Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on May 10, 2007 by CyberNet.

The next major upgrade to Opera Mini, code-named “Dimension,” is on the verge to being released to testers. Daniel from Opera Watch says that you have to be invited to be part of the Beta program and that you can be put on the list by providing your name and email address here.

He wasn’t able to say anything about what to expect in the new version of Opera Mini, but he did hint at a new way of navigating websites. Just to taunt us he had this to say about it:

I’ve been testing it for some time already, and have been truly impressed. Seeing what the tiny browser can do on my phone has blown me away.

In the Opera forum there is currently 16–pages of things people have been wanting to see in Opera Mini. I’ve been trying to think about what could be added to make navigating sites easier on phones. The first thing that popped into my head was voice navigation so that you can just say the name of a link to click on it. Then you could also command the browser to do things like opening a bookmark or scrolling down on the page. The Opera Desktop browser already has similar voice commands built-in, and something like this could make using the Opera Mini browser a lot easier.

That’s just my speculation, and I’m not sure how easy it would be to implement such a system on a mobile device. Most mobile devices have the microphone built-in, but the size of the application would probably be quite large if it included some sort of voice navigation.

So after you get done signing up for the Beta, feel free to leave a comment with your best guess as to what the new Opera Mini will have in store for us.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on May 06, 2010 by CyberNet.

Windows only
If you’re reading this site there is a pretty good chance that you already know how to use the ping and traceroute commands from the command prompt. If you only have to do these once in awhile I’m sure you don’t mind opening up the command prompt, but if you’re anything more than a casual pinger you may find the free PingMaster app to be useful.

PingMaster isn’t something that’s so great it will blow your mind. Instead it’s one of those utilities that will help keep your mind (and sanity) in tact… especially if you want an easy way to monitor site response times. As you can see in the screenshot above you can have up to five different domains/IPs being monitored at any given time. Each tab will show the realtime results, and at the bottom will provide a summary of how many packets have been lost.

One thing I found to be kinda nice was the System Tray icon. When you hover over it you’ll quickly see the last two response times for each of the five sites you are monitoring. This is really helpful if you manage several domains and want to check in periodically on the response times, which may help you identify issues before they happen.

PingMaster Homepage (Windows only; Freeware)

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on April 15, 2010 by CyberNet.

Windows; Mac
Over the last few years I’ve written about several video converters, but I always felt that none of them offered the simplicity that they I know they should. I’ve found some that I’ve really liked, but how many people want to mess with the nitty gritty details when they want to throw a video on a mobile device? The creators of the open source Miro application felt the same way, and decided that they should come up with their own app to address this.

The Miro Video Converter is the simplest video conversion utility that I’ve ever used. The interface of the app only has two areas: one where you drag-and-drop the file you want to convert, and another where you select the kind of device you want to put the video on. The supported devices include:

• Droid
• Nexus One
• G1
• Magic / myTouch
• Droid Eris
• HTC Hero
• Cliq
• Behold
• iPhone
• iPod Touch
• iPod Classic
• iPod Nano
• PSP

What kind of video files is it able to convert? Miro Video Converter supports AVI, H264, MOV, WMV, XVID, Theora, MKV, and FLV. Needless to say that covers all of the most popular formats, and is what makes this so useful. Go ahead and grab it if you have videos you want optimized for your mobile device.

Miro Video Converter Homepage (Windows/Mac; Freeware)

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on August 05, 2008 by CyberNet.

Time Saving Tuesday

Windows only
One trend that I’ve noticed as bandwidth and hard drive storage space continues to grow is that sending CD/DVD’s over the Internet is becoming a preferred way for distributing media. These files are typically in an ISO or BIN/CUE format, which most people will then burn to a CD/DVD before using them. The good news is that you can easily save the time and money involved in doing this by using a free virtual drive application.

How do you mount an ISO image? It’s actually really simple if you have the right tools. What they do is take an ISO image, BIN/CUE file, or any other supported format and displays it as a virtual drive on your computer. The drive will look just like any other CD drive in Windows Explorer. One of the huge benefits of doing this is that reading/copying files from the “CD” in this way is much faster than using a physical CD-ROM drive.

There are several free applications floating around the Internet that can do this, but you should be aware that some of them (Daemon Tools, etc..) might install spyware/malware on your machine. Luckily there are three great freeware solutions that you can trust, and that’s what we’re going to cover today.

–Virtual CloneDrive (Homepage)–

If you want a no-frills solution for mounting images Virtual CloneDrive is what you’ll likely want to use. It supports all of the common image formats including ISO, BIN, and CDD, and is capable of mounting the last used image file upon startup. You can have up to 8 virtual drives at any one given time, but the nicest feature would be the fact that you can mount an image simply by double-clicking on the file.

–MagicISO (Homepage)–

MagicISO (commonly referred to as MagicDisc) can do everything that Virtual CloneDrive is capable of plus some. It supports up to 15 simultaneous virtual drives, can automatically mount the last used image file, compress ISO images (which really just converts it from an ISO image to UIF), and more. Plus you can create ISO images from a CD/DVD!

Here are some of the filetypes it supports when creating or mounting images:

• Creating: ISO, BIN/CUE, NRG, or UIF images from a CD/DVD
• Mounting: Not only does MagicISO support the ISO image format, but it also supports over two dozen other popular formats: UIF, BIN/CUE (CDRWin), IMA/IMG, CIF (Easy CD Creator), NRG (Nero Burning ROM), IMG/CCD (CloneCD), MDF/MDS (Fantom CD), VCD (Farstone Virtual Drive), FCD, LCD, NCD, GCD, VaporCD (Noum Vapor CDROM), P01/MD1/XA (Gear), VC4/000 (Virtual CD), VDI (Virtuo CD Manager), C2D (WinOnCD), BWI/BWT (BlinkWrite), CDI (DiscJuggler), TAO/DAO (Duplicator), and PDI (Instant Copy)

The only thing this seems to be missing is the easy double-click to mount an image file that Virtual CloneDrive supports. To mount a drive in MagicISO you’ll want to click on the System Tray icon, go to Virtual CD/DVD-ROM, hover over one of the virtual adrives, and then choose the “Mount” option.

–StarBurn (Homepage)–

You might recall us writing about StarBurn as a free CD/DVD/Blu-ray burning application, but it’s also capable of mounting an ISO image! Once you have the StarBurn software running you’ll notice that there is a StarPort option located on the toolbar (also in the Action menu), and clicking on that will initiate the StarPort wizard. From there you can mount or unmount an image file on a virtual drive.

If you’ve been wanting a nice freeware application for burning CD’s and DVD’s I highly recommend picking this up. The fact that it doubles as a virtual drive manager makes it extremely worthwhile.

Note: This software tries to change your browser’s homepage during the setup process, but getting around it is as simple as unchecking a box.

–Overview–

It’s good to know that you’ve got options available to you should you decide that you need a virtual drive management application. Each one of the free solutions I’ve mentioned above caters to a different type of need: Virtual CloneDrive is simple and intuitive, MagicISO is powerful and lets you create images from CD’s, and StarBurn doubles as a CD burning application. Pick the one that benefits you the most, but it’s not like you can’t easily download one of the other free alternatives if you don’t like how one of them handles.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on December 05, 2006 by CyberNet.

That’s sarcasm in the title before you get too excited and think that Adobe did something revolutionary with the new Reader. I have spent a lot of time preparing a great article for tomorrow morning so my brain is starting to wither away to nothing (just to warn you before reading this article) 😉

Anyhow, back on topic. The new version 8 is sure to please any Adobe Reader enthusiast out there (are there any of those people?). Here are some of the things that you can do with this version:

• Maximized work area – View PDFs in a new visual design for the work area, navigation pane, and toolbars. User interface elements have been removed to maximize space.
• Customizable toolbars – Easily hide or show individual tools by right-clicking/Control-clicking a toolbar, or use the More Tools dialog box to customize all your toolbars.
• Shared reviews – Participate in a shared review. Comments are stored on a central server, allowing all participants to see comments in real time.
• Commenting and markup enhancements – View and accurately place callout and cloud markups as you apply them. The callout leader automatically moves as you position the callout. Selected comments are highlighted for easier visibility when zoomed out. Rotate stamps, and select all tools from a single, integrated toolbar.
• Booklet printing – Print pages as a simple booklet, for example, 2-up, saddle-stitched.
• 2D Measurement tool enhancements – Measurement recalculated if start or end point moved. Measurements snap to lines, intersections, or corners.

That’s about everything from their What’s New page that seems halfway noteworthy. Honestly, they still have a long ways to go to match what Foxit Reader offers. I’m not sure why they keep throwing more and more features into Adobe Reader when all it does is make it slower. If they are going to implement things that most people will never use, and never understand, then they should at least provide options to disable those features. The only thing that Adobe Reader does right is make it possible to open PDF’s from within a browser. Heck, I don’t even like that feature though because it seems like my browser crashes most of the time when using it. Oh well…there is always version 9 right?

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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