Speed up your internet (for free) with Ashampoo Internet Accelerator 2!

Ashampoo is a great company; they make great software and also they offer great promos for us to get their quality software for free.

The topic of this post is another Ashampoo freebie: Internet Accelerator 2. The purpose of Internet Accelerator 2 is to help you load web pages quicker by optimizing your connection; and the great thing is it actually works! For example, GOTD loaded quicker by approx. 1.5 seconds after I optimized my internet connection (using IE7). Although some of you might not get the same result (results will vary depending on the website you visit, your internet connection type, and the geographical difference between your computer and the server which hosts the website you visit), Internet Accelerator is really worth a try, especially as it’s now free. Here is a more detailed description from the developer on the features of this software:

A slow internet connection costs time and gets on your nerves. For this reason, taking the time to optimise the settings is almost considered a must – particularly since an optimisation in terms of speed doesn’t come with any additional cost, neither for a hardware extension nor for the software, as the Ashampoo Internet Accelerator 2 can be used completely free of charge.

The program allows a fully automatic setting of the most important parameters. To achieve this, communicating the method used for internet access to the Ashampoo Internet Accelerator 2 on the part of the user is sufficient:

Analogue modem

ISDN

DSL via LAN cable or cable modem

DSL via wireless LAN

Other LAN connections (no DSL)

This system means that the program gets the very last drop of performance out of the internet connection. When using a modem and an ISDL connection, the improvements in performance are particularly noticeable – a reason for celebration. With a DSL connection, the tuning result isn’t quite as impressive, as there are fewer things which need adjusting in order to provide an optimisation. Nonetheless, it is still the case here that every percentage of extra performance means better internet surfing.

So, how do you get this great program for free?

Visit the promotion page [click here] and fill in your email address. Ashampoo spams with their “service letters”, so feel free to use a temp email address from Mailinator, 10MinuteMail, or Trashmail. After you enter your e-mail, click “Send” and check your e-mail inbox. If you are a new Ashampoo customer, you will first need to “verify” your account; look for an e-mail from from “Ashampoo <MrReg@ashampoo.com” with the subject of “Registration (Step 1) …”. There will be a link in the e-mail for you to visit and verify your account:

Follow the link in this email and verify your account. After you have verified your account, or if you are not a new Ashampoo customer, check your inbox. You should have an e-mail from “Ashampoo <MrReg@ashampoo.com>” with a subject of “Your registration – Ashampoo® Internet Accelerator 2 (English)”. In this e-mail you will find your registration code. It should look like this:

Copy the registration code or save it in a secure place. Now go to download Internet Accelerator 2 from HERE and install it with your reg key. Enjoy!

[How To] run your high-requirement game without those graphic glitches

Some newer games, such as PES 2009 and GTA 4 require a lot of system resources and a higher-end PC to run. Even when your PC meets those requirements, sometimes the games run slowly and the graphics shows glitches because of some other resource hungry processes interfering with your game. The post will introduce a solution to this problem.

Every program you run, and some that automatically run in the background, create processes that may consume memory that interferes with your gameplay. To terminate those processes open Windows Task Manager by pressing CTRL-ALT-DELTE.

After the Task Manager shows up, click on the “Processes” Tab. If you have not previously cleaned some unused startup items using STARTER or another startup manager, you might find there are a whole lot of resource hogging processes. Now sort the processes according to “User Name” by clicking on the header of the “User Name” column.

All of the processes belonging to your user name except “explorer.exe” can be ended by highlighting the process and clicking “End Process” at the bottom-right corner of the Task Manager. Click yes to confirm.

Now, run your game. Afterwards, pause the game and use ALT-TAB to return to the desktop. Open Task Manager again using CTRL-ALT-DELTE. Go to the “Process” tab again, and find your game process. The name should be same to the game executable. For example, Pro Evolution Soccer 6 would be “pes6.exe”.

Right click on that entry, then “Set Priority” and click “Real Time”. That should make the game run as fast as possible that your PC can allow. Enjoy playing your games faster!

Note: If you terminate the wrong process(es), just do a force reboot, and the processes will rerun themselves.

[How To] Provide E-Mail Subscriptions For Your Blog Or Site

Description: This post aims to describe a way to provide Email subscriptions (daily) for your sites/blog’s readers using Google FeedBurner. The site used is my Blogging buddy’s blog, SoccerMatch. He asked me for advice on this topic, so I decided to write this tutorial in parallel to setting up subscription service for his site.

Firstly, new bloggers or site-owners might need to know what is a “feed”. There are several kinds of popular feeds on the Internet today, namely RSS (most commonly translated as “Really Simple Syndication” but sometimes “Rich Site Summary”) and Atom. These provide postings and updatings information for a “feed reader” that which can interpret can show that data as site content to the subscriber. These feeds need specific “readers”, either desktop-based, e.g. the Windows Vista “Feed” sidebar widget, or online-based, like My Yahoo! or Google Reader. FeedBurner can convert those feeds into emails so that the subscribers need not use a feed reader. To set up a email feed, follow the steps mentioned below.

First, set up an account at FeedBurner, or you can log in with your Google Account since FeedBurner is a subservice that Google acquired in 2006. After you login, type in your blog/site home page (including the slash “/” at the end) in the box provided (see screenshot on the right).

Click Next and the “initial options page” is shown. You can type in your feed title (i.e. the title shown in every email update sent), and the feed address, which is added to the end of “http://feeds.feedburner.com/.&#8221;
In our example, I typed in “soccermatch”, so the full feed address will become http://feeds.feedburner.com/soccermatch. After you’ve finished, click next again.

You can click next again to additional services. This will be covered later, so let’s click “skip directly to feed management”.

Here you can do anything you want with your feed, but, as to make it simple, we’ll just set up a sidebar widget on the blog for feeds. Different blogging platforms will make different methods to install a link, but we need to get the code first. To do this, click “Publicize” on top of the page.

Then, click “Email Subscription” on the side of the page (see screenshot for link location). Click “Activate” on the next page.

Now you have your code in the next page! There are two options. You can choose to insert a form or a link to subscription page. Inserting a form causes some problems with some themes, so you’d better choose link (the latter option on the page). Now copy that code, and paste into a new HTML/Text widget in WordPress. If you don’t know how to do this, see this page.

For other sites, you just have to copy the code on any site template, it’ll automatically show up.

After you add your code and widget, a link to subscribe to your site/blog will appear in your sidebar. Click the link and a form will appear to allow readers to subscribe to your blog/site. There are also a lot of additional features that FeedBurner provides. You can investigate yourself, or check back later to see a new article about the features of FeedBurner. To see what the resulting email looks like, subscribe to your own blog!

Update on yesterday’s post — More info on the battle of smart phones

 

When the concept ‘mobile phone,’ and the actual device were introduced around 30 years ago, people were amazed by the idea that one could build audio communication with others without the limitations and boundaries of location. (Quote THE STANDARD, an acclaimed English newspaper in Hong Kong.)

Nowadays mobile phones go far beyond; from video conferencing, word processing to online banking, this little device can do it all. It is a market that anyone would want a piece of, and different venders have been very active in providing new platforms, functions and devices to gain advantage in this enormous battleground.

One of the hottest topics in the mobile world lately must be the bang Apple iPhone brought to the market, and it continued to heat up in the past two years. From iPhone 2G to the latest iPhone 3GS, each launch has created huge expectations, and in reality its market is still expanding rapidly. According to the latest data from Gartner, Apple’s share of worldwide smart phone sales grew from 5.3% in the first quarter of 2008 to 10.8% in the first quarter of 2009. Gaining over 10% of the global market within two years is indeed very impressive, but what’s more significant is that in some sense this figure is created by one product only (if we consider all versions of iPhone as one). The 50000+ applications available for download also suggest the new market trend Apple has set.

Another smart phone that the market has showed great interest in is Sprint’s Palm Pre. Even though there are concerns about lacking in applications in the App Catalog, and no access to the webOS SDK(software development kit) by developers, Palm Pre still sold out fast when available in the US recently. Some critics believe the impressive sales of Palm Pre were largely related to current Sprint customers looking for an upgrade, rather than a flow of new Sprint subscribers, but the solid selling number shows its first stage of success, and there are huge noises of interest from countries and markets including Hong Kong, which are yet to have a scheduled launch date.

RIM
Another leading smart phone platform, Research In Motion’s Blackberry, also has a fruitful year. In the previous fiscal quarter, RIM’s $3.42 billion revenue increased 53% from $2.24 billion in the same quarter of last year, and shipped approximately 7.8 million devices After promoting ‘consumer models’ Blackberry curve 8900 and Blackberry Storm, RIM turned their focus back to business users, and launched Blackberry Enterprise Server 5.0 recently. BES 5.0 is a push-based server software, focusing on enhancing the connection link between BlackBerry smart phones and enterprise systems, applications, corporate phone environments and wireless networks. It integrates with IBM Lotus Domino, Microsoft Exchange, and Novell GroupWise, providing highly secured access to email, organizer data, instant messaging, browser and other enterprise applications.

President Obama’s insistence on keeping his BlackBerry device is a great example (especially for RiM) showing how tightly BlackBerry could merge into one’s life and BES 5.0 plus future launches would definitely stick to this angle.

All these platforms have their own advantages and supporters; along with the Android ‘Google’ phone, Windows mobile 7.0 platform, Nok ia’s partnership with 1nte, the haule of smart phones has probably lust began.

Program Contest for Windows Mobile? Trying to look like iPhone?!

iPhone’s success might be partly due to the vast array of imaginative and entertaining software for that platform, so Microsoft are doing the best to persuade the community to make software of iPhone in the form of a “Windows Mobile Software Contest” that is going to be held worldwide. This means that Microsoft are eager to excavate new software for the Windows Mobile.

Anyone aged 16 or above, irrespective of nationalities is eligible to join. Each team of contestants may consist of a maximum of 5 individuals. Individual, team, organizations and corporate entries are also welcome. The winner(s) will be provided for download on the Winodws Marketplace for download from September onwards.

A successful program should achieve a balance among the following aspects: creativity, functionality, aesthetic design, interface operation, usability and entertainment factors. It is suggested that team members may divide their respective roles as below: (It is not a must to have all these roles in a team)

Ø   Playwright: Create characters and arrange the storyboard.

Ø   Research: Collect and consolidate information the program requires.

Ø   Interface Graphic: Arrange interface elements and design graphics.

Ø   Programming: Determine data structure, program code and server.

Ø   Debugging: Testing and debugging the program and suggest improvements.

Each team is required to appoint a team leader. The team leader will be the only eligible person to claim any prizes of this Contest. The Organizers will not be involved in any prize assign issues within the team.

Go to www.windowsmobilecontest.com/en/ for more information.

False Twitter Invitations Leading to Spyware?

I’m sure some of the people who read this post follow “Welcome to the Underground” Blog and maybe other blogs  by Twitter. However, did you know that some hackers send false Twitter invitations to lure people into installing spyware or downloading viruses?

Ever since Twitter became the major channel for information spread by Iran presidential election protestors, its popularity has rocketed upwards. Even the news of the Phoenix discovering ice on Mars was first announced on Twitter. However, all good things have a bad side. Cyber criminals are now sending false Twitter invitations to prompt installation of Trojans and virus worms!

From the format and content, the false invitations looks like that it’s a real one sent by the Twitter official site. However, if you look at it closely, you’ll find that the false invitation does not have the “inviting” link in contrary to the real invitations. In its place is a link that downloads a file called “invitation.zip” in the background that you cannot control, and lures the people who are considering joining Twitter into downloading the virus contained in the “invitation.zip”.

The virus in that zip file has been identified as a worm” W32.Ackantta.B@mm” by ESET nod32 antivirus (it’s definitelyNOT an email address!). This worm earlier appeared in February’s invitation card attack, which collects email addresses from the infected computers, and copies itself to those multiple addresses (this is how it’s supposed to work, but it’s usually blocked 90% by stronger av programs such as ESET or AVG).

I remind readers to upgrade their antivirus and communication software to prevent getting infected.

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Spam emails — are you as silly as to believe them??

All right. Spam is rogue and unauthorized email that lures you into providing personal and private information, such as your job, credit card number, ID number by making you believe that you are about to win something that you would like, e.g. a car, money, or a gift of some kind.

Yesterday, I received this spam email, and had to laugh at the falseness of it. However, some novices might be tricked, so that I am going to quote it here.

From The Desk Of Ben Coroma. The Head Of File Department,
African Development Bank (A.D.B).
Ouagadougou Burkina-Faso West Africa.
Forgive my indignation if this message comes to you as a surprise and may offend your personality for contacting you without your prior consent and writing through this channel.I got your contact from the proffesional data base found in the internet Yahoo tourist search.When i was searching for a foreign reliable partner.I assured of your capability and reliability to champion this business opportunity. After series of prayers/fasting.i was divinely directed to contact you among other names found in the data base Yahoo tourist search.I believe that God has a way of helping who is in need. I am (Ben Coroma,the Head of file Department in African development bank (ADB).
In my department we discovered an abandoned sum of $15 million U.S.A dollars ( fifteen million U.S.A dollars) . In an account that belongs to one of our foreign customer who died along with all his family in the Asia Earth Quake Disaster (TSUNAMI DISASTER IN INDONESIA/INDIA http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2004/tsunami.disaster/ .All of his Family lost there lives in the Disaster. Since then I have made several inquiries to his Country embassy to locate any of his client’s extended Relatives, this has proved unsuccessful. After these several unsuccessful attempts, unfortunately we learnt that all his supposed next of kin or relation died along side with him at the TSUNAMI DISASTER IN INDONESIA/INDIA leaving nobody behind for the claim. It is therefore upon this discovery that I and one official in my department now decided to make this business proposal to you and release the money to you as the next of kin or relation to the deceased for safety and subsequent disbursement since nobody is coming for it and we don’t want this money to go into the bank treasury as unclaimed bill.

The Banking law and guideline here stipulates that if such money remained unclaimed after five (5) years, the money will be transferred into the Bank treasury as unclaimed fund. The request of foreigner as next of kin in this business is occasioned by the fact that the customer was a foreigner, and a Burkinabe cannot stand as next of kin to a foreigner. We agree that 40% of this money will be for you as foreign partner, in respect to the provision of a foreign account,and 60% would be for me and my woman colleague. That means ($6 million)  six million dollars for you,and ($9 million) nine million dollars for me and my partner.There after i will visit your country for disbursement according to the percentages indicated.

All I require is your honest cooperation to enable us seeing this deal through. I guarantee that this will be executed under a legitimate arrangement that will protect you from any breach of the law. Please consider my official positions, reputation and integrity, especially, the opportunities in the business itself, it is very necessary that all due care be taken so that we do not miss the opportunity due to carelessness. You are therefore expected and advised to display high degree of maturity, responsibility and understanding in handling this information. I will give you all the details in my next mail when you have indicated your interest and commitment to work with me. Always remember that this is the highest confidence and trust any person can repose on the other, especially when it is considered that we did not know ourselves I hope you will honor me too. I will come over to join you in your Country for disbursement when the funds hit your account. More so for an effective and easy communication I will advice that you furnish me with your telephone and fax number.Upon receipt of your reply, I will send to you by fax or email the text of the application I will not fail to bring to your notice that this transaction is hitch free and that you should not entertain any atom of fear as all required arrangements have been made for the transfer.

Your’s faithfully,

Ben Coroma. FROM (ADB) OUAGADOUGOU BURKINA-FASO. GOD BLESSINGS,PROTECTIONS AND GUIDIANCE TO YOUR ENTIRE FAMILY. (FILL THIS FORM BELLOW PLEASE AND RESEND IT TO ME). 1) Your Full Name……………………….. 2) Your Age………………………………… 3) Marital Status………………………….. 4) Your Cell Phone Number………….. 5) Your Fax Number………………….. 6) Your Country………………………….. 7) Your Occupation………………………. 8) Sex………………………………………… 9) Your Religion…………………………… 10) Your Private E-mail Adress……….. POST SCRITUM: You have to keep everything secret as to enable the transfer to move very smoothly in to the account you will prove to the bank. please write back with my private email adres bbeennccopop@live.fr .

All right, that’s quite absurd, isn’t it? Well, in the financial crisis, my family could really make good use of $6 million, but of course I didn’t believe it. Here are some ways to spot spam email.

• Having “Urgent” or “Emergency” or something similar in the title.
• Not having your name in the email (a legal bank would really have to know your name to do a deal right?)
• Comes from an unknown host, however this does not happen in this case.
• Requires you to fill in personal information.

The above list is not all, also visit here, here and here for more information. Remember, never download attachments from unknown senders, as they might contain spyware.

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Soccer Manager.com — Free soccer/football management online game!

[Note: This review was written by Adrian, the Freeware Elite. You can visit his tech blog at: Freeware Elite.com]

Description: Soccer Manager is a free website on which you can manage a soccer team through your web browser. What make it different from other similar sites is that there is a very realistic transfer market for you to participate in. Actually, it is quite fun to put players on Loan Lists, Transfer lists, or just buy and sell players if agreed. There are also “Free Agents” which are players not owned by any clubs for purchase. There is also a “Score Centre” in which you watch your own matches progress. You need to be signed up to play.

Youtube — Only has name?

The American Times magazine elected the ten worse new tech ideas in the past ten years recently. For those on the list, some of them are quite familiar to most people, such as Vista, Zune, Palm, HD-DVD, Gateway,etc. However, even Youtube is on the list. Why?!

Actually, although Youtube is the largest video sharing site on the planet (now, there are 99 million people in the US that have visited Youtube before, and the total number of videos on the site is 5.9 billion), but Youtube has not yet found it’s regular income source! Google earlier claimed that Youtube, until now, still hasn’t a “real” profit.

Because the Youtube videos generally have bad quality, not much people are willing to advertise on Youtube. Albait the fact that, according to a company in Switzerland, Youtube has a profit of US$240 million, but their total profit was US$-470 million! They will have to triple the profit in order to make the balance! ARGHHH!

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New NDS game: Dolphin Park

[Note: This post was written by Adrian, the Freeware Elite. Visit his tech blog at: Freeware Elite.com]

Nowadays, there are a lot of games on the market about raising cats and dogs, so using this genre of game to get a large audience is very impractical. Starfish-SD is marketing a new game “Welcome to DolphinPark”.  The screenshots clearly show that the aim of the game is to rear dolphins and train them to do stunning tricks and stunts.

When your dolphin performs, it gets coins (money), and those can be used to buy food, equipment and newer, more advanced courses for your dolphin, so that it can perform better.

Also, you can use the self-cam in the NDSi to take a picture of your face, and subsitute the dolphin’s face with yours. The official selling date is not yet defined, but the price will be around 5040 Japanese yen.

Sound like a game you or your children will play?  Leave a comment and let us know how it is!

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