Hacksar

Sometimes, you may want to be able to take your torrenting capabilities along with you. There’s an easy way to do this – and the program itself is barely 1 mb! You can keep torrents, keep partially completed downloads (assuming your flash drive is large enough), or whatever, all in your thumb drive. To find out how to do this, keep reading.

(continue reading…)

If you have been prone to mess around with your computer, but are not truly an expert, many times, things can and will go wrong. Being the hacksar I am, even I make mistakes. Recently, I had undertaken the challenge of trying to install a Hackintosh’d version of OSX on my laptop, but not being very knowledgeable about the Mac OS, you can only imagine how badly I messed up. Long story short, my laptop would simply not start any operating system.

Keep reading for the full story.

(continue reading…)

If you have ever used a digital camera before, you probably have noticed that there is some sort of “Format Memory Card” option, which basically deletes all the pictures on the memory card. However, this can be painful if you accidentally format your memory card (or even if you accidentally delete one or two pictures that you really wanted).

The first and most important thing to keep in mind if this happens is DO NOT TAKE ANY MORE PICTURES, OR USE THE MEMORY CARD AT ALL. All recovery programs that can undelete your files rely on the fact that when a file gets deleted, the actual data isn’t erased (at least until something overwrites the section where it is written/saved). Keep reading for the guide on how to recover your deleted or formatted files.

(continue reading…)

Now with the prices of PlayStation 3’s dropping, more and more people are buying them. It not only is the most powerful gaming platform (from a hardware point of view) on the current market, but it also has the added benefit of being able to serve content in 1080p resolution, making the most out of that HDTV you just bought. It is also one of the best Blu-Ray players that you can get. However, did you know that you can stream virtually any media (video, audio, images) that you have on your PC to your PS3 over your home network? AVI, DIVX, MP3, JPG — you name it, you can most likely stream it.

If you have your PS3 on your network and want to share your files to it to watch on your TV, have no fear. It’s beyond easy; just keep reading for the guide.

(continue reading…)

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.

(continue reading…)

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.

(continue reading…)

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.

(continue reading…)

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.

(continue reading…)

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.

(continue reading…)

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.

(continue reading…)