10 must-have Thunderbird Addons (+ 25 more)

Mozilla Thunderbird is an Outlook-like email client, but way better. It’s free, it’s multi-platform, it’s multi-lingual and most importantly, it’s highly customizable featuring lots of useful addons and themes. In case you’re new to it than you can read about it here, otherwise jump directly to must-have section below.

10 must-have Thunderbird Addons (+ 25 more)

Top GIMP tutorial sites — kristarella.com

After some discussion at Creative Curio I was starting to think that building a site similar to PSDTuts for GIMP tutorials would be cool.
I haven’t seen much in the way of GIMP tutorial sites that I really like; except for Meet the GIMP, but video tutorials are different in my mind.
Before I go and jump into a huge project like that I wanted to have a look at what was out there. When I say “Top GIMP tutorial sites” I don’t mean that these are sites that I endorse or recommend (although I might when I get to know them better), it actually means these are the top search results (with my first impressions of them).
Full list here:

Top GIMP tutorial sites — kristarella.com

Adeona: A Free, Open Source System for Helping Track and Recover Lost and Stolen Laptops

Adeona is the first Open Source system for tracking the location of your lost or stolen laptop that does not rely on a proprietary, central service. This means that you can install Adeona on your laptop and go — there's no need to rely on a single third party. What's more, Adeona addresses a critical privacy goal different from existing commercial offerings. It is privacy-preserving. This means that no one besides the owner (or an agent of the owner's choosing) can use Adeona to track a laptop. Unlike other systems, users of Adeona can rest assured that no one can abuse the system in order to track where they use their laptop.

Adeona is designed to use the Open Source OpenDHT distributed storage service to store location updates sent by a small software client installed on an owner's laptop. The client continually monitors the current location of the laptop, gathering information (such as IP addresses and local network topology) that can be used to identify its current location. The client then uses strong cryptographic mechanisms to not only encrypt the location data, but also ensure that the ciphertexts stored within OpenDHT are anonymous and unlinkable. At the same time, it is easy for an owner to retrieve location information.


Adeona: A Free, Open Source System for Helping Track and Recover Lost and Stolen Laptops

ImgBurn

ImgBurn is a lightweight CD / DVD / HD DVD / Blu-ray burning application that everyone should have in their toolkit!

It has several 'Modes', each one for performing a different task:

• Read - Read a disc to an image file
• Build - Create an image file from files on your computer or network - or you can write the files directly to a disc
• Write - Write an image file to a disc
• Verify - Check a disc is 100% readable. Optionally, you can also have ImgBurn compare it against a given image file to ensure the actual data is correct
• Discovery - Put your drive / media to the test! Used in combination with DVDInfoPro, you can check the quality of the burns your drive is producing

ImgBurn supports a wide range of image file formats - including BIN, CUE, DI, DVD, GI, IMG, ISO, MDS, NRG and PDI.

It can burn Audio CD's from any file type supported via DirectShow / ACM - including AAC, APE, FLAC, M4A, MP3, MP4, MPC, OGG, PCM, WAV, WMA and WV.

You can use it to build DVD Video discs (from a VIDEO_TS folder), HD DVD Video discs (from a HVDVD_TS folder) and Blu-ray Video discs (from a BDAV / BDMV folder) with ease.

It supports Unicode folder/file names, so you shouldn't run in to any problems if you're using an international character set.

ImgBurn supports all the Microsoft Windows OS's - Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows Me, Windows NT4, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows 2003, Windows Vista, Windows 2008 and Windows 7 (including all the 64-bit versions). If you use Wine, it should also run on Linux and other x86-based Unixes.

It's a very flexible application with several advanced features that are often lacking in other tools, especially when it comes to burning DVD Video discs. It supports all the latest drives without the need for updates (including booktype / bitsetting / advanced settings on many of the major ones - i.e. BenQ, LiteOn, LG, NEC, Plextor, Samsung, Sony).

There is an image queue system for when you're burning several images (which you can automatically share between multiple drives if you have more than one) and an easy-to-use layer break selection screen for double layer DVD Video jobs. The Automatic Write Speed feature allows you store your favourite burn speed settings on a per 'Media ID' basis, right down to a drive by drive level. Data captured during the burn (write speed, buffer levels etc) can be displayed / analysed using DVDInfoPro.

Whilst ImgBurn is designed to work perfectly straight out of the box, advanced users will appreciate just how configurable it is.

Oh and let's not forget the best thing about it.... it's 100% FREE ;-)

Please do not use this software to make illegal copies of copyrighted discs.

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Click here to download!

ImgBurn

12 Unique Email Services You Should Know About « Ijaar

We all have our regular email accounts on Gmail, Hotmail or any other service of our choice.

However, there are times when you don’t want to use your regular email address for one reason or another.

For such times, when you need a special type of email, following services can come in very handy to serve your purpose.

Disposable Email:

For all those times when you don’t really want to give out your email address to somebody but you really have to, these disposable email accounts can be very useful. For example, if you want to register for a software but do not want to give your actual email address, you can create a temporary/disposable email account that will expire after sometime.

12 Unique Email Services You Should Know About « Ijaar

10 Best Firefox Extensions to Manage Tabs

Even though Firefox was not the first browser that supported tabs, no other browser can even come close to Firefox when we talk about the tab management.

There are innumerable extensions for your Firefox tabs, but extensions below can really help you save your time managing tabs. Here are my picks…

10 Best Firefox Extensions to Manage Tabs

Total Copy

Total Copy is a improved version of Windows' copy-function. Here are some of the features:

• Pause / Resuming : At any time you may pause the copy-prosess, and continue later.
• Auto-pause on any error : If you run out of diskspace, the network goes down or some other error occur, copying is automaticly paused, and you may resume when the error is sorted out.
• Resuming on powerfailure : If the computer is turned off during the copyprosess (ex. power-loss or system-crash), Total Copy let's you resume when you restart.
• Speedlimit : Slows down the copyprosess, and frees resources to other tasks.
• Faster than Windows : Copies slightly faster than Windows (approx. 10% localy, and 1% on network)
• Small improvements : Shows copy-speed, a percent-bar and KBytes remaining.
• Does not modify Windows' own copy-function : This program will not alter the existing windows-copy-function.
  

Total Copy

Conversion Central: 101 Tools to Convert Video, Music, Images, PDF and More : Codswallop

Few things are more irritating than having to deal with a format that is incompatible with what you need it to do. It doesn’t matter if it’s a media file, document, or shoe size; it’s just plain frustrating. To make your life easier, check out this list of 101 tools that will allow you to convert just about anything.

Original Art by Bob Ostrom

Conversion Central: 101 Tools to Convert Video, Music, Images, PDF and More : Codswallop

How to Find Drivers for Unknown Devices in Device Manager : EmergingTechs.com

Yesterday I reinstalled Windows on a laptop for one of our users at work. When the installation was complete, I popped in the driver CD to begin the process of installing the drivers that Windows didn’t install. For some reason the CD only contained two of the eight drivers that I needed. Normally, tracking down the right driver can be a huge annoyance, especially when your devices are showing up with generic names like PCI Device, Video Controller, System Device, or Unknown Device. But with the help of a little utility, I was able to find all of the drivers that I needed saving me lots of time and frustration.


This little utility is called Unknown Devices and it works with Windows 95, 98, 98se, 2000, XP, 2003 and Vista. It’s also a portable application so it requires no installation.

When you run it, Unknown Devices immediately lists out all of the devices that Windows cannot find a driver for and tells you what each one is.

How to Find Drivers for Unknown Devices in Device Manager : EmergingTechs.com

6 Must Have Replacement Tools when Fixing a Computer Infected by Virus » Raymond.CC Blog

When a good and powerful virus infects a computer, most likely it will disable you from running Task Manager (taskmgr.exe), Registry Editor (regedit.exe), Command Prompt (cmd.exe), System Configuration Utility (msconfig.exe), configuring Folder Options and hide the Run from Start Menu. Reason the virus does that is because most of the time it is “possible” for computer experts to remove the virus by using the built-in Windows programs without any third party tools.

But if you can’t run Task Manager, you cannot end the suspicious process. You could use the taskkill command in command prompt to kill the process but again you won’t be able to do that if CMD has been disabled. Perhaps you can run msconfig to stop the virus from auto startup but also cannot because of the virus. For advance computer users who has knowledge in registry and thought that they could manually remove the virus auto startup entries there, they too can’t do anything about it if regedit has been disabled. Disabling of Folder Options is to stop you from setting your computer to display hidden and system files. This way you can’t see the virus file and hence you won’t be able to delete them.

It is easy to re-enable all those tools back by modifying some values in your registry but if the is still virus active in your computer, the restrictions will be restored back. So for emergency cases, here are some replacement tools you can use to replace the disabled Windows tools.

6 Must Have Replacement Tools when Fixing a Computer Infected by Virus » Raymond.CC Blog