EMBITS.CO.UK

Archive for the ‘Downloads’ Category

GoogleMail (or GMail, if you prefer), is great. Google Calendar is also great. In fact, both are modern miracles by virtue of the fact that they offer desktop style applications through a web browser.

Many people are not willing to make the jump and ‘live in the cloud’ as they say, favouring traditional desktop applications such as Outlook or Thunderbird with Lightning to manage their email and calendaring requirements.

The benefit of ‘living in the cloud’ is that no matter what machine you are on, anywhere in the world, you can have access to your email, address book and calendar. But how can you do it with no easy way to synchronise your data to your desktop apps?

Enter GCalDaemon. It works as a bridge between your desktop and the cloud, allowing you to see your Google Calendar in your desktop app, and also synchronises your address book with your Google Mail account!

It can be a little tricky to set up, but full instructions are given on the website.

Works on Windows, Linux and OS X, and requires JAVA. Download it from here.

Please note, I intentionally have not mentioned Boro’s defeat yesterday to Reading from a last minute goal. Nor do I intend to mention it…

Use ZIP files a lot? Use WinZIP, WinRAR, or my previous personal favourite, ZipGenius?

Here’s one that’s a bit better – leaner, meaner, sexier. OK, I’ve never actually found computer software sexy…that’s just a rumour.

IZARC – from http://www.izarc.org, is the program in question.

IZArc is the ultimate freeware archive utility supporting many archive formats like: 7-ZIP, A, ACE, ARC, ARJ, B64, BH, BIN, BZ2, BZA, C2D, CAB, CDI, CPIO, DEB, ENC, GCA, GZ, GZA, HA, IMG, ISO, JAR, LHA, LIB, LZH, MDF, MBF, MIM, NRG, PAK, PDI, PK3, RAR, RPM, TAR, TAZ, TBZ, TGZ, TZ, UUE, WAR, XXE, YZ1, Z, ZIP, ZOO. With a modern easy-to-use interface, IZArc provides support for most compressed and encoded files, as well as access to many powerful features and tools. It allows you to drag and drop files from and to Windows Explorer, create and extract archives directly in Windows Explorer, create multiple archives spanning disks, creating self-extracting archives, repair damaged zip archives, converting from one archive type to another, view and write comments and many more. IZArc has also build-in multilanguage support.

With IZArc you can open CD image files like ISO, BIN, CDI and NRG. It is also possible to convert such files from one type to another (BIN to ISO, NRG to ISO).

OpenDNS has been profiled many times before by lots of different people – but here’s a use for it that you may have missed.

If you create an account on OpenDNS.com, you are able to switch on the site blocker. This will not only help protect you from phishing attacks, but is great if you have kids – there is an option to block “adult” sites. Safe surfing for all the family!

In case you haven’t heard of OpenDNS before, it is a service that aims to speed up your internet access. Each time you look for a website by name, a DNS server is contacted to turn that name in to an IP address. OpenDNS is basically a superfast DNS server – but with extra bells and whistles.

Check it out at http://www.opendns.com.