Ashfame | Tech Blog » Software

Google Sky Maps discover and browse the night sky by pointing your phone to space

Ashfame — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 18:35:01 +0000

Now this is really amazing. Google is known to bring the best in innovation to the world and that too for free. If you are reading this, that means you have already read the title and asked yourself “Hey! Is that for real?”. Yes it is for real and brings a WOW factor with it that you can actually discover and browse the night sky by just pointing your Android phone to the space.

It is possible because of Android’s phone orientation sensors, the official application named Google Sky Map can show you a star map location.

Features

Search: Find planets, stars, and constellations guided by your phone.
Motion detection: Sky Map uses your phone’s GPS, accelerometer, and compass to create a window in the sky that moves with your hand.
Celestial objects: Browse a map showing the brightest naked-eye stars, planets, sun and moon, constellation lines, horizon, cardinal points, and Messier Objects.
Navigation: Use automatic mode to let Sky Map adjust the map for you or switch to a manual mode that allows the map to be dragged with a finger.

Download Google Sky Map application from Android Market

Point your phone’s bar code scanner to this code or search for “Sky Map” in the Android Market. The App is free to download.

Here is the official video of what you can do with your Android phone with Google Sky Map application.

Do you have an Android phone? What do you think about this application? Have your say in the comments!

6 Free Data Recovery Softwares

Ashfame — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 16:53:07 +0000

You may have been in a situation where you accidentally deleted your important data or it just got deleted due to data corruption or hard drive crash or whatever reason and your first reaction was of panic. All the work and possible non recoverable data is now gone forever. However you don’t need to worry too much about it as whenever any file is deleted, its not actually deleted from disk rather the space occupied is marked as reusable or free space. Chances are that the same space hasn’t been used and the data is still there and can be recovered. A fresh delete has more chances of recovering as compared to one after which several disk activity has possibly taken place. One good point to remember is that most of these software are more effective if you install it on a perfectly working PC and attach the affected hard drive to it as the secondary drive which ensures that no further disk activity leading to overwriting of data can happen.

Recuva

Recuva is a freeware that can recover deleted files from your explorer and even those deleted from your Recycle Bin, digital camera or MP3 player. Files can also be recovered from a formatted drive. Also you can recover deleted emails from Microsoft Outlook Express, Mozilla Thunderbird or Windows Live Mail. Unsaved Word documents can also be recovered. In the program, the state of the file is color coded. Green files indicate files can be easily recovered, while red files indicate files which are hard to recover. Also available as a portable version.

Size: 3.6 MB | Download Link – http://www.piriform.com/recuva/download

ADRC Data Recovery Software Tools

ADRC Data Recovery Software Tools consists of several tools for data recovery and that is why a large number of file systems and drive types are supported. The user interface is very easy to work with. In fact it is so simple that data can be recovered easily and without much difficulties. You can easily undelete files, disk image back up or restore a backup image. You can even copy files from hard disk with bad sectors, clone disks, backup, edit and restore your boot parameters. It does not require any installation as it is a portable tool.

Size: 44.6 KB | Download Link – http://www.adrc.com/software/data_recovery_tools/

Avira UnErase Personal

Avira UnErase is a free data recovery software from the makers of Avira antivirus software. It can recover deleted data or lost data due to virus infection or corruption. It also supports recovering from compressed or encrypted NTFS and NTFS5 file systems. It shows files detected for recovery with a level of recoverability for each file. It has a high success rate of recovering even those poor conditioned files. Its not in development anymore but this is a fully functional version free for personal use.

Size: 403 KB | Download Link – http://www.free-av.com/en/products/10/avira_unerase_personal.html

FreeUndelete

FreeUndelete from Officerecovery.com is one of the most simplest data recovery tools to undelete files. It can recover deleted files from NTFS 1.0, NTFS 2.0, FAT12, FAT16 and FAT32 file systems. It works on Windows XP, 2000, NT 4 (SP2 or higher required), Windows 2003 Server, but Windows 95/98 are not supported. It is very easy to use. The user just needs to select the drive to be scanned for deleted files and press the Scan button. After scanning is complete, the recoverable file list is displayed, from which the user can select the files to be recovered and recover them to the destination drive.

Size: 720 KB | Download Link - http://www.officerecovery.com/freeundelete/download.htm

Glary Undelete

Glary Undelete is a free and easy-to-use yet powerful file undelete solution for FAT and NTFS file systems. It can undelete files deleted from the Recycle Bin, DOS window, from Windows Explorer with the SHIFT key held down(deleting without moving it to Recycle Bin). It is also capable of recovering files that have been deleted by bugs, crashes and viruses just like many others on the list. It works under Win 95/98/Me/NT/2000/XP/2003/Vista operating systems. The program supports all Windows file systems for hard and floppy drives including FAT12/16/32,NTFS/NTFS5 and image recovery from CompactFlash, SmartMedia, MultiMedia and Secure Digital cards.

Size: 3.19 MB | Download Link - http://glarysoft.com/gun.html?tag=download

Undelete Plus (Free Trial)

Undelete Plus is not totally free but it does offer a trial version and that can work for you if you don’t want a regular solution for undeleting files. For instance you just lost a precious file and wants to recover it, you can use the trial version at once. It is one of the quickest and easiest ways to restore accidentally deleted data. It can undelete files deleted from the Recycle Bin, DOS window, from Windows Explorer with the SHIFT key held down(deleting without moving it to Recycle Bin) and from CompactFlash, SmartMedia, MultiMedia and Secure Digital cards. It works with all types of Windows file systems including FAT12, FAT16, FAT32, NTFS and NTFS5 and works under Windows 95/98/Me/NT/2000/XP/2003/Vista/7 operating systems. A portable version is also available, which requires no installation.

Size: 3.7 MB | Download Link – http://undelete-plus.com/download

I hope you never lost your precious files again. Have you ever used any such tool to recover files? Share yourself in the comments.

Problem Step Recorder – Tool for making steps with screenshots based on actions

Ashfame — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 09:34:38 +0000

Have your ever faced the situation where you need to guide someone to do something on the computer and it has made you pull your hair because no matter how hard you try, the other guy won’t do it correctly?

If you are a geek, then I bet you must have faced this situation before. And if you use a Windows 7 computer, then you just got lucky as I just know came to know of a pretty useful tool bundled in Winodws 7 OS which can just make your work of guiding a noob very easy.

Records action with text and screenshots

Press Start menu and type psr to search for Problem Step Recorder(psr)

Press Start Record on PSR and proceed.

Now do anything and PSR will record every action of yours and take screenshots.

When you are done press Stop Record and PSR will generate a zip file containing mhtml document of your recording with text and screenshots.

It will ask the location where the zip file should be saved. Specify it.

Just mail this zip file to the guy to whom you are trying to explain things or extract it if you want to have a look by yourself.

This will save much of my time and headache when I will need to tell something the next time. I am going to use Problem Step Recorder for sure. Give it a try and let me know what you think about it.

View torrent video before downloading them completely

Ashfame — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 06:40:52 +0000

Everyone know we need to download the whole file from torrents before we can view it. Some torrents do have sample videos with them and user can download them first and see if this quality will suffice to their needs of watching the video but most of the times, the torrent doesn’t have any sample video files which means one need to download the full length video and then view it, may be only to find out that the video’s quality is not even watchable or its something that is not worth watching at this quality.

Watch video before downloading the whole video

RARBG Player is the solution to this problem. It will let you view the video file without the need of downloading them completely. Just download the torrent file, and then RARBG player will start downloading the file and playback can begin right at that moment as if the video was being streamed. Hence, the player is a very quick method of finding out the quality of video torrents which don’t have any sample video in them.

How does it work?

It actually works like a torrent client, start connecting with other peers and download from them and playbacks it as if it was streamed. Pretty simple!

The video is in fact downloaded, like when we watch YouTube videos but it doesn’t require us to download the entire video file to play it.

The player is pretty basic and it can only be used for trying out videos and not to be made something as a standalone media player. However the makers do claim it to play all the files but it can’t play them from local storage (hard disk) and only from torrents.

Give it a try and let me know how you find it.

GigaTribe Private P2P Network

Ashfame — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 18:31:50 +0000

We all must have used Torrents at least once. Torrents, as we know work on P2P network. If you are new to torrents and P2P, I would suggest you read the post where I explained the basics of using torrents to download a file.

GigaTribe lets you transfer files among other users with ease. Its like have a private torrent network and that too with 256 bit encryption. There is no limit on the file size or transfer limits.

Its really a good alternative of sending files larger than 10 MB or 20 MB, the usual attachment limit. You can send whole movies, your entire songs collection. It works by setting up folders that you want to share. Connect with a friend on the client. Browse their shared files and download. Pretty simple!

Download and Install GigaTribe

You will be prompted for login. Create a new user account. You will get a confirmation email. Click on the activation link within the email and your account is ready.

Now click on Folders tab and add folders to share.

Make sure you take care to select subfolders so that all the contents of that folder can be shared. Just check the Enable recursive sharing option.

Ask your friend to do the same steps till this point.

Now click on Add to add your friend in your list.

Select the first option – Sending an invitation to a friend who already uses GigaTribe.

Accept the invitation by selecting the user from left sidebar and then clicking on Accept invitation.

Now select the user and open it. You would be able to view the files.

If you look under the Folders tab, then you can see the list of folders shared by that user.

Right click on the file and download it. It will be placed in your GigaTribe Downloads folder under My Documents.

Under the My Transfers you can see the transfers going on.

A friend needed to get some file and I crawled him to try out this application. As far as the application is concerned, I am pretty much satisfied with the application and the best thing is that interrupted sessions are resumed flawlessly.

Say Goodbye to traditional ways of transferring files to other users, GigaTribe is here.

Have your say in the comments.

Lunascape – Triple Engine Browser

Ashfame — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 18:24:29 +0000

We web designers know how important it is to check our web designs in different browsers as different browsers interpret things differently because they are based on different engines. Not to mention we have IE 6 (I hate it as much as I love my love). Right now apart from Multiple IE browser trick, and using Browsershots to take screenshots, I have all the standalone installations of IE, Firefox, Opera, Google Chrome, Apple Safari. Wouldn’t it be easy and convenient to have the rendering of different engines all in a single package?

Coming to the point, I would like to introduce you to Lunascape which is the world’s first triple engine based browser.

Trident Engine Rendering
Gecko Engine Rendering
Webkit Engine Rendering

That said, you might have get the idea that with a single installation of Lunascape you get to view how the design will render in different browsers.

Lunascape = IE (Trident)+Firefox (Gecko)+Chrome & Safari (Webkit)

Reader’s usability is totally left off other than just giving him more options than the user needs regularly. Its skinny & has got a plethora of options. Moreover it just has a size of 9MB. Their site says that it has already been downloaded 10 million times in Japan. Worth the try? huh? Let me know how did you find it through your valuable comments.

Check webdesign in different versions of IE

Ashfame — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 19:24:33 +0000

I am a freelancer web designer and as a web designer I design websites that are cross browser compatible. I know how much of a pain is IE for all web designers. So today I am sharing something that will help some, if not many of the web designers (front end developers).

Earlier I have written about BrowserShots.org which takes the screenshot of how a webpage will look in different browsers and save screenshots of it. But what if we need to take a look at a design which is not live yet? For this, every one including me uses (at least has installed) several of popular browsers like Firefox, Opera, Google Chrome, Safari & IE.

IE 7 got smarter and IE 8 is still holding that up. Things will improve in future but what about the people still using IE 6 or previous versions. Earlier I was using Multiple IE (10.3MB) which enables the installation of IE 3 to IE 6 by exploiting a known workaround called DLL redirection. It is no longer maintained but it it still available to download.

Today I found another software named IE Tester (24MB) which is an alpha release but works well till far I used it. It is a web browser of its own which allows you to have the rendering & JavaScript engines of IE 5, IE 6, IE 7 & IE 8. Its equivalent of running different versions of IE at the same time.

Did you find the share useful? What do you use for checking cross browser compatibilities of web designs. Let me know through your valuable comments.

Vaccinate USB drives to prevent virus infection

Ashfame — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 13:05:39 +0000

Earlier I have written about how to disabe USB autorun to save the computer from being infected with various sort of malware which adds action in the autorun.inf file to execute them self on the double click action. Hence if you double click open a pen drive or your USB drive (an infected one), then the virus will itself get executed. A virus residing in a folder does not harm unless it is executed. After all, virus is just a piece of code and before it can do anything, it needs to be in running state (execution state).

The earlier method that i wrote was a registry hack with the help of which one can disable USB autorun but a few days back, I found out a great tool from Panda which can disable autorun from your computer completely and moreover it implements a special trick which renders the virus attack of adding its execution to the autorun.inf useless.

It adds a autorun.inf file of its own which can’t be read or deleted. Hence even the virus can’t modify it and you are safe to go. An antivirus is recommended all the time though.

It can also be operated in command Line interface for making it run automatically each time when a USB drive is mounted or to perform network wide vaccinations. Best of all its free.

I would recommend creating a shortcut to the tool with the parameters USBVaccine.exe /resident /hidetray +system and copying the shortcut to startup folder so that every time a USB device is mounted on the computer and if it is not vaccinated, it will prompt you for vaccination. Nice. Isn’t it?

So why don’t you give it a try and enjoy what I call as “Safe Computing”.

Bonus Tip: How to practice safe computing?

Make a habit of never opening a pen drive / USB drive / thumb drive by double click. Always open the drive from the tree pane view. (Exploring My Computer opens that view only and moreover you can press the folder options in explorer to enable it). Why? Because the default action with this method is always viewing the content and not executing any file.

Similarly Optical drives can be inserted by holding the Shift key which disable the autorun feature temporarily. This tool can disable that for you. No worries!

Download Panda USB Vaccination Tool [380KB]

I would like to hear your words on the trick implemented by this tool. Do you like it?

Download Windows 7 Transformation Pack for Windows XP

Ashfame — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 07:53:50 +0000

Microsoft has officially confirmed that Windows 7 (Codenamed Vienna) is not going to be released until early 2010. However, fresh rumors claim the release date to be June 3, 2009 – whatever the case maybe, we are not going to see the new OS anytime soon, so here we have another cool Windows Vienna Transformation Pack for Windows XP.

Windows 7 / Vienna Transformation Pack Features

Vienna Navigator.
Cool Superbar.
Windows 7 Visual Styles.
Sounds.
Windows 7 wallpapers.
Cursor Set.
Windows Vienna Logon Screen.
Windows Vienna Bootskin.
All the required applications to apply these effects.

The Transformation Pack is 60MB in size. You can download it from Megaleecher.

Although tranformation packs slow down old computers or I should say computers with not enough graphics processing power. I never felt the drop in performance with my ATI HD 4850. Its good if you have a graphics card inside your cabinet. Have your say in the comments.

[via Megaleecher]

PNotes – Easy way of organizing notes

Ashfame — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 17:16:48 +0000

Today I am writing a quick review of PNotes, my favorite quick note taker. I use it to jot down any important point that strike my mind anytime. It helps me in having a list of ideas of upcoming blog post ideas and in quickly writing down anything. Its interface is quite friendly and its note looks very cool when the transparency feature is used.

You just double click on the icon in the system tray and you are ready to go with a new note. Apart from normal note taking applications or softwares, PNotes also offers an auto save feature which saves your notes at specified interval of minutes. It has skin support too. The one in the screenshot is a skin which was bundled with the setup.

If you have never used any note taking software before then I strongly recommend you using one as it saves you a lot of time and unnecessary hassles of different text files. There may be better alternatives to Pnotes both in features but the thing that I like the most about PNotes is its skin support. It adds to the pleasing look of my desktop instead of spoiling it. Have your say in the comments.

Minilyrics – Get lyrics within your media player

Ashfame — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 10:35:22 +0000

I am in a habit of hunting lyrics of my favorite songs but this can be a time consuming method if you like many songs. As you are no different from me (We all love music. Don’t we?), here is a method that can save you time if you are also like me and hunt for music lyrics every now and then.

Minilyrics is one tool that can be used with your favorite media player. When you play your songs, MiniLyrics will search, download and display song lyrics automatically. You may be asked to select the best match lyrics to download. You can also search and select lyrics manually by clicking the context menu item Download Lyrics.

Minilyrics support the following media players:

Winamp
Windows Media Player
Foobar2000
Apple iTunes
RealPlayer
Quintessential Player
Musicmatch Jukebox
MediaMonkey
The KMPlayer
JetAudio
Yahoo! Music Engine
J. River Media Center
J. River Media Jukebox
XMPlay
AIMP2
Helium Music Manager
AlbumPlayer
BSPlayer

It has even got skin support and is available for Windows Mobile too.

Download Minilyrics (1.5MB)

Process Lasso – Manage your multi core CPUs effectively

Ashfame — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 12:55:32 +0000

Many of us uses dual core or quad core processors. The reason being simple that they are better in terms of performance but I would like to point out that the potential of multi core CPUs are not being effectively utilized. The OS are smart enough to use them but we and our programs don’t have much control over their usage.

What is going on in cores?

Like you have a anti-virus scan running on your computer and then you start media player to play music. What happens is that OS assigns one core for anti-virus scan and other core is used for playing media player. If you start another process or application, then it is also assigned one of the existing cores like it happens in single core processors. This is called multi tasking as multiple cores are handling multiple applications. There are rarely any softwares that can run on both cores thus doubling up the speed of the computer as they are yet to be developed. Only Software Simulation is in implementation these days which is not able to tap its full power.

What is missing?

We don’t have any control on the choice that which core will be assigned to which applications and this might decrease the responsiveness of the computer. It doesn’t decrease the responsiveness always but sometimes it happens.

So What can you do?

You can use Process Lasso to manage which core is assigned to which application. I must tell you that if you are a newbie, then Process Lasso is not for you as it might confuse you. Even its help contain many technical terminologies but still if you want to give it a try, then go ahead.

You can take more control of managing the usage of cores by different applications which results in a more responsive environment, set priorities of different processes etc. There are also lots of other options that you can tweak for a more responsive and better working environment.

If you wish to read more about it, then read it on Techtree. Have your say in the comments.

3 creative ways of showcasing your best content on sidebar

Extract audio from video files

Ashfame — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 04:47:01 +0000

Many times it happens that we have a video file and we wished if the audio can be extracted in some way from it but didn’t know the way around. So today I am going to share a freeware audio extracter tool that can serve all your needs of extracting audio from video files. You can use it to have a audio file of a video song or you can use it to extract the audio out of a full length movie and then cut the audio file as per your needs. If you need an introduction on audio editing, then read this article of mine : Cut parts of audio file

AoA Audio extracter is one such tool that can be used to extract audio files out of various formats such as AVI, MPEG, MPG, FLV (Flash Video), DAT, WMV, MOV, MP4, 3GP video files and save them as MP3, WAV and AC3 formats. It also supports batch conversion i.e. processing multiple files one after the another without user intervention. And the best part is that it is totally free. I just extracted audio from a video file and saved it in mp3 format and the sped was

Give it a spin and let me know what you like about the software and what you don’t.

MemTest – Check faulty RAM for errors

Ashfame — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 19:29:06 +0000

Many times it happened with a lot of computer users that they face weird issues on their computer, the reason of which they are unable to find out. In most of the cases RAM is the culprit. Either it will restart the computer randomly or it will freeze the computer or in severe case, faulty RAM stick might not even allow the computer to boot up. Today I am going to share a small software named MemTest (15KB) that can test if your RAM is functioning correctly.

MemTest is designed to find all types of memory errors including intermittent problems. Therefore, it needs to be run for several hours to truly evaluate your RAM. You have the option of running it either till 100% RAM coverage or let it run the test for 1hr or let it run more aggressively by leaving it to run overnight.

A good RAM will completely be free of error and can run MemTest for weeks without any errors. If you find even a single error, then that means either there is a fault with your RAM or your system is incorrectly configured.

It is available for all the versions of windows and it can run on both 32 bit and 64 bit Windows. Vista is also supported by MemTest. The free version does pretty night job of checking your RAM but if you intend to do it on a regular basis on multiple machines, then they also have Pro & Deluxe versions available that offers some extra features over the free version.

Download Memtest (15KB) and if you feel like reading more about it, then here is its manual.

A similar utility for testing RAM under linux is available by the name of Memtest86. They even offer iso image downloads so that you can create a bootable disc but I haven’t tried it. Why don’t you give it a shot and let me know. If you are thinking of buying RAM for your computer, then you might want to read this guide : RAM buying guide. Have your say in the comments.

Design a banner for every need

Ashfame — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 13:40:58 +0000

Don’t expect me to design a banner from scratch, I am not a expert in it yet. You may read this if you want to spice up a image or need to fuel up your creativity for designing good banners for every need. In this post, I will give you the steps I took to design a banner for my blog.

You will need Gimp (I am using Gimp-Portable) to manipulate images.

Step #1

Decide the size of banner you want. You can use the Crop-Resize technique over a bigger image to get a image of desired size. This step is the biggest step for newbies and unfortunately it can’t be explained in a written format. Like I wanted a banner of size 896 X 200. I took a larger image from stock images and select the portion I want to use in banner and crop it. Then after resizing and a little more of cropping I ended up with this image. Lets name it image_1.

(Click image to enlarge)

Step #2

Open the image_1 with Gimp. From the menu, choose Filters > Glass Effects > Glass Tile. After this you can set the tile width and height. When you are satisfied with the preview, click Ok to apply that effect. You will get this image. Lets name it image_2.

(Click image to enlarge)

Q: What I wanted to have?
A: I wanted to stand out from the crowd and for that I need to make one man clear in the image and others under the glass tile effect, we just used.

Step #3

To implement the need, I took the image_1 and crop the middle man out and save it. Also I cropped the ‘A’ of my logo.

Step #4

Then I opened image_2 and select File > Open as layer and browse to the man image which we have just saved. From the tools, select Move layers & selections tool () and move it exactly over the middle man. Similarly open the cropped ‘A’ as layer and resize it using Scale the layer or selection tool () to a size that we can tag the middle man with this image but keep the aspect ratio same.

Again move this image using Move layers & selections tool () to a suitable place so that background color matches with the background of the image you are going to paste else you will need some transparency. When you are done with moving the layer, save it to obtain the final image (shown below).

(Click image to enlarge)

Thats how I made my banner. If you need any kind of help, then feel free to ask in the comments and if you want to fuel up your creativity (not with just image editing) then you can subscribe to my feeds and can have a look at how creative my articles can get. Do tell me what you made for yourself out of inspiration.