Ninite – Easily Install All Your Favorite Free Apps In One Go

Ninite – Easily Install All Your Favorite Free Apps In One Go: "

So when you get a new machine or you do a reformat what is the first thing you do? If you are not imaging your system, chances are you will need to install the pieces of software that enable your machine to be a tool instead of a big paper weight.

I find myself downloading Putty, VLC, Firefox and a multitude of other applications each time I install. The ones I downloaded the last time around are easily outdated.

It is important to grab the latest and greatest versions to protect against bugs or other issues with the software. So you have a list of 10 items you need to download and install. Wouldn’t it be MUCH easier if we could select these applications from a list or website and have IT download and install my applications?

It sure would be! And now we will show you how you can do just that! Head on over to Ninite and once you are there it will be a breeze to get the applications you want on your system with a limited amount of clicking. (Note: Ninite currently works only on Windows PCs)

Once you hit the installer app site you will see a screen that looks like this:

Under the instructions you will see applications and check boxes. You can install from a vast array of applications ranging from Skype to Firefox, Dropbox to Google Earth and back to Putty and Notepad ++. You will see the applications broken up into categories that include Web Browsers, Messaging, Imaging, Documents, Anti Virus, File Sharing, utilities, compression, tools and other items. The list is quite extensive but if something is not there you can suggest it!

Let’s run through the list and check the check box next to each item you want to download. If you want FoxIt reader installed simply click the box next to it – it is that simple. When you are done selecting the items you want in your installer app, scroll all the way down to the bottom of the screen.

You will see directly under the entry for Eclipse there is a grey button that says – Get Installer. All you need to do is hit this button and a custom installer app will be created for you on the fly so you can install all of these packages with ease. I selected 3 items and hit Get Installer.

The screen changed and told me the download would start shortly – I can only imagine they are compiling your download at this point. And sure enough in about 1 minute another window popped up.

My new installer app was ready to be downloaded and installed. I clicked Save File and Firefox saved the file to my normal download folder. I navigated through the jungle that is my hard drive and double clicked on the executable. The file’s name has all of the applications listed that you selected. That’s nifty!

Once I ran it it started preparing to run which took about 30 seconds.

Then the application started downloading my installers at the speed of light. The three of them were complete in under 1 minute.

As soon as the downloads were complete Ninite started installing each of the applications silently. I saw NO prompts. Very cool!

And as quick as it started – it was complete.

Upon checking my start menu all of the applications I choose were installed with the newest versions. This is a very handy tool!

Does anyone else use something like this on Windows? We would love to hear about it in the comments!

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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Seven things to know about Windows 7 - CNN.com

Seven things to know about Windows 7 - CNN.com

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Free Fax • Free Internet Faxing

Free Fax • Free Internet Faxing

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Robo de señal de celulares…

Mi hermano Jimmy me comunica que:

Estoy enviando este mensaje a algunas personas que conozco, para poder evitar que pasen por el mismo dolor de cabeza que pase yo. Sientanse en la libertad de pasar el mensaje a otras personas que ustedes crean le pueda ser util. Es relacioando al teléfono celular. Me consta que esta sucediendo el los teléfonos celulares que estan con Sprint en el area oeste. Una persona de Sprint me indico que puede ser que suceda con otros proveedores de servicio de celular también.
 
Sucede que de alguna forma, esta en investigación federal, desde hace unas tres semanas se han o están robando el MSID del teléfono celular. Esto permite que otras personas hagan llamadas a donde deseen y el cargo se refleje en tu cuenta de telefono celular. Me consta que le ha sucedido a muchas personas que lo han reportado a Sprint desde Quebradillals hasta Mayaguez. A un cliente de Sprint le llego una factura de mas de $35K. Mi factura aumento por $4,700 desde el miércoles 14 de octubre hasta el sábado 17 de octubre.
 
Las llamadas las están haciendo a lugares como: Miami, St. Kits, St. Vincent, Santo Domingo, Barbados, Jamaica, California, etc.
 
Como lo detectas?: si recibes una llamada de uno de estos lugares, están respondiendo a una llamada perdida que tu supuestamente le hiciste a su teléfono. Otra opción, es entrando a tu reporte de "usage" en el internet y te darás cuenta la cantidad de llamadas internacionales que te están cargando a lugares que tu no has llamado. El reporte de "usage" lo tienes que cotejar por cada uno de los teléfonos de tu cuenta. Ya hay casos documentados, donde Sprint se da cuenta del fraude antes que el cliente y le hace un "lock" al teléfono. El cliente no puede hacer ni recibir llamadas, va al centro de servicio mas cercano con el problema y ya tiene una nota en el sistema para reprogramar el celular. Si el que lo atiende no le indica la causa del problema, se arriezga a que su próxima factura sea BIEN Alta, ya que Sprint se tarda en conceder el crédito.
 
Como lo solucionas?: Llamas a Sprint (*2) a servicio y reportas lo sucedido. Es importante que te comuniquen con la division de fraude para que conste en tu record, te asignaran un nuevo MSID y te indicaran como reprogramar el teléfono. Esto resuelve el problema, hasta que encuentren COMO evitar el robo del MSID. Necesitas pedirle el crédito de esas llamadas. y si tienes deduccion directa de tu cuenta de banco, cancela la deduccion directa, porque puede tomar hasta 3 meses el que te den el crédito por esas llamadas. El cambio de numero telefónico, sin cambiar el MSID NO resuelve el problema.
 
En mi caso, se robaron el MSID del teléfono de Loly y el mio. Hicieron mas de 600 llamadas registradas al teléfono de Loly en menos de 3 días. La division de fraude sprint no trabaja los fines de semana, así que estuvimos sin teléfono por 2.5 días. el teléfono de Loly se pudo programar remotamente, pero yo tuve que ir a Mayaguez para que me reprogramaran el mio.
Espero que esto les ayude a evitar un dolor de cabeza grande.
--
Saludos,
Jimmy Orengo

YouTube - Barack Obama has won the Nobel Peace Prize

YouTube - Barack Obama has won the Nobel Peace Prize

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12 No-crap Tools to Make Your Blog Better

12 No-crap Tools to Make Your Blog Better

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12 No-crap Tools to Make Your Blog Better

12 No-crap Tools to Make Your Blog Better

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QuestionPro University Sponsorship Program

QuestionPro University Sponsorship Program: "

He gestionado para que los profesores y estudiantes de la Universidad puedan disfrutar del QuestionPro University Sponsorship Program:

The QuestionPro University Sponsorship program is a simple yet effective model for both universities and QuestionPro to engage students and faculty members to collect and analyze data. The University Sponsorship program allows universities worldwide to leverage our technology to benefit and enrich their educational curriculum by providing our software solution free of cost to all the students and faculty.QuestionPro will set-up a dedicated portal for students and faculty members to create accounts. All users signing up through the portal will automatically be part of the sponsorship program.

Me parece un excelente herramienta para facilitar la investigación en línea. Si es estudiante o profesor de la Universidad de Puerto Rico puede crear una cuenta en este portal. Necesita utilizar su dirección de upr.edu.

Etiquetas: Herramientas, questionpro

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Ecofont | less is more

Ecofont | less is more

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Use LicenseCrawler To Recover Your Lost Software Serial Numbers

Use LicenseCrawler To Recover Your Lost Software Serial Numbers: "

Have you ever had a installation of something that you wanted to reinstall but you couldn’t? Have you ever lost a software serial number or key code? How about something that was pre-installed on your system – how do you reinstall that? I have had issues with all of these situations and I know a lot of other people that have had these issues as well.

What can you do to solve them? How can we grab the information we need from the registry? That’s right – all of that information is in there if you know where to look for it and here is a program that can do that for you automagically!

It is a neat little piece of freeware called LicenseCrawler.

Once you download this little gem you can use it to scan your machine for serials. The program is 100% free – make sure you do not pay for it! Some of the download links ask for money – don’t use them! Use the free links! The author wants the application to be free, so lets keep him happy!

After downloading the application you simply run it and it will return all the keys from your computer. When you first run the application you will see a screen that looks like this:

You have the option of searching your machine or another on your network by replacing localhost with another machine’s hostname or IP address that you have access to.

You will need a user name and password for the remote machine with access to the registry. I would leave the registry setting set at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE and simply hit that start button. The application will scour your machine and return a screen with all of your keys. Yes MUO readers it is that easy!

The software serial numbers seen above are not real and just used for illustrative purposes. The key that comes up for Internet Explorer is actually your Windows Product Registration. You can use this key to reinstall Windows. All your other keys can be used in reinstalling these applications on another machine or simply after a format. You have to manually write them down as there is no copy and paste functionality – hey no big deal for a free application that works just as expected.

Without this application I would have got caught with having to re-buy programs or at the very least having to contact each software maker’s respective support line and begging for them to reissue another key. I HATE DOING THAT! Why should I have to?

Have you had success with another License retrieving application? There have been many of these applications over the years but this is the best one I have seen so far. It got ALL of the keys I needed. I have used something called The Magical Jelly Bean in the past but that is strictly for Microsoft Applications.

We would love to hear about your experiences with software serial numbers – either good or horror stories! Please share them with us in the comments!

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Top 5 Free OCR Software Tools To Convert Images Into Text

Top 5 Free OCR Software Tools To Convert Images Into Text: "

Quite frankly, I wish I knew about this simple way to use freely available OCR software back in my school days. Of course, we didn’t have camera mobile phones or inexpensive Digicams, but wouldn’t it have saved hours of copying notes!

Ah, modern technology is wonderful; take a scanned image (or take a snap using a mobile camera/Digicam) and presto – OCR software extracts all the information from the image into easily editable text format.

Optical character recognition (OCR) is a system of converting scanned printed/handwritten image files into its machine readable text format. OCR software works by analyzing a document and comparing it with fonts stored in its database and/or by noting features typical to characters. Some OCR software also puts it through a spell checker to “guess” unrecognized words. 100% accuracy is difficult to achieve, but close approximation is what most software strive for.

Maybe you have already come across our previous How to Extract Text from Images (OCR) post and used JOCR, a a free OCR software tool. Or you might have set your preference for a few online OCR tools. Then again, if you have thought up ways to exploit OCR software for productivity shortcuts, then let us give you a few more tools to play with.

We will be looking at 5 free pieces of OCR software and to start off let’s see the overlooked two that are already installed on our systems.

OCR Using Microsoft OneNote 2007

For the occasional basic OCR stuff, MS OneNote’s optical character recognition feature is a timesaver. You might have missed it…it’s called Copy Text from Picture.

• Drag a scan or a saved picture into OneNote. You can also use OneNote to clip part of the screen or an image into OneNote.


• Right click on the inserted picture and select Copy Text from Picture. The copied optically recognized text goes into the clipboard and you can now paste it into any program like Word or Notepad.

OneNote is simplicity personified. But it’s not too great for handwritten characters or even fuzzy ones. But for a quick job, I am all for OneNote’s clip and paste.

OCR Using Microsoft Office Document Imaging

Another little used tool within the Microsoft family. It’s right there under Menu – Microsoft Office – Microsoft Office Tools – Microsoft Office Document Imaging.

Doing OCR using the document imaging tool is a bit limiting because it accepts only TIFF (or MDI) formats. But that’s not too much of a bother as any graphic application can be used to convert an image to TIFF. In the screenshot below, I have used MS Paint to convert a JPEG to a TIFF.

• Open the file in Microsoft Office Document Imaging – File – Open.


• Click the little eye icon – Recognize Text Using OCR.


• Click on MS Word Icon – Send Text to Word.


• A MS Word File opens with the editable converted text.


• Alternatively, you can also use MS Paint to select a specific area and copy it to the clipboard. Open MS Office Document Imaging – select Page – Paste Page to copy the selection for OCR.

Again, MODI handled printed text ably, but my handwritten text was met with an ‘OCR performed but could not recognize text prompt’. Of course, do try out with your own handwriting.

So, now let’s leave the Microsoft family behind and look at three free tools which call themselves OCR Software…

SimpleOCR

The difficulty I was having with handwriting recognition using MS tools, could have found a solution in SimpleOCR. But the software offers handwriting recognition only as a 14 day free trial. Machine print recognition though does not have any restrictions.

• The software can be set up to read directly from a scanner or by adding a page (jpg, tiff, bmp formats).


• SimpleOCR offers some control over the conversion through text selection, image selection and text ignore features.


• Conversion to text takes the process into a validation stage; a user can correct discrepancies in the converted text using an in-built spell-checker.


• The converted file can be saved to a doc or txt format.

SimpleOCR was fine with normal text, but its handling of multi-column layouts was a comedown. In my opinion, the conversion accuracy of the Microsoft tools was considerably better than SimpleOCR.

SimpleOCR (v3.1) is a 9MB download and is compatible with Windows.

TopOCR

Just what I was talking about in the beginning! TopOCR, in a breakaway from typical OCR software, is designed more for digital cameras (at least 3MP) and mobile phones along with scanners. Like SimpleOCR, it has a two window interface – The source Image window and the Text window.

The image sourced from a camera or a scanner in the left window gets converted to the text format in the text editor on the right. The text editor functions like WordPad and can use Microsoft’s Text to Speech engine.

• The software supports JPEG, TIFF, GIF and BMP formats.


• Image settings like brightness, color, contrast, despeckle, sharpen etc. can be used to improve readability of the image.


• Camera filter settings can also be configured for enhancing the image.


• The converted file can be saved in a variety of formats – PDF, RTF, HTML and TXT.


• TopOCR functions well with straight oriented text but the usual failing of OCR with columned text remains.


• The software though, parses a mixed page (text plus graphics) well and processes the text only.


• The software works with 11 languages.

For best results with your camera read there How to Get the Best Results with TopOCR page.

TopOCR (v3.1) is an 8MB download and is compatible with Windows (not tested on Vista).

FreeOCR

This free OCR software uses the Tesseract OCR engine. Tesseract OCR code was developed at HP Labs between 1985 and 1995 and is currently with Google. It is thought of as one of the most accurate open source OCR engines available.

FreeOCR is a simple Windows interface for that underlying code.

• It supports most image files and multi-page TIFF files.


• It can handle PDF formats and is also compatible with TWAIN devices like scanners.


• FreeOCR also has the familiar double window interface with easy to understand settings.


• Before starting the one click conversion process, you can adjust the image contrast for better readability.

FreeOCR (v.2.03) requires Microsoft Net 2.0 framework. The Windows XP/Vista compatible 4.38MB software can also be downloaded from this alternate site.

Free OCR tools come with their own limitations. And scanning a page has to do a lot with resolutions, contrasts and clarity of fonts. From an average user’s standpoint, 100% OCR accuracy remains a pipedream.

Though the free tools were adequate with printed text, they failed with normal cursive handwritten text. My personal preference for offhand OCR use leans towards the two Microsoft products I mentioned in the beginning.

Your own say matters. Which is your tool of choice? Do the free OCR software recognize what you through at it? And more importantly, do you recognize what they throw back at you? Let us know…

Image Credit: kalleboo

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