Latest Tips from MakeUseOf.com |  |
- Cool Websites and Tools [December 10th]
- Become A MakeUseOf Fan On Facebook!
- CommentLuv – Reward Commenters On Your Blog With Blog Links
- The Moblin Netbook OS – Giving Chrome OS A Run For Its Money
- The FarmVille Facebook Game Craze – Easy & Fun
- How To Change Your Wordpress Blog Theme In 3 Easy Steps
- Technology Explained: What Is MP3 Format & What Is Its Origins?
- 3 Free Applications To Analyze & Inspect Your Hard Disk Space [Mac]
- Create PDFs For Free & Convert PDFs To Word Documents
| Cool Websites and Tools [December 10th] Posted: 10 Dec 2009 08:01 PM PST
(1) Noctur – Nice Google Maps mash up that lets you find cafes, bars and restaurants that open late. It currently lists over 38,000 places across the US and more locations are added all the time. Read more: Noctur: Find Cafes, Bars & Restaurants That Open Late
(2) Swim.com – This is an online network for swimmers and people who are interested in and want to learn the various skills related to this sport. You can search for swimming buddies in your locality, find swim instructors near your place, check out pools, water parks, swim schools and swimming events in your area and join groups and forums. Read more: Swim.com: Online Network For Swimmers (3) Thinkmeter – Easy decision making tool which helps you quickly collect opinions from friends when you are stuck at something and can't decide. The tool has a clean user interface and makes the entire process of creating, sharing and evaluating decisions hassle-free. Read more: Thinkmeter: Online Tool For Easy Decision Making (4) ReloadEvery – A web page auto refresh add-for Firefox which helps you refresh web pages on a schedule. The default reload options start from every 5 seconds and go on up to every 15 minutes. However, you can customize the time after which the pages are refreshed automatically. Read more: ReloadEvery: Scheduled Web Page Auto Refresh (5) CopyTrans4 – Smart utility that cuts down the iTunes bloat and brings to you better organization and backup of your music, videos, photos, podcasts etc in the iPod or the iPhone. The new versions supports voice memos and MMS videos and has a "Smart backup" feature that helps you customize the transfer of your stuff from iPod to your PC. Read more: CopyTrans4: iPod / iPhone Transfer, Backup & Recovery Utility
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! Become a MakeUseOf fan on Facebook? – Our photos, MakeUseOf specials and more. Related posts
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| Become A MakeUseOf Fan On Facebook! Posted: 10 Dec 2009 06:31 PM PST If you enjoy reading MakeUseOf and have a Facebook account, become a fan of our Facebook page and join in on the fun! Simply click on the “Become a Fan” button on the left to get started! You’ll be rewarded with exclusive previews of future publications, what we refer to as “Sneak Peeks”; and the best posts from the day before, “Yesterday’s Bests”. We will also use our fan page to occasionally inform you about premium software giveaways. In addition to that, you’ll have the chance to participate in MakeUseOf polls and discussions; and ask our MakeUseOf writers technically-related questions or just tell everyone how much you love reading our site!
Our Facebook fan page is the perfect way to interact with our readers – that’s you! So grab some friends and become our fans today! 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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| CommentLuv – Reward Commenters On Your Blog With Blog Links Posted: 10 Dec 2009 05:01 PM PST
These days, now that we have “Web 2.0″, everything’s different. The Internet is more than just a one way communication. Even mainstream websites have places where you can participate in the conversation. The blog is a big player in the conversation going on online. In a way, the goal of a blog is to create community and conversation. There is a Wordpress comments plugin that aims to help encourage the community bloggers want. CommentLuv was created to reward commentors by giving them voice and promotion while adding much needed conversation to the blog. Let me explain.
The Wordpress comments plugin takes the website address someone enters in the URL field and looks for a feed. If a feed is found, it then offers to allow a link to one of the latest posts to be placed right after the comment.
As you can see, when Brett commented on my post about the Ow.Ly URL shortening service, he was rewarded with a link to his post on Google Wave. This is cool because it’s a win-win situation. The blogger gets conversation going on his blog and the commenter gets some publicity! Let’s see just how easy it is to add such a plugin to a blog (for screenshots on installing a Wordpress plugin, see the article on the FAQ Builder for Wordpress).
The correct plugin should show up on the top of the list. It’s the one by Andy Bailey.
Now you can go the CommentLuv settings page and tweak things the way you want. CommentLuv also offers the option to register on their website. This brings out some more features you may be interested in such as having a full profile set up and seeing comment stats. I’ve been wondering if there is a way to find other blogs that also utilize the CommentLuv plugin and today I happened upon a solution. There’s a CommentLuv search engine you can use to search for other blogs in your niche who also use CommentLuv. This way you can comment on other blogs while leaving links to your latest posts! Head over to CommentLuv.com and give it a shot. So there you have it. You CAN encourage your readers to interact and create a community. In my limited experience this really works and those people who DO regularly comment on my blog appreciate the links. Check it out today but remember to get the most use out of the plugin by installing it now, registering your profile on ComLuv.com AND using the CommentLuv search engine. How do you encourage community and interaction on your blog? We’d love to hear your tips! Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section! Become a MakeUseOf fan on Facebook? – Our photos, MakeUseOf specials and more. Related posts
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| The Moblin Netbook OS – Giving Chrome OS A Run For Its Money Posted: 10 Dec 2009 03:01 PM PST
The project’s now operated by the Linux Foundation, but Intel programmers still contribute a fair amount of code and serve on the project’s board. Moblin netbook OS is meant to be a lot of things: user-friendly, Internet-oriented and based on existing standards, just to name a few. But Moblin’s most significant strength is supposed to be how well it runs on Intel’s Atom processor. I loaded Moblin 2.1 onto my (beloved) EEE PC 700a to answer one question: is Moblin any good yet? Here’s what I discovered.
Performance & DriversThe first thing I noticed was the blazing fast boot time. I thought I was seeing a boot screen, but no: the operating system had already booted within seconds. While the importance of fast boot times is sometimes overstated amongst geeks, a netbook is something that should start quickly. In this, the Moblin netbook OS delivers. All the programs I ran while testing Moblin started noticeably faster than my usual operating system: Ubuntu Netbook Remix. Wireless, sound and video all worked perfectly out of the box. Nice work there, to be sure. First Impression: “MyZone.”When Moblin first starts up it automatically displays the “MyZone” page, one of the eight main panels that make up Moblin. MyZone features three main sections: your calendar, your recent history and your friend’s activities on the social networks.
While I personally would prefer the social networks be left off the home page completely, the three elements in combination seem like a logical starting-point for a netbook operating system: synthesising elements of online and offline content. After all, in this age of widely-accessible wireless Internet why should online content be limited to the browser? That’s not to say MyZone is perfect yet. The calendar displayed is synced with various services, but I was disappointed to learn there’s no default way to sync with my calendar of choice – Google Calendar. Apparently this can be achieved using a subscription-based third party service called Goosync, but I’m hardly looking to pay money to access a free service. As for compatible social networks, Moblin can currently display content from Twitter and Last.fm. More are presumably on the way, but if Facebook or LinkedIn integration is essential for you you’ll probably find the “MyZone” page less useful than intended for now. Despite these shortcomings, however, Moblin’s first impression is a good one. MyZone combines elements of your online life – your friend’s comments on social networks, your browsing history and your calendar – with the documents you store and use on your netbook. Online and Offline content are integrated seamlessly. The ToolbarRather than opting for the traditional, program-centric toolbar Moblin attempts to create a new paradigm, centred on the computer’s uses rather than on applications.
The toolbar, hidden until the user moves the mouse to the top of the screen, consists of the time and date on the left followed by eight main buttons and four configuration tools. From right to left, the main buttons include MyZone, Status, People, Internet, Media, Pasteboard, Applications and Zones. Configuration buttons, to the right of these, include battery, volume, Bluetooth and network connectivity. Pressing any of these buttons instantly brings up a system-integrated panel. Click the “Status” button, for example, and you can quickly update your social network status – currently only Twitter. If you’re a avid microblogger this kind of accessibility will doubtless strike you as useful. Press the “People” button and you’ll see all your email and instant messaging contacts. Double-click one of them and you’ll open a new window to talk to them or an email window to write them. This is a good example of Moblin taking an existing open source program – in this case the instant-messaging application Empathy and the email program Evolution – and integrating them seamlessly into its own user interface. InternetPressing the “Internet” button shows a quick panel allowing you to type a web address or click on one of your most commonly accessed web sites. Do so and the Moblin browser will open the page you’re looking for. I was seriously impressed with the browser. A huge improvement over Moblin 2, Moblin 2.1 includes a slick Mozilla-based browser optimized for usage on a netbook screen.
This is the fastest browser I’ve ever run on my netbook—doubtless the result of the browser being optimised for the Intel Atom processor. But that’s not all. Not only is the browser attractive, clean and well-integrated into Moblin – it’s Mozilla based, meaning it’s compatible with Firefox plugins and add-ins. So essential plugins like Adobe Flash, Greasemonkey and Adblock Plus are all compatible with this browser. One of the many strengths of open source software is the ability of one project to integrate components from another, and Moblin’s browser is a great example of this. Simply put, this is a netbook browser done right. Integrated into the rest of Moblin this gives Chrome OS a run for its money. MediaPressing the “Media” button brings up a simple user interface allowing you to quickly browse your videos, music and pictures.
The interface is very intuitive. Insert an SD card with media files and this program will automatically find these files and point them out to you, allowing you to browse your media quickly and even search within it. Videos and pictures are automatically opened full-screen, very sensible for a netbook operating system running on systems with limited screen space. This panel is simple, but that’s what it needs to be. To the right of Media is Pasteboard. If you copy text or a picture in any program this is where it ends up. Unlike other operating systems, however, Moblin records a history of your copy-pasting, meaning if you copy over something you can retrieve it here. Simple idea but very useful in context. ApplicationsNext up is Applications, which shows you a conventional menu where you can load locally-installed programs. Linux users will doubtlessly recognise the programs and games available. Note the contrast to Chrome OS, which does not allow the user to install programs on the local hard drive in favor of net apps. Moblin goes to no lengths to point out the programs, but it does allow users to install additional software and to use it. This is a great compromise between simplicity and customisability. Longtime Linux users will be pleased to know that “Alt” and “F2″, a favorite shortcut of many, brings up the search button of the Applications panel, allowing users to type the name of their favourite program rather than browsing through the (quite annoying) application menu by mouse. It’s also possible to install software from the Moblin repositories through a very easy-to-use interface. Currently there aren’t many applications available, but more are sure to come.
ZonesThe final main panel is Zones. When a program is opened in Moblin it is given its own workspace, or Zone, in which to operate. Clicking the Zone button on the panel will show you all the Zones currently open and allow you to switch between them, as well as moving programs from one Zone to another. This may sound complicated on paper, but is actually a very elegant way to run multiple programs on a small screen. ConclusionMoblin is a very elegant and very fast netbook operating system, taking some of the best things about Linux and transforming it into a system perfect of Netbooks. The result is a very tight, well-thought-out system that combines the best of the offline and online worlds. Philosophically, Moblin represents what I think is the perfect compromise between Google’s Chrome OS and traditional operating systems such as Windows or Ubuntu. While it’s simple and instantly easy to use in a manner similar to Chrome OS, it’s far easier to customise and extend—not to mention use offline. But Moblin, for all its virtues, is not done yet. Installing third party applications isn’t easy, meaning installing Skype and Dropbox is out of the reach of most users (unless you’re running the Ubuntu version of Moblin, which is compatible with Ubuntu packages.) But while Moblin might not be perfect yet, it’s certainly usable – but if it doesn’t yet meet your needs it’s certainly one worth waiting for. With a few tweaks it could easily become my netbook operating system of choice. I’ll be the first to write an article congratulating Intel and the Linux Foundation when it does. Want to give Moblin a spin? You’ll need to download the image from Moblin, and then make a bootable disk using the image. You can learn how to do this using Moblin’s own detailed instructions, or you can use Unetbootin. I myself used Unetbootin and it worked great. Once you manage to boot from the image you can run Moblin directly from your disk or install it to your hard drive. Have fun and make sure to leave your opinions about Moblin in the comments. Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section! Become a MakeUseOf fan on Facebook? – Our photos, MakeUseOf specials and more. Related posts
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| The FarmVille Facebook Game Craze – Easy & Fun Posted: 10 Dec 2009 02:01 PM PST
FarmVille is a game by Zynga Games that you can play via Facebook’s application feature. Recently, Zynga launched a stand-alone FarmVille website so Facebook is not required to access FarmVille (ha! so much for the Facebook reputation!).
FarmingYou can also spend coins on trees, flowers, and various farm animals. All of these can be "harvested" as well, earning you more coins.
You can use coins to buy decorations for your farm such as bird baths, mailboxes, hay bales and so on. Plus, no farm is complete without a barn and a farm house, so these items are available as well. In addition, you can buy a chicken coop to put your chickens in or a dairy farm to put your cows in. Once you have a bunch of chickens or cows in these buildings, it’s one click harvesting of the whole group. All purchases are made through the market.
ExperienceAlong the way you earn experience points for plowing and planting. Experience points, commonly referred to as "XP", are how you move up in levels within the game. As you progress in levels you can buy crops that provide higher returns, nicer buildings and nicer decorations. Currently, there are at least 40 known levels in the Farmville game. Progressing through the early levels is easy but as you move up, it exponentially takes more and more XP to reach the next level. Furthermore, as you plant and harvest, you gain "mastery" points for each different type of crop. It takes approximately 400 plots of an individual crop to be harvested to earn a mastery "star". Once you earn three stars, you are awarded a sign to post on your farm. NeighborsSome items within the Farmville game, including the ability to expand your farm to a larger size, require you to have "neighbors". Neighbors are nothing more than your Facebook friends who are playing Farmville and accepted your request to be added as their neighbor. You can make visits to their farms to check on their progress and to "help" them out. This amounts to fertilizing some crops, chasing racoons away and other menial tasks that only require the click of a button. You earn a few coins and XP each time you help a neighbor, and you can only help each neighbor out about once in a six to eight hour time frame.
GiftsYou can also pass gifts back and forth between neighbors. You can send each neighbor a gift once a day. The gifts are basically decorations, animals or items that they could otherwise purchase with the coins they earn. If someone sends you a gift you don’t need or want, you can sell the gift for a few coins. As different levels in the game are attained by you and your neighbors, you may be able to give them a gift of something they may not currently be able to purchase.
CashBeyond the coins you earn through your farming "work", you can also earn FarmVille cash. FarmVille cash takes a lot of time to earn; you only earn a few dollars each time you level up, and it is used to buy premium items or shortcut the system of waiting on levels or specific numbers of neighbors to unlock items. FarmVille is free to play, but you can purchase coins and cash using real money. Ribbons, Adoption & Sharing The WealthAs you progress through the game you also have the ability to collect ribbons for your efforts. There are eighteen activities for which you can earn a series of ribbons, progressing from yellow, white, red and blue. Each time you earn a ribbon you are given the option to post a notification as your Facebook status. Usually this allows your friends to "share the wealth", meaning if they are one of the first few to view your update and click a link, they get bonus coins.
Once in a while a stray animal will wander onto your farm and you can rescue it. This amounts to another status update and your friends can click a link to adopt the animal for their farm.
Why all the fuss? What is all the buzz about? Well, it’s addictive. The FarmVille game currently claims 70 million monthly Facebook users. The game, like the others I reviewed previously, is an idle time game, which means it inherently provides break time where you don’t have to play it continuously. The crops mature in differing amounts of time, ranging from one hour to four days, so you can schedule your game play to fit your lifestyle and play only when you choose to. If a crop matures in one day, you also have about the same amount of time to harvest it before it goes bad and you lose your investment. This adds a little flexibility to the game play as well. Trees and animals do not spoil, so you don’t have to worry about them as much. With the wide variety of buildings and decorations available, farm customization is easy and fun. You can choose from several colors of hay bales and buildings, so you can use your farm to reflect the spirit of your favorite sports team. You can use the hay bales, flowers, fences and even arrange crops to spell out messages or make decorative designs. Creativity abounds if you are so inclined. Zynga continuously updates the game, adding new features. Seasonal and promotional items are available from time to time to purchase and add to your farm. Differing crops, new buildings and decorations are added from time to time. One recent modification was the ability to use your barns to store items from your farm. If you purchased some Halloween decorations and they look out of season close to Christmas time, you can store them in a barn and pull them out next year instead of having to sell them. There are several unofficial FarmVille game "guide" websites out there on the internet which provide information, tips and tricks. If you play but very few of your friends do, you can join forums or sign up on some of these sites and recruit neighbors. Here are just a few of the many FarmVille guide sites available: Farmville: The Unofficial Strategy Guide Do you know of any other guide sites? Or perhaps you have some games tips you would like to share? If so, the comments area below is open and ready for your contributions. Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section! Become a MakeUseOf fan on Facebook? – Our photos, MakeUseOf specials and more. Related posts
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| How To Change Your Wordpress Blog Theme In 3 Easy Steps Posted: 10 Dec 2009 01:01 PM PST
As I strive to create that utopia, I find myself constantly tweaking my existing blogs in order to improve ad revenue and conversion rates (how many visitors actually click on ads). One of the most significant aspects of a blog that will either convince your new visitors to stay, or force them to turn and run away, is the aesthetic quality of your website. Let’s face it, if your blog looks like it was designed by some guy straight out of a 1995 “Introduction to Web Page Design” class, you can bet they won’t hang around, and they certainly won’t subscribe to your blog. However, if your template looks like it’s created by a Web 2.0 guru with one finger on the pulse of social networks and the other dabbling in high-tech widgets – your visitors may be impressed enough to actually take a look at what you have to say. To that end, I’ve decided to completely revamp the Wordpress template of one of my blogs, and I want to show MakeUseOf readers how wonderfully simple it is to change your Wordpress blog theme.
How To Change Your Wordpress Blog Theme In 3 Easy StepsThe website that I’m going to operate on is a paranormal blog called Invisible Articles. The site has been doing fairly well, but I noticed that it hasn’t seen the same traffic as the original version built on Blogger’s free platform. After running the blog for a few months, I realized why. This is the current appearance of the paranormal blog.
This is the Arthemia theme created by Michael Hutagalung. It’s an excellent theme that lets you build your blog based on an e-zine or news website look and feel. Unfortunately, I learned too late that most paranormal enthusiasts don’t really want the websites they visit to look like an e-zine with a white background and a nicely laid out menu bar of categories. What this crowd looks for are dark backgrounds, spooky and intriguing imagery and lots of cool links and widgets. So, I’ve decided to fall back on one of my favorite Wordpress themes known as Ikarus. Step 1 – Install The New ThemeWant to try out a new theme? It’s head-slappingly simple. All you have to do is download the Wordpress theme of your choice and then copy that theme (along with all sub-folders) to the /wp-content/themes folder under your Wordpress installation directory.
I use the JavaFTP web based client to transfer the files, but you can use whatever FTP client you like. If there are a lot of files in the theme, it could time out if you try to transfer the entire parent folder, so you may need to drill down and transfer one subfolder at a time. Once you’re finished transferring all of the theme files up to the “themes” folder of your Wordpress blog, the new theme will show up in your Wordpress control panel under the “Appearance” menu option.
Ready to switch your blog’s entire theme in the blink of an eye? Just click on the theme image and then click “Activate,” and you’re done! Well…sort of. Step 2: Configuring The Theme OptionsNow that I’ve switched themes, my blog style has completely changed – it’s like night and day! I’m very pleased by how drastically the new theme has completely changed the “feel” of this paranormal site, but as you can tell there are still a lot of the default images and settings that still aren’t working and don’t look right.
If this were my first time doing this, I’d probably freak out because I’ve spent many hours getting my last theme to look just right. But this time I know that I can easily switch back by simply activating the old theme if I have to. Customizing the theme will be different depending on the theme you download, but in general the things you’ll need to customize will include the header image, or logo, of your blog, your advertisements, and usually you’ll need to configure embedded widgets or code, like image slideshows or video players. Many of these will be available to customize in a nice options form under the Wordpress “Appearance” tab.
In my case for Ikarus it’s the “IKARUS Options” item, and this well-programmed theme lets you fill in the fields for images and links for the ads, customize colors and change the header image. With a few simple tweaks (and some quick image creation), my new template is almost done.
As you can see, my blog finally looks more like a cool paranormal blog and less like a dry and boring news website. Of course, there are a few things that can only be changed by tweaking the code or knowing some of the background scripting. This is typical of some of the more advanced themes, and Ikarus is no exception. Step 3: Adding The Header Image & AdsThis free template is configured so that the ad images and links can go into the options field, but if you’re using Google Adsense, you have to insert the iframe code. The only way this works is by editing the “header.php” file itself. The default is the Ikarus logo shown above. To replace it with your own, you just create your logo image with dimensions 265 pixels wide and 75 pixels high, and then save it as logo.png and use it to overwrite the logo.png in the image directory in your Ikarus theme folder. To create my logo, I used CoolText.
Editing the PHP files aren’t really that bad. Usually the theme creator makes it pretty clear where the ads should go, as you can see in the header script above. Once I pasted my Google Adsense code and created my logo image, my page was completely converted to the new theme and live!
As you can see, testing out new themes with your Wordpress blog is a piece of cake – just be careful which themes you choose. If you end up trying one that’s written by an amateur and riddled with bugs, you could waste hours trying to get it to work. On the other hand if you stick with themes that are obviously well designed (usually a quick glance at the quality of the design itself will tell), then you’ll likely have no problems. Do you switch your Wordpress blog themes often? Do you ever run up against any difficulties that you need help with, or do you have any tips for other Wordpress users? Share your insight in the comments section below. 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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| Technology Explained: What Is MP3 Format & What Is Its Origins? Posted: 10 Dec 2009 11:01 AM PST
What is MP3 format exactly? We will now take a deeper look into such questions concerning MP3’s in this article. What?So what is MP3 format? We addressed the question to some extent above. Simply speaking, MP3 is a file extension for an audio file. OR to be a little more precise – it is a digital audio encoding format that can be used to effectively compress sound files with minimal loss in percieved quality. MP3 stands for MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3. Despite the seemingly scary translation the technology involved is surprisingly simple. One important thing though – MP3 is strictly an audio encoding format, which means that it cannot be used for photo or video encoding, unlike some of the other formats out there.
Who?As is often the case, there has to be an organisation or a person who specifies and mantains the standard. MP3 is no exception. It was designed by Moving Picture Experts Group which is responsible for setting the standards for audio and video encoding. When?
Why?
How?The MP3 encoding algorithm is wily and cunning. It is based on what is called perceptual noise shaping. The perceptual noise shaping technique takes into consideration the following rules based on the characterstics of the human ear:
Apply these three rules to any sound file and you will end up removing those sounds which the human ear was not going to hear anyway. Moreover, there is no perceived loss in sound quality when compared with the original uncompressed, non-MP3 file. Despite of all this MP3 is referred to as a “lossy” format because it doesn’t contain all the information that was contained in the original sound file and it is thus smaller in size.
That said, there are situations when you might not care about the file size and you might want to include more information in the resulting MP3 file. This is certainly possible by using a higher bit rate. There is always a tradeoff between bit rate and file size when creating an MP3 file. Higher the bit rate, the more information there will be in the MP3 file but it also means that the file size will be larger. On the other hand you can achieve an insanely small file size with low bit rates but that leads to loss of information and introduces compression artifacts (or noises) in the resulting MP3 file. Most MP3 encoders allow you to choose a bit rate either directly or as a quality setting, so you can tweak things around according to your needs. Some Free Tools For MP3 FilesThat’s enough information you can bang your head on. Now it’s time to get a little pragmatic. Here are some tools and articles that should get you started:
MP3 is presently the most popular audio file format out there. Now that you know a thing or two about MP3, go reward yourself with a few minutes of your favorite track. Banshee here I come. Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section! Become a MakeUseOf fan on Facebook? – Our photos, MakeUseOf specials and more. Related posts
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| 3 Free Applications To Analyze & Inspect Your Hard Disk Space [Mac] Posted: 10 Dec 2009 09:01 AM PST
My 160GB was filled in no time. Even the new 500GB external hard drive is already at the last quarter of it’s remaining space. I wonder what’s eating the free space out. Where Has All The Free Space Gone?I have found five alternative applications to analyze hard drive space and determine what occupies the storage space. Here they are in no particular order.
There are two other alternatives suited to analyze hard drive space, they are: Disk Inventory X and WhatSize. The reason why Disk Inventory X didn’t make it to the list is because it’s been so long since the last updates (2005). While for WhatSize, it was kicked out of the list because it’s no longer freeware. Do you know any other alternatives for troubleshooting your shrinking disk space? If so, please share using the comments below. 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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| Create PDFs For Free & Convert PDFs To Word Documents Posted: 10 Dec 2009 07:01 AM PST
That is why I am about to show you a free application that will allow you to create PDF's right from your Microsoft application. As an added bonus this will also allow you to convert any PDF or XPS file to an editable Microsoft Word document. The conversions seem really fast. The only downside I see is the HUGE 120MB download. It seems that the application is so big because they bundle a trial version of their Fusion application which is a PDF viewer. You do NOT need to use this). Let us take a look at the application. There is a 32 bit and 64 bit version and it is compatible with Windows XP, Vista and 7. Go here to grab the download. Then after the download, the applications will install. Make sure you close your browser and any Open Office applications. During the install you will see this:
Leave it as it is to run with the free gDoc version and Fusion in evaluation mode. Next you need to decide what you want to do. I would uncheck the box next to the middle two options as to not bring in the evaluation version of their viewer into play. But that is your call and can be dealt with later on.
I received a message that the printer could not be installed during the installation but I continued on. The installation will complete and you will see this:
This is the screen we use to convert a PDF or XPS file to Word, Excel or PowerPoint. For PDF creation we have a much easier method that we will show you. Select what you want to convert to then drag the PDF or XPS file and drop it on the window.
The file will start converting as soon as you drop it and the output will go to the same folder the original is in. The result is a FULLY EDITABLE WORD DOCUMENT! Whooo Hooo! Next up we will see how to convert an Office document to a PDF or XPS document. Simply open the file in the application you created it in. We will use Word for our example. Once you have the document open in Word, hit File – Print or Control and P.
Select the gDoc PDF creator or gDoc XPS creator and the wizard will do the rest!
Select where you want the output to go. Hit save and watch the quick fast magic! It will print to the converter and you will have your converted PDF. How awesome is that for free? When your conversions are done it will attempt to open the file in its Fusion application even if you unchecked the box during setup. To make this stop happening we only found one method and that is to delete the fusion executable. So instead you will see an error that the file could not be found. If you have another method to prevent Fusion from popping up after the conversion is done we would love to know! Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section! Become a MakeUseOf fan on Facebook? – Our photos, MakeUseOf specials and more. Related posts
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The blog is an interesting medium, don’t you think? I still remember the days of the static web. Back then websites were a one way communication. If you wanted to know something, you probably ran a search and found a website. That website hopefully would contain the information you needed. That was about it. The information was there for you to read. There was no conversation. There was no reply. You just read.
Google’s new netbook-oriented operating system, Chrome OS, got more than its fair share of press when its source code was released (including a 
I don’t want to get the reputation at MakeUseOf as the Facebook Guy, but I’ve realized that a lot of my articles have been about Facebook. I’ve written about the 
I love blogging. It’s just that simple. If I could spend my entire day only writing articles for my own blogs and earn a decent living doing so, I would.
MP3 – you keep hearing it all over. You realize that it has something to do with music or that it is an audio file extension. However, there are many audio file formats out there, but nothing as popular as MP3.
While it is difficult to point out a single date when MP3 was created / first became popular, it can be said with a fair amount of certainty that the first MP3 files started appearing in the early 1990’s. From then on, riding atop the Internet’s popularity and peer to peer networking (think Napster) MP3 quickly became the audio format of choice.
So why was MP3, and is, so popular? In those early days of limited hard drive space, MP3 proved to be a blessing because it could reduce file sizes to as much as a 10th of the original size. Add to that it is super easy to create MP3 files, and there is no evident loss in sound quality and you have got yourself a winner in audio encoding format.
I once had a 20GB hard drive and it was always full. I thought that with bigger space – 40 or 80 Gigs – I could have some storage to spare. I couldn’t be more wrong.
So you don't want to spring for Adobe Acrobat Pro? I can empathize as it is really expensive and in today's economy we shouldn’t be spending money when we don't have to. What do you do when you need to create a PDF or convert a PDF to word document?
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