Tired of the waiting for your CPU to be freed from the massive process eaters? This is a common issue for those having slow processors. Upgrading is one solution but what about a free software that will save you the pennies? Continue Reading »
Category: Software
Music Recognition on PC for FREE with Tunatic!
Update: For an online service that works like Tunatic, check this post from us. For a roundup of identification services, check this post.
Fans of Sony Ericsson can surely boast about their TrackID service, which gives you the details of a music track currently being played, like the name of the artist, and the song title. You just have to record a few seconds of music with TrackID, and within seconds, you will automagically have the details of the song.
PC users like me have long searched for a similar application, to identify music currently being played. Sometimes, you hear a track somewhere, and would like to know which band or artist is playing.
Well rejoice, now you can!
Brief VS Sage – The Feed Reader Duel
In today’s article I will be talking on how to read feeds (your favourite ones). Brief and Sage are Firefox’s two most popular feed reader. Hanging out with one is a wise decision, that’s another chance to take your browser one level up. Before going any further, we must not forget, there are also web based feed readers like Google Reader, Bloglines, alongside we also have specialised applications meant just for reading feeds.
Mass Rename Files (and folders) with ReNamer
Have you ever come up with a situation where you have a batch of files, which you need to rename according to a pattern, or according to file names from a list. I do. And I do often.
Consider this scenario. You downloaded a bunch of video files or episodes off the Internet, and you want to rename them to something meaningful. Like from “S01E08_Episode_Released By_XYZ” to “1×08 – Episode by XYZ”.
Now, doing this rename operation on one file manually is alright. Doing it for 100’s of episodes? I guess no one is ready for this. Anyways, for this situation, a very useful and friendly application is needed. It’s called ReNamer by Denis Kozlov.
There are tons of freeware batch-renamers out there, but I found ReNamer to be the friendliest of them till now, and my personal favourite. I thought that it would be nice to share it with you.
AVG Free 8.0 Released
I know many people are using AVG as an anti-virus solution. Well, you probably know that AVG upgraded to 8.0, but the free version was stuck at 7.5.
Good news! You can now get the 8.0 version of AVG Free. It’s really worth it, considering that the free version now comes bundled with an anti-spyware solution, which is better than 7.5 which didn’t offer anti-spyware.
Go get it here. I personally think AVG is one of the best anti-virus solutions around, specially among the free ones. So 8.0 is worth checking out.
(Wow! That thing is growing in size! 8.0 is a 46MB file now! It was 23MB previously! I just hope it’s not becoming a bloatware!)
Here are some screenshots:
The interface is much cleaner, pleasing to the eyes and functional. Everything can be known about the state of the antivirus at a glance.
The number of settings has been increased too. AVG8 is much more customizable than 7.5. In fact, much much more!
The computer scanning screen is nice and clean. Note the slider at the bottom, where it says automatic scan. That can be changed to slow scan (less resources needed) and fast scan (more resources needed). This is a nice improvement, and I didn’t find that in any other AV I used.
(If you want to bypass the image-overlay, just right-click on the image and click View Image or Open in Background Tab (if you have TabMix) in Firefox)
Overall, I’m impressed with AVG8. It’s lots better than 7.5 and deserves its 46MB file size. Now, I haven’t tested its virus detection and cleaning skills yet. So more on this part later. Give it a try if you need a small, fast (no fuss) and free AV.
EDIT: I found a problem with AVG 8. For some obscure reason, the Link Scanner crashes my Firefox or greatly slows it down. Disabling Link Scanner in AVG itself results in an ugly icon in my notification area, with a big exclamation mark.
If you want to disable AVG’s Link Scanner, go to Tools – Add-ons in Firefox, and disable AVG Safe Search 8.0 there. This doesn’t result in an ugly icon, and returns Firefox to stability.
Monitor your traffic usage with NetMeter
With Orange having implemented their Fair Use Policy (FUP), it is advisable for us, Internet users to monitor our bandwidth usage. No, we are not going to take out a notebook and track every download we ever made! For this task, we will a small application called NetMeter.
XP SP3 out by 29th April?
According to this Engadget article, yes.
The much anticipated XP SP3 will be coming out on 29th April, hitting Windows Update and Microsoft Download Centre.
There’s not much info about it for now, so more on this as I find something interesting.
For now, I know that there will be around 10% speed boost, and possibly a version of DirectX 10 for XP. Maybe! Nothing confirmed yet.
I also downloaded the Whitepaper of SP3. There is no mention of DirectX 10 for XP. It’s just a rumor I heard. But I can say there’s some new “features”, mainly regarding security issues. Like the ability to skip entering a product key at install, but later supply it as part of Windows Genuine Advantage.
For people who want the Whitepaper, it’s here.