Matt Whitlock over at Presto Place posted a great article on how to “How To Make Your Own PDF Files” the article is directed towards the Presto service but you can also use his tips to create any PDF file.

Most folks don’t need to create PDFs but if you are like us and want a non-changeable document PDF is the way to go.

So head over and check out his post. You will be surprised on how easy and free it is!

You can see his post here.

Cox is now the latest Internet service provider to have been found blocking peer-to-peer traffic on its network.

The Max Planck Institute for Software Systems released a survey Thursday showing that 54 percent of Cox subscribers reported having their connections blocked when they tried to share files over the Internet. Comcast has been castigated for a similar practice, but apparently it wasn’t the only company engaging in such action, according to the Associated Press.

The blocked connections occurred when Cox subscribers used BitTorrent to download or upload files, according to the results of the survey. Cox has acknowledged a practice called “protocol filtering,” but says that’s not the equivalent of creating different standards for handling content traveling across its networks.

If you are interested in finding out if your Cox Cable setup is blocking Bittorrent traffic, check out this tool here.

We have had a TiVo S3 for about a year and it was working great. Then one day it started tiling and pixelating on certain channels. We run Cox Cable, Phoenix area, and have the HD package also. The tiling was on the lower channels 62 on down.

This started about the middle of last December, they could not fix it until now. Basically it took them 2 months to get it fixed. We had about 10 repair visits, supervisor inspections, billing problems, new cable runs and all kinds of other stuff done.

Just check out everything they did.

1. Came out, decided the powered signal booster was too high. Removed it. No fix
2. Came out, decided they needed to replace all the splitters and recheck all cables, No fix
3. Came out, decided they needed a power booster, no fix and other TV’s now no longer worked.
4. Came out, decided they needed a new dedicated cable ran directly to the TiVo without sharing the source. No fix, but they billed us for a new cable run.
5. Came out, decided the last guy didn’t hook up the other splitters right, rearranged, no fix.
6. Came out, decided to replace the two single source SA cards with one Multi card. No Fix and now we can’t use the dual tuner function.
7. Came out, decided the “levels” were to high, reduced them to the TiVo S3, no Fix
8. Came out, looked at the system, decided they needed to call a supervisor to discuss. Never got a call back.
9. Came out, tried attenuators, to reduce the levels, tried a 3, 6 and 9 reducer. All kinds of combinations. No fix.
10. Came out. Decided to replace both cards, with multi stream cards. Guess what? Fixed it!!!

It has only been a few days since it has been fixed, but we have also not have the black TV channels like some others report. So hopefully all is good!

We want to that Kirt at Cox for figuring it out and not stopping until it is is working! We will definitely recommend him to all TiVo S3 owners in the Phoenix area!

If you are having a problem, and yes, after all of this, we have heard there are tons of people having TiVo S3 problems with Cox Cable. Have them check your cards, and replace them with multi channel cards before wasting a ton of your time!

In order to close a support case with Toshiba (concerning the lack of HDMI–DVI functionality with the HD-A3 and my TV), I replied to their previous e-mail and told them that I had returned the player and gotten a Blu-ray one due to the news from Warner Brothers. This was their response:

Thanks for writing!

Robert
Toshiba Customer Service

That was a rather cordial response, especially since I really expected no response to my e-mail at all. I have nothing against Toshiba or the HD DVD format; I just didn’t want my Christmas present to become a doorstop.

As a side note, I deleted my Blockbuster Online cue and filled it with Blu-ray selections.

As usual we were hopping around the internet and came to a site I had never seen before. They have quite a few videos that you won’t see on YouTube or other places.

No, I am not talking about Porn or adult videos, just videos that I thought were funny and that I would like to share with my friends.

The place I found was funnyjunk.com they have quite a few funny and interesting videos.

I came across this video and thought that it would be nice to send it and share it with my friends and also to save to my computer and my Sansa. Unfortunately they don’t have anything to allow me to download the video into some kind of Windows type format.

After a little research, I found a way to do just what I want and with very little effort.

The first thing I needed to do was download the video to my computer. I did this using a site called ClipNabber. This site allows you to paste the URL of the site that has a video you want and then you can download it into your computer.

It’s very simple to make this happen. All you have to do is, once you see a video you want, go to ClipNabber and paste into the site the webpage of the video you want.

In my case it was http://www.funnyjunk.com/movies/1152/Floating+Cigarette+Trick/ Once you have pasted the address in, you just click on “Nab Video” and the site will give you the download link to the video. Simply “Right Click” and “Save As” and you now have the video on your computer.

The only problem with this is that most videos you download from sites are what’s called an FLV file or a Flash Video. Most computers and Windows Media Player, will not play a FLV file. To do this you need to convert it to something Windows likes more, like an AVI or WMV file.

But no biggie, all we need is a FLV Converter. A program to convert the FLV file into an AVI. As a bonus it would be nice if it was free. Welp, we came across this one, the Free FLV Converter

The Free FLV Converter, not only does this but you can search youTube, dailyMotion, google, metacafe videos without opening your browser and you can even watch the videos using the built-in video player.

The software can convert the videos to Avi (xvid, DivX), Ipod, Iphone, 3GP and Psp format (MPEG4 and H.264).

Also as a bonus, this software can also convert all your videos (divx, xvid, mpeg, dvd, avi) to FLV video (Flash video) with an automatic HTML page creation. You will only have to place the files on your website to share your videos with the entire world.

So, once installed I simply ran the Free FLV Converter and converted my Cigarette video into a new AVI file. Now I can send this video to anyone I wish and they can watch it without having to go to a specific website and I can put this on my Sansa if I wish.

You can also convert your new AVI file to just about any other video format, just grab the audio and other things using MediaCoder. But we will save that info for next time.

There are tons of software out there for Windows XP. Most of them are not cheap. We want to help. Check out some of these freeware program available what you can use with Windows XP.

We did not do the research on this. This information was found by us at at the FreeWare Genius. you should definitely check out their site

Produkey: use this program to keep a record of all the product keys for the Microsoft products that are on ytour system, including Windows XP and Office.

PC Decrapifier: if you install Windows from a CD image disk provided with your computer then it is highly likely that it comes pre-loaded with all manner of junk software that the computer maker wants to foist on you. PC Decrapifier will batch-uninstall many of these for you; be careful, however, to check the list so as not to uninstall something you might want something you actually want.

Launchy: everybody needs a good launcher. Pressing a hotkey will prompt a dialog to appear whereby you can type in the first few letters of the name of the program that you want in order to launch it. Launchy will index your start menu and program files folders by default so that it will know all the programs available on your computer (you can define other folders for it to index as well).

AVG Antivirus: This is a free antivirus of choice is (a) it is very light on the system’s resources, (b) it does a simply excellent job,and (c) it supports email scan. Spyware Terminator: provides very good real-time protection against spyware/malware. For system scans it also integrates the open source ClamAV virus killer, which it also auto updates. Overall this program provides a very good free antispyware solution. Note that it will attempt to install a “Web Security Guard” toolbar in the setup which you can disable.

Comodo Firewall: this is not only an excellent free firewall, this program is a PC Magazine Editor’s choice and is possibly the best personal firewall out there, free or paid.

TweakUI: This powerful Windows tweaking tool from Microsoft is one of the best out there.

OpenOffice: a world class office productivity suite and Microsoft Office replacement. OpenOffice can read and write MS Office 2003 documents in DOC (Word 2003) ,PPT (Powerpoint 2003) and XLS (Excel 2003) formats, and can also output documents in PDF format.

Forcevision Image Viewer: this is a very competent and straightforward free image viewer.

JZip: Compression/zip utility of choice. Based on the 7 Zip open source archiver, JZip Can handle a good number of formats, has excellent compression ratio and speed as well as context menu integration. Other options that are good in this category are TugZip, IZArc, and ALzip .

CDBurnerXP 4: is the free program you can use to burn CDs and DVDs; it is a full featured CD/DVD burning program that can burn audio CDs, copy CDs/DVDs, burn/convert ISOs images, and handle a large variety of formats (including Double layer DVDs, Blu-Ray and HD-DVDs).

JKDefrag GUI: This is the graphical user interface for JKDefrag a hard disk defragmentation program. There are 3 reasons why you should use this program (a) JKDefrag has recently been tested and found to be the best amongst x different defragmentation programs, free and paid, (b) it provides the option to install itself as a screen saver, which will kick-off the defragmentation process whenever your computer is idle and goes into screensaver mode, and (c) it is fast and delivers excellent performance

Folder Size: this free Windows Explorer extension provides a “Folder Size” column in Windows explorer’s ’Detail’ view that shows the size of both files and folders (Windows shows the size of files but not that of folders).

Pidgin: a fantastic IM client that supports multiple messaging protocols including AIM, MSN, Yahoo!, XMPP, ICQ, IRC, SILC, SIP/SIMPLE, Novell GroupWise, Lotus Sametime, Bonjour, Zephyr, MySpaceIM, Gadu-Gadu, and QQ. It enables you to access all of your instant messaging accounts for the above networks simultaneously in the same client. You can use it to communicate individually with other people or to create chat rooms where multiple people interact simultaneously.

CCleaner: a fantastic hard drive cleaner that can rid your system of temp files, internet traces such as your surfing history, cookies, logfiles, cached files and other unused files from your computer. Installer comes with Yahoo toolbar included, so be careful to uncheck that during the installation process so it doesn’t install on your computer. Also includes a registry cleaner.

Shock Sticker: a really nice desktop ’sticky notes’ program that provides rich text editing and minimizing notes to floating icon (which is why I like it). This is my favortie desktop notes program, although Stickies, another similar program, is also extremely good and has more features.

FolderICO: A great way to differentiate folders with different colors and/or icons. FolderICO installs an entry into the Windows context menu that does this, but it also saves the changed icons within the folders such that the changed icon is preserved if, say, the folder is accessed on a network from another computer from a different operating system (or after a Windows re-install).
BeCyIconGrabber: if you work with icons you will love this one. It enables you not just to extract icon resources from files, but to do the opposite (save individual icons into libraries) which most like-programs do not. Very cool.

Alpass: an excellent password manager (for Internet Explorer only) that can store, encrypt, and fill in passwords and logins into forms for you.

Picasa: an excellent program from Google that can help manage your picture libraries as well as share/upload them online. Provides many picture enhancement functions, and is also a very nice viewer to boot.

Faststone Capture: a really powerful image capture program that is extremely easy to use and has a built in editor for adding annotations and image manipulations. Unfortunately this program has recently become shareware but you can still download and use the last freeware version (5.3). Check out Screenshot Captor for another excellent screenshot capture program. If you know another excellent screenshot capture program please mention it in the comments (I’d like to try something new).

GOM Media Player: a fantastic player that plays DVDs as well as video formats, including Real Media, Quicktime, DivX, Xvid and FLV. Whats is really nice about this program is that it is self-contained and uses all internal codecs (meaning that in most cases it will not install codecs on your system). If, however, it encounters a video file that it cannot play it will automatically download it for you.

You can chose this one over other favorites, VLC media player, because it handles FLV videos better (allows you to jump to the middle of an FLV video, which the current version of VLC does not). It also has a nicer look and feel, IMHO, esp. when playing DVDs.

Also check out CodecInstaller, an excellent program that can identify, download, and install the codecs needed to play any media file (regardless of the player you are using)

Quintessential Media Player: supports most audio formats. It is simultaneously (a) a very nice player, (b) a competent tag editor, (c) a CD ripper with CDDB database support, and (d) and audio formats converter. Also features an equalizer, visualizations, and skins and is extendable through plugins. One of the nicer abilities is autotagging, which it does through digital thumbprinting and CDDB.

Mediamonkey is another excellent program that also provides CD ripping, mp3 tag management, downloading of album art, audio format conversion, visualizations, skins, and equalizer, etc. Mediamonkey is vastly extendible though plugins and has a large community following.

MP3Tag: a fantastic MP3 tag/metadata manager that can download album art from Amazon and save it into the audio file itself. I’ve used a number of similar programs but like this one most because of it’s straightforward interface and user experience. |

Try The Godfather for another free alternative that also provides MP3 tag management, which might be sufficient for most people’s needs).

MusicBrainz Picard: use this program if your audio files have incomplete and or missing tags. Picard uses sophisticated digital fingerprinting to compare audio files to the community-created MusicBrainz database. It employs a different technology than Quintessential Media Player and can in the most cases auto-tag audio files that have no tags whatever.

Exact Audio Copy: an audio CD ripper that reads audio CDs “almost perfectly” (i.e. produces very high quality MP3s), connects to CDDB/Freedb to get track information, and supports a handful of audio file formats
If you are looking for an excellent audio file converter try Any Audio Converter which supports most audio formats as well as FLV and can demux audio from video files.

MP3gain: this program can analyze a group of MP3s and determine the average volume for each, and then raise and/or lower the volume of the files in order to “normalize” them (such that volume differences that might occur when one song transitions to another largely disappear). The cool thing is that it does this without re-encoding the files and its intervention is reversible.

Unlocker: this small memory resident program will pop-up whenever you encounter a file that is locked by a process or another program which prevents you from deleting or moving it. Once you install and use this you will start to consider it a must have program.

Orbit Downloader: is an excellent download manager that has the unique ability to download streaming media (audio and video, as well as flash SWF) from video sharing and other sites.

WinSCP: if you need an FTP client WinSCP is an excellent program that supports FTP and SFTP (as well as the legacy SCP), allows for secure transfers, and features dual pane file-manager like functionalities (such as sorting and comparing directories). It also allows for session saving (i.e. a bookmarking functionality), with the option to create entries in the Windows’ send-to menu for uploading files straight from Windows.

FileZilla is another competent, free program that is constantly improving and supports FTP, SFTP, and FTPS. If you want a very nice program that integrates FTP support into explorer through the Windows’ right-click context menu.

Local Website Archive: is a program that saves individual webpages locally on your hard drive, including pictures and formatting, and allows for later viewing even if offline. What’s cool about this one is that it saves websites in the original HTML format and therefore allows you to reference the local URL of the saved webpage in your notes program or other applications.

Flashnote: a quick and handy scratch-pad that pops-up when you press a hotkey and disappears back into the background again when you minimize it (or press the hotkey again). You can store multiple notes in it and quickly retrieve them when needed.

Revo Uninstaller: A great uninstaller, Revo Uninstaller will uninstall a program and then look for any files and/or registry entries that were left behind by the program’s uninstaller (and does a beautiful job at that). Be carful to look at the entries that it identifies for deletion post-uninstall, as it will sometimes list registry entries and/or files that should not be removed. Revo also provides a slew of other tools such as a startup manager and hard drive cleaner.

BitTyrant: this is the free torrent client. What it is is a modified version of Azureus that, controversially, picks and chooses peers to allocate bandwidth to such that those who are providing more bandwidth for downloaded files receive more of your own bandwidth (which is why it is sometimes called the ’selfish’ bittorent client). It is claimed that this can result in up to 70% faster downloads, but the reason this is controversial is that peers with lower connection speeds or are not sharing files may be overlooked by this program.

Starter: a small, no-install program which does a fantastic job managing the programs that start with Windows. Note that Revo Uninstaller, above, provides a built in startup programs manager as well.

Send To Toys: use this program to add any folder to the explorer “send to” menu, which allows you to quickly copy or move any file to your favorite or most used folders.

Returnil: a system virtualization program that allows you to surf dangerous sites and/or install and test software or implement any desired changes then restart your system to get it back to the state it was before said changes.

SysTrayMeter: a small program that shows your processor usage and free memory in the system tray. Invaluable if you like to keep an eye on your available resources, and very useful in troubleshooting a problematic or slow system.

SweepRAM: a tiny, no-install RAM optimizer that frees system RAM by allowing applications all the RAM that they need, but no more (i.e. does not deprive programs from RAM). Use it to free RAM whenever your available memory plummets and/or your system becomes sluggish.

VSO Image Resizer: installs an entry in the Windows right-click context menu that enables image resizing and format conversions on-the-fly. One of the nicer things about this software is the ability to create custom image profiles that you can save in order to access them quickly at any later point.

Photoscape: is an all-in-one image management and manipulation suite that includes an image editor, a screen capture program, image formats conversions, an image viewer, GIF animation editor, mass image renamer, page creator, as well as a handful of other functions.

PDF-XChange Viewer: a very nice PDF reader that allows for form filling as well as annotation and adding notes.

Primo PDF: a virtual printer that can create PDF files out of any printable document. If you’re interested in printing to image formats as well try PDFCreator.

HobComment: this will add a “file/folder comments” in Windows details view, and a right-click “add comment” extension in Windows explorer (the latter only for NTFS partitions). The end result is a very easy way to add comments to files and folders that can be displayed in the Windows details view.

I.Mage: Use this image editing program as a replacement to Windows’ “Paint” program; it’s simple and straightforward and sufficient for my occasional image manipulation needs. If you need a more powerful Photoshop-replacement freeware bitmap editor try Gimpshop or Paint.net.

Flashfolder: An explorer extension that adds user-defined favorites folders (and recent folders) to Windows’ open/save dialogs. A favorite of mine that I always have on my machine.

JOCR: Can snap any area of the screen (or simply load an image) and provide instant (and excellent) optical character recognition.

Firefox, The award-winning Web browser is now faster, more secure, and fully customizable to your online life. With Firefox 2, we’ve added powerful new features that make your online experience even better.

SIW: System information for Windows, a standalone program to make a full inventory of your Hardware.

We are a great advocate of CCleaner a great ‘Crap Cleaner” for Windows. We use this program quite a bit, almost on a daily basis.
Now Piriform the creators of CCleaner have come out with a new Windows Defragmation tool.

It’s called Defraggler and it differs from other defrag tools on the market, by enabling you to quickly and simply defrag the files you want to, without having to process the whole drive. Simply run it, select the file and defragment in seconds. No more struggling with the Windows defragmentation tool!

The best part about it is, like all Piriform products, Defraggler is completely free for both corporate and individual use.

Defraggler supports all OSs released since Windows 2000, this includes Windows 2000, 2003, XP and Vista. Although 64-bit support is not included in this version, thay are working on compatibility, so it will be available soon!
Aditionally Defraggler supports both NTFS and FAT32 file systems.

Check it out here and enjoy!

We recently posted a question about if you would text in, using your cell phone for a  coupon on something.

If you missed it, you can read it here.

Here is an example of a commercial  using this technology.

What do you think? Does this work? We are thinking about spending a few thousands on this technology. But would love to hear your thoughts first.