brijmin on Tech

I have my home desktop set up with applications for a variety of tasks, but when traveling, at work or at a friend’s house (I’m often de facto IT for friends and family) I never seem to have the tools I need. I used to carry around a book of CDs with various applications, but that was bulky and required installation on someone else’s machine. About three years ago I discovered PortableApps.com and now I just carry a thumbdrive with the PortableApps suite — a downloadable collection of freeware and open-source utilities (for PCs only, not Macs) designed to be loaded onto a removable drive.

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The development house Big In Japan has just rolled out its 3.5 update to its ShopSavvy Android app. ShopSavvy is the useful app that allows you to use an Android phone’s camera to scan barcodes and get pricing information. More importantly, it allows you to compare prices of that item to prices on the web, where you’ll many times find a better deal. This new update which the team calls “Rodan” offers 1,000 new retailers and 750,000 new products, is better optimized for battery life and is much faster, I’m told.

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Your days of downloading WAREZ are at an end…

Swedish software firm Global Gaming Factory X this morning announced it has agreed to buy file-sharing service The Pirate Bay for 60 million Swedish crowns (which currently converts to approx. $7.7 million).

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Cc:Betty, a free service that helps organize group email threads, today has secured $1.5 million in seed led by Venrock with investors Seraph Group and Hillsven participating. The company was incubated in Venrock’s offices and officially launched at DEMO in March.

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There are a few widely-accepted ways to anonymize your browsing or torrent activity, but they all have their drawbacks. TOR is free, but it’s poor etiquette to use it for torrents and put a strain on the bandwidth of the nice folks who run TOR servers. Not to mention that it’s incredibly, stupefyingly slow. You could get a VPN, but that’ll cost you. So, what’s the solution to making your torrents free and anonymous, without a huge drag on your transfer speeds? A new open source project called BitBlinder might be the ticket.
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*I hope this title change does not throw anyone for a loop. This new title seems more appropriate for the sites news and content. I scour the net looking for the only the best tech “stuff”. I hope you enjoy your visit here. Drop me a comment if you feel the need, I always enjoy hearing feedback from my visitors.

later techheads,

brijmin

Microsoft has published the Windows 7 SKU or product editions that will be available to end-users. In Windows 7 operating system, higher version (more expensive) of Windows 7 OS automatically includes all features of lower edition (cheaper version). Refer to the Windows 7 – Compare Editions chart below for a list of features for each editions of Windows 7.

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Here are six (seventeen, really, but some are grouped) simple applications that will help – and they’re all free for personal use!

1. PC Decrapifier – A lot of people that drop their systems off for repair say “take out any programs that don’t need to be there.” Well, that’s exactly the kind of crud Decrapifier is designed to get rid of. It compares the programs on your system to a list of known bloatware (Wikipedia definition) and simplifies the removal process.

2. Malware Bytes – Those annoying popups you’re getting? The weird pages you see when you try to search for something in your browser? Malware Bytes does a great job at removing the pests that cause those problems. It’s usually the first program I run on horribly bogged-down computers. After a scan, clean, and reboot, they’re usually much more cooperative.
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Recently I could not play a game that seemed to be in perfect working order just the day before. Well I did some digging and discovered the problem is not unique to me or the AWESOME game i was trying to play. The game in question was Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. What was happening was, I would place the game in the console and it would load a BLACK screen sort of like turning off the console, but I could hear the disk spinning.

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