Category: GReader

As we prepare to stuff our faces with a bountiful Thanksgiving feast, we turn our Thanksgiving spirit to the gobs of free software we love to say thank you to the developers, and to give our computers a feast of their own.

Earlier this week we asked you to share the free apps you’re most thankful for, and after rounding up thousands of your suggestions, considering our own favorites, and performing a little spreadsheet magic, we’ve cooked up our own cornucopia of excellent free software and webapps we’re extremely thankful for. So whether you’re an American celebrating the season or not, the selection of apps below is like gravy-drenched turkey and mashed potatoes for your computer. Happy Thanksgiving, everybody!

61 Free Desktop Applications, Webapps, and Tools We’re Most Thankful For

1. Firefox (see also: Power User’s Guide to Firefox 3, Top 10 Firefox 3.5 Features)
2. VLC (see also: Master Your Digital Media with VLC, VLC Hits 1.0 with Better Playback and File Support)
3. CCleaner (see also: Five Best Windows Maintenance Tools)
4. Dropbox (see also: Use Dropbox for More Than Just File Syncing, Sync Files and Folders Outside Your My Dropbox Folder)
5. 7-Zip (see also: Five Best File Compression Tools)
6. OpenOffice.org (see also: OpenOffice.org 3.1’s Usability Tweaks, OpenOffice.org Screenshots Preview a Ribbon-Like Toolbar)
7. Google Chrome (see also: The Power User’s Guide to Google Chrome, 2009 Edition)
8. µTorrent (see also: Tweak uTorrent’s Settings for Faster Downloads, Five Best BitTorrent Applications)
9. Notepad++ (see also: Five Best Text Editors, AutoSave Adds Reassurance to Notepad++ Editing)
10. Gmail (see also: Our full Gmail coverage)
11. GIMP (see also: Gimp 2.7 Beta Improves Text Editing, Streamlines Saving)
12. Paint.NET (see also: Paint.NET Releases Big Update, Still a Killer Photoshop Alternative, Paint.NET Plugin Lets You Open Photoshop Files)
13. Microsoft Security Essentials (see also: Microsoft Security Essentials Free Antivirus App Leaves Beta, Stop Paying for Windows Security; Microsoft’s Security Tools Are Good Enough)
14. Revo Uninstaller (see also: Lifehacker Pack 2009: Our List of Essential Free Windows Downloads)
15. Evernote (see also: Evernote 3.5 Beta Brings Tons of Tiny Fixes to Windows, Expand Your Brain with Evernote)
16. Thunderbird (see also: Thunderbird 3 Release Candidate Available for Download)
17. Audacity (see also: Geek to Live: Make a ringtone from any MP3)
18. ImgBurn (see also: Turn Your PC into a DVD Ripping Monster, Five Best CD and DVD Burning Tools)
19. Picasa (see also: Picasa 3.5 Organizes Your Photos with Facial Recognition)
20. Skype (see also: Our full Skype coverage)
21. Pidgin (see also: Ten Must-Have Plug-ins to Power Up Pidgin, Five Best Instant Messengers)
22. Ubuntu (see also: First Look at Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala, Dual-Boot Windows 7 and Ubuntu in Perfect Harmony)
23. iTunes (see also: iTunes 9 Improves Syncing, Network Sharing, More)
24. foobar2000 (see also: Screenshot Tour: The beautiful and varied world of foobar2000, Hack Attack: Roll your own killer audio player with foobar2000)
25. Foxit Reader (see also: Five Best PDF Readers, Lifehacker Pack 2009: Our List of Essential Free Windows Downloads)
26. FileZilla (see also: Five Best FTP Clients, Build a Home FTP Server with FileZilla)
27. VirtualBox (see also: The Beginner’s Guide to Creating Virtual Machines with VirtualBox)
28. TrueCrypt (see also: Geek to Live: Encrypt your data, Five Best Portable Applications)
29. Avast! (see also: Five Best Antivirus Applications)
30. Defraggler (see also: Five Best Disk Defragmenters)
31. KeePass (see also: Eight Best KeePass Plug-Ins to Master Your Passwords, How to Use Dropbox as the Ultimate Password Syncer)
32. Opera (see also: Opera 10.10 with Unite Media Server Released)
33. AVG (see also: AVG 9 Free Now Available for Download)
34. Digsby (see also: Five Best Instant Messengers, Digsby Sees the Light, Removes (Some) Bundled Crapware)
35. Google Reader (see also: Our full Google Reader coverage)
36. Winamp (see also: Win7shell Adds Windows 7 Jump List Support to Winamp)
37. Google Earth (see also: Google Earth 5.1 Speeds Up Your World Browsing)
38. TeraCopy (see also: Five Best Alternative File Copiers)
39. Launchy (see also: Our full Launchy coverage)
40. Transmission (see also: Lifehacker Pack 2009: Our List of Essential Free Mac Downloads)
41. Eclipse IDE
42. SpyBot Search & Destroy (see also: Five Best Malware Removal Tools)
43. Adium (see also: Adium Updates with Security Fixes, Better Facebook Integration)
44. PuTTY (see also: Add Tabs to PuTTY with PuTTY Connection Manager)
45. Songbird (see also: Songbird 1.0 Release Official, Fixes Bugs, Plays iTunes Purchases, Killer Add-ons Make Songbird So Much Better)
46. Sumatra PDF (see also: Sumatra 1.0 is a Blazing Fast Replacement for Adobe Reader)
47. XBMC (see also: Build a Silent, Standalone XBMC Media Center On the Cheap, Customize XBMC with These Five Awesome Skins, Turbo Charge Your New XBMC Installation)
48. Blender (see also: Learn Blender with free e-book)
49. CDBurnerXP (see also: Five Best CD and DVD Burning Tools)
50. Everything (see also: Everything Finds Windows Files As You Type, Top 10 Tiny & Awesome Windows Utilities)
51. HandBrake (see also: HandBrake Updates to 0.9.4 with Over 1,000 Changes, 64-Bit Support)
52. Rainmeter (see also: Rainmeter 1.0 Brings the Enigma Desktop to Everyone)
53. AutoHotkey (see also: Turn Any Action into a Keyboard Shortcut, Hack Attack: Knock down repetitive email with AutoHotKey)
54. Google Calendar (see also: Our full Google Calendar coverage)
55. MediaMonkey (see also: MediaMonkey 3.2 Syncs with More Devices, Adds Auto Folder Watching)
56. Quicksilver (see also: A beginner’s guide to Quicksilver)
57. WinSCP
58. Google Voice (see also: Make Unlimited Free Calls on Your Cellphone with Google Voice, How to Ease Your Transition to Google Voice)
59. Boxee (see also: Build a Cheap But Powerful Boxee Media Center, Boxee to Launch Beta with Loads of New Features)
60. AdBlock Plus (see also: Top 10 Must-Have Firefox Extensions, 2009 Edition)
61. Media Player Classic (see also: Five Best Video Players)

In case you’re curious, here’s a broad look at how your votes broke down among the 10 most popular:

The list above represents every application that garnered roughly ten votes or above. The highest vote-earner, Firefox, pulled in a couple hundred. If you’re interested in how the full count went down, you can check out a Google Spreadsheet of the results here. Happy Thanksputering!

The number of new cases of H1N1 influenza in many communities across Canada appears to be levelling off, federal health officials say.

Confirmed. The rumors about Google’s redesign are true, and you can try it for yourself with a very simple method.

1. Go to Google.com.
2. Once it loads, enter this code into your web browser’s URL address field:

javascript:void(document.cookie=”PREF=ID=20b6e4c2f44943bb:U=4bf292d46faad806:TM=1249677602:LM=1257919388:S=odm0Ys-53ZueXfZG;path=/; domain=.google.com”);

There shouldn’t be any http://google.com in front of that. Just that code.

3. Hit enter.
4. Reload or open a new Google.com page and you will have access to the new user interface.

It’s fast and sweet, although the changes don’t affect all the available sections. [Thanks Matt Karolian]

Google has, according to some Gizmodo readers, begun offering up a bolder but more condensed view of its home and search results pages to certain users. Take a full-size look, and try it out for yourself with some JavaScript magic.

Our own tips box isn’t lit up with readers seeing this new, more Google-Wave-like interface, but Gizmodo reader Matt Karolian sent over these pics that look a little bit too polished and thought out to be a reader joke (we’d hope/think). Most notable is the permanent sidebar being shown, which breaks searches down into “News,” “Maps,” “Everything,” and the more familiar drop-down “More” options.

Update: Google Blogoscoped already has a JavaScript tweak that gets anyone into Google’s new look test. Head to Blogoscoped, copy the code, paste it into your address bar, and refresh Google’s page. You may, like Phillip (and I), have to sign out and back in to get it to work, but it did eventually show up for me.

What do you think of Google’s maybe-new look? Could the search giant use a new coat of paint after all these years?

Continue reading Wireless USB keyboard / touchpad is more than the sum of its parts

Wireless USB keyboard / touchpad is more than the sum of its parts originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 25 Nov 2009 03:44:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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If you’ve already upgraded to Firefox 3.6, you might have noticed that many of your extensions no longer work, and the old checkCompatibility trick doesn’t work anymore. Or does it?

Thanks to my good buddy Daniel for pointing out the change in Firefox 3.6. His personal blog is so nerdy it will make your head explode.

Force Extension Compatibility with Firefox 3.6+

This is the error you get when you try and install an extension that isn’t compatible. Pay special attention to the Firefox version string, as we’ll need that later.

Type about:config into the address bar, and then after clicking through the warning, you’ll want to right-click in the list and choose New –> Boolean from the menu.

Now we’ll be prompted to enter the preference name. This is where you need to pay attention to the exact version you are using, because the preference has to be set for the exact version of Firefox you are using.

We’re using Firefox 3.6b3, as noted in the error message above, so the preference would be the following… note the capital C there, very important.

extensions.checkCompatibility.3.6b

Basically the format is extensions.checkCompatibility.VERSION.b for Beta releases or extensions.checkCompatibility.VERSION.a for Alpha releases. So if you were testing out Firefox 3.8 Alpha, you’d use extensions.checkCompatibility.3.8a as the preference name.

Yeah, that wasn’t the simplest thing. On the next dialog, just choose “false” and close the dialog.

You should now see the value in the list if you filter for it.

And your extensions should now install. If they don’t, then you probably put the wrong version into the preference name.

Definitely a very useful tip, and one that I suspect I’ll be using all the time.

Saskatchewan Roughrider fans are gearing up for a road trip to this weekend’s Grey Cup in Calgary.

The rumors published last week may be true after all: Google is testing a new search interface on random people, as these screenshots from Gizmodo reader Matt Karolian confirm.

Like the Google Wave-inspired interface for Gmail, the new user interface is cleaner and bolder than the current version, offering more options to the user. It may still be far from deployment, however, but it’s good to see some changes after so many years of same all same all.

It was a tight race in last week’s Hive Five with a mere 0.001% of the vote separating the first and second place winners.

Earlier last week we asked you to share your favorite screen casting tools. You responded with your favorite app for recording the action in your virtual workspace and we rounded up the five most popular options for a vote. The top two contenders were neck in neck. Both CamStudio and Camtasia Studio took in 28% of the vote, CamStudio coming out ahead by a mere 3 votes. While they might be close together when it comes to votes, they're miles apart when it comes to price—CamStudio is free and open-source and Camtasia Studio is $299.

Following behind CamStudio and Camtasia Studio, Screenflow and ScreenToaster with 12% and 11% of the vote respectively—not only do they share half their names like the first and second place winners but they too were separated by mere votes. Finishing off the Hive Five was Jing with 9% of the vote.

For more information about the contenders and reader comments on the race, check out the full Hive Five.

Windows only: Driver update utility Device Doctor finds outdated drivers on your PC, and helps you download the latest version—without charging you a dime.

Using the utility, which can be installed or used as a portable application, is about as easy as it gets—just click the Begin Scan button, wait a couple of seconds, and you will be shown a list of drivers that can be updated. The download button for each driver will take you to their web site, where you can download the drivers for free, without signing up for anything at all. Most of the drivers come with setup programs, but some of them are nothing more than zip files, and would need to be installed manually—hopefully something they can improve on in the future.

During our testing, we used the application on half a dozen PCs, and had varied results—on our XP test system, Device Doctor worked well and accurately found new drivers, but for Windows 7 we didn't have as much luck, with a few incorrect drivers being thrown at us. That said, Windows 7 was only released recently, so expect that support to improve in the future.

Device Doctor isn’t perfect yet, but as a completely free, portable application that you can toss on your thumb drive, it’s well worth a look. It might even save you some time searching for new drivers while you are fixing mom’s PC.

Device Doctor is a free download for Windows only. Be sure to check out the full How-To Geek review for a more in-depth look, as well as instructions on installing drivers manually.

Researchers at the Large Hadron Collider have successfully smashed together two beams of protons in the machine’s particle accelerator for the first time.

Users of our very own Better GReader Firefox extension have been able to turn on favicon support for their feeds in the Reader sidebar for a while now (a favicon is, for example, the little ‘lh’ that displays next to the address bar when you’re visiting Lifehacker); now the folks on the Reader team have caught up, adding favicon support for your subscriptions. It’s not enabled by default, so you’ll need to head to your Reader Settings page and tick the Show favicons for subscriptions checkbox to get it up and running. Good times. [Google Reader Blog]

Writing emails while offline can help keep you on top of things, especially while on the go. As of today, Offline Gmail allows you to add attachments to an email while you’re offline, bringing essentially the full offline experience to Gmail.

No one likes sending out the “Oops! I forgot my attachment!” email following an incomplete draft. If you work offline with regularity, Offline Gmail’s new offline attachment feature means less chance of forgetting. For those who have held off using offline access, here’s how to get things started:

If you haven’t tried offline access yet, visit the Labs tab and follow these instructions to get started:

1. Select Enable next to Offline Gmail.
2. Click Save Changes.
3. After your browser reloads, you’ll see a new “Offline” link in the upper righthand corner of the Gmail page, next to your username. Click this link to start the offline set up process and download Gears if you don’t already have it.

If you aren’t using Offline Gmail just yet, take a closer look at what else it gets you.

Microsoft demonstrated SilverFace during the Silverlight 4 announcements at PDC 2009 last week. Although SilverFace is not available download, Microsoft has made Fishbowl available. Fishbowl is a WPF desktop application that uses the Facebook stream APIs to allow access to Facebook in a clean and impressive UI. Fishbowl also includes Windows 7 only features, including taskbar notifications, jump-lists and taskbar previews. The interface fully supports multi-touch navigation too and image gestures to navigate and view your photos. Fishbowl was created by the UXLabs@Microsoft to showcase the Windows Platform. Exploring photos is one of the best features of Fishbowl, you can flick using touch gestures or flip through images with your mouse scroll-wheel.

Read full story…

Rom Houben has been trapped in a series of worst nightmares, including trying for 23 years to alert those around him that he was not in a coma. A new report suggests he’s not alone in his experience.

In 1983, Belgian engineering student and martial arts enthusiast Houben, then 20, was in a car accident that was thought to have left him in a vegetative state. Doctors relied on the widely-used Glasgow Coma Scale, assessing his eyes, verbal, and motor responses. What they failed to notice was that Houben was actually conscious—but completely paralyzed.

“I screamed, but there was no one to hear,” he says in an interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel. Three years ago, neurologist Steven Laureys used modern scanning techniques to discover that Houben’s cerebral cortex was, in fact, functioning. (The doctor has only just now made Houben’s story public.)

Houben, who communicates via a computer with a special keyboard activated with the slightest movement of his right hand, is now 46. He has spent more than half his life trapped in his own body, and says he only survived this excruciating existence by dreaming himself away. In the interview, this is what he typed:

I am called Rom. I am not dead. The nurses came, they patted me, they sometimes took my hand, and I heard them say "no hope." I meditated, I dreamed my life away—it was all I could do. I don't want to blame anyone—it wouldn't do any good. But I owe my life to my family. Everyone else gave up.

I studied what happened around me as if it were a tiny piece of world drama, the bizarre peculiarities of the other patients in the common room, the entry of the doctors into my room, the gossip of the nurses who were not embarrassed to speak about their boyfriends in front of “the extinct one.” That made me an expert on relationships.

According to Laureys, Houben’s case may be far more common than we’d like to think. The doctor, who leads the Coma Science Group and Department of Neurology at Liege University Hospital, says that while Houben’s doctors were “not good,” he’s not sure better ones using this same coma scale would have detected brain activity either:

In Germany alone each year some 100,000 people suffer from severe traumatic brain injury. About 20,000 are followed by a coma of three weeks or longer. Some of them die, others regain health. But an estimated 3,000 to 5,000 people a year remain trapped in an intermediate stage—they go on living without ever coming back again.

In his paper, Laureys writes that in about 40 percent of “vegetative state” cases he has analyzed, current brain scanning techniques reveal signs of varying levels of consciousness. A case is being made, it seems, to stop relying on the Glasgow Coma Scale and start looking more closely at brain scanning images.

Think about how much of your important data is stuck in the cloud. Web service Backupify backs up all your online accounts (including WordPress, Facebook, Gmail, and Flickr) so if a service you rely on suddenly goes poof!, your data won’t.

Backupify is a spiffy service that automatically performs scheduled backups at one of the 10 online services they support. Supply the login credentials of the sites you want backed up, and Backupify takes care of the rest. Once you’re up and running, if your Gmail, Google Docs, or FriendFeed account flakes out, you won’t have to freak out because all your important stuff is stored safely somewhere else.

Backupify offers Twitter backups for free and three additional premium plans that range from $3.95 to $14.95 per month, depending on how much storage you need. Seems like a reasonable price to pay for the comfort of knowing the data you store in the cloud won’t disappear into the ether some day.

BMW’s EfficientDynamics Vision concept car combines the best of all worlds with incredible fuel efficiency, breaktaking performance, and sensational looks. It’s powered by a three-cylinder turbo-diesel engine, lithium polymer batteries, and electric motors front and rear. The BMW Vision gets a U.S. unveiling next week at the Los Angeles Auto Show, Dec. 4-13. The only bad news: The BMW Vision is more vision than production-ready concept car. What you’d most likely see on sale would be the key components such as the drivetrain and battery technology transplanted to a more mainstream body.

On a stopover from Europe en route to L.A., BMW held a series of press briefings at its Chestnut Ridge, N.J., U.S. headquarters. According to BMW, the goal was to create a car that would be as quick as BMW’s V8 M3, yet tread lightly in terms of environmental impact. Here’s how the BMW Vision has the potential to win the hearts and minds of hot-rodders, environmentalists, and techies alike:

Total output from the engine and electric motors is 356hp, and peak torque is 590 foot-pounds (a lot). Acceleration to 100 kph (62 mph) takes just 4.8 seconds and speed tops out at 155 mph. Average fuel consumption is 62.6 mpg or 3.76 liters/100 km in European figures. The fuel economy translates to CO2 emissions of 99 grams per kilometer; getting below 100 is the holy grail by EU standards.

The Vision has a range of 431 miles, BMW says: 31 miles in all-electric mode, about the same as the Chevrolet Volt, plus 400 miles from the 6.6 gallon fuel tank. BMW hasn’t yet tried to play the U.S.-automaker mpg numbers game, saying that since most trips are less than 30 miles, and since big powerplant generation is more efficient than using a combustion engine, the effective mileage is up around 200 mpg. What is clear is that electric motors are extremely efficient, as are big power plants, so the effective cost of energy is less than half that of diesel or gasoline fuel.

The three-cylinder, 1.5-liter engine alone produces 163 hp. BMW says the output of 109 hp per liter is the most power produced by a diesel engine. It’s small enough to fit ahead of the rear axle for better weigh distribution. Power travels to the rear wheels via a six-speed double-clutch transmission.

One electric motor, in back, sits between the diesel engine and transmission and produces 33 hp (51 hp peak). It can run on its own, without the combustion engine, making the Vision what’s considered an active hybrid, as opposed to a mild hybrid where the combustion engine always powers the car. The second motor powers the front axle; it produces 80 hp (continuous), 112 hp (30-second bursts), or 139 hp (10-second bursts). The two motors also act as brakes and regenerate power into the lithium polymer battery pack that runs in a tunnel along the floor of the car. Fuel for the diesel engine is in the rear of the tunnel (separate compartment; it doesn’t just slosh around the batteries).

The battery pack has enough juice to bring anyone back from cardiac arrest (or cause it): 98 lithium-polymer cells deliver 30 amp/hours at 3.7 volts, or 111 watt-hours. So each cell is about equal to two laptop batteries. For periods of up to 30 seconds, each cell develops 1,200 amps. Plug the Vision into a standard (in Europe) 220-volt, 16-amp circuit, and the car fully recharges in 2.5 hours. Uses 380 volts and 32 amps and you’re back on the road in 44 minutes. Conversely, you’d be looking at overnight plugged into 120 volt U.S. power.

Since it’s a concept car, cost and practicality aren’t the main concerns. BMW has provided some stunning visual touches:

Windshield and Roof From One Piece of Glass

The windshield and roof are a single piece of glass (or polycarbonate). The body is carbon fiber and the chassis is aluminum, all of which yields a weight under 3,000 pounds, a third of a ton less than the BMW M3.

Glass Cockpit

The instrument panel consists of both a small display in front of the steering and a big head-up display.

iDrive in the Center Console

Since it's a BMW, there's iDrive. Of course.  

Alloy Wheels Help Channel Airflow

The alloy wheels look like a child’s pinwheel, less so to extract heat from the brakes (regeneration means the brakes don’t work that hard on this car) but to help move air in a continuous boundary layer over the bodywork. There’s also a small slit in the front fender that channels air around the wheels. BMW says the tires are a new generation that provides low rolling resistance without giving up handling.

Airflow Over the Body

The trademark BMW kidney grille opens and closes to channel airflow at different speeds for reduced wind resistance.

Thin Seats Save Space

The seats are meant to be supportive but almost wafer thin. Don’t carry whiny 5-year-olds in back if they’re prone to show displeasure by kicking the front seatbacks. Not that you’d want kids in a car with white and light-color upholstery anyhow.

IBM’s shitcanning the Cell processor line—you know, the chip that's in the PS3 and uh, Toshiba laptops and TVs—according to their VP of Deep Computing, making the current PowerXCell 8i the last of its ilk. Updated.

Update: For now, IBM’s just saying that the successor to the current PowerXCell 8i is canned, not all Cell development. [Fudzilla via MaxConsole, Driver Heaven]

The Saskatchewan Roughriders are headed to the Grey Cup in Calgary after Darian Durant passed for 204 yards and three touchdowns in a 27-17 win over the defending champion Stampeders in Sunday’s West Division final.