Your PC. Prepared for Anything.
Posts tagged free
Take Control of Your PDF Documents With PDFTK
Mar 31st
There’s a good chance that you use Adobe Acrobat documents in your daily work, school or personal life. They’re very useful for keeping a nicely formatted copy of your information, especially manuals and educational material.
But what if you only need part of a really large PDF document? Or what if you if have a collection of related PDF documents you’d like to merge into a single document? PDFTK will handle these for you, as well as rotate, add a watermark or stamp and (possibly) repair damaged PDF files.
There are several flavors of PDFTK: More >
Untangle for Windows: Step-by-step Setup
Oct 10th
The skinny: Untangle for Windows is a Unified Threat Manager (UTM), which acts as a gateway to filter all web traffic on your small (up to 10 computers) network. It’s available as a free download from Untangle’s site. Untangle for Windows doesn’t need a dedicated computer (it runs in the background). Based on which options you choose, you can block advertisements, stop viruses, allow or block websites (based on category), and have access to these and other commercial-grade technologies that not too long ago were too expensive for the home office/small office.
The configuration we set up is a for a simple home network (see diagram below). The computer where Untangle for Windows is installed must have a wired connection. In our case, all other computers access the network through the wireless router. This way, anyone using your wireless network (for example, a visitor who wants to access your wireless network with their computer) will also benefit from whatever options (virus blocking, advertisement blocking, etc) that you have set up. More >
TinyURL Shortcuts – Look Before You Click!
Aug 25th
TinyURL is a handy service for creating shortcut links from long web addresses (Uniform Resource Locators, or URLs). For example, you’d like to email a very lengthy URL, such as MapQuest directions to your home. If you paste the link in an email, it may look OK to you, but for the person receiving the email, the hyperlink could be broken into multiple lines. This could be inconvenient or confusing to the person you’re emailing.
Instead, you could use TinyURL to create a “shortcut” to the original link. Because this URL is short, the person you’re emailing should be able to click on the TinyURL link with no problem.
How To Be Kind When Sending Shortcuts… More >
Giving that PC Away? Use DBAN to Wipe That Hard Drive Clean
Aug 8th
Photo by Jeff Epp
If you’re going to donate your old PC or sell it, make sure you don’t leave any personal information on the hard drive. The open-source [free for personal use] DBAN (Darik’s Boot and Nuke) will completely and securely wipe your computer’s hard drive.
Another occasion to use DBAN is to completely destroy a virus. While this is a drastic measure, there are some cases when a computer can be infected with a virus so pesky that it can survive a hard drive format. In other words, if you’re dealing with a nasty virus and decide to simply format the drive and reinstall Windows, you might still be facing that virus after all that work. If you’re going to go to the trouble of reinstalling Windows, use DBAN to completely wipe the hard drive clean first.
Preparing Your DBAN Media More >