IP, Hostname & Geographical Info

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You may know that emails contain not only the subject, CC and BCC recipients, sender’s email address etc., but also include information which is not shown in the email body text. Most online and offline email clients show only the email message body, subject & sender name, and provide users with option to enable HTML format in order to view images and other HTML elements like tables, formatted rich text etc. Although there are special tools available to reveal all the information hidden in emails without having to manually find the message source details, such tools often don’t organize the email header details, like Orignating IP address, hostname, organization, Message ID, and Geographical information (Continent, Country, City, Time zone etc). Today, we stumbled across an online app from ipTRACKERonline.com that organizes the email header details in different categories, letting users easily find and read the email source details. Read More

JDContextMenu Adds Handy File/Folder Tools To Windows Right-Click Menu

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Developed by IT-Nonstop, JDContextMenu is a small, yet powerful Windows shell extension that integrates with right-click context menu to offer numerous file and folder related tools. Since Windows doesn’t offer a direct way for adding file and folder management specific tools to context menu, you will find this application extremely useful; it adds those options that we use on daily basis, such as copy full path of selected folder and only folder name to Windows clipboard, open folder in CMD, check file MD5 checksum, read and modify file’s date and time stamps, add application to Windows Startup folder, clear junk from the folder etc. Additionally, it lets users create customizable favorite folders section, which can be accessed from right-click context menu. You can add as many folders to Favorites in order to quickly access them from its menu. Moreover, it enables you to sort available tools and options in required order. More on JDContextMenu after the jump. Read More

Split Outlook 2010 Storages / Email Account Folders By Size & Year [Addin]

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Like previous MS Outlook versions, Outlook 2010 saves each email account related files and folders including mailboxes in PST file, which can be used with any Outlook version to quickly restore the account mail items and folders. Although Outlook lets you associate PST files with new/existing email accounts, it often stops responding when large PST files are imported. If you’re planning to move or create backup of PST files, we recommend using Split Storage to split Outlook / email account storages into small PST files by Year and specified Size. It’s basically an add-in for Outlook 2007 and Outlook 2010, which allows you pick the email account storage and spilt it according to your requirements. Additionally, it creates new PST files, and splits storages while copying the data from the specified storage into a new PST. Since it only reads the data from existing PST files, it doesn’t make any changes to PST/OST archives. Read More

ServiceTray: Get Start/Stop Alerts For Any Windows Service & Monitor Its CPU/RAM Usage

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If you’re using an application on Windows that requires a special service to run and perform the required operations, then you may want to monitor the service as long as you use that application or Windows is running. In contrast to an application, Windows service is basically a program which is designed to run silently in background without any user’s interference. Therefore, it becomes quite tedious to open Windows Task Manger just to check whether a specific service is running or not. ServiceTray is a miniscule application that operates from system tray, allowing users to keep an eye on specified service all the time. Not only does it keep you updated with current status of service, it also lets you start/restart and stop the service from system tray with a few clicks. Read More

Assign Global Hotkeys To Control System Volume With Sound Volume Hotkeys

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Many media players allow users to control volume using mouse wheel; you roll mouse wheel in upward direction to increase the volume, and similarly rolling down the mouse wheel decreases the volume, but when we have to increase/decrease the system volume, we move to system volume indicator (icon) present in system tray, select the volume control and then increase/decrease the system volume. The media players like VLC and Winamp let users control volume through hotkeys as well, which are, Ctrl + Up cursor key to increase and Ctrl + down cursor key to decrease the volume, but unfortunately, these hotkeys only work when the said media players are active. This leaves users with no other option than to either manually increase/decrease the system volume, or first activate the media player and then adjust the volume. Read More

Paragon Go Virtual: Convert Host PC to Guest Virtual Machine & Set VM Properties

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P2V (physical to virtual machine) conversion tools are developed to clone physical computer in virtual hard disk image format, so that users can easily use their converted physical machine on virtualization software. There are certainly endless situations where one needs to turn physical computer into virtual machine. Consider an instance where you’re updating your system, and don’t want to go through the hassle of backing up all the data, installed applications with saved preferences, registry hives and more. In such a situation, what you can do is use a P2V conversion utility to take a snapshot of your physical machine and run it in Oracle VirtualBox, VMware Player, or Microsoft’s Virtual PC. This will make it easy to restore the data from old PC and use installed application with saved preferences on a new host computer. Read More

Quod Libet: Organize Music By Tags & Create Playlists Based On Search Keywords

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Music organizers like MusicBrainz Picard that come with the feature to automatically tag music files and organize them in separate folders, often take quite a long time to first search the audio file title from online resources, and then modify the ID3 V1 / V2 tags. If you’re looking for a audio file tagger and music collection manager that lets you decide how to manage your music library, have a look at Quod Libet. This cross-platform application has been developed on the idea that users know how to organize their music library, and they just need a right set of tools that can help them do it easily. Written in Python, it uses Mutagen tagging library to let users tag and manage their large (very large) music collection. It has the ability to create custom playlists based on regular expressions, as well as simple search queries. Read More

How To Use Google Earth To Geo Tag Photos & Delete GPS Data

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Nowadays, there are multiple types of cameras available out there that come with Geotag photofeature to automatically use your current location in order to geo tag the pictures you take, but what about all those photos in your collection which were taken with old cameras? If you’re among those who like to geo-tag their photos, Google Earth PhotoTag is probably what you need to geo tag your un-tagged photos. Based on widely used Image Metadata Manipulation Tool namely EXIV2.exe, it uses Google Earth to find the exact location where photos were taken, and help you geotag those images whose EXIF info lacks location (latitude,longitude and altitude) meta data. Moreover, it has the ability to not only show all the saved EXIF information, but also edit the meta data. You can choose to manually delete the GPS tag, add description to images, and fly to exact location on Google Earth to find more details about the area where selected photo was taken. Read More

Z-DBackup: Modular File Backup Solution With Advance Directory Sync Options

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Looking for a data backup utility that can do a lot more than just copying all the files or just newly created files from source to target locations? An application that supports numerous types of target mediums, while allowing you to create and configure file backup schemes, design synchronization jobs, set automated backup tasks, perform post-backup operations, burn files to optical discs, and compress backed up data? Z-DBackup is a modular backup system that offers a comprehensive set of features that may help you customize backup jobs as per your data backup and synchronization needs. Although it comes packed with an exhaustive list of backup features and tools, it doesn’t make it difficult for users to select the required tools that they want to use while backing up their files. Some of the noteworthy tools included in the application are backup data at network location, burn CD/DVD with backed up data, auto-shutdown after specified job finishes, create ZIP archive containers, virus self test,  run pre and post backup operations, and backup active and locked files. Read past the jump for details. Read More

AccdbMerge: Compare MS Access Databases, Find Differences & Merge Objects

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Comparing multiple objects from two separate MS Access databases is not only difficult, but also quite a tedious task, as one needs to first check each data set in databases, and then make required changes to DB objects. If you’re working with multiple versions of Access database, you may be looking for a tool that can help you identify the differences between all major objects of database, including tables, forms, reports, queries and so on. Instead of tallying each dataset and DB objects, you could use AccdbMerge to instantly view the differences, and import & export selected objects from both database versions to easily merge the required sections. AccdbMerge supports both widely used Access database formats, including MDB and ACCDB, allowing you to read all the elements of database without having to install any additional tools. Read More

Convert Physical Machine & VMware’s VMDK Into VHD Format

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Ever wanted to convert VMware’s VMDK virtual disk image to Microsoft’s VHD image, but didn’t find the right tool to carry out the required operation? 2Tware Convert VHD is a tool that may help you convert not only VMDK disk image into VHD format for running it as virtual machine via Virtual PC, but also allows you to convert your Physical machine into a single virtual disk. Using the physical machine conversion option, you can easily create full backup of your hard disk partitions without having to go through tedious process of configuring full backup settings. Unlike other virtual disk conversion tools, which attempt to copy data written on the source disk, this utility performs sector-by-sector copy operations, enabling you to select your entire hard drive and clone it in VHD format. Details to follow after the jump. Read More

Create Custom Refresh Point In Windows 8 With Recimg Tool

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Although Windows 8’s Refresh Your PC feature makes it easy to restore default Windows settings without deleting your personal files & folders and installed metro apps, it doesn’t allow creating a custom system refresh image. The Refresh Your PC feature basically creates a Windows Installer Image (WIM) to carry out the assigned tasks, i.e., restore default PC settings. Windows 8 comes with a small command line tool called Recimg, which helps you create a custom Windows 8 refresh point in Windows Installer Image (WIM) format. Using this image file, you can restore your PC to a different state, which may include all your personalized Windows settings, desktop applications with saved preferences and more. Instead of using the Windows default Refresh image, you can use the custom one to restore the specific saved state of the PC. The Recimg command requires nothing except the target location to create a current snapshot of the system. Read More

Start8 Adds Metro Start Menu In Windows 8, The Way It Should Have Been

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A while back, Aatif explained why Microsoft took a bold decision of removing the traditional Start Orb and Start Menu from Windows 8, and then Fawad featured a Windows 8 application named ViStart for all those avid Start Menu users who want to bring the classic Start Orb as well as Start Menu back to Windows 8. Even though ViStart requires you to tweak the settings and create a new toolbar to properly adjust the Start Orb, the Start Menu doesn’t support Windows 8 Aero Glass effect, and sometimes fails to add (pin) the folders and programs to the Start Menu. If you aren’t a die hard fan of Windows 7 Start Orb and Start Menu, and also don’t want the fuss of having to access Windows built-in utilities and installed apps from a newly designed Start Screen, then you may want to give Start8 a spin. It’s a freshly developed application for Windows 8 that adds Start Orb, and Metro style Start Menu to Windows 8. Read past the jump to find out what else Start8 has to offer. Read More