Friday, June 11, 2010

Free online file hosting

I have a personal website that shares drama scripts. (Pop over and see us at www.dramatix.org) It's getting pretty big now, with more than 1200 scripts listed, so I'm running up against some storage problems, especially with larger pdf files. I think I've found the answer in MediaFire, a free online storage system, that allows me to store and then share a very large quantity of pics, pdf files, Word documents or whatever else I can think of. It has a very nice interface that is exceedingly simple to use, and there's a helpful video tutorial to get started. Recommended.

Find hidden Flash files

Many of the videos you view on websites are in the .FLV or Flash format. Trouble is, if you want to download them, there is obvious way to do so. At last, here's a tool to find hidden .FLV flash video stream URLs, called URL Helper, which is basically a URL finder. This free tool can be used to find out the links or video URLs of the flash videos from various web sites so that you an download them on your computer. Find out more here.

Photo managers

There are some great new free photo managers coming available. Some people swear by Picasa, while others are happy with a simpler style such as Irfanview, which tacks image management onto a very good editor. XNView has been another very popular manager, which I have also used in preference to Picasa (I don't like the way Picasa takes over my system).
The new kid on the block sweeping all before it is Zoner Photo Studio, and I think it could become my new favourite. There's a free and a professional version. The free one is obviously stripped down, but still has enough features to satisfy most home users.

Password recovery, USB unmount, privacy and more

Here are some invaluable system helps.
Asterisk Key does one thing, but it's a lifesaver. It reveals the actual passwords hidden under the dots or asterisks in the password field. Invaluable when you've forgotten yours.
You are supposed to "unmount" USB drives before pulling them out of your computer. Which in XP you do by clicking on the little icon at the RH foot of your screen.

But sometimes when you try, you get cryptic messages saying you can't do that. Rather than just using brute force, try a little bit of freeware called USB Safely Remove.
The Blue Screen of Death is every Windows owner's nightmare. Most often it leaves you with no clue as to the real problem. Maximum PC magazine has a helpful Blue Screen of Death survival guide - everything you need to know.
Windows XP won't be around forever, and Microsoft will stop supporting it soon, meaning there will be no more bug fixes/security patches. Here's some advice from PC World for when that happens.
Internet privacy continues to dominate the news (you may have seen the hooha over Facebook in the last few weeks). Here's a list of the latest threats. And here's what you can do to fix the Facebook problem.

Some new pdf tools

PDF to Word Converter is a free tool that turns a PDF document into a Word document. It holds the layout quite well, but it does use a lot of paragraph returns to do it.
If a pdf file is locked or password protected, no pdf conversion tool will touch it. However, PDF Password Remover will do just that. Sadly, it's not free, although I managed to get a free copy via another site, so keep a look out for the offers.
I have been using FoxIt as my main pdf reader for some time now, and it works well. And I like the fact that it is tiny in comparison to the bloated Adobe Reader. However, there are some new kids on the free block, worth checking out. Nitro PDF Reader has a lot of helpful tools. And Nuance also claims many bells and whistles, including conversion to Word documents. The latter is done by uploading to a website, but so far I haven't managed to get it the feature to work. The rest looks good, though.

Some helpful photo tools

Fix blurred photographs with free software, Unshake. It really does work, and it's great for those cellphone pics that don't quite cut it, although it takes a bit of experimentation to get best results.
Microsoft Image Composite Editor is an advanced panoramic image stitcher. Given a set of overlapping photographs of a scene shot from a single camera location, the application creates a high-resolution panorama that seamlessly combines the original images. This is nice.