Thanks to the new downloadable Camera Codec Pack, users of Windows Live Gallery can view and edit RAW photos. For the average photographer, this might not be big news, but for those professionals who use Windows machines, the inclusion of RAW support is a welcome as it makes managing and viewing photos on the fly an ease without the need to open Photoshop, Lightroom or some other program to do so.

The codec pack supports camera formats from Canon, Nikon, Olympus, Sony and many others. Unfortunately, you will need either Windows Vista or 7 to utilize the codec pack. The file size is 4 or 8 MB depending on if your system is 32bit or 64bit. The codec pack can be downloaded here. You can read more about the release at the official Microsoft Windows Live Blog.

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1. Open the command line prompt by either typing “cmd” in the start menu or going to Programs > Accessories > Command Prompt. Remember to right click and “Run as Administrator.”
2. If command prompt does not navigate to your root C folder “C:\”, navigate there by typing “cd C:\” and pressing enter to execute.
3. Next, type “powercfg/hibernate on” and once again click enter.
4. Restart your computer and under shut down options, “Hibernate” will “magically” appear.

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The RIAA, the organization that handles the affairs of musicians and record labels alike, has become infamous among internet users for their harsh penalties and constant vigilance over the distribution of songs both legally and illegally and most naturally you have heard of cases where individuals were sued for millions because they illegally shared music.

The horror stories are not as bad as they sound however and only a small group of people are liable to be sued. First of all, before the RIAA goes after an individual in court for pirating music, they will generally send them a letter telling them they need to pay a sum of money for their illegal activities or face a lawsuit. Most people take that option, and though steep, paying a $2-4,000 fine versus going to court and possibly being required to pay millions is a much better option.

However, this only applies to those who are actively distributing pirated material, such as file hosting sites and P2P networks. It is very cost ineffective to go after an individual who has downloaded 2,000 songs illegally (value: $2,000). Just the legal fees along would surpass any amount of money the RIAA could possibly think of collecting because they can only sue for the market value of what you pirated.

However, if you were distributing pirated material, the cost goes up significantly because you can be charged for every person who downloaded the file from you, which is why P2P networks are so dangerous to use.

This brings us back to our original question. Is Grooveshark illegal. Yes and no. Grooveshark pays royalties to the RIAA, though the RIAA wants more of the money the company makes. This has led the RIAA to pressure Google and Apple to remove the Grooveshark app from their application stores (the app can be side loaded on Android devices or installed on Jailbroken iPhones).

However, just like the MPAA or any film distribution company will not sue you for watching a movie illegally online, it’s the same rule that applies to the RIAA. They will not sue you for listening to a song online.

Grooveshark allows it’s users to upload their musical collection to the internet however, and this might pose a legal matter for those who do, especially if Grooveshark is subpoenaed to disclose who uploaded what and how many times the media was played.

You as a user, on the other hand, is almost always immune to court action, due to the fact that it is both not cost effective and highly risky to go after a user than the distributor.

So to answer the question, no Grooveshark is not illegal. I wouldn’t go as far and say it is legal however, but listening to music on the online service is definitely not going to put you behind bars.

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Interface

Out of both interfaces, Pandora has the cleaner and more intuitive one. That said, Slacker offers more ways one can customize their listening experience. One of the best things about Pandora is that except for the advertisements, there is very little distraction. Not only that, but being a heavy user of the mobile apps for both services, I noticed that Pandora was the easier of the two to navigate. Not being a big fan of most radio stations, due to the fact that they play more ads than music, Pandora and Slacker are almost always on when I am driving. Pandora offers much less distraction and I can easily navigate my stations with a glance or two.

WINNER: Pandora

Music Quality

I have not noticed a significant difference in music quality. Both offer settings to increase or decrease the quality of the music. I have noticed that Pandora takes longer to buffer when the music quality is set to high, however, it is not significantly longer than Slacker.

WINNER: Tie

Listening Cap

If you are a heavy user of Pandora, you will notice those frequent emails saying you are reaching your cap. In reality, you get about 40 hours of streaming music a month for free. Anything above that requires a premium account. The account does give you unlimited skips and no ads however. Slacker, as of now, offers unlimited music listening with no caps. Pandora premium costs $39 annually. Once you have reach your cap however, you can pay $0.99 and receive unlimited music listening for the remainder of the month which works out to be cheaper than the annual subscription, though it does not include any premium features.

WINNER: Slacker

Music Selection

One of the best features of Pandora is the ability to select a song and build a station around that. Slacker on the other hand allows you to create a station around an artist/band etc. and include music from related artists. Overall I noticed that the selection of music on Slacker is much better than Pandora. Also, the repeating of songs is a lot less on Slacker vs. Pandora.

WINNER: Slacker

Conclusion

When it comes down to it all, Slacker takes the prize. It’s user interface might be a bit harder (and by a bit, I mean by a negligible amount) to navigate than Pandora, but it makes up for that in better music selection and less repetition of songs.

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Music can be stored in the cloud and streamed to almost every device. Documents can be created, shared and collaborated online and of course, social media has taken center stage in information exchange within the last few years.

Online converters are an example of web based tools which can easily replace a desktop application. Thanks to multiple websites offering this service, people can convert audio, video and image codecs into a variety of different formats. What follows are some of the best online converters we have personally tested and used.

• iConvert

  This simple web based converter allows you to upload an image file and convert it into .ico, .icns, ihqx or .png file format for use as icons and such on Windows, Mac and Linux based machines. The service is free and conversion is fast and simple.

• Zamzar

  One of my new favorite video converters, Zamzar allows you to upload a video file (up to 100MB) which it will than convert and send the download link to your email when the task is completed. It is free and supports the widest range of formats I have ever seen.

• Media Convertor

  My all time favorite converter, Media Converter allows you to upload multiple files and convert them into a wide range of media formats. Best of all, it supports images, audio and video files and not only can you upload a file for it to convert, it can grab a file from YouTube or some other website (once the link is provided). The service allows you to convert five files for free each day. After that, you will have to sign up for an account or wait 24 hours.

• Online-Convert

  Another solid online conversion service, Online-Convert, allows you to convert images, audio, video, document, eBook and archive file formats into a myriad of similar formats. The service is free but free registered users are allowed to send files as email attachments as well as access to a user panel where they can view statistics about their use.

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If you are a parent, concerned adult or administrator who needs to monitor the traffic of the users on your Internet connection, there are options available to you.

Monitoring Internet traffic can be done for a variety of reasons including protecting children from pornography or online predators. It can be used to prevent the sharing of personal or confidential data online as well as legal issues such as file sharing websites, hacking or other activity that could be illegal.

One of the top Internet monitoring software available is Spytech SpyAgent. SpyAgent is a full fledged monitoring system that allows you to find out what users of your Internet connection are doing. For instance, one can see what keywords are being searched for in Google, Bing and Yahoo. Social networking sites can be limited or banned completely. A list of programs and apps used by users on the network as well as logs of windows opened and even uncovering of passwords.

The best thing about SpyAgent is it runs in complete stealth mode so it is hard for anyone to detect that it is running. That said, before montoring someones Internet traffic, they should be made aware that their Internet traffic is being monitored and possibly recorded. Unfortunately, SpyAgent cannot see information sent through an encrypted connection such as a VPN. The software is available for Windows 2000, XP, Vista and that includes the 64bit editions. It does not, however, support Mac or Linux.

A trial version of the software is available that limits monitoring to 30 minute sessions. depending on your purpose, the trial version alone may be sufficient.

There are several free alternatives that offer similar features however most applications are crippled versions that lack all the features of an internet traffic monitoring software. You can find some of these applications from cnet.

Mac users can use SpectorSoft’s Spector Pro which offers an almost identical feature set. Best of all Spector Pro is available not only for Macs, but PCs as well. The package costs $99.

For Linux however, the options are a lot more limited since there are so many different distros. One of the more popular distros, Ubuntu, has a program available called Darkstat that will allow administrators to monitor most of what was mentioned above.  The only downside to it is that command line access and knowledge is required.

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So are there any apps, plugins, websites etc. that allow you to tell who visited your Facebook profile? In one word: NO! In a more detailed explanation, any app that claims to offer this ability is a scam.

(an example of a Facebook profile viewer scam)

Unlike MySpace, Tumblr and other social networking sites that allow users to install trackers to see who is viewing their profile, Facebook (and Twitter for that matter) do not accommodate this feature. In fact, if you take a quick look at the Facebook app developer guidelines, you will notice that among other things, apps that track profile views are absolutely prohibited on Facebook. Many might argue that this is a bit extreme from a company who has been known to have many a security loop holes. That might be true, but if we were to guess Facebook’s reason for such a decision, it stems from the whole idea of individual privacy, as double standard as it may sound.

Imagine if you could track who viewed your profile, or who un-friended you, while you might not use this knowledge for negative purposes, some people may be tempted to act on these information. We need not go into the countless horror stories that have stemmed from frivolous Facebook spats. Considering a very superficial example, if a jealous girlfriend finds out her boyfriend is viewing another girl’s profile more than her’s, imagine what issues that could cause? Plus, would you really want someone else to know if you have been viewing their profile? I highly doubt anyone would.

As stated before, any app that claims to offer the ability to track who views your profile is a scam and most naturally, when you activate such an app, it will spam the inbox and walls of your friends with similar messages.

Until Facebook allows developers to include that functionality in their apps, which is very unlikely I might add, we will be stuck with guessing who is viewing our profile.

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• Defragmenting a hard drive is one way to keep your battery juice. When your hard drive is fragmented, needless to say, your CPU has to spend more time finding what it needs which means hard disks will be spinning more and ultimately drain your battery quicker.

• If you have Windows Vista or 7, there are Power Management options which can customized. For instance, you can set your computer to go on “Power saver” mode when unplugged. Such a setting normally dims the screen and puts the computer on sleep or hibernation quicker.

• Completely draining the battery’s charge is another good way to increase the battery life. The more you do this is the less capacity the battery will loose. Keeping a laptop plugged in all the time is one of the easiest ways to retard battery life.

• Turning off WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS, WLAN, 4G and other wireless settings greatly increases the battery life since most of these wireless settings are always looking for a connection, and the constant pinging and or searching of networks drains the battery.

• If you are not using a program, exit it. Also, use the Task Manager to cut down on the amount of programs currently running in the background. Background programs not only eat up memory and processing performance, but it also drain battery life. On a side note, multitasking is a great way to drain battery juice. If you need to save those precious minutes of usage, monotask.

• Turning off graphical effects such as Windows Aero features will greatly increase your battery life. Aero puts a load on the computers GPU which in turn causes the battery to be used more.

• Sidebar and Widgets on Windows and Mac are another huge battery hog. Sidebar and Widgets decrease battery life as well as tie down the system and an overall huge CPU and RAM hog.

• Last but not least, choose hibernation instead of sleep. When a computer goes in sleep mode, it still uses battery juice because it’s more like suspending system performance. On the other hand, hibernation essentially shuts off the computer while saving the current state (information in the RAM) to the hard drive.

There are many other ways to increase battery performance, but these are the most common and effective. Eventually, your battery will need to be replaced (most batteries last between 2-3 years), however, these suggestions can extend the overall life of your battery.

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• Incompatible Plugins

If you noticed that after you updated to the latest version of Firefox the browser crashes, it can be due to an incompatible plugin. One way to determine this is to check your Plugin Manager and see if all installed plugins are supported.

• Flash

Even though Adobe Flash is light years ahead of where it was two years ago, Flash still carries many bugs and unfortunately, enough of those bugs can cause Firefox to become unstable and ultimately crash. Disabling Flash might not be optimum for all situations, however if you are using a Flash heavy page and you do not need to see the Flash content, disabling Flash can stabilize the browser.

• Malware

Malware can be another factor in causing Firefox to crash. Many times malware will fill a browser with cookies and other temporary files that can cause the browser to become unstable and crash. If you experience constant crashing of Firefox (or any other browser for that matter) you should run a full virus scan. If the virus scan comes back negative, try a root scan to check if there are malicious files buried deep within the operating system.

• Webpages

Not all websites are designed alike and there is a great possibility that a bug in the websites syntax, coding or scripting could case Firefox to crash. If you notice that Firefox crashes only when you visit a particular site, try turning off JavaScript, Flash etc. before returning to that website. However, be careful when visiting such a website as constant crashing could indicate malicious code on the website.

• Media Player or VLC

Conflicts between Windows Media Player and VLC Media Player have been known to cause crashing in Firefox. If you notice that Firefox crashes after trying to view a Windows Media file, you will need to delete the VLC plugin file (“npvlc.dll”) from the Firefox installation directory.

Firefox may crash for other reasons apart from the 5 aforementioned reasons. If you are having trouble rectifying the issue, leave a comment below.

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You can save yourself the trouble by backing up or exporting your Firefox bookmarks. You might export them just to keep them safe as explained before, or if you’re migrating your data to another computer or if you’re reinstalling Firefox as well. If you heavily rely on your bookmarks, you might want to have access with them at all time so that if you’re surfing the net elsewhere from your personal computer you will be able to use your bookmarks. Below are some ways you can use to export your bookmarks.

• Using Xmarks

Xmarks is by far the best method for any of the purposes mentioned above. It is a Firefox addon that lets you synchronize your bookmarks, passwords and history with the Xmarks server. They can then be accessed online or synchronized into another instance of Firefox and other popular browsers (Internet Explorer, Chrome, Safari) as well. The company was scheduled to shutdown but was thankfully acquired and active as before.

• Using Firefox Sync

This is a relatively new (in comparison to Xmarks) addon that synchronizes all your data across your Firefox browsers. It falls short of Xmarks in that it does not allow you to access the bookmarks on a web based interface like Xmarks does so if you are using a public or shared computer the only option would be to synchronize the data to that computer’s browser and delete it afterwards (unless you don’t mind it remaining there), however it does offer synchronization of more data on your browser such as your preferences. Firefox has been made a native feature in the latest version. To get the best of both worlds you may use both services.

• Using Firefox

The above two methods are automated, all you need is to set it up the first time and forget about it, however if you need to make a one time backup for some reason you can use this method. Firefox has long offered the option to simple export Firefox bookmarks from your bookmark manager. All you need to do is  go to Bookmarks > Show all bookmarks (organize bookmarks in older versions) > Import backup. Here you can choose ‘Backup’ which creates a Firefox compatible backup file, or you may choose ‘export HTML’ which creates a basic HTML file which can be used universally.

Well there you have it, you may use any one of the methods above to backup your data. There are numerous other addons to choose from for synchronization of one time backup. A quick search in the Mozilla addons database should reveal alternative options. IMO, if you are looking to export Firefox bookmarks the above methods are sufficient.

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