Month: September 2007

Labor Day really marks the end of summer, the last day when you can slouch in your sofa and do nothing before starting school or getting back to work. Instead of wasting the day having a few beers in front of your TV, how about wasting the day playing a beer bar tending game? Betty’s Beer Bar is a cartoon style role playing game where you need to get rich serving beers to clients as quickly as you can. If you feel a bit stressed about going back to work, Just Relaxing will play some peaceful natural sounds to let you relax. Labor Day is also traditional for political speeches, and with elections coming up next year, there’s plenty to listen to. Set up YouTube Downloader to watch the videos from You Choose ’08 on your desktop.

You might not know this, but an old fashion etiquette discouraged wearing white after Labor Day. If you feel the weight of tradition and are having trouble finding clothes to wear, use Virtual Fashion to design and test out a new wardrobe that isn’t white. Last but not least, and while this might not be the most exciting thing to do, you can use the day to thoroughly clean your PC and improve its performance. TuneUP Utilities is fairly easy to use. It will improve your PC’s memory, remove all unnecessary files and clean up your registry.

September has finally arrived and summer holidays are officially over. Now it’s time to go back to work, class or whatever your daily routine is. But before you begin thinking about early mornings, traffic jams, overcrowded trains and bad-tempered bosses, take a look at your holiday pictures and smile over those sweet memories. Or, even better, make something unique with them and make your summer days last forever. Possibilities are almost endless! You can:

• Create a screensaver with your best photos
• Design a personalized calendar
• Generate a mosaic-style wallpaper
• Create your own online scrapbook
• Have your favorite shot printed (on a mug, card, T-shirt…)
• Design a customized jigsaw puzzle
• Convert a picture into ASCII Art
• Stitch photos together into a panorama
• Record a slideshow on DVD (and watch it on TV)
• Create an online web gallery

Yes, it’s that time of year again: as summer draws to a close (in the Northern Hemisphere, at least), millions of students prepare for their return to full-time education. I’ll admit that I never looked forward to the arrival of September – but then I didn’t have Nick’s excellent blog post about the best software to take to college. He’s packed a lot in there, from geography and math apps to the essential CollegeBAR – probably the best cocktail software in the world.

One of the things I noticed most about my college days was just how much free time I suddenly had. Naturally, this vacuum had to be filled with something other than sleep so like most students, I turned to computer games. One game in particular, actually: SimGolf. Cyril thoughtfully included this colossus in his post about the best golf games ever – and rightly so.

For those not quite so into pitch ‘n’ putt, Elena reviewed the demo for the latest edition of the massive Medal of Honor franchise, ‘Airborne’. It’s a visually stunning game, with levels of realism and adrenaline pretty much unrivalled. This is guaranteed to be one of the games of the year, so get some practice in early!

For mobile phone owners, we’ve got good news. James and Tony had a look at a few applications which can help you secure your phone from viruses, and even deactivate it if stolen. Don’t leave home without it.

That’s it for this week. Have a great weekend – and to those of you about to start college: good luck! Those of you returning, please take it easy on the newbies.

If you’ve got a small file – say a confidential document less than 1.5MB in size – where would you hide it from prying eyes? Most people might put it on an external device and add a lock or code to the folder. However, perhaps the safest place of all is something that harks back to the good-old days of floppy disks. Private Floppy is a small utility that allows you to hide files less than 1.5MB in the boot sector of the disk – somewhere few people are likely to look.

It might sound a bit like something out of a James Bond movie, but it’s a perfect hiding place for highly sensitive data. Private Floppy allows you to view the boot sector – something that you can’t usually do in Windows. Once it’s revealed, you can drag and drop documents into it as you would normally in explorer.

Of course, if you do this, make sure you keep the disk safe and particularly the magnetic strip behind the metal foil. If this gets damaged, Private Floppy will be unable to read the boot sector and your secrets will be lost for good.