Thursday, March 27, 2008

 

Completely Uninstall Programs with AppCleaner [Featured Mac Download]



 
 

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Completely Uninstall Programs with AppCleaner [Featured Mac Download]

via Lifehacker by Adam Pash on 3/27/08

Mac OS X only: Freeware application AppCleaner completely uninstalls applications from your Mac. As most of us know, the process of "uninstalling" applications on the Mac is generally as simple as...

 
 

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Wednesday, March 26, 2008

 

25 Ways to Simplify Your Life with Kids



 
 

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25 Ways to Simplify Your Life with Kids

via Digg on 3/26/08

You won't get to ultra-simple if your life includes children ... but you can find ways to simplify, no matter how many kids you have.

 
 

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Tuesday, March 25, 2008

 

Everywhere Magazine: Because travel is all around you (win a free subscripti...



 
 

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Everywhere Magazine: Because travel is all around you (win a free subscription!)

via Gadling by Aaron Hotfelder on 3/25/08

Filed under: , , ,

Here, in no particular order, is what I love about the new Everywhere Magazine:

  • It's created almost exclusively by its readers, who submit their best travel photographs, stories, and articles to the magazine's website.
  • Contributors who are published in the magazine receive $100 and a free one-year subscription.
  • Just like the title says, the magazine realizes that everywhere is a travel destination-- not just Paris, Buenos Aires, and Tokyo, but Kentucky, Iran, and Latvia. Their stated goal is to help you "discover great new places-- in places you didn't even know had places."
  • Back issues are available to download for free here.
  • The magazine itself is beautifully put together and features stunning photographs, well-written articles, and a whole section on postcards. The only thing the glossy mag lacks is an ad every other page.

The featured places for the magazine's fourth issue are Barcelona and the Jersey Shore, and the featured themes are national parks and festivals. If you'd like your own content to be considered for the magazine, sign up to be a part of their online community, and read this post on their blog to learn more about submitting.

Thinking of subscribing? Of course you are. If you follow this link, you can get $5 off a subscription -- a special deal for Gadling readers!

We're giving away FREE subscriptions to the new magazine as well. All you need to do is leave a comment in the post below, and we'll randomly select you. Here are the juicy details:

  • To enter, simply leave a comment below telling us about a great new place -- in a place most people don't even know had a place!
  • The comment must be left before Friday, March 28 at 5:00 PM Eastern Time.
  • You may enter only once.
  • Five winners will be selected in a random drawing.
  • Five winners will receive a 1-year (6 issues) subscription to Everywhere magazine (valued at $24.99)
  • Click Here for complete Official Rules.
  • Open to legal residents of the 50 United States, the District of Columbia and Canada (excluding Quebec) who are 18 and older.

 

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Music sharing, near and far



 
 

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Music sharing, near and far

via The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) by Brett Terpstra on 3/25/08

Filed under: , ,

iTunes has historically made sharing music with friends something of a hassle. It's not impossible, but it's not a "Just Works" scenario. It does, however, make it ridiculously simple to erase your friend's iPod, but I wouldn't call that a feature. The advent of library sharing on a local network did allow for some semblance of communal music, albeit within fairly strict confines. However, a variety of solutions exist for achieving a more social level in your audio pursuits.

iPod users quickly realize that the first step is to achieve bi-directional transfer from their portable device to the computer. Several great utilities exist for augmenting iTunes' sync capabilities. We've mentioned Podworks before, and Senuti is a long-standing favorite. We've also covered iPod.iTunes, which recently underwent an update. Any of these tools can get your music from your iPod into iTunes, including your friends' iTunes, but I'll take the safe road and mention from the start that music sharing is for personal use only (which will seem increasingly ironic as you read on, but I'm sure you know the rules well enough that I don't need to elaborate).

Sharing your audio files over wider network also requires some additional software. There's Simplify Media, which we highlighted last year. You've also got KavaTunes, a shareware app that makes a web page from your music collection that looks and acts just like iTunes. And now we've got Mojo.

Mojo

Mojo makes it simple to view, play and download music from other Mojo users. You control a buddy list, allowing only certain people to access your music. And the great part is that the standard version of Mojo is free. There's a PRO version - starting at $10.95 for 3 licenses - that adds playlist subscription, but the functionality of the free version is otherwise unlimited (reader Disconnect points out that the free version is limited to 3 Internet users, a fact I missed because I didn't add any more than that. Local network sharing is unlimited, for what it's worth).

Mojo is fairly adept at automatically navigating many network configurations and multiple protocols, automatically detecting other Mojo users. A helper app runs in the background (optional) and provides a constant connection to your authorized friends. Your available Mojo friends appear in your buddy list, and you just select a connected buddy to browse the music they've made available using Mojo's (not bad-looking) interface. DRM songs display in red, and actions taken on them will offer to let you jump into iTunes to authorize your machine. It also detects songs that already exist in your iTunes collection and greys them out. They're still playable, but the option keeps you from downloading duplicates. Songs downloaded through the interface can be automatically added to iTunes, with several options for automatic organization.

I set Mojo up on a remote server and made two users, just for fun. I uploaded a few songs and then streamed them back over the Mojo connection. It worked smoothly and I found myself considering relocating my collection to a server with enough storage and automatic backups. That would free up about half of my hard drive and make my songs accessible to any computer with Mojo installed. It might never happen, but I like the possibility ... and the idea of doing it for free.

Misu

But, let's say you want to share your music with someone standing right next to you. Obviously, the option exists to do some manual transferring of your collection from iPod to iTunes to another iPod, but there's an easier way on the horizon. Enter Misu, a new application from the developers of Menuet and Art Collector (covered previously).

Misu, which just entered a beta period, offers an extremely simple interface (check out the visuals) for connecting multiple iPods, choosing a source from the detected devices, and melding the music collections together. It compares the libraries of the source and the target iPod(s) and figures out what songs are missing. Hitting the transfer button effectively synchronizes the collections. If there's more music than will fit, it will offer to stop when the target device is full. Misu doesn't offer any options for manual management. It also doesn't currently work with iPod touches, but that functionality is planned.

The Misu beta isn't publicly available, but the developer is opening it up to TUAW readers. To limit the number of beta testers, the invitation will last for 24 hours, starting this morning. People who get in on the beta will also receive a licensed copy of the final product, free. If you've been looking for a program that fills the person-to-person iPod sharing void, grab the Misu beta and take it for a spin. The super-secret code you'll need is 48372.

You'll want to set your iPods to disk mode, and you may want to disable the "Start iTunes when connected" option. Have fun with all that legal music sharing.

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Turn Your PC into a DVD Ripping Monster [Feature]



 
 

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Turn Your PC into a DVD Ripping Monster [Feature]

via Lifehacker by Adam Pash on 3/25/08

Commercial DVDs are far too expensive to let scratches turn your video into a glorified coaster, but most people still don't back up their DVD collection. Once upon a time, the four to eight gigabyte...

 
 

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Papercraft Enigma machine



 
 

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Papercraft Enigma machine

via Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow on 3/25/08


Here's a piece of crafty crypto history: a downloadable, printable papercraft Enigma machine, embodying the notorious Nazi cipher broken by Alan Turing and co. during WWII. You can also buy reasonably priced bulk-printed versions on heavy card-stock. Link (via Schneier)


 
 

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Wednesday, March 19, 2008

 

Top 30 Most Wired Airports



 
 

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Top 30 Most Wired Airports

via Digg on 3/19/08

The 30 best airports for staying in touch when you touch down.

 
 

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Download Music from Your Friends' iTunes Libraries Over the Internet with Mo...



 
 

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Download Music from Your Friends' iTunes Libraries Over the Internet with Mojo [Featured Download]

via Lifehacker by Adam Pash on 3/19/08

Windows/Mac only: Share any song in your iTunes library and download any song from your friends' iTunes libraries over the internet with freeware application Mojo. Essentially, Mojo makes sharing...

 
 

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Create a booklet from any PDF document with BookletCreator



 
 

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Create a booklet from any PDF document with BookletCreator

via Free Download A Day by Chippy on 3/19/08

PDF files are a great way to make data available. Everybody can open them, and it's much easier to email an electronic file than to print out a big document, schlep over to the Post Office, and wait days or weeks for it to get to your intended audience. Unfortunately, most PDFs are set up [...]

 
 

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Friday, March 14, 2008

 

Announcement: DivX Pro free for the Holidays!



 
 

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Announcement: DivX Pro free for the Holidays!

via Confessions of a freeware junkie by maximillian_x on 1/4/08


Another nice find from fellow blogger Amit over at Digital Inspiration...

For a limited time, you can download and install DivX Pro during the holiday season. Happy Holidays! You can check out Amit's post here...

What's so great about DivX is the ability to compress full length movies down to about 700Mb or so with very high video quality. I use DivX encoded videos on my Archos 404 all the time.

Follow Amit's instructions:

Step 1: Download DivX Pro at divx.com [Select the Mac or Windows version]

Step 2: You can either share your email address with DivX to get your own serial number for DivX Converter or if you don’t want to receive DivX offers in future, just use the following serial numbers:

For Windows: A3NI9M7P47B325A52C26
For Mac: 338BSZ759249T26B2M9E

Click Register and you are done.

via [Digital Inspiration]

Man, I love that blog... :)


 
 

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[Cool Download] Copy music/videos/etc. to and from your iPod without iTunes:...



 
 

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[Cool Download] Copy music/videos/etc. to and from your iPod without iTunes: SharePod 3.6.3

via Confessions of a freeware junkie by maximillian_x on 2/5/08

SharePod
http://www.sturm.net.nz/website.php?Section=IPod+Programs&Page=SharePod
Supported on: Windows only

Now, I'm calling this one a "quick blurb" because I don't have an iPod, so this one isn't Rob tested, but I've heard lots of things about it, and it seems to be the software of choice for all you iPod owners.

The one thing that bothered me about iPods, Zunes and some other personal media players is the proprietary way in which you have to copy music and other media files to the device (some devices, not all). Also, some players (like the aforementioned iPod and Zune) want to format themselves in hopes that you aren't trying to pirate music. Forget the fact that we just might have more than one computer we would like to synchronize with.

So, for all you iPod owners, here's a cool little application that you can use to move music to and from your iPod without fear of iTunes formatting your player. Dubbed 'SharePod', this application (which resides on your iPod) allows you to use your device like you would any flash or external USB drive, which can be managed and browsed with Windows Explorer.

You can also use SharePod as your primary music manager and player for your device. It also features tag editing, a playlist editor, and the ability to export them to iTunes.

Seems to me if this were recognized as an external drive by Windows, would Windows Media Player, WinAmp or MediaMonkey sync to it?

Again, I don't have an iPod, but this application would make me very, very happy if I did - Especially if I were getting a new computer, and wanted to move my library without the extra hassle.



 
 

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Fix Desynchronized Video and Audio with VLC [How To]



 
 

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Fix Desynchronized Video and Audio with VLC [How To]

via Lifehacker by Adam Pash on 3/13/08

If you've spent hours ripping a DVD or downloading a video just to find—when all's said and done—that the audio and video aren't matching up, reader Will suggests using...

 
 

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Tuesday, March 11, 2008

 

Make an XP Install CD with Every Patch Since SP2 [Updates]



 
 

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Make an XP Install CD with Every Patch Since SP2 [Updates]

via Lifehacker by Kevin Purdy on 3/11/08

As anyone who's reinstalled Windows XP knows, there have been a lot, and I mean a lot, of updates issued for the operating system, and waiting for them to install (/restart/install/restart) can be...

 
 

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Tuesday, March 04, 2008

 

Effortlessly Document Your Party with Simple Photo Projects [Feature]



 
 

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Effortlessly Document Your Party with Simple Photo Projects [Feature]

via Lifehacker by Adam Pash on 3/4/08

Everybody loves looking back at pictures from a party, but unless you're lucky enough to have one of those friends who brings a camera to every party and does the work for you, documenting the event...

 
 

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Sunday, March 02, 2008

 

Create Electronic Greeting Cards from Flickr with Phreetings [Ecards]



 
 

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Create Electronic Greeting Cards from Flickr with Phreetings [Ecards]

via Lifehacker by Tamar Weinberg on 3/2/08

Create greeting cards in a flash using Flickr photos with webapp Phreetings (which quite appropriately stands for photo + greetings). Simply enter in a search phrase and watch as hundreds of images...

 
 

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Saturday, March 01, 2008

 

Plan your next big get-together with disposableWebPage



 
 

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Plan your next big get-together with disposableWebPage

via Free Download A Day by Chippy on 3/1/08

We've all used disposable email addresses, where you get a real address that you don't intend to ever use. Sign up for access to a website, but don't really want to have your address given to every spammer out there? Get a disposable address—a one-time address that you don't need to have hang [...]

 
 

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