By Whitson Gordon, Lifehacker – March 13, 2010 at 03:00PM
Often, even if we do catch a virus, it’s not so difficult to eradicate it using installed antivirus—but if your system has been crippled, try using Linux to scan the drive for viruses instead. More »
By Vladislav Savov, Engadget RSS Feed – March 12, 2010 at 01:43PM
We talk about the FCC a lot here, but usually the ways ye olde Commission affects our lives are indirect. A little extra spectrum here, a nice leaked image there, that kind of thing. Not this time, though, as the FCC is getting involved directly with its own Consumer Broadband Test app, designed to probe network latencies and download speeds on your home connection or mobile device. Part of the hallowed National Broadband Plan, this will furnish the FCC will useful data to show the discrepancy between advertised and real world broadband speeds, and will also — more importantly perhaps — serve as a neat way for users to directly compare network performance in particular areas. It’s available on the App Market and App Store right now, with versions for other operating systems coming up, so why not get with the program and give it a test drive?
FCC comes through with a Consumer Broadband Test app for iPhone, Android and the home originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 12 Mar 2010 13:43:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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By Tina, MakeUseOf – March 11, 2010 at 06:31PM
April is coming up and you know what that means, don’t you? April Fools’ Day will be celebrated around the globe on April 1st. For you that means that it’s time to prepare pranks to play on your friends!
If you have friends that live too far away to literally play a practical joke on them, you could send them an email instead. Here is a list of 6 scary emails to send to friends.
Do you know someone who is scared easily? Then you don’t have to come up with anything smart, you can simply send them a scary story just in time for bedtime. Maybe spice it up by adding some pictures or by sending it anonymously. Scary For Kids has a neat collection of scary stories.
Dead Fake is a service that lets you send anonymous emails. That alone is not a prank. The thing with this site is that you can make your email appear to come from anyone you choose. Do I need to say more?
You could pretend to be your friend’s boss or a government official and I’m sure you can come up with content that will scare your friend. After all, you know them best!
If you’re short of ideas, check out this Prank Ideas site.
Do you have a friend who is very proud of their “visual acuity”? Send them this “Find the Fiend” gauge to reveal how well their eyesight is. It will show them just how much higher-than-average their perception skills really are.
A similar page better suited for a younger audience is Where’s Waldo.
For this one to work, you have to embed the code on a website or one of your social network profiles and then send your friend the link. Unfortunately, the source website gives quite a few clues to this being a fake test. However, if you manage to set this up somewhere, it’s one of the most scary tests to email a friend. Fortunately, the code to embed the test is included.
A similar test is Color Vision Deficiency.
This is a website prank. The site claims that the National Motor Vehicle License Organization is now required by law to provide public access to all US driver’s licenses online. It’s the perfect prank to play on someone who has been refusing to show you their passport or driver’s license with the claim that their picture was so ugly. You can now tell them how shocked you were by how ugly their photo really was.
WOT warns that this page has a poor reputation. Well, does it really surprise you?
If you want to scare someone in the UK, take advantage of this ingenious video generator. Be sure to enter your victim’s full name, their real age range, an actual occupation, and a real characteristic of them into the form.
Your friend will receive a link to icetruck.tv, a video webpage. The video is that of a press conference in which a serial murder is described with hints to potential future victims. At the end of the video the prank is revealed, so no reasons to worry.
The preview for the video did not work for me, the link that is emailed, however, worked perfectly.
Do you want to remain anonymous when sending scary emails to friends?
Are you looking for more scary stuff? Here is some material for you:
If, however, you’re looking for more pranks to play, check out these articles:
What is the best prank you ever played on someone?
Image credits: svilen001
Got Tech Questions? Ask Them on MakeUseOf Answers!
By Erez Zukerman, Download Squad – March 11, 2010 at 02:40PM
Filed under: Developer
Rejex is a very handy little site for building and testing regular expressions on the fly. It’s composed of four simple text boxes and a very informative cheat sheet (not shown above, but after the jump). You feed your text into the “Test String” box (the middle one), and then your expression into the top box, and immediately see the matches in the bottom box. Here I am searching for instances of the letter “o” which are either at the beginning or the end of a word, so I got a match for “over” but not for “fox”.
Half the tool’s value lies with the informative cheat sheet, showing you exactly what each regex character does. I would have been happy for some “popular regexes” such as “matching an email address” and “matching a US phone number” etc, but even so, this is definitely a tool I am going to bookmark for future use.
Rejex lets you craft regular expressions on-the-fly originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 11 Mar 2010 14:40:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Regular expression – Programming – Languages – Download Squad – Perl
By bkuchera@arstechnica.com (Ben Kuchera), Ars Technica – March 11, 2010 at 02:38PM
Cybertron isn’t just the homeworld of the Transformers… it is a Transformer itself. It was the first Transformer. In War for Cybertron you get to explore the Civil War between the Autobots and the Decepticons as they blast their way across the planet. At GDC we were treated to a long demo of the game, and yes, it looks good.
The characters were given all-new designs, and some of them will in fact be made into toys. The game takes place before Optimus gains his “Prime” designation, and shows his early days of gaining the trust of the Autobots; we get to see just how he learned to be a leader on the battleground. On the flip side of things, the game explores how Megatron met Star Scream. “We also explore why Megatron keeps this guy, who is basically a back-stabber, around,” we were told. This game is taking the Transformers lore back to basics, and filling in some serious holes.
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By Sebastian Anthony, Download Squad – March 11, 2010 at 11:30AM
Filed under: Internet, Google, web 2.0
In a move that is surely reminiscent of Microsoft and Bing’s emphasis on VISUAL RESULTS (did you see Pivot?!), Google has just launched a new feature for its Reader. It’s called Reader Play, and it lets you click through all of the goodies that the Internet has to offer (or at least the bits of the Internet that Google has deemed ‘cool’) in a sharp, fast, and minimalist black interface. Yes, this might just be Google’s first non-white-background interface.
It seemingly has nothing to do with your own RSS feeds, either. In fact, other than the ability to ‘share’ or ‘like’ items, it really doesn’t resemble Google Reader at all. Presumably, Google Reader Play builds upon the ‘magic’ sorting and ‘exploration’ that the Google Reader team implemented back in October 2009; it’s probably just a new UI over the same functionality.
The UI is nice though, and I have to admit that the ‘exploration’ feature in Google Reader is something I often use. If you’re really lazy, or if you just want to watch something hands-free while you eat your breakfast cereal, there’s even an option for an automatic slideshow. Give Reader Play a go, or go read the official announcement if you want more info.
[via Lifehacker]
Google super-charges Reader and turns it into an Interwebs slideshow originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 11 Mar 2010 11:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Google Reader – Google – Google Reader Play – Microsoft – Bing
By Kevin Purdy, Lifehacker – March 10, 2010 at 11:00AM
It’s long been one of Google Map’s most requested features, and now it’s here. Recreational cyclists and bike commuters alike can plot cycle-friendly routes, find trails, and avoid snarling traffic with Google Maps’ Bicycle layer. More »
By Jason Clarke, Download Squad – March 09, 2010 at 03:00PM
Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Adobe, Freeware, Open Source
Synergy is a cross-platform, open source application that allows you to navigate between multiple computer systems using a single mouse. Each system has its own screen, and once Synergy is installed and configured correctly, you can simply move your mouse to the edge of one screen and watch it seamlessly jump to another screen, which is a completely different computer.
We’ve talked about Synergy before, but unfortunately, development on it stagnated in 2006. Thankfully, there is a project on Google Code called Synergy+ which has taken the source code of the original Synergy, written by Chris Schoeneman, and updated it with numerous bug fixes. The team behind Synergy+ seems to want to continue improving the product, and they would welcome Schoeneman back, even to the extent of hoping that he would merge the two projects if he ever returned to active development on Synergy.
Synergy+ shares one mouse and keyboard between multiple computers originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 09 Mar 2010 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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OpenSource – Download Squad – Google – Microsoft Windows – Windows
By Adam Pash, Lifehacker – March 09, 2010 at 03:00PM
Hey there Lifehacker RSS readers! Starting today, as passed down from above, Lifehacker’s default RSS feed is switching from a full-item feed to an excerpt-only feed. Don’t panic! You can still get the full feed back. More »
By (author unknown), MacNN | The Macintosh News Network – March 09, 2010 at 02:35PM
Alchemist Guild has launched a new backup application for the Mac, Warehouse 1.0. The tool is built on Unix utilities and relies on a single-window interface for backing up files, whether to external hard drives, USB memory sticks or other Macs on a network. Any number of assigned tasks can be set, with options source folders, destination locations and up to four different backup modes….
