Windows only: HD Hacker is a free application which allows you to backup and restore sectors on your hard drives. You can backup and restore the master boot record, the boot sector from logical drives, or any other user specified sector you need to backup. Backing up the master boot record is an advised step before messing around with repartitioning or installing a new operating system to create a dual boot system. For other boot record magic, check out how to fix your master boot record with an Ubuntu Live CD. HD Hacker is freeware, Windows only. HD Hacker...
Filed under: Audio, iPhone, App StoreWhenever I'm not listening to my iPod in the car, I'm usually have my radio tuned to National Public Radio, where I get my fix of classical and jazz music. American Public Media has created an iPhone app that caters to those of us who want to listen to a particular NPR station, but don't happen to be near a computer.Public Radio Tuner (click opens iTunes) is a free application that compiles the Internet streams from more than 150 public radio stations into a single list. You scroll through the list to your preferred station,...
Windows only: Free application DVDCoach burns any video file (like DivX or Xvid videos you've downloaded off BitTorrent) to a playable DVD. The application provides a simple front-end for converting the files to the proper format (using the very popular media conversion tool ffmpeg) and burning the results to a DVD. DVDCoach Express doesn't have many advanced features—for example, you can't create custom DVD menus—but what it lacks in features it makes up for in simplicity. Just drag and drop the videos you want to burn to DVD into the application, set the few preferences available (PAL or NTSC, aspect...
One of the most frequent questions I get asked by retail customers is "Where can I get a program that burns my movies?" Nine times out of ten they actually mean "the movies I downloaded with Limewire."If you're in the same boat and need a nice, simple app to convert and burn your downloaded video files to DVD, take a look at DVDCoach Express.It's a free application for Windows that utilizes ffmpeg to handle conversion duties. The process is straightforward: drag your videos onto the file pane, set your encoding options, and start your task. Options are kept to...
The Google brand is ubiquitous. You’d have to make a concerted effort to avoid all the Googley things that Google has Googled. But what if some of the most useful Google iPhone apps…weren’t made by Google at all? We think that might be the case: here we present some of our favorite non-Google ways to access Google services on the iPhone. How do you think these compare to Google’s own app? Google Search (Paid) gSearch [iTunes/$0.99] - The web was recently abuzz with articles noting the enhanced features within the official Google application for iPhone users. And rightly so,...
Joost, the once mega-hyped online video startup, has just launched a free application for the iPhone to grant mobile access to its videos. With a nice, clean interface, this app could be a winner — if it can get over the performance issues currently plaguing it. The app gives you access to more than 46,000 videos ranging from popular movies (like Men in Black) to music videos (I see a lot of Beyonce) to television shows (Late Show with David Letterman seems popular). Unfortunately, I can’t get a single video to load. I’ve tried nearly two dozen across the app,...
iPhone only: Dozens of iPhone application are free from the iTunes App Store. While the main App Store page makes absolutely no mention of the promotion, by using the application indexer at AppShopper you can search through the free applications. Some of the applications are silly, some look rather useful, but you can't look a free application in the pixels and complain. In addition, AppShopper has a price change monitor, so you can keep an eye on applications which may not be free but have be discounted heavily for Black Friday. If you find any diamonds in the rough, share...
I was helping a buddy of mine create his artist portfolio on the inter-webs. His digital pictures of his work were very large and would all need to be resized to thumbnails and medium sized images. So today’s article is going to be a two for one. For this article we are working with Windows Only tools. Two great free tools to help us get the job done quickly and efficiently. Ready? Our artist thought he was going to have to do all the sizing and resizing manually because they needed to be various different sizes, depending on their dimensions....
VoIP clients have been a bit slow to make their move onto the iPhone, no doubt that Apple certification process takes a long, hard look at them. A new client is now available for the fruit phone, Nimbuzz which makes it possible to chat with your buddies using Skype, Yahoo! Messenger, Windows Live Messenger (MSN) and Google Talk. One of the coolest features of Nimbuzz has to do with how you can use the app on the iPhone in landscape mode so you have the widest view possible of your chat. Nimbuzz is available from the Apple App Store now...
Free application launcher and dock application RocketDock took home the gold star from this weekend's Hive Five Best Desktop Customization Tools, followed in second place by Samurize (which lost by a mere six votes). System monitor and desktop enhancement tool Rainmeter rounded out the top three....
Windows only: Free application Newzie is a feature-rich desktop newsreader designed to keep you up to date with the latest web content, whether that content is coming from a traditional RSS feed or not. To that end, Newzie monitors feedless web pages for changes, supports "virtual channels" that monitor user-defined keywords (great for ego tracking), and more. It also supports advanced content filtering, customizable keyboard shortcuts, subscription priorities, a Post Sweeper feature that clears out unnecessary posts when you've fallen behind, and built-in reading statistics. In the end, Newzie is full of interesting and innovative ideas that we'd love to...
Windows only: Free application Lunascape is a web browser capable of running any of the three major web rendering engines—Gecko (Firefox), WebKit (Safari/Chrome), and Trident (Internet Explorer). That means that each time you open a new tab or follow a link, you can tell Lunascape which engine you want to use to render the page. The idea, in theory, is that Lunascape gives you the benefits of each popular browser in one. For example, Lunascape gives you IE support for the few IE-only sites still out there and no-nonsense speed from WebKit or Gecko. You can switch which engine is...
Windows only: Free application Auto Delete monitors any user-specified folder and deletes files older than a set amount of time, from 1 day to 1 year. When deleted, files can either be sent to the Recycle Bin or permanently deleted. There isn't much else Auto Delete can do beyond that, but it's one of those dead simple tools that does exactly what it says without much fuss, which we always like. On the other hand, if you're looking for a more robust version of Auto Delete—including options to move, rename, copy, or delete files based on multiple conditions—you might consider...
Imagine sharing a word with voice-recognition software, only to hear system confirm your word as “sex”. That’s what some people with British accents reported about Google’s voice-based search tool, part of Google’s recently released Mobile App for the iPhone: The free application, which allows iPhone owners to use the Google search engine with their voice, mistook the word iPhone for “sex”, “Einstein” and “kitchen sink,” … “Awesome job google. only problem is every time I say the word ‘fish’ it registers as sex,” wrote one, identified as Kevin. Check out the app page here. Tags: British accents, Google Mobile App,...
Windows only: Free application Process Manager adds an entry to your right-click context menu that adjusts an application's priority or kills the app. Once Process Manager is running, the kill and priority options are only available when you've right-clicked a window's taskbar item. That's pretty much all there is to it. The app runs in your system tray and eats less than 1MB of RAM. While Process Manager doesn't do anything you can't already do from the Windows Task Manager, it does provide quicker access to a couple of handy functions and is worth a try if you do much...
