Month: February 2012

How to delete your Google history before March 1st

On March 1st, Google will make an important and much publicized change to their privacy policy. This means Google searches and web history will no longer be treated separately from other products such as YouTube, Google Docs etc.

For many users, the privacy policy change will result in a more useful and personalized Google experience. However, if you’d prefer to have your Google search history and web history deleted before March 1st, just follow these simple steps.

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Four great apps for downloading free, legal music

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No matter what your musical taste, it’s always great to be able to discover new music. What’s even better? When the music’s free!

There’s a problem though. Although there are lots of ways of downloading free music, not all of them are legal. For lots of users, that’s a problem. Luckily in recent times, developers have realized that people want music without breaking the law, and have come up with loads of apps that allow you to download music that’s both free AND legal.

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5 Alternatives to Total Video Converter

Video converters used to be aimed at creating smaller, high quality files to watch on computers. Now with media players supporting all formats, converting is focused on re-encoding videos for mobile devices like iOS, Android, and now PlayStation Vita.

The supported file types vary, but the desire for small, but high quality video files still exists.

Total Video Converter is a popular program for converting videos, but like the review states it “crashes frequently.” Here are four free alternative video converters:

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How to: cut YouTube videos with YouTube Downloader

YouTube Video Downloader offers a fast and simple way to download online video to your computer.

Using YouTube Video Downloader to save videos from YouTube is as easy as copying and pasting the address of the clip into the program. However, there is a little bit more you can do with YouTube Video Downloader, including the ability to cut the video you’ve downloaded.

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How to convert videos for PlayStation Vita with Handbrake

The PlayStation Vita officially launches in the United States on Wednesday. However, Sony released a First Edition bundle one week ago, and being a big fan of PlayStation, I picked up one of the bundles.

One big feature I enjoyed with the PSP was watching videos. The PS Vita’s 5 inch 960×544 OLED screen is amazing to watch videos on. But I came to a problem – the support of MP4/H.264 video limits the amount of video formats that play natively.

I found Handbrake (PC/Mac) was a great solution.

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What’s new in VLC 2.0?

After almost two-and-a-half years in the making, Videolan has finally released version 2.0 of VLC Player for Windows and Mac. Codenamed “Twoflower”, there have been some major improvements including faster decoding, support for more formats and the ability to play HD and BluRay videos.

VLC media player now supports an even wider ranger of formats including support for 10-bit codes plus multi-threaded decoding for H.264, MPEG-4/Xvid and WebM. There are also fixes for several different bugs with input from over 160 volunteers, according to Videolan.

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Free alternative to Daemon Tools Lite: Virtual CloneDrive

If you want to inspect or watch ISO files – archives of optical discs like DVDs – Daemon Tools Lite is a popular option. However, Virtual CloneDrive is a neater option.

Unlike Daemon Tools Lite, you can’t make disc images with Virtual CloneDrive, but you can mount them in the same way and this app stays out of your way in the system tray:

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Softonic Weekly Highlights

It’s only February, and already we have a contender for game of the year: Mass Effect 3. The PC demo really shows off the drama and action of the game well. We’ll have to wait until March to see whether BioWare has created a game that fittingly ends the trilogy, but it certainly starts off well. You can choose to be a male or female Commander Shepard, and also choose the type of gameplay you want.

Nick took a look at a browser add-on called Do Not Track Plus, which allows you to stop websites tracking your behavior and giving you targeted advertising etcetera. If you’ve ever wondered why you keep seeing that pair of shoes you were looking at in advertising while you are browsing, try this out! Do Not Track Plus is compatible with Mac or PC for Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer, which should just about cover all bases!

One of the best security suites around, you can now try out the beta version of avast! 7. Niamh put it through its paces. Read more in her post and see what changes are being introduced, from the new interface to cloud services and remote access. Maybe the biggest change is the avast application market – will it be the iTunes Store of security?

What you should know about Mountain Lion

Apple has taken another step forward to transforming OS X into iOS with the developer release of OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion.

We’ll bring you a full review soon but in the meantime, here are some essential points to be aware of before Apple releases it on the App Store late this summer:

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