Hacksar

If you’re one of the few lucky enough to have an unlimited texting plan, and also find yourself constantly checking your Gmail account to see if you have any new messages, (but unlucky enough not to have a smartphone / data plan), you may be in luck. With a little bit of tweaking, you can set up your Gmail account to forward all the emails (or even only specific emails) to your cell phone as text messages. You no longer have to keep checking if you have a new message on a computer because you’ll be notified instantly straight to your phone!

To do this, you need a Gmail account and a texting capable phone. (There are also some restrictions on what service providers support this, but that’s later on. It can also be done without unlimited texting, but having unlimited texting is a great benefit — just so you don’t have to ever look at a $26,000 phone bill. I also can’t vouch for international users, but this should work in USA.) Keep reading for the step-by-step guide on how to set up your Gmail account to receive your emails on your phone.

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If you’ve been reading some of our previous posts (primarily the ones on BitTorrent), or even if you have a digital video recorder, you may have noticed that getting the files onto a DVD for easy DVD player playback is much harder that it seems. Almost 99 out of a 100 times, your DVD player won’t be able to just play a video file if you just drag/drop and burn whatever video file to a DVD. When you do that, you are usually burning a data DVD, which is specially meant for only PCs to read them; DVD players usually can’t.

However, if you ever have wanted to create your own DVD, whether it was a home video or just some other collection of video clips you’ve had, there is a way to do it. What you want to do is author the DVD. When you use DVD authoring programs, you have the ability to set not only the video to play on a DVD player, but also to create aspects of the DVD such as the menu screen, scene selections, and more. There are many programs that can do this for you, the best being free. Keep reading for the list and a quick guide on how to use the best one.

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If you’ve ever found yourself on a computer that doesn’t belong to you, you’ve probably had the lost feeling of not having all of your favorite programs at your fingertips. If you are trying to work with images, Microsoft Paint just doesn’t cut it; you need the real powerhouse of image editors: Photoshop. You have the software at home, but that may not mean you have it on every computer. Also, you most likely don’t have administrator priviledges on this alien computer, so you can’t even install your own copy of… whatever.

That’s where Portable Apps come in. For those of you wondering what a Portable App is, let me just say, they are one of the best creations for all computers. A portable application is a program that has the ability to run straight from one file, without any installation. They can even be run directly off of a USB flash drive, eliminating all needs for installation and admin rights.

Now, you may recall that Adobe’s Photoshop CS3 is not only a powerhouse image editing program, but the full installed version runs at a whopping  MB. So, you may think that you can never use this wonderful piece of software on any computer other than where it’s natively installed. Guess again. Keep reading to learn how to use Adobe Photoshop CS3 as a portable application straight from your flash drive, with no installation required.

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Often times, you have probably had some problem trying to save or send some sort of file, whether it was a Word document, PowerPoint, or something else that your recipient was unable to open. If they did not have the proper program installed on their computer, they would not be able to view the file you tried to send to them. Thankfully, a solution for this problem is to send the file as a Portable Document File, better known as a PDF. However, actually creating these files can be slightly troublesome unless you know what you’re doing.

PDFs were created by Adobe, and Adobe’s Acrobat PDF Reader can be found on almost every computer that has a web browser; many files on the internet are saved as PDFs and therefore many browsers install a PDF reader automatically. You can use this to your advantage by saving your files as PDFs. Keep reading for the breakdown.

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If you download any type of video, whether they’re movies, TV shows, or what have you, you may have noticed that they come in a multitude of different file formats. AVI, MPEG, WMV, DIVX; there are just too many file formats to keep up with. I’m sure that if you own any sort of portable video player, say, an iPod or PSP, you’ve come across the problem that your downloaded files don’t play. Instead, you have to wait for hours using some crappy piece of software that’s filled with bugs and usually just dies in the middle of a 12 hour long conversion to convert one video into something that can be played by your portable media player.

If you try to shy away from those commercial video converters, you’ll only be greeted by many other converters that are “free” to try, but have some ridiculous limitation on it until you actually purchase the whole program. Often times, these programs don’t even do what they’re advertised for, and you may end up buying something that is completely useless and is actually worse than your original piece of software. So, why not stick to free software that actually works?. Keep reading for a list of the best of the best when it comes to freeware video conversion softwares.

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Sometimes you’ve been surfing the internet for so long that it seems like you’ve run out of things to do. You’ve read all of your daily news / fun websites, and you don’t want to do work. Rather than typing in random web addresses and seeing what site pops up, there’s a much better way to spend your time.

If you remember back to your childhood, there’s a game called Pictionary, where one person would basically sketch something and other people would have to guess what was being drawn. This game has made its way online, and so you can play with people from around the world in your own game of online Pictionary. Keep reading for the full details.

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If you are even the slightest bit of a geek/nerd, I’m sure you have your own red laser pointer. Who doesn’t? But… do you have a GREEN laser pointer? No, not just a red laser pointer with green plastic wrap over the end (that doesn’t work anyway), but an authentic 532 nm 5mW green laser pointer? I didn’t think so. Most websites list it for $70 or more (cough, ThinkGeek, cough) and it’s just been a tease for years now. Thankfully, I’ve come across a different site that sells this green laser pointer for less than $12. Keep reading for the full info.

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You may be paranoid about somebody else using your computer, and so to combat that, you just Switch Users and leave your computer on the log in screen. Also, you may have it set to go back to the log in screen once the screen saver kicks in, just for those times you forgot to log out. While this may be useful most of the times, it may not always cut it. What if you’re running some sort of intense process (like video encoding/conversion, for example) that you don’t necessarily need to interact with, but you just need to see how far it has progressed? Logging in every time you want to check that is a waste of time and energy, as, since the computer is busy with whatever it is processing, the login will be extremely slow and laggy.

On the other hand, if you simply don’t like the interface of the Window’s login screen (for some reason), or simply can’t access it easily, then this solution might be for you. My computer suddenly decided to stop letting me log out or even shut down the computer through regular means, so I had to resort to finding my own solutions. (It just freezes on the “Windows is shutting down” blue screen, if anybody has any idea why it may do these, leave a comment.)

I came across another AutoHotKey script that locks your computer with a password after either a certain amount of time, or if you give it the lock command. By lock, what it does is it places a white transparent cover over your whole screen and has an “Input Password” box in the middle. The AutoHotKey source is at the bottom of this post. For more information about how to use AutoHotKey, read the previous post on How to Control iTunes Remotely. Keep reading for the guide on how to use this computer locking script.

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NOTE: Facebook has seemed to finally caught on and removed this page. This guide is no longer applicable and is here only for archival purposes.

If you use Facebook on a regular basis, you may have noticed that they have changed their layout once again. This is, I believe, version 3 of the Facebook layouts. Version 2, if you recall correctly, also had a huge uproar about the massive changes, introducing tabs and a Live News Feed. There were options to see more about people you like and less about people you don’t, and it was even smart enough to “learn” who your real friends were (as opposed to acquaintances you’ll never speak to again) and only show you their stories. But, people learned to live with that. It brought you the right amount of information, and most importantly, it was information that you actually cared about.

However, now version 3 of Facebook has done away with many of the new features introduced in version 2, making it much more simplistic and Twitter-like. I honestly don’t like this, because if I wanted a Twitter copy, I’d just use Twitter. Facebook had much more, but I don’t see that anymore. Another downgrade was the fact that they seemingly removed the whole “learning” part of the news feed; Facebook just shows you EVERY post done by EVERY friend all the time. It no longer shows only the people you may talk to, and so it’s giving much more information than is actually useful. Also, all of the updates are delayed by a good 10-20 minutes, whereas at least in Facebook v2, it would be within seconds/minutes.

Thankfully, I was able to find a way to reduce the number of wall posts showing up on my news feed drastically. I don’t care about somebody who I haven’t talked to in 5 years talking about how they skipped dinner to their other friend I haven’t even remember friending. It’s just taking up space on my news feed. Keep reading for the step by step guide on how to customize (to an extent) how much of different things shows up on your news feed.

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Often times, computers get slowed down and bulky if you don’t take proper care of them. Just like anything else, computers too need the occasional maintanance. However, rather than a bath or grooming, they need things like file deletion, hard drive defragmentation, etc. No idea what that means? Luckily, you can learn how to speed up your computer in a few simple steps. Keep reading for the step-by-step guide on how to use different utility programs and how to tweak some of your computers settings to keep your baby running smoothly.

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