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You've got a PDF file on your hands that you really need to print, copy, or otherwise edit but it's locked down like Fort Knox. You're out of luck, unless you use a service like FreeMyPDF. A few years ago, I would have killed for a simple service like FreeMyPDF. Countless times people within my company would send me PDF files that had all sorts of unnecessary protections which frequently made it impossible for me to work with them the way they requested: "Hey can you print that off and bring it to the meeting?" "You locked it down with a password. I can't print it." "Oh really? Huh. I dunno what the password is." - lebaron

Firefox only (Windows/Mac/Linux): Firefox extension ReloadEvery lets you automate the refresh process by allowing you to pick a time interval right from the context menu to reload any web page. We've mentioned ReloadEvery before, but that was back in the day—now, it seems like so many things we would have used ReloadEvery for (such as webmail clients or a Facebook/Twitter-type feed) are now Ajax-powered and stay up-to-date themselves, but this extension can still be pretty handy. Whether you're trying to find your iPhone with MobileMe (it doesn't automatically update location until you refresh), waiting for concert tickets to go on sale, or just want to set your favorite blog to refresh every so often to stay on top of things (*wink*), there are still a lot of uses for this in today's high-tech, auto-updating world. - lebaron

The CyberNet News blog posts an interesting take on creating secure passwords you can actually remember, or at least remember how to retrieve—by posting a favorite web site, or an MP3 file, into an MD5 hash generator. - lebaron

What do you do when there is no optical drive in your PC or Laptop and you want to install a Windows XP on it? You can use a USB drive to do the same. Here is a detailed step by step procedure to install Windows XP from a USB Flash Drive in your computer. Before we Install, we should create a bootable USB flash drive with Windows XP loaded into it. This will be required if we want to reinstall the OS. - lebaron

We all love music and we have our own playlists of our favorite songs. Playlists vary from person to person. I usually save my playlists in a text file or an xml file. Well, I recently got an email from a person who wanted to print playlists. Here’s the question he asked, “How do I print my playlists? I want to maintain a record of my music collection”. Lemme show you how to print playlists. - lebaron

Firstly download LockImage and launch it. Go to File> Open and browse for the image you want to save as .exe. Now, go to File> Save as and give a name for the image file. You’ll be prompted to enter a password for the file, enter a password and click ok. That’s it! The image file will now be saved as a password protected .exe file. To open the image file again you need to enter the password. - lebaron

Windows only: If you've ever wanted to keep a program safe from prying eyes but don't want to close it, free utility LockThis! will let you easily protect any open program, so that un-minimizing it requires a password. - lebaron

In my earlier post I had discussed about how to capture the IP address of a remote computer. Once you obtain this IP address it is necessary to trace it back to it’s source. So in this post I will show you how to trace any IP address back to it’s source. In fact tracing an IP address is very simple and easy than we think. There exists many websites through which you can trace any IP address back to it’s source. One of my favorite site is ip2location.com. Just go to http://www.ip2location.com/demo... and enter the IP address that you want to trace in the dialog box and click on “Find Location”‘. With just a click of a button you can find the following information for any given IP address. - lebaron

One of the most noticeable improvement in Windows 7 is the task bar, rechristened as ‘Superbar’. The thick glassy task bar with features like ‘Jumplist’ and ‘Pin-to’ has endeared many to the new operating system. If you are one of those who are still not ready to upgrade to Windows 7, there is a way for you to enjoy some of the new task bar features while continuing to use Windows XP and Windows Vista. - lebaron

This tool works in real time and can detect whether email addresses are valid. - lebaron

Internet is growing really fast and sometimes we don’t even understand what’s real and what’s fake over the web. The best example is an email ID. It’s pretty difficult to identify a fake Email ID. It may so happen that you need to send an important email and the email ID doesn’t exist or it’s a wrong one. But, there are ways through which you can easily identify a fake email ID. Firstly, you can send a test email to the id. If you receive a failure mail delivery report then the ID isn’t available. Well, there’s an alternative to this method too. - lebaron

Windows/Mac/Linux: If you're a fan of photos that are desaturated save for an interesting burst of color left behind—often a vibrant one like a yellow flower or red carpet—Tintii makes it easy to play with the technique. Source photo by O Palsson. Tintii is available as a stand-alone tool, the one we're reviewing here, and as a plugin for Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro. The stand-alone version is free to try out the application, activating the plugins costs $16. - lebaron

Firefox only (Windows/Mac/Linux): Firefox extension The Camelizer adds a small button to online retailers Amazon, Newegg, and Best Buy that, when clicked, displays price history charts and item watch features to help you make a smart buy. (Click the image above for a closer look.) Once you've installed the experimental extension (the experimental part means you'll have to tick a checkbox agreeing that it could be unstable before you can install it), just start doing your normal shopping around on Amazon, Newegg, or Best Buy. You'll notice a small Camel button strip on the left of your browser. To bring up Camelizer's price history charts, just click the Camel button. As you can see in the screenshot above, on Amazon Camelizer compares Amazon's price history with third party new and used prices. - lebaron

Windows only: Portable application NirLauncher bundles 100+ of the best NirSoft utilities into a single launcher window, and even allows you to add your own utilities to make a killer flash drive toolkit. Once you've downloaded the zip file, you can extract the contents into a new folder on your desktop or flash drive, and then launch the NirLauncher.exe application from that folder, which will give you quick access to the 100+ NirSoft utilities included in the package. - lebaron

Windows only: Free application STDU Viewer is an all-in-one tabbed reader for electronic documents, supporting everything from your standard PDF to the less common comic book archive (CBZ/CBR). It's free, fairly lightweight, and snappy. (Click the image above for a closer look.) STDU has a nice browser-style tabbed interface for viewing multiple documents in one window, supports most electronic document formats you would want (including TXT, TIFF, PDF, DjVu, Comic Book Archive, and XPS), displays thumbnails of pages in the sidebar, and allows for bookmarking in documents. As FreewareGenius points out, it also has a really nice text search tool that displays all the results in a list rather than requiring you to jump all over the document. - lebaron

Windows only: Standalone application Theme Builder creates themes for Microsoft Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations, and even Outlook emails—allowing you to create a consistent look and feel across all your documents. Downloading the application requires using Microsoft's annoying File Transfer Manager, which usually requires Internet Explorer, and once you get past that hurdle you need to make sure that you've got the .NET Framework 3.0 and Office 2007 Interop installed—but once you've successfully navigated through all of those, the application is relatively easy to use. - lebaron

Note: Please create a create a restore point before patching system files. Many themes only work on a specific operating system, architeture, and service pack. i.e. Vista SP2 x86. Please read the instructions for each theme very carefully. Installing desktop themes on your Windows XP machine takes just a few minutes . Learn, in this guide, how to patch system files and install themes. - lebaron

In Scribd, If the uploader disabled the download option, you will not be able to download files for offline use and they can only be accessed online. How do you download locked or restricted files or documents from Scribd? There is a workaround using which you can get any locked files from any website. Previously we shared a way to download restricted Flickr Photos, - lebaron

Some applications display an interface, program window or command line window if they are executed even though this is not needed for the program execution. It is usually possible to minimize the application window to the Windows system tray after it appeared on the computer screen but not before that is happening. Hide App has been developed for exactly that purpose: To hide applications in Windows so that they do not display a program window upon execution. This obviously only makes sense if the program does not require some degree of user interaction as this wont be possible if Hide App is used. - lebaron

Windows only: Free Sysinternals application Disk2vhd takes a snapshot of your PC, and turns it into a Microsoft Virtual PC virtual hard drive—while your system is up and running. Using the software, which requires no installation, is as easy as launching, selecting the drives you would like to create into a virtual disk, giving the file a name, and clicking the Create button. The utility uses the same volume snapshot feature that Windows uses for backup utilities, so it doesn't matter if software is running or not—but you'll have best results if you create the virtual disk on a separate drive. Once you've created your virtual drive, you can use the free Microsoft Virtual PC to boot the image of your PC, which you can then use for testing, or just as a great way to completely backup your computer. Disk2vhd is a free download for Windows only. - lebaron

Windows only: Remember Fences, the awesome desktop icon organizer we highlighted back in February? Fences just left beta and rolled out its 1.0 release, and it continues to keep your cluttered desktop icons in attractive, minimal, organized groups. The video above should give you a pretty good idea of what Fences does and how it might come in handy on your PC, but if you want to get a closer look, check out our original post, which walks through how great Fences is at cleaning up your cluttered desktop in detail. If you're someone who keeps shortcuts on your desktop at all, Fences is a must-have. - lebaron

Windows only: Remember Fences, the awesome desktop icon organizer we highlighted back in February? Fences just left beta and rolled out its 1.0 release, and it continues to keep your cluttered desktop icons in attractive, minimal, organized groups. The video above should give you a pretty good idea of what Fences does and how it might come in handy on your PC, but if you want to get a... more... - lebaron

If you use Picasa to organize your pictures you may or may not be aware of the various options available to edit the photographs in your digital albums. Although simple to use in nature, some of the editing capabilities found in Picasa match that of photo editing packages that would normally carry a hefty price tag. Below I will walk you through the Basic Fixes tab and provide you with a description and an example of each tool. If you have any comments or questions please post them below. - lebaron

Ever wanted to read a website as a PDF file? I’m pretty sure you wanted to. But why would you want to do that? There are several reason for you to do so. Firstly, it’s helpful if you don’t have regular internet access. Secondly, if you don’t have time to read the articles and would like to read it sometime later. Well, there may be other reasons too. So, let’s speak about how you can convert a website into a PDF file. - lebaron

Nowadays the usage of Fax machines at home and offices have significantly decreased. But at times you are forced to fax your personal documents, like for companies like paypal, CJ, etoro etc for verification procedures. And even if you rarely send documents over fax, there is no sense in buying a new fax machine for that matter. Today there are few online fax services which sends your documents over Fax for free.Let’s look into some of those online services which allows us to send fax via internet. - lebaron

Unfortunately, for those of us that have an OCD with changing icons, and tricking out our desktops, there’s never been an easy way to manually change the drive icons in ‘Computer’. There are plenty of programs out there that can do the job for us but I’m a believer, in doing things the hard way! This guide will show you how to edit the registry so you can use your own icons for your drives in ‘Computer’ (Windows Explorer). You’ll need to use an ICO icon image for this guide to work. PNG, GIF etc. will not work. - lebaron

Google offer a very healthy 7372 MB of storage to it’s GMail users. Previously i’ve covered how to use Windows SkyDrive to your advantage. This time it’s Googles turn. This guide will show you how to add your GMail account to Windows Explorer, thus enabling a drag & drop system for you to use you GMail account as additional storage on your computer. Even if you don’t use GMail as an email provider nobody can turn down an extra 8GB of storage, can you? Be aware that support for this tool may suspend at any time if Google decides to block its use. To get started, download the latest version of GMail Drive from www.viksoe.dk/gmail/ and install it. You’ll notice that it’s dropped an addition to your ‘Computer’ in Explorer. - lebaron

If you use Google Calendar, you’ll know how useful and simple it is. In this guide, you’ll learn about a tool, which brings your Google Calendar entries to your desktop. After downloading GMinder, put in your Google account details. - lebaron

Did you ever want to reset your Windows Password when you lost it? But, I’m sure you had no idea how to do it and hence you ended up formatting the OS. But there’s an easy alternative! PC Login Now is a freeware that comes handy in such a situation. With this software you can easily reset local administrator and other accounts passwords without reinstalling the system. The Windows registry is protected by Syskey, but PCLoginNow can easily bypass this mechanism and reset the Windows passwords. - lebaron

Windows: There's no reason to rely on individual applications to tell you when they need an update, when you've got a handy tool like TechTracker. You'll need to create a free account or use Facebook connect to log in to CNet and download the TechTracker application. Once downloaded and installed finding the out of date applications on your system is as simple as running the application. TechTracker compares the software versions of your applications to the vast database of applications at Download.com and shows you a list of which applications need to be updated and a link to Download.com or the publisher's site where you can download the update. - lebaron

Windows: Just because you're still rocking Windows XP, or you've recently picked up a Netbook that zips along nicely with XP installed on it, doesn't mean you need to miss out on the polished graphics of newer Windows versions. XP's appearance was a big step up from the boxy grays of Windows 98 and 2000, but compared to the slicker interfaces of Vista and Windows 7 it's lost a bit of luster. - lebaron