1. Visit the Ninite website at http://www.ninite.com.
2. Check the software that you want. There’s a plethora of freeware, some that you may not have even heard of and may wish to give a trial run.
3. Hit the big Get Installer button, download the installer, and run it.
4. Follow the prompts on the screen and let it go.

All the software you had selected has now been installed on your shiny new OS. Easy as that!

If you have any suggestions or easy-install tools that you use, please tell us in the comments.

You may also have embraced Google Calendar or iCal to keep track of your life’s daily activities and be your personal secretary (I know I have), and so here’s a great way to automatically update your gCal or iCal with the airdates/airtimes of your favorite episodes with no interaction from you. It’s a good-old set-it-and-forget-it. Keep reading for the info.

1. Visit the CAT TV Calendar website and register for a new account.
2. Create your account, log in, and go to “Add Shows to your Filter” link at the top of the page. You will now be at a page with a ton of TV shows.
3. Simply click on the names of all the TV shows you’d like to subscribe to in your calendar, and hit the big Save Filter button at the bottom.
4. Now here’s the slightly tricky part. You’ll be back at the homepage calendar. At the top, you’ll see a link labeled “Download iCal File”. Now if you just click this link and download it, iCal will copy only the shows that they have information for, but it will NOT update itself in the future. Also, you cannot get it to run on Google Calendar this way. Instead, right click on the link copy the URL.
5. (This guide covers how to do this in Google Calendar, but it’s the same process in iCal.) Open up your Google Calendar, and on the left under “Other Calendars”, click the “Add” button, and then press “Add By URL”.
6. Here, paste (rightclick -> paste or Cntr+V) the link you copied from before into the box.
7. Change the word “download” to the word “generate” in the link. This step is very, very important. Your link should now look something like http://www.pogdesign.co.uk/cat/generate_ics/RANDOMDIGITS.
8. Hit add and now your calendar should show up, timings and all, in your Google Calendar. You never have to do anything again!

If you are having trouble with incorrect timings, your timezone may be incorrectly set. That can be changed at the CAT TV Calendar website under the Settings link.

However, if you still want to be alerted when there is an update to a specific site, there is a very simple way. Keep reading for the guide.

1. Visit the website Feed My Inbox and put in the link to the site you want. Hopefully, they have some sort of RSS feed. If they don’t, look for the link to the RSS feed (it probably is some file that has a .xml extension, but can be different) and use that link.
2. Put in your email address and hit Submit. You will now be alerted once a day with every update that occurs on the website of your desire.

This way, you can consolidate all of the websites you would normally check into one site – your email account. If you see an interesting post or something, then you could go to the website and read more about it. This is especially useful if you need to track things such as deals and sales from sites like SlickDeals or FatWallet.

1. Visit Hulu.com and log into your account. If you do not have a Hulu account, sign up for one, as you need it.
2. You can now either add specific episodes/movies to your Queue (to remind you to watch them at a later date), or you can subscribe to a TV series so that the latest episode automatically gets added to your queue.
3. To add a pre-existing episode to your queue for later viewing, find the episode with the search tool, and simply press the “+ queue” link found below the correct thumbnail.
4. If you want to subscribe to the entire TV series (so that new episodes are automatically queued), find any episode in the series with the search tool, and you will see “More: <title>” below the thumbnail. Go to that page and then press “Subscribe to: Episodes” (or clips, whatever you want) in the middle of the page on the right hand side.
5. You can now also set up your account to notify you when new episodes are added to your queue, or when unwatched episodes are going to expire from your queue by going to your Profile Settings and editing those options.

Now, you can simply log in and see your queue by clicking the link at the top right of the page. You can either manually remove videos that you no longer want to watch, or if you watch a video, it will automatically be removed (even if you close it/navigate away while the credits are still rolling!). The Hulu Queueing feature is wonderful and any episodiphile should use it.

However, the problem with that is that if it is such a random file format, finding a converter can be difficult in itself. Furthermore, once you do find that program, it most likely is a trial and you have to install it on your system, then convert, then uninstall. All this is a hassle and a pain, especially for one measely file conversion. That’s where online file converters come in. Keep reading for the low-down on one of the most comprehensive online file converters.

So, this magical site that supports a plethora of file formats is (aptly named) Media Convert. It handles all sorts of audio and video, is relatively fast, and even has advanced options for the power user. It can be either as easy as select your file/output, hit convert, and download (as it automatically detects your input file type), or as advanced as selecting start/end time, and more. Media Convert is a great option not only if you need to only convert one file, but it’s also great if you’re on a computer that you don’t have permission to install programs on but still need to convert some file.

You may think that you’re one step ahead of the game and head over to Google to search about the company before you purchase something from some random site, but often times that search is inconclusive. If the company name is some generic word, your search will be flooded with inapplicable results. Or, on the contrary, the company is so obscure that a search returns virtually no useful results. However, there is a way that has tons of reviews of a great deal of online stores, both sketchy and well-established. Keep reading for the info.

If you ever want to look up a company’s online business profile and customer reviews, there is a wonderful site called BizRate that has a section specifically designated for handling online company reviews. Click the link below to visit their site and search for a company.

BizRate Store Ratings

Simply type in the name of the company you wish to look up, and almost always you’ll find the company along with a decent amount of customer reviews on the specific supplier. The products themselves are not reviewed, as it is more for the services of the business than the products. There is a summary of a rating on a 10 point scale (10 being the best) for overall, “would shop here again”, “on time delivery”, “customer support”, and “product met expectations”. They even have a smiley faces for those who dislike numbers. You can even read individual customer reviews along with why they may have given the store the scores they did. It really makes the decision of buying some random (or suspiciously cheap) thing from a shady company much more reassuring.

Actually, there are a large number of sites that offer YouTube video conversions, but the thing is, all of the popular ones are constantly slammed with a large amount of traffic, and thus often fail when trying to convert the video. So, you may have to go through a few converters before you get one that actually works, so here’s a list of some of the top converters for converting/saving YouTube videos to your computer for offline and on-the-go playback.

• Vixy
• KeepVid (Download Only, No Conversion)
• FLVtoMP3 (audio only)
• Media Converter
• VConversion
• ConvertMyTube

Try these in the order they are given, and you should hopefully find one that works when you need it to.

It’s ok, though, because there’s always another way. Keep reading for the simple guide to setting up remote access to your computer where all you need to actually access your computer is a web browser.

1. Go to the LogMeIn website and register for an account.
2. Follow their instructions in setting up the software on your home computer so that it can be accessed remotely.
3. Once that’s all set up, all you need to do is leave your computer on (the process runs in the background, but takes a very small amount of system resources – it’s unnoticeable).
4. From the remote computer, go to the LogMeIn site once again, log in, and you will see the option to remote control your computer. It’s as simple as that. Your mouse and keyboard entries will now be sent to your home computer (once you see your desktop) and you can do almost everything you could as if you were sitting in front of the computer yourself.

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.

So if you have even the slightest inclination to sketch out random words (or even if you don’t), this is the best use (or waste, depends on how you look at it) of your time.

iSketch.net is a Flash-based online multiplayer version of Pictionary. You join a room (depending on which english you want, US or UK), and the game will cycle through the players, giving each one a word to draw out. You then proceed to type your guesses into the chat room, and the game will automatically tally your answers and total points for each round. In addition to being able to play Pictionary, you can also type in a secondary IRC-like chatroom that is featured, primarily for socializing with other players in the room. There are even various word-difficulty levels, with the Easy rooms having words like “neighbor”, or “ocean” and the Expert rooms having words like “ravenous” and “scintillating”.

I’ve spent countless hours on iSketch, and I yet have to get bored – and I hate all forms of graphical art, except for this.

But wait, there is! (I think I’ve been watching too many infomercials lately…)

WhatTheFont.com does just that. You upload a sample image of some words written in the font you want, and then the website will analyze and give you the closests matches to the font. I’ve used this site multiple times and it has never failed me. Keep reading for the step by step guide.

1. First, visit WhatTheFont.com and make sure that you have a clear image of the font you want sampled. They also have some samples that you can check against to see what types of images work the best.
2. Now, you can either upload your own scanned image, or link to an image online. Either way, once you hit Continue, the image will be analyzed.
3. As you can see in the image to the right, you will be then taken to a page where it asks you to confirm the accuracy of its letters. Most letters are correct, but it has trouble with some (such as i’s, as they get split). To combine letters, you can drag one on top of another. (I had to do that for the i and the ? in this example).
4. After choosing the correct letters, go to the next screen and it will show you a list of all of the viable options.
5. Here, you can compare the text of the predicted fonts alongside the original. They conveniently included a floating version of the original image that follows if you scroll down, so it becomes extremely easy to go back and forth and verify that every nuance of every letter is accommodated for by the font.
6. Once you have the font selected, clicking on the name will take you to the fonts page. From here, you can either purchase the font, or it will link you to an external site where you can purchase the font.

If you don’t want to pay for the font, there are always other options, such as searching for a similar or the same font on a free font website. Google is your best friend, and can help you possibly find the font of your desire for free. If not, you can search sites such as DaFont.com or 1001FreeFonts.com.