The popular game, Portal, has been made available via a free download for a limited time (May 24). Since I have never personally played it, I am getting the description of the game from Wikipedia’s page: The game consists primarily of a series of puzzles that must be solved by teleporting the player’s character and simple objects using the Aperture...

On many download sites, you may see an MD5 checksum (or hash) included on the page next to the file download link. If you have ever wondered what this is and how it is useful, then hopefully this tip will help. An MD5 checksum (you can read the full info on Wikipedia here) is basically a string of letters and numbers determined by the characteristics of a...

The default Windows XP theme is called Luna. This is the rather disgusting blue taskbar, program title bars/borders and the big green Start button. It looks awful. Luna can be changed to either Olive Green (equally disgusting) or Silver (the only which looks good out of the set for Luna). Many people can’t stand Luna and switch to the “Windows...

Said honestly, Windows Live Movie Maker Beta, in a word, sucks. It lost so many features compared to the old Windows Movie Maker that it’s just not worth using. Are you stuck without a free video editor in Windows 7 at this point? No. You can install the old – and far superior – Windows Movie Maker in Windows 7. All you have to do is download...

You have probably seen many articles and tips on this site about downloading videos from YouTube, however if you want to download from other sites a tool you need to check out is xVideoServiceThief. This open source tool allows you to download from (at the time of writing) 55 popular websites which use embedded videos. Additionally, xVideoServiceThief boasts the...

Firefox, while a great browser, is a bit behind the times at the moment because it’s the only major player that doesn’t have a private-browsing mode. I personally think this is an important feature to have because of the enhanced security. Some jokingly call this feature "porn mode", but where I would use it most is for online banking. So,...

Need your Linux fix? Ubuntu’s new version 9.04 is available today and with it some genuinely significant updates, such as: GNOME 2.26 The biggest improvement (for me) is that GNOME does better multi-monitor setup now with this version. Multi-monitor troubles with a Linux GUI have been a longstanding complaint of mine, and while Ubuntu 8 was a huge...

You’ve probably heard of web sites like KeepVid where you can direct-download the FLV file of any YouTube video you watch by entering its video URL. You don’t have to do this. You can use Firefox’s local file cache to do it also. Yes, it takes a little longer, but the plus is you don’t have to rely on another site just to download videos....

Whenever you are watching YouTube videos you probably come across some that you would like to save to your hard drive. While there are software titles and browser plugins which will do this for you, the abosolute easiest way I have found is by using KickYouTube. KickYouTube requires no software installation or registration of any kind and the usage could not be...

When it comes to buying most software, you typically have the option of either going to a brick and mortal store and purchasing it or ordering it online. Obviously, going to the store gives you immediate gratification over ordering online, however more and more popular software titles are being offered online with the buy and download option. When you buy and...

Firefox users: You will be prompted soon to update your software to v3.0.2. If you don’t feel like waiting, just click Help and then Check for Updates… and you can upgrade right now. So what’s new in 3.0.2 (hey, that rhymes)? Quite a bit, actually. There’s been some security fixes, "several stability issue" fixed (which...

One would think since the USA created internet (yes we did) we’d be top dog as far as adoption of broadband is concerned. We’re not. In fact, we’re in 15th place. On average, the fastest download last-mile speed is 2.3mbps. Just to give you an indication of how slow our connectivity speed is, Japan (who always kicks everyone’s ass in...