Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on January 03, 2008 by CyberNet.

With the growing popularity of online music streaming sites it’s not surprising that tools will emerge to download the tunes you listen to. Just look at YouTube and how many tools there are to download the videos to your own computer.

Free Music Zilla is an app that will monitor the content passing through your browser. If it sees that you’re listening to a song from Imeem, Last.fm, Pandora, MySpace, iJigg, MOG, or any other music service it will give you the opportunity to download the songs. The best part is that it’s pretty simple with how it works.

Once you download, install, and run Free Music Zilla it will sit in your System Tray waiting for you to listen to music on the Internet. Once it detects a song being played it will popup in the interface. Downloading it is as simple as checking the box next to the song, and hitting the download button. Alternatively you can right-click on a single song and select the download option.

As with most programs, this does have a few downsides:

• The “Leech timeout” is a timer set by the website your listening to, and once the timer gets down to zero you won’t be able to download the song.
• You never know which file corresponds to which song. The filenames are just numbers that make identifying the song rather difficult. Of course you can rename them just as you would rename any file, but if you’re doing this with several files the process would get rather tedious.
• The program is limited to downloading 10 songs per day.
• The quality of the songs vary, but the ones I tested it out on seem to have a bitrate of 128kbps. That’s not terrible, but depending on where you’re listening to the song you might be able to notice the sub-par quality.

Oh, and we can’t forget to warn you about downloading material illegally with this app. Ummm, hmmmm. I know, if you download illegal songs the RIAA will come over to your house and walk around your yard screaming “for the love of God, I have a Rolls Royce to pay for!”

What do you use to download songs from your favorite sites?

Free Music Zilla [via Download Squad & TechCrunch]

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on August 28, 2006 by CyberNet.

When AOL released the search data of over 500,000 users the whole world was in awe. No one could believe that their own search data was released to the public and AOL was quick to remove the file from the Internet. However, it wasn’t done quick enough to prevent mirrors from being setup and sites were even created for searching the 439MB data file.

So who is to say that it won’t happen again? Remember when you were a little kid and you’re parents said that you did something wrong…that never stopped you from doing it again. You just took you a little time to devise a new method to accomplish the goal. The point is that AOL learned not to share their search data with the public, but who’s to say that they wouldn’t give it to any organization that asked for it? They definitely won’t do it the same way again but I don’t think there is anything stopping them from quietly releasing your information.

What you need is a Firefox extension that will prevent the search engines from storing your searches. TrackMeNot does just that! According to their homepage:

It hides users’ actual search trails in a cloud of ‘ghost’ queries, significantly increasing the difficulty of aggregating such data into accurate or identifying user profiles.

So it doesn’t block the search engines from receiving your query but it will try to give them false information. That way they won’t be able to accurately identify you and your search patterns. Sounds like a nice solution for right now and hopefully this extension will continue to evolve.

Thanks for the tip “C”!

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on October 16, 2006 by CyberNet.

I’m not sure how legal this is but Softpedia currently has the pre-release version of Adobe Reader 8 available for download. The Adobe Reader site says that version 8 is coming soon but they only offer download links to version 7.

The download went a little slow but I was able to get it installed on Vista without any problems. The primary reason that I wanted to try it was to see if there were any speed improvements so that it didn’t take hours to start it up like before. Foxit has gained popularity simply because it starts up instantly compared to the long delay that Adobe Reader has always had.

The first launch took just as long as it normally did but I decided to disable the “Welcome” screen from appearing. Then I restarted Adobe Reader and I was absolutely blown away that it actually popped open almost instantly! I had to sit back and breathe for a minute and then you know what I did? I kept opening and closing Adobe Reader! It was amazing!

Of course the first thing that popped into my mind was that Adobe Reader loaded all of the “plug-ins” into memory and that was why each subsequent startup was fast. I looked in my list of processes on Vista and I didn’t see anything related to Adobe Reader after I had closed the program. Hmm, so I restarted the computer to try and determine if Adobe really fixed the speed issue or not.

After restarting it still loaded really quick but there was a little bit of lag that isn’t there when you run the program a second time. So I am thoroughly confused about whether it is loading something into memory without me knowing…I’ll probably just stick with Foxit anyhow.

Here are the features that Adobe Reader 8 has:

• New interface, new tools, more options
  Use the redesigned Adobe Reader 8 interface to select from a variety of new document viewing options. Zoom in, pan over, or leverage the loupe feature to take a closer look.
• Launch an online, real-time meeting in seconds
  Select “Start Meeting” in Reader 8 to deliver online training or communicate in real time. Set up shared, server-based document reviews. Leverage the new review tracker and simple RSS reader.
• Secure existing workflows
  Combine Reader 8 with Adobe LiveCycle Policy Server and the new Adobe Online Services Document Center. Digitally sign Adobe PDF files.
• Save time working with PDF files
  Open, view, and collaborate on PDF document packages that contain Adobe PDF files and other files types. Try new markup and review tools, customizable toolbars, and combined search and find.
• Simplied deployment across your organization
  Quickly manage and control Reader 8 deployments using the Adobe Customization Wizard 8, IBM Tivoli, Microsoft Systems Management Server, Windows Group Policy Objects, and Active Directory.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on February 23, 2007 by CyberNet.

I was just reading a post by Brandon Paddock regarding a new (free) tool called Start++ that he made for Windows Vista. He works on the search technology over at Microsoft, and sticking with his area of expertise he has gone and made an awesome application. It reminds me of the keyword search in Firefox and Opera where you can designate a single letter or phrase to performing a search. The example search pictured above would do a Google search for “CyberNet News” in my default browser.

The thing that I really like about Start++ is that you can assign both keyword searches that open in your default web browser, or you can have it open a program/file. The only catch is that right now there is no “Browse” command to browse for the program or file that you want to open. I also noticed that it doesn’t support spaces in the file path even if you put quotes around it, and looking through the comments I see that someone else was having a similar problem. Brandon said that he should be able to work on it this weekend so I’ll be anxiously awaiting a new version.

It is probably important for me to mention that this does not work with Vista’s “global search field” and only works with things entered in Vista’s Start Menu search box. Initially I was bummed about that, but I don’t think I would ever use it anywhere but the Start Menu.

While you’re waiting along with me for the new release you can still take advantage of performing a quick search for your favorite sites. I can’t wait for this to work with spaces in document names and applications because it will become really useful to me then. Thanks for a great tool Brandon!

Vista tip: If you didn’t notice, as soon as you click on the Start Orb the search box is focused. I didn’t realize that initially and found myself clicking in the search field before I started typing, when in reality all I had to do was click the Start Orb (or press the Windows Key) and start typing. Props to Microsoft for thinking about focusing on the search box!

Download Start++

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on October 10, 2006 by CyberNet.

It has been a little while since I have taken a look to see what Firefox 3 (codenamed Gran Paradiso and also known as Minefield) is up to. I didn’t expect it to be much different than Firefox 2 but there were a few features, such as Places, that had gotten pushed back for the release of Firefox 3. In a matter of a few minutes I had the latest nightly build up and running.

I was shocked to see essentially no difference between version 2 and version 3. You may ask yourself “what about the Places bookmark system?” That has actually been pulled out of Firefox 3 for the time being because they just implemented the new theme. For that reason they removed Places until they could get it adjusted to match the rest of Firefox.

As far as the Acid 2 web standard compliance goes it looks like it gets a little better with Firefox 3. Hey, at least the face has eyes now!

I’ll probably be making the switch over to Firefox 3 pre-Alpha about a month after Firefox 2 gets released (I need to have some stability in my life, and a month’s worth should be enough ). I love testing new browsers mostly for the sheer excitement. I’ve been using Firefox 2 since around January as my primary browser and there were a few bumps along the way but it was always my default browser.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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