August 25, 2012

CDBurnerXP - Free Audio CD Burn Program

This is a great free little program to burn audio CDs or CD/DVD ISOs for free.  Watch the check box to install a toolbar and not select this. Overall a great little free program.

CDBurnerXP is an easy to use CD/DVD burning software, that can write CD-R and CD-RW discs. The program can also write disks directly from an ISO image file, and save image as an ISO image file (*.iso). You can create data and audio CDs, and it supports Burn-Proof technology, multi-session disks, import of ISO images and more. In addition to CD burning, you can also rip audio CDs, normalize WAV files, encode MP3 files, erase disks, and more. The program can also convert .bin and .nrg (Nero) images to .ISO format.

 


 You can download it here: http://www.snapfiles.com/get/cdburnerxp.html
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August 10, 2012

5 Video Sites Other Than uTube


August 8, 2012, by David Parrack, from Makeuseof.com, By Dave Parrack
Believe it or not there was a time when YouTube wasn’t the daddy of all online video sites. It was instead merely just one of a number that was offering ordinary people the chance to share their videos on the Internet. Now it’s difficult to see past YouTube, at least in terms of user-generated content.

There are of course the big media sites such as Hulu and Netflix, but YouTube is such a strong contender, it’s even going after those guys with channels curated by celebrities and content created by professionals. In the same way we now ‘Google’ something, we also ‘YouTube’ it, and that’s disheartening for the other sites that were once contenders. Perhaps it’s time to take a fresh look at a few of the YouTube alternatives that are still with us.

Dailymotion

alternatives to youtube


Dailymotion is very popular, being the second largest video-sharing website in the world. It’s based on France and was started by a guy in his Paris apartment in 2005, the same year YouTube burst on to the scene.
The site feels very similar to YouTube, with a homepage featuring trending videos, a set of different categories, and a visible search bar. Clicking on a video brings up a clean and simple player, though it lacks some of the finesse YouTube’s player possesses.
The selection of videos available to watch is good, although it’s nowhere near as varied or numerous as what YouTube has to offer. I’d suggest the vast majority of clips you can find on Dailymotion can also be found on YouTube.k


It’s these similarities to YouTube that are both Dailymotion’s biggest strength and biggest weakness. If you’re looking for a direct alternative it’s the most likely to fill the void, but it also means it struggles to find its true identity.
One Word Review: Clone.

Metacafe

youtube alternatives


Metacafe began life in 2003, with two Israeli entrepreneurs starting the site in Tel Aviv. It’s now based in San Francisco, and early on switched from the YouTube/Dailymotion model to a more-curated platform for original shortform videos.

The site has a very different feel to YouTube, and is immediately weighed down by a busy homepage dominated (at the time of writing) by a banner ad. Beyond that there are dropdown menus for ‘Movies’, ‘Games’, and ‘Music’, as well as a selection of other channels.

Like YouTube it’s pretty hard to stop clicking around the site once you set off doing so. One video inevitably links to another that you’ll be interested in watching. There are original shows to be seen but YouTube has since muscled in on that market.
I like Metacafe but again it’s pretty hard to distinguish it from YouTube. To get the most from the site seek out the originals, exclusives, and partner channels. Otherwise it’s a definite case of YouTube Lite.
One Word Review: Original?

Vimeo

youtube alternatives


Vimeo, which is literally the word ‘video’ with ‘me’ stuffed in the middle, is a U.S.-based website launched in late 2004. It’s not really a direct competitor to YouTube, having taken a more subtle approach that puts the onus on quality rather than quantity.
The Vimeo homepage is a strange beast, being more about selling the site to casual passers-by than promoting the content hidden within. However, by hovering over ‘Explore’ you can see the categories and channels that are where the visual goodness resides.
Vimeo isn’t the place to go if you want to see cats acting crazy or dogs running on treadmills. They may be there if you look hard enough but Vimeo is more about classy short films, experimental music videos, or snapshots of interesting people’s interesting lives.
The best thing about Vimeo is the player, which places the video front and center, keeping all the extraneous crap to a minimum. There are enough options to keep you clicking, but this is the one site that shows the videos to their full potentials.
One Word Review: Classy.

Veoh

youtube alternatives

Veoh is a San Diego-based website that launched in beta in 2006. It has changed much since its debut, now being a subsidiary of Qlipso. Its content is a strange mix of movies, music, and user-generated content.
The Veoh homepage is, if anything, a little too simplistic. There are a few selected videos presented in thumbnail form but beyond that it’s difficult to know where to begin. Clicking on one of the dropdown menus is the only way to proceed but even that isn’t guaranteed to get you far.
There are ‘Channels’ and ‘Movies’, but they’ll invariably lead to clips rather than full-length episodes of television shows or films. The ‘Music’ and ‘Videos’ tabs are more worthy of exploring, but only just.
One Word Review: Confused.

Blip

alternatives to youtube
 
 
Blip is another site that launched around the same time as YouTube but that has since walked a different path. Founded in 2005 and based in New York City, Blip focuses on offering a platform for producers of original Web series.
The Blip homepage sets the site’s stall out from the start, highlighting the latest episodes of various of the Web series that makes up the bulk of Blip’s content. This is a good strategy as clicking on one episode could get you hooked and needing to watch more of the same series.
Like Vimeo, Blip lets the videos breathe with a player that automatically dims the lights. All of the various shows are organized by category, which means it’s easy to find original programming that is likely to appeal to your interests or sensibilities.
One Word Review: Episodic.

Conclusions

All of these sites will have been mentioned – whether highlighted or just in passing – on MakeUseOf already, but I suspect many people will have forgotten they even exist. Let’s be frank and admit none of them can compete with YouTube in terms of popularity, brand-awareness, and the sheer number of videos, but they’re also not ready to be condemned to the dustbin of history.
Do you ever head for an online video site other than YouTube? If so, is it one of the above or one that hasn’t been featured? If you do head away from YouTube, what are your reasons for doing so? After all, as long as it doesn’t infringe on copyrights any video you care to mention makes it onto the Google-owned site. Whatever your thoughts on the subject please let us know in the comments section below.
Image Credit: Maurits Knook


Source: http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/5-video-sites-alternatives-to-youtube/



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August 3, 2012

Top 20 Sites for Free Textbooks

Another great article from about.com

Free Books: The Top 20 Websites

Create your own free library!

By , About.com Guide

Ever thought of creating a library with thousands of books, and never spending a dime? Sounds impossible, but it's not! Freely available books in nearly any subject you can think of abound on the Web, ready to be read, downloaded, and shared. Here are the top twenty sites where you can find a wide variety of completely free books, anything from romance novels to computer technology manuals.
  • ReadPrint.com: ReadPrint offers thousands of free books, including novels, poems, fiction, nonfiction, essays, and plays. They were voted one of Time magazine’s best 50 websites in 2010, and for good reason: the site is easy to navigate, and there are over 8000 books here to download for free. The front page offers several different ways to find books, but my personal favorite is browsing through the list of Top Authors; notable picks include Louisa May Alcott, Rudyard Kipling, and Jack London.
  • ManyBooks.net: Check out the most popular titles, special collections, or browse through some covers to see what interests you. ManyBooks offers over 29,000 free ebooks in a wide range of categories, from Adventure to Young Readers. Browse through the most popular downloads, recommendations, and special collections.
  • The Literature Network: This site is organized alphabetically by author. Click on any author's name, and you'll see a biography, related links and articles, quizzes, and forums. Most of the literature here is free; some downloads require a small fee.
  • Free Computer Books: Every computer subject and programming language you can think of is represented here. Free books and textbooks, as well as extensive lecture notes, are available.
  • Librivox.org: Librivox is a dream come true for audiobook lovers. All the books here are absolutely free, which is good news for those of us who have had to pony up ridiculously high fees for substandard audiobooks. Librivox has many volunteers that work to release quality recordings of classic books, all free for anyone to download. If you've been looking for a great place to find free audio books, Librivox is a good place to start.
  • Authorama.com: Authorama features a nice selection of books written in HTML and XHTML, which basically means that they are in easily readable format. Most books here are featured in English, but there are quite a few German language texts as well. Books are organized alphabetically by the author’s last name. Authorama offers a good selection of free books from a variety of authors, both current and classic.
  • Project Gutenberg: Project Gutenberg is one of the largest sources for free books on the Web, with over 30,000 free downloadable ebooks available in a wide variety of formats. Project Gutenberg is the oldest (and quite possibly the largest) library on the Web, with literally hundreds of thousands books available for free download. The vast majority of books at Project Gutenberg are released in English, but there are other languages available. If you already know what you are looking for, search the database by author name, title, language, or subjects. You can also check out the top 100 list to see what other people have been downloading.
  • Scribd offers a fascination collection of all kinds of reading materials: presentations, textbooks, popular reading, and much more, all organized by topic. Scribd is one of the Web’s largest sources of published content, with literally millions of documents published every month.
  • International Digital Children's Library: Browse through a wide selection of high quality children's literature here. Check out Simple Search to get a big picture of how this library is organized: by age, reading level, length of book, genres, and more.
  • Ebooks and Text Archives: From the Internet Archive; a library of fiction, popular books, children's books, historical texts and academic books.
  • World Public Library: Technically, the World Public Library is NOT free. But for a measly 8.95 a year, you can gain access to hundreds of thousands of books in over one hundred different languages. They also have over one hundred different special collections ranging from American Lit to Western Philosophy. Worth a look. They also have what they call a Give Away Page, which is over two hundred of their most popular titles, audio books, technical books,a and books made into movies. Give the freebies a try, and if you really like their service, then you can choose to become a member and get the whole collection.
  • Questia Public Library: Questia has long been a favorite choice of librarians and scholars for research help. They also offer a world-class library of free books filled with classics, rarities, and textbooks. More than 5000 books are available for download here, alphabetized both by title and by author.
  • Wikisource: Online library of user-submitted and maintained content. At the time of this writing, over 200,000 pieces of content are available to read.
  • Wikibooks: Wikibooks is an open collection of (mostly) textbooks. Subjects range from Computing to Languages to Science; you can see all that Wikibooks has to offer in Books by Subject. Be sure to check out the Featured Books section, which highlights books that the Wikibooks community at large believes to be “the best of what Wikibooks has to offer, and should inspire people to improve the quality of other books”.
  • Bibliomania: Bibliomania gives readers over 2000 free classics, including literature book notes, author bios, book summaries, and study guides. Books are presented in chapter format.
  • The Open Library: There are over one million books here, all free, all available in PDF, ePub, Daisy, DjVu and ASCII text. You can search for ebooks specifically by checking the "show only ebooks" box under the main search box. Once you've found an ebook, you will see that it will be available in a variety of formats.
  • Sacred Texts: Sacred Texts contains the Web’s largest collection of free books about religion, mythology, folklore and the esoteric in general.
  • Free eBooks: Free eBooks offers a wonderfully diverse variety of books, ranging from Advertising to Health to Web Design. Standard memberships (yes, you do have to register in order to download anything, but it only takes a minute) are free and allow members to access unlimited eBooks in HTML, but only five books every month in the PDF and TXT formats. A VIP membership here gives you unlimited access to any book you want, in any format.
  • Slideshare: Slideshare is an online forum where anyone can upload a digital presentation on any subject. Millions of people utilize SlideShare for research, sharing ideas, and learning about new technologies. SlideShare supports documents and PDF files, and all these are available for free download (after free registration).
  • The Online Books Page: Maintained by the University of Pennsylvania, this page lists over one MILLION free books free available for download in dozens of different formats.

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