Category: ifttt

By Karl L. Gechlik, MakeUseOf – March 22, 2010 at 10:30PM

It’s time once again for our featured Movers and Shakers post. Each week, we take one software category and list the top ten most downloaded apps. This week, we are looking at security applications. These are the apps that can be carried on a USB thumb drive and can be used on pretty much any computer.

1. AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition

Weighing in at first place, raking in 2,583,548 downloads this week is AVG’s free anti-virus application. A great free anti virus program that we have seen many times on MakeUseOf.com including our Top 15 Must-Have Windows Applications. It has had 268,048,933 total downloads! It was also our readers choice in our poll here.

2. Avast Free Antivirus

This comes in second place with over 1 million downloads this week and over 79 million downloads since its release. Avast is a great AV solution and one I use personally. Avast came in second place to AVG in our poll.

3. Avira AntiVir Personal – Free Antivirus

Another anti-virus application that I have used personally on some slower machines.

4. Malwarebytes Anti-Malware

This one is my go-to application for spyware and virus removal when nothing else can do the trick. I always keep MalwareBytes on my flash drive – don’t you? It was covered on MakeUseOf here.

5. Ad-Aware Free Anti-Malware

I used to use Ad-Aware back in the day for spyware removal before my antivirus application knew what that was. Apparently it has come a long way since 2004. With over 350 million downloads, the users can’t be wrong!

6. IObit Security 360

An application I have never personally used but it did make it into our 15 Must-Have PC Applications.

7. Spybot – Search & Destroy

Good old Spybot S&D. I couldn’t have made it out of 2005 without you! Not quite as popular as Ad-Aware but another Must-Have application.

8. ZoneAlarm

The best free firewall application on the market. Protect yourself from unauthorized access by applications or people. ZoneAlarm came in 3rd place in our What Firewall Do You Use poll.

9. Hotspot Shield

This is a tool to help maintain your anonymity on unknown or unsafe wireless networks. It encrypts your web traffic by using their service. It is ad-supported meaning you will see their ads on top of every web page and there is also a 5GB limit per month. I have not personally used this but with almost 3 million downloads since last year maybe they are on to something. In the past we recommended the app as a tool to watch Hulu movies from abroad but I think it no longer works for that.

10. A Squared Free

This is a utility for scanning for and removing malware from your computer. You can run four types of scans. They are Quick, Smart, Custom and Deep scans. The deep scan took over 6 hours to run on my machine and it is pretty reliable in detection. It seems it is pretty slow when updating the application and sometimes even requires a restart. It is able to quarantine items and then allow you to rescan them against a new definition file. With over 2 million downloads in about a month, it seems to be growing in popularity exponentially.

Check out this post on 7 Essential Security Downloads That You Must Have Installed and this post on The 10 Best Firefox Security and Privacy Add-ons.

Got Questions? Ask Them Now FREE on MakeUseOf Answers!

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By Jason Fitzpatrick, Lifehacker – March 22, 2010 at 04:00PM

If you loved browsing the archives of National Geographic when they opened up their vaults last November and found yourself wanting to take your own impressive nature shots, you’ll definitely want to check out the BBC Photo Masterclasses.

Published in the pages of the BBC’s Wildlife magazine, the Photo Masterclasses are articles written by Wildlife photographers and specialists in their genre of nature photography. You’ll find articles on macro photography, landscape photography, and photographing different creatures under all sorts of different conditions. If you love learning a new photography trick or two you’ll definitely want to dive into the archives of the BBC.

Check out the full list of articles at the link below. If you have a favorite site for learning new photography tricks—nature-related or otherwise—let’s hear about it in the comments. Thanks thom_vee!

By Ryan Dube, MakeUseOf – March 22, 2010 at 03:30PM

With April 1st approaching, it’s that time of year when everyone is looking for that funny and unique prank to play on a friend. Here at MakeUseOf, we’ve covered a number of cool pranks. I recently wrote about Ask Peter, a unique prank you can use to make your friends think something paranormal is going on. Justin described 4 funny ways to prank your parents, and I wrote an article on funny prank call websites.

If that wasn’t enough, John wrote about prank news story websites, and now I’d like to cover 4 free April Fools prank ideas with small applications you can use to really fool your friends or family members. I’ve tested each of these programs, and as far as I can tell they are perfectly safe and very fun methods to prank your friends this April Fools.

Change Your Voice for a Funny Phone Call

Have you ever considered calling a friend and pretending to be an IRS agent or maybe a long lost relative? Maybe you would like to tell your friend that an unknown uncle died and left them millions? Your friend would easily recognize your voice. So, the best option is to use free voice changing software, and then dial out using your computer and your favorite VoIP application. Never fear! The perfect free voice-changing application is here, and it’s called Screaming Bee MorphVOX Junior.

This software is very fast and easy to set up. It sits between your microphone and any application you use and morphs your voice in whatever way you configure it to. The free version allows you to use an alternative male or female voice, or for a funny alternative, you can raise the level of your voice to sound like a tiny person! Another fun feature is the fact that you can click and insert sound effects into the call, such as a cuckoo clock, a drum roll (like after telling a joke), an alarm clock  or a screeching sound.

Strange Windows Errors

If you share a computer with a friend or with family members, and you really want to play a funny joke on other people who use the computer often, you can install the little Dr. Windows app offered by DonationCoder. This application gets installed into the apps menu, and appears as just a small antivirus application called “Dr. Windows.” In reality, it’s counting down the minutes to when it delivers one of the strange error messages that you’ve set up.

Once you install the application, it appears in the system tray as a very small anti-virus application. Any user who isn’t very tech savvy should completely ignore it. When you first install it, right click on the icon and click on Options.

Make sure to enable “Hide Options” so that when the user right clicks on the icon, nothing will happen. The only way to enter settings is to hold down the Ctrl key while right-clicking. The software comes with about 50 random Windows error messages that pup up either when you trigger them with the hotkey combination, or at a set interval that you enter.

The messages are fairly random and all pretty funny. If you have anyone using the computer who is just completely non tech-savvy at all, these will really throw them for a loop. Just sit back and watch them panic and pull out their hair in frustration…just try not to snicker too loudly!

Install a Small Fake Virus

We certainly spend a lot of time here at MakeUseOf focused on helping people avoid or get rid of viruses, adware and spyware on their computer. However, in the spirit of April 1st, I’d like to propose a safe and very funny application called Lappet. Lappet is a completely safe and very funny fake computer virus that will inflict terror into the heart of just about any computer user who doesn’t know any better.

The reason I write that it would scare anyone who doesn’t know any better is because most of the savvy MUO readers would instantly recognize the progress bar as a very non-standard Windows app (what’s up with that horrid green color). But I’m sure many of you know someone who would completely fall for it.

Once the hard drive is “erased,” Windows crashes. Mind you – the app takes a screenshot and uses it as the background so that it appears the entire computer froze. The user may try clicking around, but almost nothing will work (there is the secret of simply pressing the “up” key to escape though).

Finally, the very last window reveals the truth – that the entire episode was just a funny gag. The application doesn’t require any kind of install, it’s just an executable, so you can deliver it to your friend in whatever format works best – an email, a download from your website or blog or anything else that gets them to run it.

Install a Very Scary Fake Computer Virus

Another great computer prank you can use on your friends this April 1st is a full scale computer virus, packaged up as a promotion for real antivirus software. It’s actually a somewhat realistic fake virus called Ultimate, which first asks if you really want to delete the Windows folder (it doesn’t matter what the user clicks, or whether they even click anything at all!)

Before you know it, the next screen comes up that shows sections of Windows Explorer literally getting “deleted” and turning into black space. To the savvy user, this animation looks a little bit cheesy. But to the standard or amateur user, it could come across as convincing enough.

Finally, once all contents of the Windows folder are deleted, the entire screen goes completely blank and stays that way, just long enough for the user’s heart to stop beating for a few moments. Then, very slowly, the following message prints across the screen.

After a few more keystrokes, the application closes and the user returns to their normal screen. This is also delivered in the form of a simple executable. If you can’t get your friends or family to run it from an email, you can always install it in the Startup folder on the computer of an unsuspecting friend of family member.

Do you know of any safe and scary or funny computer pranks that might come in handy for other MakeUseOf readers this April Fools? Share your own ideas for free April Fools prank ideas in the comments section below.

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By Jason Fitzpatrick, Lifehacker – March 22, 2010 at 03:00PM

If you’d like a lot of shelf space for less money than you’d spend on traditional bookcases and without all the damage to the wall that comes with wall-mounted shelving, these DIY compression shelves are a great alternative.

Instructables user Tiffehr was inspired by the free-standing shelves designed by Julie Scheu. Since they were a custom build and it would be outrageous to commission another custom build, the only solution was to DIY.

Using parts from IKEA as well as shelving from the local hardware, they were able to construct a sturdy and reasonable replica of the inspiration piece. The total cost came to $550—a cost which could be substantially reduced by using less expensive wood for the shelves—for two of the shelves seen in the photo here. Half a grand isn’t chump change by anyone’s measure but for a quality bookcase that isn’t a particle-board piece of crap, $550 for two attractive and sturdy shelves isn’t outrageous at all.

Check out the full Instructable at the link below or sound off in the comments with you own creative DIY projects.

By Rich Whittle, Business Opportunities Weblog – March 22, 2010 at 01:20PM

Sometimes, the most memorable moments happen during the daily clatter of life. Especially when they involve children.

Those adorable half-asleep eyes in the early morning hours. A serious case of giggles at bath time. The excitement after scoring a soccer goal. Even a temper tantrum, in hindsight.

The Philadelphia Inquirer reports many parents are preserving those candid minutes forever – not by grabbing the family point-and-click but by hiring a personal photographer to follow and shoot their children doing everyday activities.

Known as lifestyle or documentary portraiture, the snapshots look like the stuff of first families – often with price tags worthy of a head of state. Full-day sessions with kiddie paparazzi and the resulting coffee-table-quality books can run into tens of thousands of dollars.

Wedding and Portrait Photographers International, a trade association with more than 7,000 members, has seen lifestyle photography explode, an outgrowth of the popular, photojournalistic wedding pictures that brought spontaneity to the choreographed albums of yesteryear.

“The same photographer wants to do your engagement, your wedding, your newborn, the first birthday, the fifth birthday, everything,” said Abigail Ronck, a staff member with the Los Angeles-based association and managing editor of two trade magazines. “They want to build these relationships. It’s not a session over hours or even days. It’s over years.”

Photo by Philadelphia Inquirer.

From Business Opportunities Weblog.

By The How-To Geek, Lifehacker – March 22, 2010 at 12:00PM

Whether you want to save and watch a Flash video offline, convert a Flash music video for your MP3 player, or do something else entirely, learning how to rip and convert Flash videos is a useful skill. Here’s how it works.

When it comes to ripping Flash videos, there’s more than one way to accomplish the task, and in many cases it depends greatly on where you’re grabbing the video. We’ll cover a number of different options for downloading Flash videos, as well as several ways you can convert them into more useful formats. Once you’ve seen the options, you can choose the one that works best for you and your situation.

Downloading the Flash Video

Most online videos these days use the FLV format to store the actual video files, so our first task is to get a copy of that file. Some sites, like YouTube, will offer an MP4 download in certain cases, but if not, the FLV file can be converted in the next step to a more usable format, so let’s concentrate on getting the file downloaded.

The easiest way to download any video from the majority of online video sites is with the Video DownloadHelper extension for Firefox. Once you’ve installed the extension, head to any video page, and then click the DownloadHelper button button (see screenshot below) to see a list of the available media to download on that page. The extension provides a built-in method for converting video files, but they will end up watermarked, so just download the files in MP4 if possible, or FLV if not.

If the Video DownloadHelper extension doesn’t detect the video on the page, you can sometimes head into Tools -> Page Info -> Media, find the video file in the list of resources, and then click the Save As button. If you are a Linux user, you can also just wait until a Flash video is entirely loaded, and then grab the file from your /tmp folder.

Alternatively, you can use Orbit Downloader, which seems to work best in Internet Explorer—just move your mouse over the video until the GetIt button shows up, and then select the video to download. In our testing, this method worked in an instance or two where the Firefox extension did not. Another solid choice is TubeMaster++, which actually scans network traffic to grab videos, works on Windows or Linux, and can convert to any format—but it doesn’t really work with a wireless network card.

Downloading YouTube Videos

You can’t talk about ripping Flash videos from the web without giving special attention to YouTube, since much more specialized tools are available for easily downloading and converting video from YouTube in a single step.

The single easiest Windows tool I’ve found for downloading and ripping YouTube videos is the YouTube Downloader application, which is as simple to use as pasting in the URL and clicking the OK button. Once it downloads the video, you can switch the radio button and convert the video into almost any format—in fact, you can use this tiny application to convert almost any video (YouTube or not) into almost any popular format.

If you’d rather not use a separate piece of software, you can use the Get YouTube Video bookmarklet, or any number of specialized sites like KickYouTube, KeepVid, deturl, or Vixy to download and rip videos from YouTube or some other sites. The problem with most of these types of sites is that they go up and down, and often end up covered in sleazy ads that trick you into clicking the wrong thing—though Vixy seems to be a solid option, for now.

Converting Flash Video to Other Formats (Video or Music)

Once you’ve got the Flash video downloaded, you’ll probably want to convert it into a format that’s easier to use on other devices (like, say, your iPod). If you’re using the YouTube Downloader or one of the video ripping sites you can download and convert in one step, but if you downloaded from elsewhere you will probably want to convert them.

To convert almost any video into almost any format, I like using the free Format Factory utility; it easily handles every video conversion task you can throw at it, including bulk conversion, which comes in very handy if you want to convert a bunch of YouTube music videos into MP3 files. Just open up the utility, choose your desired format on the left, add the files or folders you want to convert, and then click the Start button. It’s got many advanced formatting options available if you want them, but in our testing the defaults usually work fairly well.

On the other hand, instead of installing a conversion utility, you can always grab yourself a copy of the command-line ffmpeg utility, which is what most video conversion applications use behind the scenes. To convert FLV to another video format like MP4, just use a command line similar to this one:

ffmpeg -i filename.FLV -qmin 2 -qmax 5 -ar 22050 filename.MP4

The qmin and qmax parameters are important for making sure the quality of video is good—the lower the parameters, the better the quality. The -ar parameter is the quality of the audio, and the extension of the filename on the last parameter tells ffmpeg what format to convert the file into. For instance, to convert a flash video to MP3, you could use something like the following:

ffmpeg -i filename.FLV -ar 44100 filename.MP3

If all the command-line options are too much for you to deal with, you can always grab a graphical front-end for ffmpeg, like WinFF or Super.

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What about you? What’s your favorite method for downloading and ripping Flash videos? Share your thoughts and expertise in the comments.

The How-To Geek thinks everybody should watch this FarmVille parody. His geeky articles can be found daily here on Lifehacker, How-To Geek, and Twitter.

By , USA National Innovation Marketplace, iBridge Network Innovations – March 22, 2010 at 11:01AM

advanced visualization system for real time surveillance

By , USA National Innovation Marketplace, iBridge Network Innovations – March 22, 2010 at 11:01AM

advanced visualization sytstem for real time surveillance

By Walker, ColumbusUnderground.com – March 22, 2010 at 11:00AM

If you happen to stroll down a quiet portion of South Fifth Street, you might have already discovered the Meat Packers Outlet. If not, you may never have known that this establishment was right under your nose.

The Meat Packers Outlet is a family owned business that has been around for over 53 years, and has roots dating further back to the Columbus Central Market in the early 1900’s.

This family business has been passed down through three generations and continues to operate today as a destination for beef, pork and poultry products. Most items are sold by the pound similar to a grocery store, and special bulk packages are also sold. These bulk sets are generally designed for a either a backyard grilling party, or someone looking to stock a deep freezer with meats.

The Meat Packers Outlet is located at 317 S. 5th Street, Downtown. Their hours are Monday through Saturday 8am to 6pm. More information can be found online at www.meatpackersoutlet.com.

By Whitson Gordon, Lifehacker – March 21, 2010 at 06:00PM

Windows/Mac/Linux: It’s still slim pickings when it comes to finding a good freeware application for ripping Blu-Ray discs, but ripping and converting tool MakeMKV is free for as long as it’s in beta—and it’s undoubtedly the simplest ripper around.

Those of you with large Blu-Ray collections have probably already invested in a good ripping tool, but those running a bit behind on the format changes (or that don’t have the space on your HTPC to hold all those 50 GB files) should take advantage of this limited time opportunity. MakeMKV is a two-click decrypting, ripping and converting tool for DVDs and Blu-Ray discs. Literally all you do is pop in the disc, click the DVD or Blu-Ray icon, and then hit Make MKV—30 minutes later, you’ve got yourself a high-definition MKV file that can be played in most media players (like Lifehacker favorites VLC or XBMC). You can opt to rip only certain chapters, as well as edit a few advanced preferences, but the default settings work just fine for those not well versed in DVD ripping lingo.

MakeMKV is a free download for all operating systems. DVD ripping will always be free, but Blu-Ray ripping is only free as long as it’s in beta, after which it will go to a to-be-determined price, so get ripping now!