December 11, 2011

StreamWriter: Stream & Record Various Online Radio Stations

Many music fans download their music from the Internet for free. But downloading free MP3 files from websites is illegal. What is not illegal however in most countries is recording radio stations – that is exactly what an app called StreamWriter lets you do.

record online radio stations

StreamWriter is a freeware application for Windows computers. Sized at only 1.8 MB, the setup file of the app is quick to download and easy to install. Once installed you can open the app and search for music radio stations of various genres. While executing your search you can also specify the station’s music genre, audio bit rate, and type.

The stations that appear can be streamed; streamed stations appear in the left pane. You can easily begin recording these radio stations and keep local copies of the audio.

streamwriter
Features:
  • A userfriendly desktop application.
  • Compatible with Windows computers.
  • Lets you find and stream online radio stations.
  • Lets you record radio stations.
Check out streamWriter @ http://streamwriter.org/en (By Umar from AllThatIsApple)

Source:  http://www.makeuseof.com/dir/streamwriter-record-online-radio-stations/

December 9, 2011

Free TV Shows on the Web

Instead of paying monthly subscription fees for cable or DVR's, you can visit the Web to watch all your favorite TV shows, all for free. Here are the top nine sites that offer a wide variety of popular TV shows for Web searchers, anything from sitcoms to comedy to live sports events.
Images 1-9 of 9
YouTubeFancastFOXHulu
JoostNBCSpreetyVeoh
ABC.com


Source: http://websearch.about.com/od/freetvonline/ig/Free-TV-Shows/?nl=1


30 Sites to Watch Free TV Online- The Best Sites to Watch Free TV Online
By Wendy Boswell, About.com Guide


Did you know that you can watch watch free TV online? Here are over 30 sites where you can watch free TV online, including news broadcasts, sports events, and thousands of your favorite TV shows - all for free.
  • LinkTV:Global news, documentaries, TV shows, and movies.
  • YouTube: YouTube is a great way to catch up on TV shows that you might've missed or find obscure clips and outtakes from your favorites.
  • CurrentTV: not a traditional TV network; this is mostly user-created and submitted free online TV.
  • Angry Alien Productions: silly, crazy bunnies re-enact movies and TV shows.
  • PBS: PBS features many of their programs online in a free streaming format; just use this Google query: site:www.pbs.org pbs watch online, and you should be able to find quite a few.
  • ABC TV: download and watch free Web TV at Abc.com.
  • ChannelChooser: ChannelChooser is a good place to find many different free web TV channels, all streaming.
  • BBC:the BBC's most popular stories; not all the top stories are linked to video, but quite a few are.
  • wwITv.com: You can find free web TV channels from all over the world here; a great selection.
  • StewieLive: Not quite free web TV, but close - you can make Stewie from Family Guy do (almost) anything you want.
  • Democracy Internet TV: Over 600 different free web TV channels are available here at the Democracy Internet TV platform.
  • Veoh.comp: Watch all kinds of free web TV and more videos at Veoh.com.
  • Jeff's Guide to "TV Shows Only Available on the Internet": This free web TV fan has put together a great list of all the shows he could find that are ONLY available on the Web - you'd be surprised.
  • Blip.tv: Watch the most popular TV shows over at Blip.tv; lots of free web TV here.
  • Yahoo TV: Yahoo TV is still really getting going, but you can find a lot of good stuff here, especially trailers and pilots from upcoming TV shows.
  • TV.com: Not necessarily complete TV shows, but this is a great place to get previews and snippets.
  • AOL in2tv: AOL's in2tv is one of the best places on the Web to find classic TV shows.
  • Vanderbilt Television Archive: What a treasure: "The collection holds more than 30,000 individual network evening news broadcasts from the major U.S. national broadcast networks: ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN, and more than 9,000 hours of special news-related programming including ABC's Nightline since 1989."
  • BBC: The BBC has generously placed its news programs online in a free, streaming format.
  • Newsfilm Library: From the University of South Carolina; this collection hosts a part of the Fox MovieTone collection.
  • Choose and Watch: Choose and Watch is a free web TV site with literally hundreds of channels to choose from.
  • BaseballRace.com:Watch live streaming MLB baseball pennant games and more.
  • Live Online TV: Live Online TV is a good site with many free channel offerings to choose from.
  • Zap2it.com: You can watch all sorts of free web TV at Zap2it, also includes news and reviews.
  • Streamick: Streamick has many, many free web TV channels to choose from, but I especially appreciate that it's so nicely organized into categories.
  • TVLand: Watch old and new TV shows here at TVLand; I got sucked into an old episode of Little House on the Prairie.
  • NASA TV: Instantly get space updates and news from NASA's free web TV channel.
  • SingingFish: SingingFish is a good place to find all kinds of multimedia. Make sure you take advantage of the advanced search filters.
  • FoodNetwork: Don't have cable, but you need that recipe? No problem - you can watch free web TV demonstrations.
  • Google Video: Google Video is a good place to find free web TV, however, many of the shows are pay-per-view (you can just go over to YouTube and find them there!).
  • BeelineTV: Free web TV channels from all around the world.
  • Yahoo Video Search: Yahoo Video Search is a good place to find music videos, TV show snippets, and more.
  • RadioFreeWorld: Find free web TV here, as well as free online radio stations.
Source: http://websearch.about.com/od/imagesearch/a/freeonlineTV.htm

December 2, 2011

Malware Removal Quick Links

Rootkit removers. Rootkit malware (Wikipedia definition) can be especially hard to remove, making it seem like the infection keeps coming back. (It's not really coming back — it never left!) Given your PC's symptoms, Tom, I suggest you run one or more of the following utilities — they're specifically designed to detect and remove rootkits and all are free. (The product names are linked to each app's info page.)
  • Sophos' Anti-Rootkit has an excellent reputation and is easy to use.
  • Trend Micro's RootkitBuster targets a broad array of related threats in "hidden files, registry entries, processes, services, drivers, kernel code patches, ports, operating system service hooks, and Master Boot Record (MBR) rootkits."
  • Microsoft's RootkitRevealer specifically targets "Registry and file system API discrepancies that may indicate the presence of a user-mode or kernel-mode rootkit. RootkitRevealer successfully detects many persistent rootkits including AFX, Vanquish, and HackerDefender."
General-purpose malware removers. Other forms of malware also can cause the kinds of trouble you're experiencing, Tom. These additional tools may help:
  • Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware is an excellent, free, anti-malware utility that scans your system on whatever schedule you choose. (Windows Secrets contributors often recommend running this app on a regular basis.) The Pro version (U.S. $25) offers additional real-time protection not available in the free version.
  • Lavasoft's Ad-Aware comes in free, Pro ($30), and Total ($50) editions. The free version is a general anti-malware tool. The paid versions add rootkit protection and other features. (See the site for a comparison.)
  • Safer Networking's Spybot Search & Destroy (freeware/donationware) had fallen off my radar because it was, frankly, ancient. But a new Version 2 is in public beta. It looks promising, but beta software is unfinished by definition and so may have flaws. Use with extra caution.
  • Trend Micro's Hijack This comes with several tools to help identify and remove malware. It also can generate a nicely detailed report on your system's registry and file settings, so you can look deeply for anomalies.
  • Trend Micro's RUBotted specifically monitors your computer for bots (short for "robot"), a common type of Internet app that can be used for malicious purposes such as allowing hackers to take control of your computer. (Check out the "Malicious purposes" section in the Wikipedia Internet-bot definition page.)
On-demand anti-malware scans. I also suggest you use one or more standalone, live (or on-demand) scanning services that operate independently of the other security tools on your PC. They may be able to catch malware your mainline defenses miss.
  • Trend Micro's HouseCall now at version 7.1, remains one of the best in this category. (Notice how many times I've mentioned Trend Micro products? Kudos to them for offering so many excellent tools!)
  • Symantec's Security Check seems to do a thorough job of on-demand scanning.
  • ESET's Online Scanner isn't noted for its speed, but it is undeniably thorough.
  • Microsoft's Safety Scanner is extremely simple to use and checks for a variety of viruses and other malware.



    Source: http://windowssecrets.com/category/langalist/

November 7, 2011

Winyl Is The Ideal Music Player Alternative

By | November 13, 2011 | 2 Comments

There are a lot of options out there for music players. We have talked about a few music players for your computer and music players for your mobile devices. Winyl is a great replacement for a desktop music player.

What you get with Winyl is a very lightweight player that lets you easily manage your music collection without bogging down your computer. That means you can still do other things while your music is playing; especially a netbook.

What you get with Winyl

There are a few cool things you will notice about the layout. First, there is not the usual menu bar. Winyl replaces the menu with an icon. You can click on the icon to get to the menu options. It makes for a much cleaner look.

winyl-main menu

The same change goes for audio adjustments and the cover art display. The cover art does not auto download, so you may need to find it elsewhere on the web. Here is a screen shot of the equalizer popup window that shows up when you click on the music note at the top of the right sidebar.

winyl-eq

Other than that, the layout is pretty self explanatory. You have your library in the middle.

winyl-full screen

The right sidebar either displays the cover art
winyl-cover art
or the playlist and genre options.
winyl-playlists
There is a star-based rating system similar to iTunes.
winyl-stars

There is a smart folder option in the right sidebar. There is an option to choose random playlists based on 25 most played songs or 5 random albums. This helps mix up your music. I know I have many gigabytes of music and mostly listen to a few albums. Using a random play option, you may play some golden oldies you downloaded and forgot about.

winyl-smartlists

Why Winyl is so great

The main reason you would want to use Winyl is that you are probably not super happy with iTunes or Windows Media Player. If you were not in the market for a new player, you probably wouldn’t have read this far. ;-) Being tethered to a service can be a problem for those people who may not acquire their music in the legalist of ways. Is iTunes looking and collecting information for big brother? Who knows for sure.

Skins

Also, there are different skins. The skins can change the look to make you feel more at home when switching from iTunes or Windows Media Player. Here is a look at a couple of the skins. You will see what I mean.

Luna Black Skin

winyl-luna black skin

Windows Media Player Skin

winyl-wmp skin

iTunes Skin

winyl-itunes

Conclusion

When you are searching for a music player, you have specific needs. Most people seem to like simple over fancy. The other reason is, a lot of people are looking to break away from iTunes or Windows Media Player for one reason or another. Winyl offers a great transition application because of the skin options that are pretty close replicas of the applications you are looking to break free from.
What are your reasons to look for a new desktop music player?
Download Winyl

Source: http://maketecheasier.com/winyl-is-the-ideal-music-player-alternative/2011/11/13?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+MakeTechEasier+%28Make+Tech+Easier%29

October 29, 2011

How to Rip to, Play and Split One-Album FLAC Files


 
How to Rip to, Play and Split One-Album FLAC Files?
Flac is the most well known lossless audio codec among audiophile communities. It allows you to archive CDs without any loss of quality. It is possible to rip CDs in one file per CD, instead of one track per song. Along with the one-album flac file, we will have a cue file containing the markers and tracklist.
To rip a CD we're going to use the excellent fre:ac (formerly known as BonkEnc). Click here to download.
Go to Options > General Settings, choose "Flac audio encoder v1.2.1". Choose your output directory. Check "Encode to single file" on the right. Then go to the tab "Playlists", and check "Create cue sheets". It is also possible to check "Encode to single file" and "Create cue sheet" on the main window.
 
You are now ready to rip your CD: click the "Add audio CD" icon, fill in the information, then click the "Start the encoding process" button.
Encoding with fre:ac

To play a one-album flac file, I recommend you use Foobar, an awesome audio player. Just open the .cue file with Foobar and enjoy the music! Click here to download Foobar.
Playing flac and cue with Foobar

To split one-album flac files into the actual songs, use Medieval, an excellent cue splitter. Open the .cue file with Medieval, choose the options you want then click "Split!". Click here to download Medieval.
Splitting flac files with cue files in Medieval CUE Splitter
Source: http://www.techsupportalert.com/How-to-rip-to-play-and-split-one-album-flac-files

September 22, 2011

Pandora Upgrades Service - No More 40-Hour Cap



Popular music streaming service Pandora has finished beta testing its new HTML5 web 
interface and rolled it out to all users. At the same time they’ve removed the free-user cap of 
40 hours per month–listen for free as long as you want.
The new interface is a huge improvement over the old one; the transition away from Flash to 
HTML5 has increased speed and includes an interface update. If an interface overhaul doesn’t 
excite you, they also removed the cap from the free accounts–free users can listen to as much 
music as they wish. Upgrading to a premium account unlocks additional features and removes the ads.
You can read more about the changes at Pandora in their official announcement at the link below.
New Pandora For All [Pandora via Tech Crunch]


Below is the announcement from Pandora.com

SEPTEMBER 20, 2011

New Pandora for All

Today is a big day for Pandora: after more than a year of planning, design, engineering, and beta testing we're launching an entirely new Pandora website.
In late 2010 we started with a clean sheet of paper, challenging ourselves to create a new internet radio experience that was fast, social, and easy while still being familiar to the tens of millions of people that listen to Pandora each month.
The result is "New Pandora" -- the same personalized radio experience you've enjoyed for years, wrapped in a new HTML5 look that makes it more responsive, easier to use, and better integrated with the friends and music lovers in your life. We also think it looks more beautiful than ever, but we're biased.
For the last two months we've been gradually rolling a preview of the new site out to our listeners, taking their feedback, fixing bugs and making improvements here and there. With all those little fixes and refinements in place, today we're rolling out the new site for everyone.
Some of our new features include:
Simplified Station Creation - Enhanced auto-complete choices and personalized suggestions make creating new stations and discovering new music or comedy more intuitive and personal.
Discovery of Music with Friends - Enhanced listener profiles and a new music feed offer a centralized place to find, like and comment on what friends and like-minded listeners are discovering and enjoying on Pandora. The music feed will roll out slowly over the course of the coming days. In addition to the prominent new "share" button, stations now have their own URLs, making it super easy for listeners to share favorite stations via Twitter, Facebook, or email.
Improved Control - Prominent and ubiquitous access to familiar player control buttons including Play, Pause, Thumbs-Up and Thumbs-Down icons helps listeners to easily personalize their music and comedy stations. A new shuffle feature also allows listeners to shuffle any collection of stations to add variety to their listening experience.
Enhanced Artist Information - An option to learn more about the music, find lyrics, read artists' biographies and expand the album art size.
Unlimited listening - We've removed the 40 hours listening cap - you can now listen as much as you want for free.
The new social feed will roll out over the next few days to everyone and we want to remind you that you control of how others see your Pandora profile page and listening activity. Here's a link to view and to edit your privacy settings. http://www.pandora.com/#/account/privacy
We'd love to hear what you think of our latest project. To let us know what you think, to get help, or to find answers please visit http://help.pandora.com.
Posted by Tom Conrad at September 20, 2011 1:26 PM

September 3, 2011

Craigslist Search Engines

How to Harness Technology to Score Amazing Craigslist Deals

from the howtogeek.com 



Craigslist is a great resource for scoring local deals but only if you’re adept at using it. Today we’re taking a look at tips and  tools you can use to go from being a casual Craigslist user to a deal-scoring ninja.
Photo by Beatrice Murch.
You can save huge amounts of money by using Craigslist to score local deals. The site, however, is super Spartan and doesn’t lend itself to easy power use. Armed with the right tools, however, you can cull the simple text listings of Craigslist to find awesome deals. Read on to learn more.

A Brief History of Craigslist and Some Safe Shopping Tips

Although eBay is often lauded as being something akin to a giant garage sale, in reality Craigslist is quite a bit closer. For the unfamiliar Craigslist is a simple classified web site that began, way back in 1995, as an email distribution list created by Craig Newmark  to service the Bay Area. A year later he created a web site to centralize the listings. Since then it has grown quite a bit, but has changed very little in appearance since the early days. Craigslist is a hyper-local classified system where in people can list goods and services for sale, personal ads, job listings, apartment rentals, and more. Anything you might find in a traditional newspaper classified section (and then some!) can be found on Craigslist. We’re framing the following tools in light of you wanting to search for deals on physical goods; in most cases, though, you can just as easily adept them for rental listings or other Craigslist postings.

Unlike more traditional newspaper listings Craigslist is, essentially, totally unregulated. The community self-polices by flagging problem entries (scams, illegal listings), but for the most part it’s a buyer-beware market. Staying safe and not getting ripped off is pretty easy, however, if you follow some common sense guidelines.

If it’s too good to be true, it probably is (and it’s probably stolen). People selling $100 iPads are either selling stolen iPads or they want to club you with a tire iron and take your $100 (or both). Don’t meet potential sellers on Skid Row at 2 AM. Unless the person is selling an item that can’t easily be brought to a public place (like a hot tub currently attached to their deck), avoid going to their home. If a situation seems like it’ll end up with you getting robbed, it probably will and you should reconsider. Always be prepared to walk away from a deal; if a guy said the used bike was $200 and when you show up he insists it was actually $300, hit the road. You can read more tips directly from Craigslist in their avoiding scams and personal safety sections.

Finding the Loot



A brief history and some safety tips aside, it’s time to find some loot. Craigslist is packed with loot. Even the small metropolitan Craiglists have so much stuff: electronics, tools, bikes, car listings, furniture, musical instruments, and more. It’s free to list things so people have very little reason to avoid listing anything and everything they want to offload for cash.
The basic Craigslist interface isn’t the greatest for finding things quickly, however. You’ll spend a lot of time reading links and a lot of time clicking through them to get additional information. If you’re trying to keep an eye on multiple areas of interest on Craigslist, especially if you’re trying to look at multiple local Craigslists, you’ll get frustrated pretty quickly. Craigslist was designed for simple listings not for complex searching and tracking.
Fortunately various developers have jumped in to create a Craigslist experience that the base system doesn’t provide. The first thing you want to do is to supercharge your search experience. If you’re trying to keep an aggressive eye on collectible cards, vintage bikes, iPads, or game consoles you’re going to need to go beyond simple manual searches. You want one of at least three things in your Craigslist search tool: better access to photo listings, cross-Craigslist site searches, and—ideally although not all search tools have it—some notification method. Let’s take a look at some some of the power user tools you’ll want to put in your deal-hunting tool kit.

Search Tempest: Search Tempest—seen in the screenshot above—offers a plethora of handy Craigslist search tools. You plug in a zip code, some keywords, and a search radius and it will search all the Craigslists that fall within that search radius. You can then check through the listings for not just the most local listing but for all listings that fall within your search radius. You can toggle on image thumbnails—with mouse-over enlarging–and mashup your searches against a map to see how far you’ll be driving to get the loot. You can also set up RSS feeds for any of the custom searches you create.




Crazed List: If you want to search multiple Craigslists but not necessarily limited by a perfect radius, Crazed List allows you to cherry pick just those USA and  global locations you want to use. This is handy if the geography of your locale makes a perfect “200 miles from here” radial search impractical or if you’d like to search locations where a friend or relative of yours can pick up the item on your behalf. In addition you can set a minimum and maximum price window. You can either search on Crazed List or use Crazed List to generate RSS feeds for your searches in your target locales. The only down side to Crazed List is that you need to use a web browser, such as Firefox, which allows you to disable referrers (this limitation applies only to the web-based search, not to the generation of RSS feeds).

CraigQuery: Similar to Crazed List, CraigQuery searches multiple Craigslists from around the USA. Unlike Crazed List you don’t have to do any mucking about in your About:Config browser file to gain the full functionality of the site. You can select multiple regions, search by keyword and set a minimum and maximum price window. CraigQuery automatically thumbnails listings with images.

Craigstoolbox: Available for both Firefox and Chrome, Craigstoolbox is a tiered-price extension. The free basic package offers enhancements to the Craigslist experience such as 15 inline images per search and a favorites system, the $9.99/year version adds in unlimited inline images and Carfax and AutoCheck integration, and the $19.99/year version adds on to that with SMS and email notification tools. You can achieve the same functionality offered in Craigstoolbox for free by cobbling together additional tools but if you want an all-in-one solution, it might be worth the premium.

Typo Buddy: Typo Buddy is a one trick pony, but it’s a handy trick to have in your deal hunting toolkit. Typo Buddy searches Craigslist (and eBay too) for variations on your search term—typos. If somebody puts a listing on Craigslist for a “playstaytion”, for example, nobody searching for “playstation” will find it. If you search your local Craigslist with Typo Buddy, however, it will plug in variations of PlayStation like “playsation”, “playstaytion”, and “playstaion”. No, we didn’t need to try very had to think of those variations, those are all typos from our local Craigslist that Typo Buddy found.

CraigsEasy: CraigsEasy is a free bookmarklet designed to enhance your on-site Craigslist searches. When you’re looking at the search results on your local Craigslist you can simply hit the “Easy” bookmarklet from CraigsEasy to convert the search listings into an image gallery. It’s fast and resistant to being shut down by Craigslist as it’s just a bookmarklet that acts upon the search results you’ve already loaded up.

Setting Up Loot Notifications




Having good search mojo is only half the Craigslist battle. The other half is beating the rest of the deal hounds to the punch. Most people list stuff on Craigslist because they want to get rid of it and make a buck or two in the process. If you can get to them first and make them a decent offer, you can have the loot in your hands before the suckers you beat out have even sat down after work to check Craigslist. The faster you respond the more likely the person is to say yes to your offer, the faster they say yes the faster you can get the item, and the faster you get the item the less chance they have to wait for better offers and turn you down when somebody else offers more money.
Photo by Johan Larsson.

There are three common ways you can receive notifications: email, SMS, and RSS. Which one you select is dependent on what kind of setup you spend most of your day with. If you have a smart phone with automatic email updates, email is a handy and information rich solution. If you have an older phone you might be stuck with SMS updates only. RSS feeds are also a viable choice for smart phones with an RSS reader—this would be a great time to use the new widget feature in Google 
Reader for Android. If you’re at a desk all day you can, of course, use email or RSS just as effectively; mobile solutions are superior, however,  if you really want to stay totally on top of listings. One thing to keep in mind, even if you find an email-only solution you can always set it up to email your phone using cell-provider email gateways.

Previously mentioned Search Tempest and Crazed List support custom RSS searches. It’s worth noting that Craigslist has native RSS support, but third party search tools usually make it easier to grab RSS feeds for multiple custom searchers. The pay version of Craigstoolbox supports both email and SMS notifications.
In addition to the aforementioned solutions, you can set up notifications using the following tools:

HEYCRAIG: HEYCRAIG is a simple search-to-email notification tool. Visit the site, plug in your search terms, your email, and the city you want to actively search in, and HEYCRAIG will send you an email every time a match for your search terms is listed on that local Craigslist.



NotiFinder: Like HEYCRAIG, it enables email notifications. Unlike HEYCRAIG, it supports variables like which category you want to search, minimum and maximum price, and how often you want to be notified (instantly, daily, weekly).

CraigsNotifica: A free Android-based solution that actively monitor Craigslist with custom search parameters and than alerts you via audible ring, vibration,  and/or flashing LEDs when a match is found.

CraigsPro+: For iOS users, CraigsPro is an inexpensive ($1.99) solution that makes searching Craigslist and setting up notifications a breeze. Custom searches can be converted into search agents with customized notifications (sound, vibration, and push-style icon updates).
Armed with the above tools to provide blanket coverage via email, SMS—remember to use the email-to-SMS trick if need be—and RSS, you’ll be first in line to respond to new Craigslist postings. Even if you don’t end up scoring every deal that the notifications alert you to you still benefit—because you’ve got an active eye on the price of things in your area you’ll become better at spotting excellent deals and making offers that will be accepted quickly.

Source:http://www.howtogeek.com/59458/how-to-harness-technology-to-score-amazing-craigslist-deals/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=200411