Computer Tips -Tech Info

Tag: free

  • Free Codeweavers Wine today Only

    This is for Mac or Linux. Their servers are VERY busy right now as you might imagine. But, if you’ve always wondered about crossover wine, see if you can get a copy today at Codeweavers main site. I was redirected to their DOWN page which is a lean page with the download links and a place to sign up for a license key. The license key you can register by the end of the month. Right now their server is crying since they’ve been dugg and slashdot’ted at the same time, but I’m sure it will be possible to slip in sometime today for a free copy of their polished product.

    On a side note, I’ve been a paying crossover license owner for some time although on my current main laptop I’ve been using stock wine with VERY good results. If you look “up the food chain” though. Many of the good results we get in the free stock wine is thanks to the work at codeweavers. So…. in spite of todays free offer, they deserve the communities support if you believe that a working Windows compatibility layer is important to the future of operating systems such as Linux.

  • Adobe Reader 8.1 has Encountered an Error and Needs to Close

    So, the adobe reader version 8.1 should be a straightforward install. On one particular XP system it wasn’t and from what I can tell, there are several that have run into the same problem. The installer seems to work well enough, but when I try to launch the application I just see the windows error reporting dialog that says Adobe Reader has encountered an error and needs to close. So, I did a full uninstall and tried to clean out everything, but on reinstall it still complains even before the splash screen.

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  • Voiceshot – Easy Way to Get a Message Out – Automated Message Calling

    We’ve all received them…. “robocalls”. Usually they fall into a couple categories…. 1) doctors appointment reminders and 2) political campaign ads and 3) telemarketers. Items 2 and three annoy me to no end. In hotly contested elections we have easily received several robocalls a day from each side for a decent stretch. These types of things do have their use though. Recently I had a bit of a dilemma, I needed to cancel about 20 appointments in a short period of time with short notice. Wouldn’t it be nice if I could send out one phone message and not have to call each one individually (in some cases at multiple numbers…)

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  • Secrets of Making money online – bux.to

    I know, you’ve seen the ads – make $6000 a week in your spare time!! Make money doing the things you do ANYWAY, like reading email, browsing the web. The last week or so as things have been slow (and technically I was still “on vacation” until the 3rd of January). I had plenty of time to test out a few of these ideas. It seems that entrepreneurial-ism is a progressive disease – you find yourself many times thinking, hmmmm…. it seems like there should be a way to make a small profit by….. Anyway, many of these ideas are MORE trouble than they’re worth. REALLY. But one, that I signed up for just last night is actually looking very promising…. bux.to….

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  • Hard drive testing utilities

    Windows users know chkdsk, linux users know fsck… users of each MIGHT have heard of SMART. These are different ways of TESTING hard drives. Well, there’s also a utility called TestDisk that looks promising for recovering data… Here’s the clip from their site. “free data recovery software! It was primarily designed to help recover lost partitions and/or make non-booting disks bootable again when these symptoms are caused by faulty software, certain types of viruses or human error (such as accidentally deleting a Partition Table). Partition table recovery using TestDisk is really easy.” It runs under a variety of OS’s and recognizes several different disk formats.

  • Free PDF printers for Windows

    I like the PDF file format for so many reasons – free writer under linux is one of them, usually it’s just configured out of the box – openoffice does a nice export to PDF too. Of course, PDF is accessible on all platforms with free viewers…. there are some pdf writers for windows that are free, among them…. PDF Creator and cutepdf also distributes a free pdf writer. Printing to the virtual pdf printer makes archiving web pages fairly easily done as well.

  • Drive images – filling free space with zeros

    So, one of the things I’ve been doing is drive imaging. I’ve got 3 systems that are to be identical (based on, of all things Freedos…) So, I thought it was a perfect opportunity to dust off cloning/imaging software. So, I’ve been using the excellent g4l (ghost4linux) which is now up to v 0.22 (I make use of this for trying to rescue failing hard drives too as it includes dd_rescue). Anyway, the new machines have 80GB drives and the lzo compressed images are running ~450MB…. but one of my questions was making sure that it was as small an image as could be. I found that there are a few ways to squish the image file more and that it mostly revolves around filling the empty drive space with zeros.

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  • Big Ubuntu Linux news

    This is something that really looks interesting. Recently Linspire announced their intent to open source the CNR (Click N Run) concept for installing software, launching a wiki based web site that would allow supported linux distributions to install software (open source or commercial) with as easy a process as possible (visit web site, browse, click). Well, today Canonical (the company behind Ubuntu) and Linspire have announced how some of this will look and then some. For starters, Freespire and Linspire are going to be based upon Ubuntu in the future (instead of directly based on debian linux.) That is a fair enough shift. The other part of the news is that as of the release of Fiesty Fawn (The Ubuntu Linux release due in April), Ubuntu users will be able to access Click N Run. So what does this mean?

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  • Virtualbox virtualization open source availability

    This last week virtualbox announced that they have released a version of their virtualization software as open source. There is a pay version as well with more features. (*read on for features available in the full version.)

    While I appreciate them making the core virtualization open source and currently they are likely the most advanced open source virtualization software out there… it is a bit disappointing to see some of the really juicy features in the non-open source version. However, it should be noted that the full version is free for personal use or evaluation.

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