Month: September 2007

PDP, hacker and main contributor to the excellent GNUCITIZEN blog, revealed yesterday a flaw in Adobe Reader that could potentially put many users’ computers at risk. He defines it as a “HIGH Risk vulnerability: Adobe Acrobat/Reader PDF documents can be used to compromise your Windows box.” The issue was found using Adobe Reader 8.1 on Windows XP SP2 and previous versions and other PDF viewers are also concerned, although he did not say if the vulnerability could also affect other operating systems.

The senior security analyst declined to publish any code showing how the attack works for now, as this would obviously put a lot of people’s PCs at risk. He has promised to make it available as soon as Adobe fix this vulnerability though. For the time being he suggests to avoid opening any PDF files locally or remotely.

[via Macworld]

OpenTTD is a cloned free version of the economic simulation classic, where you have to develop your own transportation network, via rail, air or sea, and build your empire delivering goods all over the country. This version has been completely revamped adding new features and better graphics and usability. You’ll even be able to play online with up to 8 players.

Do you need to check your home PC from work? Do your friends -and customers- often need assistance with computers? No need to worry: use LogMeIn Free and you’ll be able to remotely access any computer from your web browser. Simply install the client in the target machine, connect to it and see the remote desktop as if you were sitting right in front of the PC!

As you’ve probably realized, Windows comes bundled with all sorts of components, of which many of the system tools, online services and of course Windows Media Player, Internet Explorer, Outlook Express, MSN Explorer and Messenger. Some of these tools you’ll probably never use or even need.  There’s nothing you can do about this during the installation procedure but afterwards, you can use nLite to remove those stubborn programs or applications that you don’t want.

nLite uses a simple Graphical User Interface for permanent Windows component removal much like Windows’ own ‘Add-Remove Program’ dialogue. The beauty is that, after you’ve finished the removal procedure nLite gives you the option to create a bootable image ready for burning on CD or testing in virtual machines. In this way, you’ve got your own customized Windows installation disk which doesn’t include all the annoying components you’ve removed.

Windows Explorer doesn’t exactly provide much scope for analysing and delving deeper into the details of your hard drive. For example, it’s not easy to see which folders are the biggest on your hard drive, which files are taking up the most space and how much space your operating system is occupying. Fortunately, there are several tools out there that can help you see in an instant, what is what on your hard drive without even touching Explorer. These can help you do various things from identifying which files that are taking up too much space on your disk drive to which ones are obsolete.

• OverDisk – Graphically display your hard drive partitions

• Scanner – View hard drive usage on a pie chart

• TreeSize – Find which files are consuming the most disk space

• JDiskReport – Graphically display data in chronological order

• FolderInfo – Analyse folder usage and export the results to text text or HTML

For those of you not acquainted with Pocoyo, and I must admit I’m more of a Bob the Builder man, apparently he has been taking children’s television by storm in both the UK and Spain over the past couple of years. He’s a smiley little boy dressed in blue with a rather fat face and a whole host of friends that include a pink elephant, a dog and a duck. And of course they get into plenty of adventures.

You’re probably a hardcore gamer with hundreds of playing hours under your belt. You’ve created your own clan and you train a few hours everyday in your favorite First Person Shooter (FPS). You’ve even upgraded your PC just for the sake of playing. However, I’m sure there’s something you haven’t tried yet: playing your own game!

Don’t get me wrong here: I’m not talking about simply making up a game and its rules. I’m talking about creating your very own first person shooter! What’s more, you don’t need to have any programming or 3D designing knowledge: just install FPS Creator and put your imagination to work.

This excellent editor provides you with all the elements you need to create your personal FPS: walls, doors, corridors, stairs and more, as well as decorative elements. The game also takes care of physics and music. You can download extra packs from their website to obtain more characters, weapons and other elements.

This demo version has a 30-day limitation but gives a very good sneak peek of the whole version. Besides, it also includes the complete PDF user manual to help you during your first days with the program. Just one more thing: if you eventually manage to create a great FPS, don’t forget to send it to Softonic so that we can review it!

If you’re a little on the obsessive-compulsive side then there’s probably nothing more satisfying than having your music library all neat and tidy, with all the track titles, authors, musical styles and album names entered correctly. Let’s face it though, filling in all those ID3 tags in your music library can be a real nightmare, all the so more if you have a lot of music and have never really tended to it. What you can do then is use an application that will specifically edit music tags.

mp3Tag for one, as you can read up in James’s review, is very quick and efficient at editing all this metadata, allowing you to replace words, and most of all importing tags from the FreeDB database. Audio Tags Editor will also allow you to export tags to various formats and automatically applies changes into your own music library. If you’re looking for a more basic application, you can turn to Audio Tagging Tools. It has all the editing features you need, can generate statistics on your collection and create HTML reports. Tag&Rename is probably even easier to use, thanks to its double-paned interface. It also lets you complete tags by entering information from the FreeDB database. There’s many more tag editors to choose from and we suggest you take a closer look if none of the aforementioned convince you.

If you suspect you’re suffering hardware problems, then it’s worth testing it all to probe for suspected bugs or failures. This need not mean taking your PC to a technician though. Test My Hardware analyses the configuration of your PC to spot if there are any potential problems on your system. It displays the results, clearly showing the status of each component. The program classifies the results in order of potential problems so you can see immediately where failures are.

In reality, this is not a particularly deep probing tester. It performs a rather simple analysis that won’t reveal anything serious. However, it does at least give you a general overview of the condition of your system including processor, motherboard, memory, additional components and devices, etc. A quick and simple program that might not solve your hardware problems but provides a good starting point for investigating further.

There’s nothing more annoying than an Mp3 music collection that constantly varies in sound levels. One minute, you can hardly hear a track and then the next one comes blasting through your speakers. Mp3 Tester is an automatic testing tool that informs you about the sound levels and labeling of your MP3 collection so you can order, arrange and equalize them as you like. For example, you can specify the maximum and minimum bitrate you want and the program warns you if any of the values are exceeded.

Usually, this means you can equalize bitrates to the standard size of 128Kbps or 192Kbps. It can also detect if a file has finished suddenly, is incomplete, or does not contain the correct ID3 information (i.e. album, artist, title) and make verifications on the structure of Mp3s. Note that the test version only allows you to make two types of verifications simultaneously and only analyzes 70% of the Mp3 file that you scan.