Free Online PC Magazine!

Phew! Finally!

This was a long time coming. An online magazine, completely free, paving the way of what the future of publication will be.

And the best part? You can download it in both broadband and dialup modes! Besides that, you can even get it over on bittorrent! Need I say more?

(Click on the image to go to the website)



via The Office Weblog

The Perfect Desk Top Publishing Software - Ragtime

Well, it's perfect because it's free! Besides that, it's a full fledged utility for publishing anything from brochures, to cards, to documents, to spreadsheets, to visiting cards, to anything!!

I got this link from The Red Ferret Journal and as it says there, here are the main reasons why you might want to use this:

Five reasons why you need RagTime Solo:

1. You don’t want to persuade your wordprocessor or spreadsheet program to do layout any longer.
2. You want to break the barriers of common wordprocessors and spreadsheet programs and handle everything on one page: Texts, pictures, spreadsheets, charts and drawings.
3. You have no fun with slipped pictures or pages added unexpectedly.
4. No surprises when printing, please!

The download page is here (or just click on the image)

Via The Red Ferret Journal

Another anti-spamming email Site - Jetable.org

There are many ways to avoid spam! Things like compulsory registration is one thing I absolutely detest on free sites. I mean, what's the point? Of course, every once in a while someone you know you never want an email from asks for your email address!

For situations like all of the above, Mailinator is always there to give you a hand. In fact the post on mailinator was the second post on my PCtweaks blog (pctweaks.blospot.com) which is about free utilities that I've found on the web.

Unfortunately, because of Mailinator's popularity, the website is down for the rest of 2004, because it's attacked by a huge load of spam! So here's an alternative - It's called Jetable (Jetable.org) and you can create a temporary email id at their website for anywhere between 24 hours to 8 days!



Jetable forwards mails sent to this new email id to your actual email id for the period you specify! So, next time some website is asking you to to register for a newsletter just so that you can get to a particular article go Jetable!

Another way to use Gmail!

So, you've got Gmail.

And what do you do with the 1GB space? Well, frankly, with Yahoo! and Hotmail upping their space as well, and with a little bit of cleaning up you really don't need 1 GB of space now, do you?

Contrast this with the list of files you use on a regular basic. Or maybe you want to share some files between home and office. So you rely on email, or you've gotten yourself a USB drive.

But Gmail Drive Extension gives us another option. With this, you can make your Gmail appear as another drive in Windows Explorer. So you can drag and drop files here to be accessed from any other computer you want!



A great way to get large files across to different PCs if you move around a lot. Sure beats lugging around CDs or any other form of storage!

Download it here

Design and Simulate Electronic Circuits

Came across a software called TKGate (http://www.tkgate.org/) which can be used to design, test and simulate electronic circuits.

I think it'll be of tremendous use to hobbyists as complex projects are undertaken. Imagine testing the success of the whole project before buying a single resistor!!



via Slashdot

The OpenCD!!

Finally, finally, a great CD with some of the best Open Source software!



This is absolutely a must have!

Just look at some of the programs included:

Productivity Software
OpenOffice, AbiWord, PDFCreator

Design Software
GIMP, Blender, ....

Internet/Networking
FireFox, Thunderbird, Mozilla suite, Gaim, TightVNC, ....

Go here for the complete list of programs or just click on the image above to go the website.

The Linux Rescue CD

Well, sometimes things screw up. And that's when this Linux System Rescue CD would be of help.




The CD contains the following softwares:

• GNU Parted is the best tool for editing your disk partitions under linux


• QtParted is a Partition Magic clone for Linux.


• Partimage is a Ghost/Drive-image clone for Linux


• File systems tools (e2fsprogs, reiserfsprogs, xfsprogs, jfsutils, ntfsprogs, dosfstools): they allow you to format, resize, debug an existing partition of your hard disk


• Sfdisk allows you to backup and restore your partition table

besides lots more!

Credit Card Mathematics!

Usually, I only deal with PC tweaks and applications which help in the virtual world, but today I came across a freeware which might help even in the real world!

This particular software is a credit card calculator which gives you a single place to do all your credit calculations in. It tells you the duration of repayments and also suggests ways to make the most out of it, by making better repayments and consolidating all credit!




From their site,
"Credit Card Math will give you the knowledge you need to get yourself out of debt fast, save money and beat credit card issuers at their own game."

The download link is here

via The Red Ferret Journal

Aerial Photography for those who don't fly!!

First there was the idea of putting a digital camera on a kite and then taking snaps! I found that itself very unique! And the snaps are quite amazing!

The How-To is in two parts - Part 1, Part 2.



All it takes is $1.50 chip from RadioShack and a soldering iron. Of course, you'll also need a digital camera (which you won't mind hacking!), a light one is an obvious choice!

In Part 2 of the How-To, you'll see a lot of other snaps as well. I was wondering if this could be used for other things as well. Like what about traffic monitoring, or taking pictures above a scene which cannot be reached manually. For a low cost option, I think this is truly remarkable!

And then today, I came across this site which tells how to put a digital camera on a remote controlled airplane to take photos! Of course, the control possible is more, so the quality of snaps are invariably way better!