Last.fm

February 8th, 2009 . Posted in Programs, Websites | No Comments »
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last-fm_audioscrobbler_logoIf you have alot of music on your computer and listen to it often you might sometimes wonder if there is music out there similiar to the what you listen to. You might be limited to know the things your hear on the radio, tv and hear about from your friends. But people tend to get suprised when they really get a chance to know all the different music there is out there. And thats why a program like last.fm is a very nice thing to have on your computer.

www.Last.fm

But what does this program really do? When you install the program it installs a plugin to your favorite music player. Now when you start playing music the program start will start to scrobble what you listen too. Scrobble means that the program remembers what music you listen too and list it on last.fm under your profile. After awhile the website will start to recommend music to you and even create a radio station with the music you listen to and similiar music styles.

Last.fm is in many ways a social website like facebook.com. You add friends and can comment on their profiles. But the big different is ofcourse that the main focus here is music. You can check musical compatibility, join groups with genre’s of music and recommend music to other people. This give you a much broader access to music and learn to know all kinds of music that you maybe not would have listen to otherwise.

But last.fm depends on one thing. That your mp3’s have the corrent meta tags. Like artist, album and year. Without that information the info you submit to last.fm is useless. If you rip your cd’s in programs like windows media player or get your music from itunes then this information should allready be there. If you get your music by.. less legal means, then you should try and check if your music does have the correct information embed in them. This is not something I will go into now. But you can do that in windows media player.

Info about artists and more

lastfm

A really cool feature about last.fm is that when you listen to a piece of music with last.fm is that you can get all kind of information about the artist you listen to directly in the program. A short bio about the band or artist similiar music and if you press the name of the artist or name of the song the browser will open up with the page for artist you are listing too, which will give you even more info about the band and let you comment and see other users which also listen to this music.

If you know more about a band or maybe even are the first that listen to something you can write and edit info about the band yourself and upload album covers. So if you see something that is missing in the info about a band you can go in and edit the info yourself.

Radio Station

lastfmmadonnaMy favorit feature is the radio station fuction. This lets you listen a station with a artist or another user’s radio which will play music that he/she listen to daily and have scrobbled to last.fm. Other users can also listen to your station this way. Even yourself. Are you sitting at a computer where you music is not on? Then just tune into your own radio station! Thats really brilliant. Ofcource you can choose which music is next as this will just play as a radio. You can however choose to skip a number if you wish. So you are not forced to listen too something as you would normally on a radio.

Last thoughts

This is a wonderful little application that really can expand on what you listen too. Just make sure you music have the correct info and soon you will get recommendations for new music. Get your friends added and see what they listen too. Join groups and learn about music that you might newer would have listen too else.

This little gem get 4 stars by me. I would really like to give it 5. But it really is just a “fluff” item and not something you really need on your computer.

Dropbox

February 8th, 2009 . Posted in Programs, Websites | No Comments »
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dropboxDo you have more then one computer? A desktop computer and a laptop maybe? Have you ever wanted to share files between computers without having to copy them over yourself. Or just have your files up to date no matter which computer you are at? Then you should check out dropbox.

www.getdropbox.com

Dropbox is a small program that resists in the system tray and gives you online storage for your files and synchronize the files between your computers. Let me give you a small example. You are sitting at home with your desktop computer and working on a document. You save the draft in your dropbox folder and grab your laptop and head over to a friend. Once you log onto your dropbox on the laptop over at your friend, then it will sync your document from dropbox. The document is there as you left it and you can continue work on it again on the laptop. Once you get home and turn on you desktop computer then updated document will once again be sync’ed from dropbox and any chance you made on it will be there. This is without you ever moving the document. All it requires is a internet connection. You files will always be up to date.

But that’s not all dropbox is useful for. Want to share pictures with your friends? Then put your pictures in your dropbox photo folder. Log on the dropbox website and you can get a link to the album with pictures. This could be a link like this: Pictures of some of my cats

Now lets say we want to share a document that we created then thats also possible. Go into your dropbox folder and right click on the file and select dropbox>Copy public link. That will gives us a link that we can paste to a chat or webpage like this. This is a file I have linked: dropbox Review. This file will also update as I write new things in it on my computer. Ideal to share files that you don’t mind other looking at while you work on them.

So what have we learned so far. Dropbox lets on sync files between our computers with little effort. It makes it easy to share files and photos. But is it worth it? YES if you have more then one computer you work at and want to be able to access your files anywhere then this a the program to get.

When you install dropbox you get 2 GB of online storage for free. This is enogh if you just need to share small files, but if you want to get more space you have to pay for it. Right now the only option is a 50 gb upgrade that costs 9$ per month or 99$ per year. This a pretty big step and I would wish there was more options. But the developers also say more options will be avaible later. The program is available for windows, mac and linux and allows sharing between all three systems. This is wonderful is you work with both macs and pc.

My only complain right now is that there aren’t a do not sync option. If you have a one of the new mini netbooks then you can quickly run out of space if you are on the 50 gb plan. But as far as I can find out, this is something they are working on. One more thing might be secruity. So far I have had no problems, but it would be useful if there was a way to encrypt your files on the remote server, so even if the files was comprimised they would not be able to read them. As it stands right now I would not put any file you would want to keep secret on the server.

This is a wonderful little application that I use with great joy to share small files between my laptop and desktop computer. Its very easy to use and most people should be able to figure this one out fairly easy. It still needs some work, but as it is now I have no problems using it or recommending it to others. The program can do much more then I have written here. But I will leave that up to you to explore.

Only thing I have left to add is my rating. And that is 3.5 out of 5.

Piriform CCleaner

February 8th, 2009 . Posted in Programs | No Comments »
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ccleaner

Sometimes computers just get cluttered with useless junk and too often people do nothing about it. The computer just gets slower and slower as temperate files fill up in folders. The registry full of old data from programs you might have uninstalled, and programs you almost newer use that start up with your computer.

Today i will review CCleaner from Periform.

http://www.ccleaner.com

Many users do not know how to deal with things like this and either live with it or turn to friends which might or might not know more about computers. Often the solution is a complete reinstall of the entire OS! 9 out 10 times such drastic steps is not needed. What computer users need to learn is too clean out their computer and everything will run better and more smoothly for much longer. Luckily there are several programs that will help us do this and one of them is CCleaner.

CCleaner is a free program that will help you clean out your computer of temporary files and remove old entires from your registry(this is where windows will store info about a program and file associations among other things) and enable you a easy way to disable programs from running when you start windows. All of this is something that most users don’t know how to deal with but this program will do it all for you. In a safe way. Lets take a look at how this works.

Cleaner

The First thing you will want to use is the Cleaner. This is the main function of this program and will remove all the old files from your computer. Don’t worry. All it will remove is temporary files that you do not use. This is files created by your browser like Internet Explorer or Firefox, your anti virus program when updating, or temporary files from your paint program. This is files that is useful while using a program to make a program go faster or store temporary information about a file. But too often the programs do not remove this information itself when you close your program and now just take up space on your computer and if there is really many old files in your temp folders it will also make your computer slower then it should be. In the screenshot below I have just used the Analyze button and the program have checked for old files on my computer. If a program that it checks is in use the program will ask you too close that program so it can clean it. You can just skip that program if you wish or close it so ccleaner also can remove old files from that program. In my case here the program when it have checked the computer gave me this information:

ANALYSIS COMPLETE - (50.603 secs)
——————————————————————————————
777,9MB to be removed. (Approximate size)
——————————————————————————————
Details of files to be deleted (Note: No files have been deleted yet)
——————————————————————————————

In my case here the program found 777 MB of old files on my computer! that’s alot of space used on your harddisk for files you don’t really need. So I press will choose to use the button on the lower right side called “Run Cleaner” The program will now ask for confirmation if I want to remove the files permanently from my computer. I want to do this and press yes and CCleaner gives me a overview of what was removed.

ccleaner

You can choose which programs and files the program should clean yourself. Most of the time you can just let the program run from what it is set to. But if you wish you can go over the settings yourself. Maybe there is a program that you don’t wish the program touch.

Registry

The registry is a place where windows stores all kind of information. But all to often this data is from programs no longer on your computer or broken links that don’t work anymore. This is a major source of slow don’t on many computers. And many users don’t know about it. The more advanced users truly hate the registry and many thinks its a outdated concept. But as it stands this is still in all versions of windows we use today.

The screen we see when we press the “registry” button looks alot like what we saw in the cleaner screen. Now we just have “scan for issues” and “fix issues” We first press scan for issues and the computer will be searched for problems in the registry When its done it will show a list of problems that might be on your computer. This is often problems with files that are linked to that no longer are in your computer and missing keys that no longer are in use. In a perfect world all of this would not be a problem as your programs should remove all info no longer needed them self when you uninstall. But much to often this is not the case and thats why its good to have a program like this to help you out. When you press the “fix selected issues” button the program will ask you if you wish to take a backup of the registry before you clean. I don’t do this very often because I have not yet had a problem with anything the program remove. But if you are first time user I recommend that you do this, so any program that may arise can be undone again. Next up the program will ask you about each problem and if you want to fix them or you can just choose fix all issues now. When this is done you will be back and the registry screen. I have found that running this a couple of times in a row will sometimes reveal more problems then what was found first time. So I suggest you do that as well.

Now that you are done with the cleaner and registry parts you might already feel that  your computer runs a little faster. This is because obsolete information has been removed from your computer and no longer uses resources that should be used for the things  you really need.

Tools

Next up is Tools. This is where you can uninstall programs and remove programs from starting up when your computer starts. For the uninstall I recommend that you just continue to use the uninstaller under your control panel in windows. This is not something you need to do from inside this program and better left to windows itself. But feature fro Startup programs can be really useful and if you newer cleaned up what starts up with your computer this can really speed up your computer alot. But it can also be a confusing thing to look at. What you can remove and what should stay. If you have no idea what to here and have a friend that are good with computers I suggest that you let him or her help you with this. But I also want to say that you should not be afraid to try it out on your own. You can choose disable by right clicking on a item and it will not be deleted from your computer. It will just not run when you start your computer and can always be enabled again from ccleaner if you notice that you needed that startup item. But use common sense. Look over the list. Is there things like adobe speed launcher or lightscribe control panel? This is items that you properly don’t need daily and safely can be disabled. Look over the list and disable what you don’t use. When you are done. Restart your computer. If you removed alot of items from startup windows will now start up alot faster since it don’t have to start lots of small programs.

The Rest

I hope this has given you a overview of what CCleaner is and can do. Its a really good program and best of all its free. Its one of the first programs I install when I come to a new computer because it helps me remove things I don’t need and really speeds up the computer by removing old information. Its easy to use and its translated to many languages , so its easy to use for pretty much everyone. Don’t be afraid to try it.

My rating of this program: 5 out 5 stars