Friday, December 11, 2009

Best free... firewalls, photo editing

If you are confused about which firewalls to install on your computer, Gizmo has a very helpful article listing the best free utilities available. And also gives some good pointers about how they work.
And seeing it's nearly Christmas, here's a list of 10 free alternatives to Photoshop (a number of them are Mac only, but it's about time the Mac got some attention). Surprisingly, the article does not mention either PhotoFiltre or Photoscape, both of which I would recommend.

Recovering files erased from memory stick

I accidentally erased some files from a memory stick this week. Normally, when you delete files from your hard drive, they reside in the computer's Trash Can until you finally empty the trash. And before that, if you realise you still want them, you can restore the files from there. But files erased from a memory don't go to the Trash in the same way - they are gone. Well, not exactly. A good recovery utility can still get them back. So I tried the free program Recuva, and it did an excellent job. Some of the files were not recoverable, but 90%-95% were, so I'm, a happy chappy again. Incidentally, you can perform the same rescue operation from a digital camera. In both cases, make sure you save the recovered files to a different disk. The Piriform website is also the home of CCleaner, an indispensable anti-spyware utility, and some other goodies worth investigating.

Thursday, December 10, 2009

New Thunderbird features

The Thunderbird email program (for some obscure reason in the computer world, email programs are called "clients") has just had a major upgrade. Thunderbird is a stablemate to Firefox, and I use it very successfully at home, so the new features sound welcome. I'll be downloading the new version asap.

Troubleshooting PC problems

I have been having some major hassles with my home computer lately. All of a sudden it has taken to switching itself off in mid-flight, or rebooting randomly, often at quite frequent intervals. I have begun running all the usual checks (spyware, viruses, etc), but so far nothing obvious has shown up. If you're in the position where your technology is refusing to cooperate, you might find this advice from Rick Broida helpful. Don't get mad, he says, get methodical.

Monday, December 7, 2009

Google and Bing leapfrogging

It seems that Google and Bing release new features almost every second week, in a bid to try and establish dominance.
Bing has a new Visual Maps feature, which tries to outdo Google Earth and Google Maps. It's similar to Google Street View, but adds some mash-ups, many of which are more applicable to the USA than here, but no doubt will migrate before long. One particularly clever app is Photosynth, a photo-management tool from Microsoft that stitches together digital images to create "synths" - 3D renderings of multiple photos of the same scene. Bing users can rotate and view the synths from many angles. The more photos supplied by Bing users, the better the 3D effect.
Meanwhile, Google has a released two new features: a dictionary in English and 27 other languages, plus the ability to search in English across websites written in other languages.