Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on January 02, 2008 by CyberNet.

Web Browser Wednesday

There’s no doubt that your browser stores a lot of important information that could leave you in quite a bind should it disappear all of a sudden. The Firefox users out there probably have a bunch of extensions installed and configured, settings tweaked just the way they like them, obscure passwords stored that no human could possibly memorize, and enough bookmarks saved to make even a hardcore geek nauseous.

I don’t find much joy in the fact that a hard drive can crash at anytime for any number of reasons. We’ve had it happen twice this year, but fortunately for us we had backups of all our most important information. You shouldn’t even think twice about backing up your browser’s profile, and that’s why today we’re going to show you two easy and free Firefox profile backup solutions!

–MozBackup (Homepage)–

This is a small program that you can download, and on the website you’re given the choice between an installable version or a no-install ZIP version. I opted for the ZIP version because I can always keep it on my USB drive, which conveniently happens to be the place where I store my Firefox profile backup.

MozBackup is not restricted just to Firefox profiles either. It can also backup profiles for Thunderbird, Seamonkey, Mozilla Suite, and Netscape. Don’t worry, you’ll be prompted early on in MozBackup to select specifically what application and profile you want to backup.

You’ll then be able to pick exactly what you want to backup, such as bookmarks, history, extensions, passwords, cookies, and more. I’ve documented the entire process in screenshots:

(Click to Enlarge)

Once you’ve got the backup done it will create a single file that can be used to restore everything that you backed up. To perform a restoration just go back through the wizard, and on the second screen just choose the Restore a profile option instead of Backup a profile.

Tip: Close Firefox before using MozBackup, otherwise it will prompt you to do so in the middle of the wizard.

–FEBE (Homepage)–

I find this to be a rather interesting profile backup option for Firefox. FEBE (short for Firefox Environment Backup Extension) is an extension that can be used to backup important parts of your profile. Things like themes, extensions, bookmarks, preferences, cookies, passwords and more can all be saved to a single file, and restored at a moments notice.

What really makes this a fantastic choice for backing up your Firefox profile is that it has scheduling capabilities. You can choose to have your profile automatically backed up daily, weekly, monthly, or you can just set it to remind you every few days.

The first thing you’ll want to do after installing FEBE is go and setup the directory where your backups will be stored. Then from the Tools -> FEBE menu you can initiate your first backup of whatever profile items you chose in the options.

(Click to Enlarge)

As you can see this is an extremely intuitive option for backing up your Firefox profile, but MozBackup is also nice since it works with several different Mozilla applications. The choice of which backup solution is obviously up to you, but take them seriously because they could save you a lot of trouble in the future.

Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com

This article was written on August 06, 2008 by CyberNet.

We’ve been wondering when Google was going to get into the music game, and it appears as though they’re diving in head-first starting today. The only catch is that the service is only available in China. Users outside of China will need to use a China proxy if they want to gain access to the site.

Google’s Music search site, available at www.google.cn/music, has a database of tens of thousands of songs. All of them are of course searchable by song name, artist, or album. The most shocking part is that Google then provides links to listen or download songs from their Top100.cn music partner. Lyrics and ringtones are also available.

I checked out the content on Top100.cn, and it looks like they have a lot from North America. MP3 download links are directly available on their site without needing to go through Google, but I wasn’t able to successfully start a transfer of a song (the download just sat there without doing anything). They’re likely blocking downloads from outside of China… bummer.

I’m not holding my breath for something like this in the United States because there’s no way the RIAA would allow it. It’s just amazing that the songs are not only freely available for download, but they aren’t even DRM-infested.

[via Google Blogoscoped]

Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com

This article was written on June 07, 2007 by CyberNet.

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If you’re a fan of DivX then you’ll probably want to take advantage of this limited time offer. the DivX team is currently offering a free version of DivX Pro for Windows and for Mac which would normally cost you $20. Basically you download the 21MB file, install DivX Pro, and after the installation is done it will prompt for your email address (as seen in the screenshot above). You’ll receive the serial number needed to register the software at the email address you provide.

The big difference the free DivX and DivX Pro is that you get the DivX Converter (which didn’t work with Vista when I tried it) and the DivX Pro Codec. Here are the benefits each provide:

• DivX Converter
  • Drag-and-drop nearly any video format to create a high-quality, highly compressed DivX video
  • Merge and convert multiple videos into a single DivX file with an automatically generated menu
• DivX Pro Codec
  • Higher performance, including multi-threaded support for better performance on all HyperThreaded, dual core and dual CPU (SMP) systems
  • More encoding options, including six carefully optimized encoding modes that balance visual quality and performance for virtually any application

Even if you don’t need it right now, I recommend that you download DivX Pro for Windows or for Mac so that you can get a serial number. Unfortunately it requires that you immediately install it to get the serial number, but you can pick and choose which components you want installed.

Source: Ghacks

Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com

This article was written on August 29, 2007 by CyberNet.

AutoPatcher is an application that hundreds of thousands of people, especially those working in IT, depend on and use regularly. It’s a simple and free application that has been around since 2003. It has served a vital purpose for many people by providing Windows Updates in one consolidated package that could be downloaded. These were available for XP, 2000, 2003, Vista, and even various versions of Office.

The entire point of AutoPatcher was to make updating multiple computers a piece of cake. I always used this after formatting my PC so that I wouldn’t have to sit and download all of the updates just to get my computer back up to speed. The great thing was that AutoPatcher was updated monthly therefore providing the latest updates. Each of those updates came in two different flavors:

Core releases – these are the main releases which contain the bulk of the patches. These are rather large in size (normally several hundred megabytes), and are often only downloaded by first-time users.

Update releases – these allow you to update a Core release with additional patches as new ones are created.

AutoPatcher does require that you install the app first, but after that you can pick and choose which updates you want installed. The program even gives you a brief description of what each update does:

Click to Enlarge

Unfortunately Microsoft saw this application in a different light, and decided to shut it down. As of right now the AutoPatcher site remains available, but the links to the downloads have since been removed. From the looks of it Microsoft hasn’t been able to reach the mirrors yet to have the files removed:

Download AutoPatcher Cores (most recent versions):

• AutoPatcher August 2007 for Windows 2000 [249MB]
• AutoPatcher August 2007 for Windows 2003 [242MB]
• AutoPatcher August 2007 for Windows XP [333MB]
• AutoPatcher July 2007 for Windows Vista [211MB]
• AutoPatcher August 2007 for Office 2003 [56MB]
• AutoPatcher August 2007 for Office 2007 [121MB]

Alternatively the downloads are readily available from several sites, or you can download AutoPatcher via Torrents. The only bad part is that the software probably won’t be updated anymore. 🙁 Maybe this wouldn’t be such a big deal if Microsoft made it easier to install these updates offline. Honestly they should be offering a tool themselves that does the same thing as AutoPatcher.

Of course the only thing that AutoPatcher is doing wrong is redistributing the patches that Microsoft provides. They could possibly get around this by having users download a small application that will retrieve all of the updates from Microsoft. I’m sure there has to be a workaround, and hopefully the AutoPatcher team will find it!

Source: AutoPatcher [via Neowin]

Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com

This article was written on November 04, 2010 by CyberNet.

Most current operating systems include some sort of indexed file searching functionality, and with that you can often get instant results back on any query you perform. As I pointed out a few weeks ago those tools still leave some things to be desired… especially when dealing with searching the contents of files for some particular text.

FileSeek falls in line with the MariusSoft File Searcher in that it does a great job searching the contents of any file you desire. Both are free utilities that don’t require any files to be indexed prior to kicking off a search, and they are pretty fast at getting results. Both also let you use regular expressions to search for text in a file, but FileSeek is the only one that has Windows Explorer context menu integration. If you regularly perform file searches that can become quite useful.

Here are some of the features highlighted by the developer:

• Search for text string matches inside any kind of file
• Match Regular Expressions inside any kind of file
• Search a folder and all of it’s sub-folders
• Match 1 or more file patterns, like *.jpg, file?.txt or anything else you can imagine
• Exclude 1 or more file patterns from your search, like *.exe or *.dll
• Filter results by the last modified date
• Never indexes files in the background

When you go to grab the download you may overlook the tiny text underneath the download button that offers a version without an installer. That’s the version I tend to lean towards, but you can always grab the installer version if you want all the shortcuts and stuff to be created for you. It’s free either way you decide to go.

FileSeek Homepage (Windows only; 32/64-bit compatible; Freeware)

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