Clipomatic: quick access and save the clipboard text as a resident fragment

Have you ever copied an important link or block of text, and before pasting it, copied something else over it accidentally? Due to the limitation of Windows’ native clipboard manager, which holds only one item at a time, most users rely on third-party clipboard managers to extend its functionality. If you’ve been looking for an application that can show you all copied text items, and let you choose the ones you need, we recommend giving Clipomatic a whirl. It’s a simple clipboard manager for Windows that offers bothhotkey and context menu support, allowing users to quickly paste the text into required applications. What makes it unique from other clipboard tools is its context menu, which gives one-click access to all the text items that you copy to the clipboard. Sadly, the tool doesn’t support image and rich text format, though, you could could turn lack of support for the latter to your advantage by using the tool to remove formatting applied to copied text. Another noteworthy feature is its ability to save most frequently used text snippets as Permanent Text Items, so that you can easily access them from its context menu.

 

 

 

The application parks itself in the system tray after being launched. The system tray menu allows you to start and stop clipboard caching, flush all current text snippets (except permanent ones), bring up Clipset editor, and open Settings console. The number of snippets you want to hold can be changed from the settings. The maximum number of snippets it can hold at a time is 64.

You can access the context menu using Ctrl+Alt+V hotkey combination, which holds all the cached clipboard items as well as permament text snippets. Using the clipboard item in required application is easy; all you need is to select the required clipboard item and it will insert it into the active application. For instance, if you want to use the copied text item in Notepad, activate the Notepad window, press the aforementioned hotkey, and then select the item you want to insert.

The Settings window enables you to change the predefined hotkey and the number of cache items. Here, you can also specify Quick sets and permanent clipset directories, enable the option to flush current itemon exit and ignore whitespace. 

To add a snippet to the permanent clipset, first select Quick Sets > permanent.clipset from the menu, and then click Clipset Editor. A Clipset Editor window will open, click the Browse button and select the Permanent clipset file. Once loaded, right click in the list, select New from the context menu, and type in or paste the text item you want to save in permanent clipset. Click OK and repeat the process to save the permanent text snippet.

To quickly disable the Clipomatic, just click its system icon, and it will stop saving the clipboard items. Sadly, it doesn’t restore clipboard items after system reboot, but you can send the current clipboard items to the permanent clipset to access them even after rebooting your system. It supports Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8. Testing was carried out on Windows 7 64-bit.

Download Clipomatic

A Free Tool to Format USB Disks and Create Bootable USB Disks

Rufus is a simple free utility which makes it easy to create bootable USB disks from ISO images. Creating a bootable USB disk might come very handy when you don’t have access to CD/DVD drive in a computer system. When you download some bootable tool like an antivirus repair disc, you’ll often find it comes in the form of an ISO image, which it’s assumed you’ll then burn to CD or DVD. Of course if your target system doesn’t have an CD/DVD drive then that won’t help you very much. Rufus is specially useful for those who do not have any optical drive on their system.

Rufus works with all kinds of USB memory devices like USB pen drives, USB keys, USB hard disks, USB memory cards and so on. You can create a bootable USB pen drive for Windows or Linux setup and then boot your system using it and then you can install the OS without any worries. It also makes the installation a little bit faster compared to installing via setup CD/DVD.

Official Website of Rufus
http://rufus.akeo.ie/
Current version: 1.2.0

System Requirements
Windows XP or later, 32 or 64 bit doesn’t matter.
If elevation is required, you will be prompted for it.

Usage of Rufus
Attach your USB disk to your computer. Visit Rufus website and download Rufus. Then executable and run it – no installation is necessary. The interface looks very close to default format window which is shown by Windows whenever you try to format a hard disk partition or a USB drive.
Rufus automatically selects the first USB drive it finds, you only have to point the program to your ISO file before clicking “Start”. Rufus will format the USB disk and write the ISO image into it. All data on your USB disk will be lost while formatting and creating the bootable USB disk. So please backup your USB disk data before running Rufus.

Please remember that once completed, your bootable USB drive is still usable as before to transfer data: it doesn’t have to be dedicated for DOS or ISO installation only.

Rufus also allows you to check your USB disk for bad blocks. Up to 4 passes can be selected to find out if your USB disk is defected.

The best thing about Rufus is that it’s faster than other tools. I personally use free ImgBurn tool for all my ISO, CD or DVD related requirements. The only thing it lacks is a feature to create a bootable USB disk from a bootable ISO image of a CD or DVD. Everyone can create bootable USB drives easily with Rufus.

Disk Falcon Is A Sleek Disk Analyzer Tool For Windows

Windows 8 release isn’t quite far from now and you may already have tried Windows 8 Consumer Preview. Build from the ground up – by keeping desktops and tablets in mind – Microsoft’s new operating system looks cool, and to maintain that cool factor, developers are trying to create Windows 8 apps that perfectly embellish the new Metro Modern UI. In order to use the new operating system, you must ensure that you have sufficient amount of disk space available for a seamless experience. Disk Falcon, available at Windows Store is a disk analyzer that provides both eye-candy and excellent functionality. What makes it stand out is its user-interface, which according to the developer, is based on Ultraviolet Dawn’s game engine. Using the engine’s full potential, Disk Falcon displays everything related to disk space usage in real-time on pie, bar and doughnut charts. Although the scan engine is not outstanding and a bit slow compared to other disk analyzers, it performs a deep scan of selected drive and folders, so you can easily identify which files are taking too much of your disk space.

 

 

Upon launch, you might praise the application’s sci-fi interface, but obviously there’s more to it. At the bottom right side, there’s a Volumes pane that displays the current disk drives on your machine. To start the scan process, click Scan Location at the bottom and then browse the drive or directory you want to analyze.

Disk Falcon displays the progress of the scanned items in real-time. The Details pane to the right side gives an overview of the files/folder being processed, along with an allocated color.

Apart from Age view, the application also lets you see and analyze files under Pie chart, Bar chart andDoughnut chart views. For instance, Pie view shows the files with their designated colors, while you can click or tap the color to interact. Hovering the mouse pointer over a particular disk space section displays the source file directories.

Another nifty feature of Disk Falcon is Bin. It allows you to drag the superfluous files and folders from Details pane over its trash can to remove them from the disk.

During testing, we noticed the application has quite a slack performance; it takes a considerable amount of time while scanning an entire drive. However, the time it takes to scan the drive depends upon the total used and available space.  The application is available at Windows Store and supports both 32-bit and 64-bit editions of Windows 8.

Get Disk Falcon from Windows Store

 

Get RSS Feed Alerts In Mountain Lion Notification Center With News Notifications

OS X Mountain Lion’s Notification Center is largely dependent on other apps supporting it, and since not many do, we’ve seen an influx of apps that redirect Growl notifications to Notification Center. The Notification Center presents a lot of opportunity for app development and for users it is an excellent feature that they would likely want to put more creative uses. Since there is nothing wrong with Growl and a new version of the app for Mountain Lion has recently been submitted to the Mac App Store, you can rest assured it isn’t going anywhere. That leaves you with Notification Center and a world of possibilities. Demonstrating just one of the many uses you can put Notification Center to is News Notifications, a Mac app worth $0.99 in the Mac App Store that lets you put RSS feeds in the Notification Center.

News Notifications runs in the menu bar and allows you to add multiple feeds. It comes with three pre-added feeds with an option to add your own. By default, News Notifications shows one item at a time from a particular feed and checks for new items every 1 minute, but you can change it to your liking. Remember that you still have limited space in the Notification Center, so if you pull something like 10 or 20 items from a particular feed you will be scrolling through them. If you continue to use the Notification Center for other apps, you might want to consider changing the order the notifications; go to System Preferences>Notification Center to change the order.

News Notifications sends notifications that you can swipe to dismiss and lists the new items from your feed in the Notification Center. Clicking an item in Notification Center will open it in your default browser.

Strictly speaking, News Notifications is one of the few apps that demonstrate how you can make better use of Notification Center so perhaps criticism would be a bit harsh just now. It works perfectly well and the interface isn’t bad. However, it would’ve been a lot better, if you could easily identify different feeds. At present, the app writes the name of the feed before the news item, but it is difficult to read. If you have an iPhone, you will appreciate the freedom of being able to do this with a simple app rather than using a Cydia tweak. Lets hope more developers find a way to develop apps for the Notification Center and put it to more diverse use.

Get News Notifications From Mac App Store

Weekend tech reading: Windows Phone 8 "Apollo" hits RTM

Microsoft said to have finalized Windows Phone 8 OS Chalk up another one for those Windows Phone tipsters. Back in July, I heard whispers that Microsoft would release to manufacturing (RTM) the Windows Phone 8 operating system in September. The plan, as of then, was that the first Windows Phone 8 devices would ship in November 2012. On September 14, Microsoft's phone team shipped the OS, codenamed "Apollo," according to a couple of my contacts. WPCentral is reporting they are hearing the same. ZDNet

 

How Windows Phone 8 can succeed Big projects sometimes fail, no matter how much money, time, effort and brainpower is devoted to making them succeed. Big-budget movies and video games end up returning a mere fraction of their budget; high-profile startups release products that fail to impact the market; beautiful pieces of hardware gather dust on store-shelves. Microsoft is trying very hard to ensure that Windows Phone is a big project that doesn’t fail. In the two years since the platform’s launch, however, it’s failed to take much territory... Slashdot

 

Cosmo, the hacker 'god' who fell to Earth Cosmo is huge -- 6 foot 7 and 220 pounds the last time he was weighed, at a detention facility in Long Beach, California on June 26. And yet he’s getting bigger, because Cosmo -- also known as Cosmo the God, the social-engineering mastermind who weaseled his way past security systems at Amazon, Apple, AT&T, PayPal, AOL, Netflix, Network Solutions, and Microsoft -- is just 15 years old. He turns 16 next March, and he may very well do so inside a prison cell. Cosmo was arrested along with dozens of others in a recent multi-state FBI sting targeting credit card fraud. Wired

 

Intel’s Haswell is an unprecedented threat to Nvidia, AMD Intel's next-generation architecture, codenamed Haswell, isn’t just another "tock" in Intel's tick/tock cadence; it’s a serious threat to both AMD and Nvidia. For the first time, Intel is poised to challenge both companies in the mainstream graphics market while simultaneously eroding Nvidia’s edge in the GPGPU business. Its low-power, 10W TDP ULV parts will challenge the price/performance ratio of AMD’s second-generation Brazos SoC (codenamed Kabini) as well as any ARM-based Windows 8 notebooks... ExtremeTech

 

Anonymous’ Barrett Brown raided by FBI during online chat For the second time this year, self-proclaimed Anonymous spokesman Barrett Brown was raided by the FBI. The latest dramatic incident occurred late Wednesday evening while Brown and another woman identified by some as his girlfriend were participating in an online chat on TinyChat with other individuals. Two minutes into the recorded chat session, loud voices could be heard in the background of Brown’s residence in Texas while the woman in the room with him was in front of the computer screen. Wired

 

The iPhone 5's A6 SoC: Not A15 or A9, a custom Apple core instead When Apple announced the iPhone 5, Phil Schiller officially announced what had leaked several days earlier: the phone is powered by Apple's new A6 SoC. As always, Apple didn't announce clock speeds, CPU microarchitecture, memory bandwidth or GPU details. It did however give us an indication of expected CPU performance. Prior to the announcement we speculated the iPhone 5's SoC would simply be a higher clocked version of the 32nm A5r2 used in the iPad 2,4. AnandTech

 

Nvidia confirms departure of mobile-chip chief Nvidia, a chip maker that grew up around the personal-computer industry, has made some headway lately in moving its technology into newer-wave mobile devices. But the man who spearheaded that effort has quietly departed. Mike Rayfield, general manager of Nvidia’s mobile business unit, resigned effective Aug. 24 to take a role at another company, said Hector Marinez, an Nvidia spokesman, in an emailed response. Details about the new job have not been disclosed yet, Marinez added. The WSJ

 

Who wants to be a billionaire? Twice a year, close to 200 teams of aspiring tech entrepreneurs, most in their 20s, converge on Mountain View, in Silicon Valley, vying for a spot at Y Combinator, the seven-year-old seed-funding firm–cum–accelerator co-founded by venture investor Paul Graham. Their dream: becoming the next Y.C.-backed sensation, like Dropbox, Airbnb, or OMGPOP. In an adaptation from his new book, Randall Stross follows one of the summer 2011 start-ups from tryout to “Demo Day,” to see what it takes. Vanity Fair

 

MGM, 'Narnia' producer pick up rights to Russian sci-fi novel 'Metro 2033' MGM has picked up the screen rights to Metro 2033, a Russian sci-fi novel by Dmitry Glukhovsky, setting F. Scott Frazier to pen the script. Mark Johnson, whose credits include The Chronicles of Narnia movies and Galaxy Quest, is producing via his Gran Via Productions. The story is set in 2033, after a nuclear holocaust devastates Moscow and survivors head under ground. The focus is on a young survivor who is forced to go on a journey... The Hollywood Reporter

 

Just Cause 2 multiplayer mod Forget Grand Theft Auto: Just Cause 2 is the ultimate virtual playground for gamers. The lush island of Panau stretches across 400 square miles of territory - roughly the same size as Hong Kong, except somebody drew it. You can fly stealth bombers, steal boats, ride monster trucks. Your player, Rico, is equipped with a grappling hook and a parachute by default. And it has a multiplayer mode which can support more than 1,800 players at a time on the same server. RedBull

 

USB cables could power PCs, peripherals Today, you likely charge your phone with a USB cable. Tomorrow, you might well use one to charge your laptop and other devices. With a new Universal Serial Bus technology called Power Delivery (USB PD), Intel and its allies hope the ubiquitous cable will become even more widespread. "One USB cable does it all," said Brad Saunders and Bob Dunstan, two Intel architects in a presentation at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco this week. CNET

 

Firefox OS: Disrupting the market by aiming low! With this week's hulaballoo around the iPhone 5, it’s tempting to dismiss Firefox OS, the mobile operating system from browser maker Mozilla. But of the two, Firefox OS is the one which aims to shake things up -- while the new iPhone is just an update. Why do we need another OS when the existing ones are fighting so hard for market share, and previously strong players like RIM are going down the drain? TechWeekEurope

 

Elon Musk, the 21st century industrialist On Fridays, Elon Musk gathers his engineers in an old hangar in Los Angeles. The building, next to a municipal airport a couple miles south of the Hollywood Park race track and casino, is now a research and development facility for Musk’s electric car company, Tesla Motors (TSLA). Musk uses these meetings to check the team’s progress and give straightforward, often withering, design critiques. Businessweek

 

The software patent solution has been right here all along Software patents have been an agent of change in open source over the last decade, as I explained in my keynote at the 8th International Conference on Open Source Systems this week. Most notably, the astonishing proliferation of software patents has forced technology companies to spend a lot of time and energy assembling defensive portfolios. InfoWorld

Final version of Office for Windows RT to land in November

Microsoft has offered up some fresh details about the upcoming release of Office for Windows RT. In a post at the Office Next blog yesterday, the company re-confirmed that the tablet-focused productivity software optimized for ARM processors will come pre-installed on Windows RT devices at no extra cost, but it will be a preview version of Office Home & Student 2013 containing Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote.

 

It’s unclear if this means Microsoft expects the software to be buggy and crash prone initially, or if some features will be missing. That said, all customers will eventually receive an upgrade to the final version of the suite for free via Windows Update starting in early November through January depending on their language.

Office Home & Student 2013 RT will only run in Windows RT machines and will not be sold as a stand-alone product. It was built from the same code base as the versions of Office for computers running traditional x86 chips from Intel and AMD, and offers "the vast majority" of the features available in the full PC version.

 

Microsoft says Windows RT tablets have special requirements for security, reliability, and battery life, thus some differences with x86 version are unavoidable. Here's the list of features missing for ARM users:

 

Macros, add-ins, and features that rely on ActiveX controls or 3rd party code such as the PowerPoint Slide Library ActiveX control and Flash Video Playback

Certain legacy features such as playing older media formats in PowerPoint (upgrade to modern formats and they will play) and editing equations written in Equation Editor 3.0, which was used in older versions of Office (viewing works fine)

Certain email sending features, since Windows RT does not support Outlook or other desktop mail applications (opening a mail app, such as the mail app that comes with Windows RT devices, and inserting your Office content works fine)

Creating a Data Model in Excel 2013 RT (PivotTables, QueryTables, Pivot Charts work fine)

Recording narrations in PowerPoint 2013 RT

Searching embedded audio/video files, recording audio/video notes, and importing from an attached scanner with OneNote 2013 RT (inserting audio/video notes or scanned images from another program works fine)

The company will disclose more details on October 26, the day Windows 8 and Windows RT officially debut.

 

Intel lowers third quarter revenue outlook due to weak demand

It’s been a tough year for PC manufacturers as they continue to struggle with declining sales thanks to a number of issues, including but not limited to consumer interest in tablets and other mobile devices. Even the world’s largest semiconductor chip maker is feeling the effects as Intel was just forced tolower their third-quarter revenue outlook once again.

During their second quarter earnings call in July, Intel said their third quarter outlook declined just slightly to $14.3 billion which would still have tied their previous earnings record. Now Chipzilla expects revenue for the third quarter to be $13.2 billion, plus or minus $300 million. The company cites reduced inventory in the supply chain, softness in the enterprise PC market segment and a slow demand in emerging markets as specific reasons for the new forecast. Intel notes that their data center business is meeting expectations, however.

Third quarter gross margin has been pushed to 62 percent, down a single percentage point from the previous expectation. They point out that expectations for R&D and MG&A spending remain unchanged. Full-year capital spending is also expected to drop below the low-end of their previous outlook of $12.1 billion to $12.9 billion.

It’s worth pointing out that the third quarter outlook doesn’t include the effect of any acquisitions, divestitures or other transactions that may or may not take place following today’s announcement. Furthermore, Intel has withdrawn all other quarterly and full-year expectations and will update those accordingly when they report third quarter earnings on October 16.

Microsoft's "Bing It On" search-off pits Bing against Google

Firmly believing in the power of Bing, Microsoft is daring skeptics to compare its own search results against those of its arch nemesis, Google. The company's "Bing it On" initiative provides a blind, side-by-side challenge between the rivals, selecting the winning search engine based on five user-performed searches. For each query, users are asked to select their favored results; however, they won't know which search engine produced them until the end of the test.

Microsoft has been investing heavily in Bing, carving itself out a chunk of the search and advertising market -- a highly profitable arena which, unfortunately for Microsoft, remains overwhelmingly Google's domain. In fall 2011, we noted that Bing's operation was losing Microsoft nearly a billion dollars per quarter and a whopping $5 billion between 2009 and 2011.

In the face of Google's empire, Microsoft has also made a number of bold moves to invigorate Bing: its deal with Yahoo, Facebook and Twitter integration, generous rewards and cashback programs and even utilizing its competitors search results to enhance its own.

I would like to add that my own search-off concluded with Google winning 4 out of 5 results. I made several varied queries (e.g. answers to an obscure Windows XP problem, a good coffee grinder, a recent news item and so forth). The one query where Google did not win had been marked as a "draw" due to identical results. 

Although Bing is clearly a bad match for my own tastes, some readers may find it better suits their own needs. Microsoft is claiming that nearly twice as many people prefer Bing's results to Google. Feel free to take the testand let us know what you discover.

Synchronize Text Notes Between Windows, Mac And The Cloud

Note-taking is a highly productive activity, and when it comes to jotting down your notes and appointments, Evernote is simply an unparalleled contender (okay, there’s also OneNote, but then again, it’s not available for free). Evernote has flourished the concept of how we can annotate and synchronize our work across different devices, making it at our disposal wherever we go. We have covered plentiful alternative note management applications for all major platforms as well, such as CintaNotes, which syncs notes in real-time via Dropbox. Today, we have another one for you called Notee. Akin to Evernote, the application effectively syncs your notes and other agenda between Windows and Mac machines (no Android or iOS love yet). Along with that, it provides remote storage access through the web browser, for which you’d obviously need a Notee user account first.

You can either complete the sign up process through web or from within the desktop client, whichever seems suitable. After successfully signing up (which doesn’t even require a confirmation email), enter your User Name and Password into the application and click the login button to get started.

The interface of Notee is not something jaw-dropping, as it looks plain and simple. There’s a preview panel to the right, which displays all the saved notes, as well as provides preview of the content itself. The feature that is quite commendable however, is its integrated calendar (Evernote lacks any calendar integration). This calendar provides legend symbols for Notes and Scheduling (N and S, respectively), so you can easily keep an eye on your day to day agenda. You can either click New on the toolbar or Double-click your preferred date to store a new note.

All the notes writing and scheduling takes place in a separate window. To store a new note, simply input its Title, Time, Type (note or schedule) and enter your note in the text body. The application doesn’t allow attaching any multimedia content with the entries, so all you can do is write the textual information only. Once done, click the Save button to the right to store the note.

Notee automatically syncs all the locally saved notes with your user account in the cloud. Not only can you view your notes by logging into Notee’s webpage, but you can also edit or delete them, should you so need to. It offers the same calendar layout that is found the desktop client, and a Note List to the right for instant access.

Notee is far from being as impressive as our favorite Evernote is, but a few features, like the built-in calendar and event scheduling, make it stand apart. The application works on Windows and Mac OS X, with the Android version currently under development.

Download Notee

Nitroshare or Share Files On A Network With Computers Running Different Operating Systems

Ask most people how do they share files among different computers on the LAN and they will say, using Windows built-in file sharing feature. Well, it all makes sense, as this solution is easy to configure as well as hassle free, but what if your computers are running different operating systems? For instance, if you want to transfer files from a Windows PC to Mac and vice versa, you may need to configure SMB sharing options on Mac to view and access files shared on your Windows PC, but as we all know, Mac OS X often fails to identify Windows PC on the network and one has to restart the system to let it identify all connected nodes. Today, we came across a simple file sharing tool called Nitroshare that lets you easily share files across the network. The application can be easily configured within a few simple clicks, and doesn’t require users to configure OS-specific file sharing settings.

After downloading and installing the program on your systems, run the executable file and follow the onscreen instructions. If you don’t know where to begin, select Help me set up Nitroshare and click Next.

After entering the machine name on both of your PCs, click Next. Make sure both machines are running this wizard. In the last step, use the notification slider to adjust event alerts and then click Finish to complete Nitroshare’s setup wizard.

Now that you have successfully configured the setup, the rest of the work is just a piece of cake. There are two methods to send your files and folders. The first one is a lot easier. Nitroshare creates a miniscule file sharing box on your desktop. All you need is to drag the files over this box to receive it from other connected system.

The other method is to use its system tray menu; select the PC to which you want to send the file. The context menu allows you to send either a file or a whole directory.

The Accept Files dialog box appears on the recipient’s PC, containing a list of files that are being shared. Clicking Yes begins the transfer process.

You may also configure a few application-specific options from the Settings window. It has General, Appearance, Notifications, Security and Network tabs. For instance, you can toggle a few display notifications from Notifications tab. The Security tab allows you to specify security parameters for acceptance of files, while from Network tab, you can configure Broadcast and TCP settings.

Nitroshare works on Windows, Mac OSX and Linux. Testing was carried out on Windows 7, 64-bit edition.

Download Nitroshare