Computer and Technology Help and Tips From MalekTips.Com

iGoogle - Add a Fly Eating Tree Frog
Customize a tree frog and watch it go after flies in this iGoogle gadget.

There are a variety of virtual animals that you can add to your iGoogle page. Now amphibian lovers can add a tree frog.

...

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Photoscape - Add Frames or Borders to Make Photos Stand Out
Give photographs rounded or straight borders, or choose from many decorative custom frames.

Photoscape has a wide variety of options to add decorative frames and borders to your photos. Whether you want to give a landscape image a rounded edge, make a photo of your friends appear as if they were on a filmstrip, or create a heart-shaped photograph of your special someone, Photoscape can handle the job.

1. First make a backup of your original photo....

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Google Search Engine - Visualize Population, Unemployment, Health, Other Data
The Google Public Data Explorer offers ways to visualize huge amounts of data and present it on web pages.

To help visualize large amounts of data such as health issues, unemployment rates, and population, Google has created the "Public Data Explorer" tool. With this you can access a variety of data resources such as Eurostat, the U.S. Census Bureau, and the World Bank, and generate line graphs, bar graphs, maps, or bubble charts.

Depending on the data, you can perform comparisons, adjust colors, change the timeline, and further manipulate the data. For example, the below screenshot shows a visual representation of the population of the U.S. - the bigger the circle, the larger the population concentration in a particular state:...

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Google Chrome - Add an Extensions Button to Google Chrome's Toolbar
Make managing extensions in Google Chrome easier by adding a shortcut button to the toolbar.

There are several extensions to add commonly-used buttons to the Google Chrome toolbar such as a history button or downloads button. What if you need an easier way to manage your extensions (uninstalling, removing, and changing options) instead of selecting the wrench button and clicking "Extensions"?

The "Go Extensions" extension adds a button to the right of the address bar in the Google Chrome toolbar. Click it and a new tab opens allowing you to manage extensions, including this one. ...

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File Transfer - FTP - SFTP - FTP with Multiple Simultaneous Transfers
3D-FTP supports a configurable theme, virus scanning after file downloads, logging, and other features.

3D-FTP is a file transfer application for Windows supporting multiple connections to an FTP server allowing for simultaneous file transfers. A site manager helps organize FTP connections and a variety of predefined sites are included with the software to get you started. The software supports using a proxy for FTP or HTTP connections if desired.

Features include importing sites from various clients such as CuteFTP and WS_FTP, a drag-and-drop user interface, support for transferring large files over 4 GB+ (claimed by the author, untested for this tip), and printing directory listings....

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Text Editors - Notepad Replacements - Multi Platform Editor for Programmers
EditRocket is a multi-platform text / source code editor with programmer-centric features such as syntax highlighting, sample code builders, and convenient inserts.

EditRocket is a text editor for Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris, and Windows geared towards software developers. The application supports syntax highlighting for many languages include Java, Perl, and Ruby, and includes templates providing sample code. A variety of inserts may save you typing when creating if/then clauses, exception handling, and loops. Sidekicks for several languages include features such as function lists, syntax checking (the language executable must be present), and links to API references.

Other features includes single file find and replace with regular expression support as well as multi-file searching, spell check, an ASCII table, a color chooser, various text removers such as duplicate and blank lines, bracket and tag matching, and conversions between Windows, Macintosh, and Unix-style line breaks....

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iGoogle - Daily Recipes and a Food Related Blog
The Epicurious gadget displays a daily recipe on your iGoogle page, news items from a food-related blog, and a recipe search box.

Looking for a new recipe every day to appear on your iGoogle page? The Epicurious gadget displays the photo of a daily item such as "Pear-Cranberry Cobblers", "Coconut Shrimp", or "Butternut Squash and Fried Sage Pasta". Clicking on a photo or recipe name opens up full details in a new window or tab.

You can scroll through previous days' recipes, or search for recipes direct from the gadget. Clips of items from the "Epi Log" are available, containing food-related news and views regarding cooking....

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Sticky Notes - Stickies, Freeware for Windows
Stickies lets you attach sticky notes to your Windows Desktop, plus offers many options to prevent it from getting too cluttered.

Stickies is a feature-rich application for Windows that lets you "attach" sticky notes to your Desktop. Each sticky note can have a title, multiple fonts and colors, highlighted text, and a configurable opacity level. You can decide whether or not each note will appear on top of windows. To save space, notes can be rolled up, or you can attach a note to a window so it is only visible when the window is visible and not minimized.

You can set alarms for each note, alerting you in a few minutes or at a definable time and date. You can also put notes to "sleep", hiding them for a certain amount of time but appearing silently after the time period. Plus, to help prevent important notes from being modified, you can lock them. ...

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Digital Image Resizers - Resize Images, Perform Cropping, Color Mode Adjusting, More
Able Batch Converter provides a variety of image manipulation options including adding borders and watermarks to images.

Able Batch Converter is an image manipulation program for Windows. Besides resizing images, the software provides a myriad of other options including cropping, rotating images, changing color depths, adding borders (straight and rounded), and adding shadows.

The software also can remove EXIF metadata (such as that found in .JPEG images) or all metadata including GIF and PNG comments. Image or text watermarks may be added with a variety of options. Noise may be removed, and other effects may be applied including adjusting the brightness and contrast; the screenshot to the right lists some of them....

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Disk Usage Utility - Commercial Disk Usage Utility with Temporary, Duplicate File Reports
FolderSizes offers an impressive array of features including schedulable reports, multiple graph types, and multiple types of report exporting.

FolderSizes is a commercial disk usage reporting application for Windows. The software can report free and used space for drives or individual folders, and generates bar graphs, pie charts, and Treemaps representations.

The software can generate a wide array of reports including the largest files (are movies and music taking up too much room?), oldest files, temporary files (you can consider deleting old temporary files to save space), and duplicate files (so you don't need a separate duplicate file scanning utility). Details and graphs may be displayed for file types, attributes, owners, sizes, names, and dates. ...

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Google Chrome - View IMDb Information About a Selected Movie
Select a movie name in a web page and the "Go To IMDb" extension lets you access related information at the click of a mouse.

Do you often view entertainment or movie-related web sites in Google Chrome and wish it was easier to access IMDb (The Internet Movie Database) information about a particular movie?

The "Go to IMDb" extension adds a "IMDb" button to the right of the address bar in Google Chrome. Highlight a movie name with your mouse and the extension searches for it; if found, the icon then contains the movie's rating. Click the icon and IMDb opens in a new tab with information on the selected movie....

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Calculators - Freeware Calculator that Doesn't Take Much Space
Type in an equation into Calculator Prompter; includes support for several constants and functions.

Calculator Prompter is a freeware calculator tool for Windows. The software lacks a keypad and does not take much space on the Desktop; merely input your equation and click the "Result" button to get an answer. The software prompts you if any mistakes are made in the equation such as a missing parenthesis or unknown function.

Several functions are supported including trigonometric sine, cosine, and tangent, as well as rounding functions ceil and floor. A few constants are supported such as e, pi, and ln10. You can switch between angles and radians, as well as between decimal, octal, hex, and exponent number systems. ...

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Sticky Notes - Efficient Sticky Notes Freeware
Attach notes to your Desktop in a variety of colors and fonts with Efficient Sticky Notes.

Efficient Sticky Notes is a free Desktop sticky note application for Windows. Each note can have its own background color, font, and transparency level, and notes can be made to stay on top of other windows. You can also attach files to notes.

The software comes with a manager where you can view all notes, edit or delete notes, and organize notes into groups. You can export notes to text files in case they contain important information you need to keep, or perform a complete backup or restore of all notes. Plus, you can password protect your notes files to help keep them away from prying eyes....

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Clipboard Managers - Enhancers - Freeware Clipboard Manager with Preview
PasteCopy.NET stores image and text clips for later retrieval, and includes built-in rich-text and HTML clip converters.

PasteCopy.NET is a freeware Windows application that keeps track of items copied to the clipboard, and allows old items to be copied back to the clipboard by selecting them. The software supports text, rich-text, HTML, and image clips, and supports previews. If desired, rich-text can be converted to plain text, and HTML code can be converted to rich-text or plain text.

Clips can be edited or deleted as desired (for images, only the picture name is editable). The entire list of clips may be exported to a rich-text file or printed. To save space or de-clutter the display, the preview area may be disabled as well as the clip dimensions (image dimensions or text length)....

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File Recovery - Undelete - File Scavenger for Windows
File Scavenger can help recover accidentally-deleted files. Images may be previewed before recovery.

File Scavenger is a data recovery package for Windows. The software can perform file recovery on NTFS, as well as FAT 12/16/32 file systems.

Use is simple; enter in the types of files to find (or "*" for all files), the path to search, and whether or not to perform a quick or long search. Click the "Search" button to look for possibly recoverable files; results will contain original paths (where applicable), sizes, and the possibility of successful recovery. Then check boxes to try to recover files, click the "Recover" button, and follow the prompts to save the recovered files. ...

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IrfanView - Perform a Full or Partial Screen Capture
IrfanView comes with a screen capture utility that can optionally include the mouse cursor.

When using IrfanView, if you need to perform a screen capture of the Desktop, multiple monitors, a window, or a rectangular area, you may not need to use an external screen capture program; IrfanView comes with a screen capture utility.

To perform a screen capture, do one of the following:...

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Google Chrome - Do Not Press the Red Button
Better not press the red button... but how can you resist? It's a button... and it's RED!

Bad things tend to happen when you press red buttons. Plans spring into action, things may blow up, items may disappear... but the red button is tempting, isn't it? It's shiny. It's begging you to press it. And.... it's.... so..... RED!

Now you can add your own red button to Google Chrome via the "Do Not Press" extension. This adds a red button to the right of the address bar. But can you keep from pressing it? You never know what would happen......

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Opera - Keep JavaScript Enabled but Prevent Certain Operations
Prevent JavaScript in web pages viewed in Opera from moving windows, resizing them, and more.

JavaScript is a feature used by more and more websites to add menus, interactivity, immediate feedback (AJAX), and other features. While the web is becoming more unusable if JavaScript is completely turned off, you can disable a few "features" in Opera such as automatic window resizing or moving and changing the status text.

1. Click the "Tools" menu, selecting "Preferences". Or press Ctrl + F12....

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Mozilla Firefox - Plugins and Extensions - Need Help with Scrabble Tiles?
If you need help while playing Scrabble or other anagram word games from within Firefox, this search engine may help.

Do you play an online version of Scrabble(r) while using Mozilla Firefox and ever get dealt a rack of tiles that you cannot create anything with? The "Scrabble Solver" add-on may help. This adds a search engine to Firefox allowing you to type a list of your tiles and search the Scrabble Solver service. Note that at the time this tip was written, this only searches the US / Canada version.

To add this search engine:...

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iGoogle - News from the BBC
Display headlines and snippets of news stories from the BBC.

The "BBC News - Front Page - World Edition" gadget for iGoogle allows you to display snippets of top news stories around the world. Clicking the plus sign next to a headline displays a clip; click a headline to view the full story in a new web browser tab or window.

While the gadget defaults to showing three headlines, click the down-pointed arrow at the top of the gadget and choose "Edit settings". From here you can display anywhere from 1 to 9 items (if this setting does not stick, trying a second time should work in displaying fewer/additional news items)....

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Miscellaneous Software - Convert Text Files to PDFs for Distribution
TipCase provides an application to convert text files to PDFs with just enough options so as not to overwhelm the user.

Do you need to distribute a text file, but find that sending text files seems a little unprofessional? One option is to send the file instead as a PDF, but this may require purchasing software or installing complicated tools.

As a quick method to convert your texts into better looking PDF documents, you may wish to consider the freeware TipCase Text To PDF Converter for Windows. To create a PDF, simply open the program and answer a few questions such as the document's author, keywords, subject, and title. ...

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Google Chrome - Prevent Movies from Automatically Playing on YouTube
Tired of YouTube videos automatically playing as you access the pages? Try out this extension.

While browsing YouTube in Google Chrome, if you are a "power user" you might want to open multiple videos from a search result in their own tabs. However, since videos are set to automatically play, you must go to each tab and pause the videos else several may try to play simultaneously.

The "Stop Autoplay for YouTube" extension helps solve this problem. Not only will videos be prevented from automatically playing, but pre-buffering will still occur. This way your browser can still buffer several videos while you are watching another one, so they may start faster when you're ready to press play....

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