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- Top 3 Sites To Download Windows Mobile 6 Freeware
- Cool Websites and Tools [November 24]
- Media Cope – An All In One Media Player, Cutter & Converter
- Monitor Off – Software to Switch Off Your Monitor & Save Energy
- Stay Connected To IRC Chat 24/7 Using Quassel
- 9 Hilarious Websites To Visit When You Need To Kill Time
- Never Forget Your Facebook Friend’s Birthday & Social Events With fbCal
- Top 8 Sites To Listen To Free Christmas Music Online
- PhraseExpress – A Great Alternative Text Replacement Tool
| Top 3 Sites To Download Windows Mobile 6 Freeware Posted: 25 Nov 2009 04:01 AM PST
Today we will be looking at my favorite places for downloading Windows Mobile 6 freeware. My favorite will be listed last and not covered as extensively as the first two – this is due to the fact that it also hosts a lot of hacked applications that should cost money. We do not advocate this at MakeUseOf and urge you to pay for software that helps you. It will aid in the development of more applications that will help you! Do you follow me? First up is FreewarePocketPC. Head on over there to see a full blown catalog of Windows Mobile freeware divided up by category. They have a RSS feed and a search box on the home page for easier stalking and searching.
When you click on a category you will see a tighter list with less details, click on what you want to download and you will see more details including a screen shot.
You can socialize the application, rate the application, favorite the application and of course download the application from its detail screen.
Towards the bottom of the page you will also see an embed code to embed the download in your blog or website.
Next up is Cnet. To view only the free mobile downloads click on this link or you can always use the normal URL http://download.cnet.com/mobile and filter the search yourself using our method below.
The homepage shows featured downloads with huge total download numbers – these are highly popular downloads as you can see.
This site also has categories. We clicked on System Utilities and can further filter by age and other search options. You can click on the Free filter to only see free downloads! You can also filter out applications that would not be compatible with your device.
When you get to the products download page you will see a detailed description, how many times it was downloaded in total, downloads this week and much more. You will see your screenshot here as well. Download the application by clicking Download Now.
And last but CERTAINLY not least is Xda-developers. Xda-Developers is my one stop shop for freeware, roms and everything Windows Mobile. But as I said before it can also have cracked or pirated software so check this one out on your own with the knowledge that there may be some shady goings on over there. But you can find any piece of mobile software probably ever created over at Xda! Do you have another favorite site for grabbing Windows Mobile 6 freeware? We would love to hear about them in the comments. Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section! New on Twitter ? Now you can follow MakeUseOf on Twitter too. Related posts
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| Cool Websites and Tools [November 24] Posted: 24 Nov 2009 05:01 PM PST
(1) AceFreeFonts – Free font archive that provides you with a huge collection (over 20,000) of downloadable fonts. All fonts are nicely organized into categories and searchable by name or tags. Read more: AceFreeFonts – Free Font Archive
(2) Vanilla – Forum hosting service built from Vanilla Open Source Forum. It allows you to start online communities with their simple discussion platform and bring a layer of interaction onto your website, brand, or business. Setting up a forum is very fast and simple. Read more: Vanilla – Fast & Free Forum Hosting (3) Myoats – Web community for people who want to draw cool designs using an online drawing tool. These designs are shared to other users and can be rated, downloaded as wallpapers or archived for further editing. Read more: Myoats – Draw Cool Designs Online & Share (4) Swirl – Google Image Search is one of the most popular ways of finding images on the web. Now, a Swirl version which is currently in Google Labs allows you to search for Images using an innovative 'wheel' pattern for displaying the results. All similar images or images in the same category are grouped together in stacks. Read more: Swirl – Cool Image Search From Google Labs (5) PalMood – Web applications which let you track your mood online. You can link your Twitter profile to Palmood and easily post tweets from your PalMood account. Moreover you can post and @replies and @remood (equivalent of Twitter's retweet). Read more: PalMood – Share & Track Your Mood Via Twitter
These are just half of the websites that we discovered in the last couple of days. If you want us to send you daily round-ups of all cool websites we come across, leave your email here. Or follow us via RSS feed. Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section! New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/ Related posts
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| Media Cope – An All In One Media Player, Cutter & Converter Posted: 24 Nov 2009 02:01 PM PST
It is an all in one media player solution and lets you play audio & video files, cut them according to your needs or transcode them to other formats. In addition you get a photo cutter, resizer and much more. In short, it’s as complete a media package as you’re likely to get. It is called Media Cope. The tag line doesn’t overstate Media Cope’s capabilities, when it says: “It is all you need“. Media Cope combines the best open source software in the business to give you a killer application. It has mplayer for playing media files and uses ffmpeg for all the transcoding heavy lifting. Let us take a deeper look on what Media Cope offers. An All in One Audio/Video Media PlayerMedia Cope supports all the major media file formats. It lets you play file formats mp3, avi, divx, mov, mkv, flac, rmvb, flv, vob, wma and mp4 to mention a few. In addition it also offers other mplayer functionality like speed change, ratio change, audio delay , framestep and screenshots etc.
An Audio/Video CutterHop over to the next tab and you can now trim audio & video files to your liking. All the formats listed above and many more are supported. Open the file, you can use the slider to go the exact location you want to start the video clip from, click “Select Start” and the starting point will be set to the current slider position. You can choose the end point in similar fashion. Now choose the output file format and you are ready to save the trimmed file as an audio/video clip.
An Audio/Video ConverterThe next two tabs let you transcode your media files into a format of your choice. Queuing, output quality and transcoding to and from all major formats are supported. I missed default presets or the ability to create and save your presets. Such an option is extremely useful if you transcode files for playback on an iPod or any other device.
Photo Cutter/Resizer/ConverterMedia Cope lets you do common photo tasks like resizing and converting to different dimensions and formats. The photo tools do a fairly good job and are great for batch processing. That said, I would stick with image editors for such needs mainly because of the interface and greater control and visual feedback they offer.
Slide ShowMedia Cope also lets view your photos as a slide show. You can specify a background music and basic slide show configuration options. There is no option to export your slide show as a video file which makes it seem as misfit as a mere photo-browser amongst other tools.
Internet ToolsYou can also use Media Cope when browsing the Internet. Media Cope offers text to speech functionality in Internet Explorer and Firefox web browsers. You have to explicitly enable Internet tools from Media Cope’s settings.
Media Cope offers a number of tools to meet all your media needs. There are some glitches and the user interface could use some touch up. Even then the media player, cutter and transcoders are straightforward and easy to use. MPlayer and FFMPEG form a deadly combo and it would be interesting to see Media Cope develop further and iron out some of the shortcomings. What do you think of the Media Cope all in one media player? Do you know of any other application that packs so much functionality? Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section! New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/ Related posts
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| Monitor Off – Software to Switch Off Your Monitor & Save Energy Posted: 24 Nov 2009 12:01 PM PST
I can't give you the figures right here that will show the power saving effects when you switch off your monitor when you aren't using it. But it must be something when you consider that a LCD monitor consumes 20 -30 Watts and a CRT glows with 70 – 80 Watts. When computers sleep or are on standby, there is some minimal energy consumption but it is far lower than when they running in all their glory. Putting our computers on standby is a wonderful habit to develop. Shutting off the monitor is a first step towards lesser power consumption. The benefit is not related to eco-consciousness alone but also to our wallets. Energy savings means lower bills. Lesser monitor usage means better battery life of laptops. That again lowers the running cost of a computer. If I have managed to wake up your interest then let's look at that 420Kb sized freeware we were speaking about. Rather aptly, it's called Monitor Off.
Monitor Off can be downloaded and installed or can be run as a standalone program (i.e. without an installation). Either way, it runs minimized in the background. Here are the three things you can make it do : Setup Monitor Off To Switch Off Display Or Start The ScreensaverFor energy saving with a keystroke you can enable hot keys.
Also, activate the screensaver with another set of hot keys.
Alternatively, you can use the right click on the system tray icon as a toggle switch to turn off the display or start the screensaver. Another option is to set the tray icon to take a double click as a switch off command.
Setup Monitor Switch Off Delay
You can set the number of seconds the program delays switching off the monitors after monitor power off action. The default is 10 seconds. During this delay interval, the operation can be aborted. Setup Monitor Off To Lock The Computer Before Switching OffThis combines a power saving with a bit of security, especially in an office environment. Thinking of going to the water cooler? Set this option and the computer display will power down and lock the display. The program supports multiple displays. Though, I couldn't test this aspect – going by the words on the website, it should be able to handle double display workstations. The energy saving freeware is a no hassle piece of software and the best thing about it is that it's portable too. Monitor Off (v1.0) is supported on Windows 98/2000/ME/XP/Vista and requires NET Framework 2.0 or later. Do you use a specific energy management app? Or do you leave the energy saving to Windows default settings? But before you comment, do read our posts on how computers can be used to save the world. Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section! New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/ Related posts
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| Stay Connected To IRC Chat 24/7 Using Quassel Posted: 24 Nov 2009 11:01 AM PST
What makes Quassel IRC different is its client/server architecture. A typical IRC chat client is just that, a client. When you disconnect your client or end your program, you are disconnected from IRC. Quassel really brings IRC chat to the next level. It splits your IRC client into two parts – the “client” and the “core”. The core is actually what connects to the external IRC servers – your client simply connects to the core and from there, you access IRC networks.
First you download the “core” application on a PC that you leave running all of the time. This PC can be a server or it can be a regular computer that you leave on 24/7. I have this running on a server in a data center so that the connection to the internet and server uptime are rock solid. They have both the core and client available for Windows, Linux and Mac – also the source code is freely available. After running the core, you have your client to setup and configure. All configuration of the ‘core’ server is done via the client on another PC (or on the same PC, it does not matter at this point which computer the client is running on). Upon first connection to the server, it will give you the option to “Launch Wizard” to setup the core.
Once your Quassel user is set up, you can authenticate to the core. Next up will be setting up your identity. Later on you can even have separate identities for each IRC chat network that you connect to! For now, enter your username and other information and continue. By default it will connect you to Freenode but you can connect to any network you want, or multiple IRC networks. For added security between your client and core, you can encrypt the connection. Quassel core has SSL capability added in, or if you have a Hamachi network set up you can use the IP address of your Core server for the hostname (the port is 4242). I’ve been using Quassel for over a year now and it is definately a project to watch. mIRC is the most popular IRC chat client, but I’ve found that Quassel is just as good, and as stable. It is a great way to manage your connections to multiple IRC networks while maintaining your connectivity. It is being actively developed so look for more features such as scripting coming out soon! And just to address the command line lovers out there – I wanted to note that this has been possible for a long time on the command line side using something like screen and irssi. However the ability to have a remote, stable connection for GUI users has been a long time coming. Do you use Quassel? Or do you have another preferred IRC client? Let us know all about it in the comments. Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section! New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/ Related posts
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| 9 Hilarious Websites To Visit When You Need To Kill Time Posted: 24 Nov 2009 09:13 AM PST
When you’re having one of those days, we all need to be cheered up. Actually, even without having one of those days, most people can use a good laugh. And because none of your friends know any good jokes to tell, MakeUseOf comes to the rescue. Below is a compilation of hilarious websites you can visit for a good dose of humour. Of course, this list is not complete, by far. If you think we missed something, add it in the comments! Comedy VideosNeed a laugh now? First stop; online video. The net is filled to bursting with videos that make you giggle. Dry British humour or slapstick entertainment, it’s your call. On most hilarious websites like these though, it’s often the latter.
CollegeHumor is one of the most hilarious websites on the web. You’ll find very funny pictures and essays, but mostly videos. Most videos are aggregated from all over the internet, but you should also check out the CollegeHumor Originals – these are made by the CollegeHumor staff and are more often than not of supreme quality.
Break is an online video sharing community. Unlike YouTube though, it only focuses on funny videos. With no other filters than the community machine, quality is not always guaranteed, but the funniest videos of the web get born on sites like these. Funny WebcomicsNext stop, webcomics. For more inspiration, be sure to check out 5 Great Webcomics You Should Read and 10 Great Online Gaming Webcomics.
A MakeUseOf favorite, Dilbert is about personal geeky problems and the day-to-day hilarity of a highly dysfunctional business.
Explosm’s humor is a tad less delicate. It mostly involves almost brutal sadistic jokes and disgusting punchlines. If you enjoy the weird and indelicate funnies, this one is for you. Not always safe for work, though. Since Explosm has multiple authors, the quality and ‘funniness’ is not always consistent, though. You might have to skip a few to get to the good ones.
Wulffmorgenthaler is a hilarious, often one-drawing comic. And its humor is often even drier than Dilbert’s. Not always safe for work either, as you might see a naked Easter bunny once in a while, but rarely anything ‘disgusting’. Parodist News ChannelsIt’s important to watch real news. But also boring. Give your news a twist with these fake news channels. Beware – a touch of cynicism is advised.
The Onion News Network (ONN) is one of the most popular fake online news channels there are. With everything performed and produced with incredible realism, it’s not uncommon to realize the ‘fake’ only halfway through the video. Of course, the subjects are often so excessive, they just can’t be missed. Don’t watch without a sense of humor and perspective – the ONN is not afraid to touch sensible subjects.
The Daily Show should be known to all. It’s a satirical news show on Comedy Central, hosted by the magnificent Jon Stewart. Most ironically, he was chosen as America’s ‘most trusted newscaster’ earlier this year in an online poll by Time Magazine. Which might be justified if you can read behind the sarcasm, but would otherwise be just very sad. You can watch a few funny excerpts, and even entire episodes if you live in the US internationally! 4chan (NSFW)This is one excessively funny website, belonging in all, yet none of the categories above. With their background, a separate mention is nothing but righteous.
You might know them as the guys behind Lolcats and the Rickrolling meme. Most people know them as the biggest retards on the internet. And that’s not an insult, it’s their legacy, carried high. 4chan is a free-to-join anonymous forum with boards for – well, almost everything. Although serious discussions occur, most is filled with pictures and craziness (refer to the above screenshot). Not too right in the head and willing to browse the endless forums? Hilarity ensured! If you’ve got any other tips, be sure to mention them in the comments below. What are your favorite funny websites? Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section! New on Twitter ? Now you can follow MakeUseOf on Twitter too. Related posts
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| Never Forget Your Facebook Friend’s Birthday & Social Events With fbCal Posted: 24 Nov 2009 08:01 AM PST
Facebook is one of those e-areas. The millions of Facebook users around the world is the proof that we could never leave our basic behavior as social beings. Facebook members are meeting their old school friends, getting new friends, organizing social events, and doing things that people from ten years ago never thought possible like getting supporters for political campaigns. Converting Facebook Events & Birthday Notifications Into A Birthday Reminder Calendar | ||
| Top 8 Sites To Listen To Free Christmas Music Online Posted: 24 Nov 2009 06:01 AM PST
Yes, it’s that time of year again: weekends are spent baking cookies, tempting Xmas treats, seasonal decorations in every store and cheesy songs on the radio. If you want to get into the mood with music you enjoy or accompany your Christmas celebrations with a quality selection of songs, check out the following best websites to listen to free online Christmas music. 8. Jingle Bell JukeboxJingle Bell Jukebox allows you to listen to entire albums worth if free online Christmas music. The archive contains nine albums, including Dean Martin’s “My Kind of Christmas”, Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas”, and Amy Grant’s “A Christmas Album”. You can skip songs and switch between albums. Each album is played in a loop.
7. Radioio Holiday Channels
The player is simple and easy to use. You can choose a bitrate (64 or 32), see which song is being played, which other songs were played recently, and quickly change to another holiday channel through a menu on the left (not shown below).
6. AOL Radio Christmas Music
The link above directs you to a site listing them all. Click the play button next to a station to launch the player.
Inside the player you can also switch between categories and stations.
If you like a channel, you can add it to your presets through the menu at the bottom right. All your presets are listed on the right (not shown in the image above). 5. SHOUTcast Radio
The web player allows to switch between related stations.
4. Web-Radio Christmas Player
Click on the Web-Radio Player to open it in a new tab or window, then select your Christmas station and enjoy.
Web-Radio offers a Toolbar for IE and Firefox, which comes with a lot of ad material and does not include its Christmas stations. 3. Last.fm Xmas Radio
If you want to block a song you can’t stand, such as Wham’s Last Christmas, you have to log in.
2. Christmas Radio
You can choose from nine different Christmas-themed radio stations, including Christmas Classics, Christmas Rock, and the Top 40 of Christmas songs. Songs are played on site through JW FLV Media Player.
A neat little extra is the word cloud to display the headline in different languages.
1. AccuHolidays
Select a station from the site to launch the AccuHolidays player. Alternatively, you can build your own music mix, i.e. mix all your favorite stations. The player shows the current song and you can quickly switch to other channels or modify the list of artists (read: ban artists) used for this station.
I love the option to remove artists from the playlist. Goodbye Mariah and Celine! If you’re looking for Christmas midis check out Christmas music from All Things Christmas. What is your favorite Christmas song and which one do you hate the most? I have to admit I don’t mind Last Christmas at all. My favorite, however, is a different one each year. Image credits: quitargoa Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section! New on Twitter ? Now you can follow MakeUseOf on Twitter too. Related posts
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| PhraseExpress – A Great Alternative Text Replacement Tool Posted: 24 Nov 2009 04:01 AM PST
I guess I configured mine properly to stay out of my hair and not interfere with my other applications – and I do not work in Japanese, Portuguese or any other language other than English. But when I heard from Tamar Weinberg, she also expressed interest in a Texter alternative text replacement tool and MakeUseOf does not disappoint, so without further ado I bring you Phrase Express Beta 7.0.94. The download is available from their website at PhraseExpress. For those of you who want to see it in action, there is an animated gif at the bottom of this post.
Once you arrive at their website you will see several versions – we will be working with the USB version. The network version is very nice with central server files for all workstations – but it is not free. So back to the USB version. Download, extract and run the executable to begin.
Above you can see the main interface window. You can always bring up this screen by right clicking on the system tray icon and choosing Settings
On the interface you can click New Phrase or right click on the system tray and choose New Phrase. You will need to fill in the Autotext, which is what you will type in. The phrase content is what your autotext will be replaced with and the description is to help you easily identify your rules. Make sure the autotext check box is selected on the left and you have options like match case, exact match and match whole word to help prevent accidents.
Click OK at the bottom of the screen and you have created your first Phrase Express rule. When you type sig now it will automagically be replace by your signature. Let's try some more complex ones now:
Now I can replace my initials with my full (real) signature. But that's not all, this is not a one hit wonder. It can import all of your Microsoft Word autotext rules and bring them into every application by doing the following:
Then once the import is complete you will see a new set of rules like so:
So now when I type a R with an a after it – it will automatically write a Registered symbol like so: ® . It will also prompt you to disable Word's similar feature so the applications will not be competing. But there is still more!
There are functions that are called macros and they can do tasks when you type in a keyword like to insert the current date, time or both. You can have the clipboard pasted, create an email, open a URL, execute a application, open a file or folder – even switch the focus to another application!
This text replacement tool is very sweet and it did not interfere with any of my other hotkey programs – and as a bonus it works on Windows 7 and Vista!
Do you have another favorite text replacement program that is free? We would love to hear about it in the comments! Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section! New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/ Related posts
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Are you a Windows Mobile lover? I am – I absolutely love the platform and I have mastered it. I am running Windows Mobile 6.5 now and I am looking for a good copy of 7 for my handheld now. But that is another story for another time!
We have covered plenty of audio/video tools in the past, from 
What if somebody gave you a little 420KB free software and said that it could not only lengthen the life of your monitor but also shorten your electricity bill? Would you consider it a must-have?
Back in the 1990’s, the only “instant messenger” system in use was 
We all have our bad days. A laptop that gets stolen, keys that disappear into the drain and those mothers-in-law.
In this digital era, every part of human life which can be digitized has been digitized. From work documents to personal conversations, everything can be transferred into bits and bytes. Even social communities are moving into the virtual territories.
. But if you are the kind of Facebook user whose friends list is expanding on a regular basis, or if you are subscribing to event calendars, this setting should be set to a time interval. The available options are: every 5 minutes, every 15 minutes, every hour, every day and every week.
Halloween is over and Thanksgiving is coming up. Then comes Christmas.
Radioio has launched three channels dedicated to holiday music. They are Christmas Traditions, Country Christmas, and Today’s Christmas.
AOL radio features a great selection of radio stations, including Christmas music.
SHOUTcast is powered by AOL music, but the selection of stations is different. There are actually less Christmas-themed stations, however I prefer the options. You can use the web player or listen to the stations in Winamp and other players.
Web-Radio also has a selection of stations dedicated to Christmas.
Last.fm radio stations can be played without creating an account. You can use the radio station I linked to or search for your own. Other Last.fm Christmas-themed stations include 
The easiest to use site to listen to free online Christmas music is Christmas Radio.
AccuHolidays features a long list of holiday music radio stations, for example Holiday on Broadway, Quiet Christmas Eve, Blue and White Christmas, and Celtic Christmas.
I wrote about a favorite application of mine called Texter last week. You can see 
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