Making Mondays Easier: Accessing Blocked websites

So its Monday… again. For most people that means back to work or school. I bet you wish you could access all those web pages that your employer or school blocked, huh? Here is a sneaky little trick that makes it so you can! While you won’t be able to check the most recent versions of the web pages, you can check the most recently cached version of the page even if it is blocked! Schweet.
Open up your web browser (this should work in any web browser). Do the following:
In your address bar type in "cache:" and then the URL of the website you would like to visit. So if you wanted to check out textsfromlastnight.com you would type in “cache:http:www.textsfromlastnight.com” or for ebaumsworld “cache:http:www.ebaumsworld.com” and so forth. I hope this helps get you through your Monday! Enjoy! Love, Tiggity

Download YouTube videos and songs for free!

There are some really awesome and funny videos on YouTube as everyone knows, duh. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to download those and have them on your HD for instant access whenever you want. Maybe watch all your favorites in succession? Well, check it out. DVDVideosoft Free aka Free Studio makes this possible and really easy and fast! This program can do a lot, but today I will be showing one of its capabilities: downloading from Youtube to a WebM video (which can be viewed on basically every single media player)! But just so you know, this program is also capable of downloading videos straight to audio MP4 format so that you can add them to your iTunes (because some songs are really hard to track down elsewhere). Free Studio can also convert audio in multiple formats, videos into mp3s, easily edit and cut portions of videos (from your HD or YouTube), burn CDs and DVDs, screen video recorder, convert videos to Android, blackberry, PSP, Xbox, Nintendo, PS3 etc, as well as iPhone, iPad, and iPods. These are just some of the features of this amazing free program. So go snag this program right HERE. It takes up less than 58 MB of space and can do sooo much! Then I will walk you through the process of downloading a YouTube video to your hard drive.
Ok so when you download there is a screen during setup that asks if you want to install the DVDVideosoft tool bar and make it your default search engine. I recommend you uncheck them all like so:

Continue with the install and open the program. I really like the way this program looks. Here is what the user interface looks like:

Alright so with the program open, click on the YouTube button. Then click on the ‘Free YouTube Download’ button.

A new window will open asking you to insert the URL of the YouTube vid that you want to download that looks like this:

So you can add as many URL’s into this window as you would like. Just right click and paste them in this window. The program will do a quick scan to make sure the URL is valid and that the whole video is available. Then just click the download button at the bottom of the window or the Play Arrows just to the right of each video and it will download to your desired folder. Here I am downloadin some of my all time fav’s: Bizkit the Sleep running dog and the baby who laughs at paper tearing. Hilarious!

You can select from several different video qualities or just download the MP3 version of these videos in the quality drop down menu on this screen:

And then it will download. WOW! It downloaded those really fast! Faster than I can stream those videos as a matter of fact!
And that is that. The files are saved for viewing at any time. Now you can make a compilation of all of your favorite YouTube videos and watch them all in a row! You can also burn these files to a DVD to take with you and watch anywhere. Note: I don’t encourage you to sell these or illegally reproduce copyrighted material. So don’t get caught! do it!
Any great unknown vids I should know about? Please inform me and boost my YouTube IQ! Thanks!

The Garbage Hunter - Glary Utilities

Is your computer completely free of unused/temporary files, and garb(age) free? I doubt it. Most people have tons of garb all over their hard drives and don’t even know about most of it, or even where to look to find it all. Here is a simple way to have a small and free program (8.46MB) do all the searching for you. I stumbled across Glary Utilities recently and it found a ton of nonsense on my computer and fixed and/or erased it and cleared up several gigs of hard drive space! Very nice! Glary Utilities checks all sorts of ways to improve your computers efficiency and remove all that excess garb. This can be done through Glary Utilities 1-Click Maintenance which can clean your registry, fix shortcuts that don’t work, clean dangerous startup entries, clear out your temporary files, and remove spyware all in one full sweep. It is pretty sweet and it works with any windows 2000 or beyond.

To begin this garbage hunt click on the 'Scan For Issues' button under the 1-Click Maintenance tab and let Glary do its magic. So here is what happened when I did the 1-Click Maintenance…

Wow. That is a lot of garb! 625 problems with my registry?! 21 Shortcuts are messed up, almost 2 gigs of temp files?! That’s crazy talk. Once all of the issues have been identified, click on the 'Repair' button and as many of the issues as can be fixed will be done automatically.

This whole search took about 5 minutes and it cleared up a bunch of space and fixed corrupt links and more so definitely worth it!
Glary Utilities also has a Modules tab with several submenus that can be accessed in order to do more specific searches or search manually to fix your issues if you don’t want it all done at once as well. All in all a great program!


Download from cnet: Glary Utilities

Customizing your Right-Click Menu commands!

Sometimes when I right-click there are some options that I always hope will be there, but they never are! Luckily I found a program that allows me to put whatever commands I want into my right click menu. And let me tell you, it is SO convenient! It is called FileMenu Tools and can be acquired here. The site will automatically prompt you to download it so go ahead and save the install file.

So you may be thinking that adding a whole bunch of commands will just make your right-click menu HUGE, but actually all of the commands that you add manually will be under one submenu called ‘FileMenu Tools’ so it won’t change the appearance much. Scroll to the bottom to see what this looks like if you can’t wait!

In the following example I will create a custom command for ‘Play in iTunes’ to appear in my right click menu. I have tons of songs in my iTunes library so I have my default music player set to WinAmp so that I can play random files without loading my whole iTunes library. Sometimes I do want to play in iTunes and rather than go through the whole ‘Open with’ menu and deal with that I will simply create my own command to do so. And it is really easy. Once installed, ‘FileMenu Tools’ will always be running to provide you with your custom right click options, but when you want to create your own commands you will need to open the program itself. Here is what the user interface looks like:

How to create a Command:
With FileMenu Tools UI open click on the ‘Add Command’ button in the ‘Actions’ tab that looks like this:

Now you will notice that the information tab (below) displays some information and that a ‘New Command’ appears in the ‘Commands of FileMenu Tools’ tab on the right.

In the information tab you will see a variety of text and blank cells. The cells in the left column tell you what you can customize and the accompanying cells to the right are where you enter your information. To create a ‘Run program’ type command you only need to use 3.

1.)The first is ‘Action’ which is defaulted to ‘Run Program’ so you need not change anything.
2.)The next is ‘Menu Text’ which will display how your command appears in the right click menu. I clicked in the cell immediately to the right of ‘Menu Text’ and typed ‘Play with iTunes.’

3.)The third item that matters in further down in the list under the Information tab so scroll down to ‘Program’ and click in the blank cell to the right of it. Three dots will appear (…). Click on these dots and windows explorer will open and you will need to identify the program that you want to open with this command.

I tracked down ‘iTunes.exe’ and then clicked open. ***If you need helping finding your program you can search for it in the search bar at the top right of the Windows explorer bar***

Now all you have to do is click the ‘Apply Changes’ icon at the top left window of FileMenu Tools to accept the changes and your command will automatically be added to your custom right-click menu.

Here you can see my new command that I added in my right click menu that wasn’t there before:

What else FileMenu Tools can do:
There are five command types which let you make specific actions. This actions are:
• Run an external program, whose arguments are the selected elements.
• Copy the selected elements to an specific folder.
• Move the selected elements to an specific folder.
• Delete specific file types into the selected folders.
• Send the selected elements to mail recipients with specific parameters (e-mail recipients, subject and body).

You can do with as many different commands as you would like. Once you have done this once it will be very easy to do it multiple times to create all of your own shortcuts and make your computing life much more convenient! I will shortly be making a Tiggity on how to reduce the size of your right click menu so that it looks cleaner. If you have any questions feel free to email me @ bendavisadams@gmail.com

I would like to thank SnapFiles for providing an awesome and constantly updated list of great software with short reviews and ratings.

SendToSendTo - picking your own destination folders

Alright well this is pretty cool. So you know when you right click a file or folder, or picture or anything on your computer and a new list of options appears? Yes. Of course you do. Well, one of those options is the ‘Send To’ menu, which has a couple preset locations like Documents, Desktop, maybe a couple hard drives or CD/DVD drives, but often the locations you save to or frequent most are not those preset locations. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could pick the destination folders that you wanted in the ‘Send To’ submenu? Well you can… and it IS cool! The easiest way to do this is with the help of the very small (109kb) and free SendToSendTo. If you click the previous link it will automatically direct you to a free download of the file. Do not be alarmed that it will automatically prompt you to download it. (Note: you may need to disable popup blocker for this. I didn’t, but I’m just saying).

Once the file is downloaded you will be able to pick whatever folders you want to have included in ‘Send To’ simply by right clicking on the directory of choice by going to the ‘Send To’ menu and clicking on “Add here” like so:

This is great because i never used this feature before because i didnt want to save stuff to those defaults. Now i use this all the time. In my example I am adding the folder titled “Stuff” and yes I really have that folder on my computer. And it has A LOT of stuff in it. A new small window will open and will give you the option of altering the file name (this will still keep the original destination folder and will not change its title elsewhere on your computer). I suppose this feature may be useful if you had some super secret folder buried deep within other folders and wanted to keep the name ambiguous in the shortcut? Anyway it looks like this:

Ok so now when I right click on various items on my computer and scroll down to ‘Send To’ you can see that the “Stuff” folder is now an option. Sweet!

You can do this with as many destination folders as you would like and this can make organizing much easier.
Unfortunately the program does not have an easy way of removing the newly created folders in this menu, but it can be done. If anyone is curious as how to do that I can post it later by request. Anyway, Enjoy!

Ben


Note: The ‘Send To’ menu can be adjusted without the uses of this add on but it is much more time consuming. For a detailed step by step process on how to add or remove locations from your ‘Send To’ menu without Sendtosendto, check out this helpful page: winvistaclub

Auto color blind conversion in Chrome Daltonize!

If you are color blind, then you may not be able to see the contrast others see in images online. Awesome developers at Chrome have created a program that assists in creating contrast for those with different types of color blindness. I, myself am not color blind, but I know some who are and I thought this application might come in handy. Chrome Daltonize is a very small application that can be added to the Chrome Web Browser that automatically loads web pages so that they are color-blind friendly. Whether you are protanope, deuteranope or tritanope, the web, including pictures can be loaded to fit your eyesight. Although I have read that the tritanope conversion is not very accurate. Chrome Daltonize can be loaded manually on desired pages or can be set to automatically convert web pages upon load! This works for most images and text, but does not for videos. Also, this is only available in the Chrome web browser, to the best of my knowledge.
So here is a quick rundown of how to acquire and use this very simple program:
Go to the link above which will direct you to the app. Note: you must be using Chrome for this to work).
Click on the App button and a notification will pop up that looks like-uh this:

Click Install and then Chrome will automatically put an icon in the top right of your browser as an extension. It will look like this:

Right click on the icon for PC users or Command + click Mac users and a menu will appear like so:

Select options and a very brief set of options will appear.
If you would like your web pages to start automatically converting to your set preferences, then select run at page load.

There is also a drop down menu that will allow you to select what type of color blindness you would like Chrome Daltonize! to attempt to correct.

There are a few other simple things that can be changed, but this app is very focussed and created for one obvious purpose. Before you run off and get the FREE app, here is an example of how it will recreate images in order to enhance contrast, without losing too much of the original colors.

Here is the original image i selected:

And here is the image after it is automatically converted to suit the needs for someone who is a protanope:

and here is what the picture looks like when altered for deuteranopia:

Since I do not have any form of color blindness, I am unsure if my example really demonstrates the effectiveness of the app, so please let me know. Many people who do have color blindness have had lots off good things to say about this widely unknown app.
Please lemme know if you found this helpful or if you have a picture that better demonstrates the capabilities of this sweet app. Thanks!

Gmail Notifier (AKA down with Outlook Express)

If you are like me, you probably never use Outlook Express for windows. Tell me if this scenario sounds familiar: When you click an email address link while browsing on the net (i.e. Craigslist or any email on a Contact list for instance) Outlook automatically pops up because it is the default email provider for windows users. This becomes rather obnoxious because you never set up an Outlook account because it is just a waste of memory and is a vestigial product in the Microsoft Office Package. So what ends up happening when you want to send an email to the said email address is this:  you must highlight and copy the desired email address, open a new tab or window, go to your email, click compose new email and paste the copied email into the “To:” box. Doing this once is not so bad, but when applying for jobs or contacting multiple emails this process gets old very quickly. Is this sounding familiar?

Gmail Notifier

Luckily for us, there is an easier way! Google offers a product called Gmail Notifier and it can be downloaded right here for PC or here for MAC users. Gmail Notifier is in no way a new product, but most people don’t know it even exists. This product is very small (292Kb for windows and 1.08Mb for MAC) and downloads almost instantly. The installation takes only seconds as well and best of all IT IS FREE! This product completely replaces all of the functions of Outlook and any Gmail account can be used. The entire process should take less than 2 minutes! So now when you click on an email link while browsing, Gmail Notifier will automatically assume that you are using your Gmail account to reply. This means that there will be no more cutting and pasting and opening of new windows in order to reply to posts. All you have to do is click it!

Gmail Notifier automatically opens when you start windows so you are always logged in and have this ease of access available. It can also show up at the bottom right of your task bar (it will look like an envelope) and can be set so that a tiny popup appears when new email arrives. To open your Gmail account all you have to do is double click the icon and your default browser will open directly to your email. Unless you are using Outlook for some odd reason or haven’t converted your outdated hotmail or Yahoo! email to Gmail, then there is really no reason to not have this awesome software!

A more in depth description of installing the product: more about Gmail Notifier

Or check out Gmail Notifer help from Google: Google Notifier Help

And always check out Google’s Blog for a huge assortment of awesome stuff you can do with Google products: Google Blog