Google Books Downloader – Download Google Books Marked As ‘Full View’

Are you tired of using desktop tools which often fail to download digital books from Google Books in PDF and in image formats due to copyright issues and other imposed restrictions? Contrasting to Picasa which lets you download photos without any restrictions, Google Books Service doesn’t permit users to download full and free digital editions of books without digital copy protection. If you’re looking for an application which can remove such restrictions while letting you seamlessly download free electronic books from Google Books, you can try Google Books Downloader. It’s a tiny portable application which not only downloads Google Books in PDF format but can convert pages into JPG format.

The only thing it takes to download book is the URL Link of the book provided by Google Books service.

Just paste the link and hit Start to begin the downloading process.

By default, it saves books in PDF format, however, you can change the Output Format to JPG before clicking Start.

It’s worth mentioning here that Google Books Downloader can download only those books which are marked as Full View. It works on Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7.

Download Google Books Downloader

Using Mac? Check out previously covered Google Book Downloader.

6 Live Professional News Streams You Can Watch Online For Free

Watch what’s happening in the world right now, without paying for a cable subscription. Several TV stations from around the world stream their English channels directly to the web, giving you access to what’s happening right now from your browser. A growing number of broadcasters, seeking new audiences, are putting their shows onto the Internet for everyone to watch. The quality and the viewpoints vary, but the point is clear – if you have Internet access you can watch live news.

We’ve previously shown you websites where you can watch news online, but that list focused mostly on on-demand clips. If you want to know what’s being reported right now though, you’ll need a live stream. Here’s 6 that you should consider watching on a regular basis.

Al Jazeera

Arab dictators hate it but that doesn’t mean you will.

It’s hard-hitting journalism from the Middle East with coverage from all over the world. Al Jazeera is making a name for itself during the Arab Spring. They have reporters on the ground all over the region and every dictator seems to, at some point, blame them for causing the uprisings.

You can watch Al Jazeera on your desktop with LiveStation, or you can watch on their website.

Bloomberg

Business more your thing than politics? Check out Bloomberg.

Known for its up-to-the-minute take on Wall Street and stock markets around the world, Bloomberg offers three different TV streams: US, Europe and Asia. Check out all three streams at Bloomberg TV.

C-SPAN

To some it’s that channel you surf by when you’re looking for something else to watch. Don’t let C-SPAN’s reputation scare you though. It’s possibly the best resource out for there for hardcore political junkies. Watch what’s happening in Washington DC in real time.

France24

In many ways, it’s France’s answer to the BBC. Funded by the French government, France24 aims to bring a less Anglo-centric worldview to the news cycle. Having said that, they do offer an English stream.

Curious? Why not check it out? Expect to hear some debate and get a different point of view.

NHK World

The international broadcast of Japan’s national broadcaster, NHK World is perfect when news from Japan dominates the headlines. Their coverage of the recent earthquakes gave them a great presence on the web, but as that story fades into the background, NHK remains a solid news broadcaster from a Japanese perspective.

RT

RT is an international broadcast funded by the Russian government, offering news and documentaries around the clock.

This one seems a little more blatant with its agenda than any of the other networks listed here. There’s even an entire Wikipedia article of criticisms. Still, it’s important sometimes to find news from an entirely different perspective, and for Westerners, RT is certainly that.

Conclusion

These are the highest quality, free streams that I could find. Do you know of any other ones? If so, please add them in the comments below, and be sure to check the comments for other recommendations. If past news-related articles are any indication I’ll probably be called a liberal/conservative/communist/fascist/corporate hack/anti-globalist a few times as well, which will be fun.

Watch Your Spending & Control Your Budget With These 8 Free Budget Calculators

Any personal finance adviser will tell you that developing and maintaining a financial budget is the best way to meet monthly expenses, save for financial emergencies and plan for the future. Keeping a budget basically means totaling your income for the month and subtracting the total of all your expenses. A budget calculator allows you to itemize your expenses so you can see where all your spending is going, especially for non-fixed discretionary items like groceries, music downloads, fast food, entertainment, computer software and the like that may be keeping you from paying off your credit debts or building a sufficient savings account.

Mint is one of the best free online budgeting systems, but if you don’t think you need something that elaborate, there are several other free sites for doing month-to-month budget calculations.

The Budget Calculator

This aptly named budget calculator is straightforward and includes expense boxes for many of the most typical types of fixed and non-fixed expenses—rent or mortgage, electricity, water, phone, Internet, etc. You need to input of course what applies to your personal finances. It also contains boxes for monthly savings, IRA, and investments.

After you enter the amounts and press “Calculate Budget” you can view and print out your budget for the month. As the site points out, “If the amount you get is a negative number check your expenses and savings to find out what is causing you to spend more than you make, and if you have money left over, put more money into savings or put it towards ‘Fun and Entertainment‘”.

Budget Calculator

This calculator is not as extensive as the one above, but if your expenses are limited to the basics – rent or mortgage, one or two credit cards, car loan, entertainment, etc – then this calculator is useful for quick results.

College Budgeting Calculator

If going to college is in your plans, the banking website, Chase.com, has a free student loan and budget calculator that computes your assets. This includes job income, scholarships, grants, parents/other, and your expenses – tuition, books and fees, room board, etc.

Free Financial Advice

Free Financial Advice also has a basic budget calculator, but it also features lots of short article advice for personal finance management and savings, including investing for beginners, ideas for earning extra money, saving gas, clothing, computer software, landscaping, paying off debts, etc.

Free Financial Advice doesn’t require you to register or provide your email.

DebtSteps

DebtSteps has three extensive budget and loan calculators – Free Household Budget Form, Mortgage Payment Calculator, and a Credit Card Payoff Calculator.

When you click on the household budget form, select the Print View option at the bottom of the page, and you will get a very extensive list for income and assets boxes, and numerous one for expenses – including unsecured debts, and gifts and donations.

Home Budget Calculator

Home Budget Calculator does what the above calculators do, but it includes two other unique features. It provides data boxes for you and your spouse’s income as well as more specific data, such as your tax withholdings, FICA, and retirement deductions or expenses.

The calculator also includes a visual pie chart that depicts your monthly expenses.

Frugalpig

Frugalpig is a site dedicated to providing readers with tips and strategies for frugal living. It includes its own budget calculator for finding what the site calls “budget leaks”. If you need or want an old fashion pen and paper method for budgeting, you can also download the site’s free PDF family budget worksheet.

Frugalpig also provides lots of tips about saving money on groceries, gas, home expenses, entertainment, and shopping in general.

Bankrate

When you get into the habit of creating and maintaining a budget, you will typically start looking for how you can tighten your budget to either meet monthly expenses, pay off a huge debt, or create emergency savings.

Bankrate has a budget calculator as well, but it also includes several other financial calculators for mortgages, auto loans, credit card transfers, and home equity calculations.

Also, check out these articles for other online and software tools about budget keeping:

Manage Your Money Safely with ClearCheckbook – Daniel
Save Money and Track Your Finances with Mint – Karl
How To Use Mint To Manage Your Budget & Spendings Online – Bakari

Let us know what you think of these sites and which online financial tools you have found useful for controlling your budget.

Editra: A Powerful & Expandable Cross-Platform Text & Code Editor

There are tons of text editors out there, so why would you need another one? Most people will be satisfied by their OS default plain text editor, while the coders would need a dedicated code editor. There are also people who need both.

For those who are still looking for the perfect text editor, you might want to try Editra. This is a powerful and expandable cross-platform editor, for both plain text and code. It’s available for Windows, Mac and Linux, and you can add more features to fit your needs by installing plugins. If there’s one text editor which is worth trying out among all others, Editra would be it.

Go Beyond Plain Text

The first time you open Editra, you might not see the advanced features hidden behind the simplistic look. There is only a white blank text area and a set of basic tools in the toolbar. You don’t have to do anything to use it as a plain text editor. Just type the words as you would normally do.

But once you start writing a line of code, you will see the real power of Editra. Not only does Editra color the codes based on their types but it will also automatically put limits to those codes. For example, if you write “html” between ““, Editra will not let you write anything else on the line.

Editra will also put the codes into groups that you can fold (hide) and unfold (show) by clicking the small minus/plus symbol on the sidebar.

Editra supports tabs so you can work on multiple texts and codes in different tabs. A little exploration will also lead you to other features hidden within Editra’s menu. One of them is the ability to generate HTML, LaTeX, and RTF using the “Generator” menu under “Tools“.

To quickly fold and/or unfold a long set of codes, you could use the “View – Code Folding” menu. Use “Toggle fold” to fold/unfold selected codes, or use “Toggle all folds” to hide/unhide everything on the page.

If you prefer to code without the colors, you can uncheck “Syntax Highlighting” under the “Settings” menu.

Expanding The Features

One of the ways to develop applications that fits everyone’s needs without bloating the size, is to use add-ons. This concept allows users to add only the features that they need by installing specific plugins.

You can find many plugins for Editra in their “Plugins and Extras” page, but the quickest way to add them is via the “Plugin Manager” under the “Tools” menu.

There are three places inside Plugin Manager. You can find all the installed plugins under “Configure“. Here’s the place to enable/disable, uninstall, and configure them.

To browse and choose new plugins to install, go to “Download“. Check the boxes of the plugins that you want and click the “Download” button.

The chosen plugins will be listed in “Install“. Decide whether you want to install them in “User Directory” (available only for the specific user) or to “System Directory” (available to all users). Click the “Install” button to wrap up the process.

Go back to “Configure” to activate them. All the changes will be applied after you restart Editra.

Another feature worth mentioning is the “Style Editor“. This feature allows users to change the writing environment to their preference. Users can customize everything from the background color to the code color.

There are some pre-set style theme that you can use by choosing one from the dropdown list, but you can further customize any item manually by choosing it from the side list and changing its elements.

There are so many more features lying dormant within Editra’s menus that it’s impossible to list them all. Try and explore the application yourself to find the hidden gems. Then tell us what you think in the comments below.

While you’re doing that, don’t forget to check out our other articles about other text editors such as: Vim, Tincta, Sublime Text, and WriteMonkey.

Test Your Computer For Security Misconfigurations With Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer

Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer (MBSA) is a free tool, designed for IT professionals of small and medium-sized businesses. Given its clear graphical user interface however, it also serves as a great security tool for personal use. MBSA analyzes the security setup of local and networked Windows computers and can identify common security misconfigurations or missing updates.

You can download MBSA 2.2 from the Microsoft Download Center. It is available for 64-bit (x64) and 32-bit (x86) Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, Windows 7, and Windows Server 2008 R2. Moreover, it comes in four different languages: German (DE), English (EN), French (FR), and Japanese (JA).

Getting Started

The startup interface of MBSA is very simple and basically offers only three options: scan a computer, scan multiple computers, or view existing security scan reports. The sidebar also offers links to the program documentation and the Microsoft security website.

Note that you require Administrator rights for all machines that you wish to scan. You can scan a single or multiple systems based on the computer name or IP address. If you select to scan multiple computers, you need to enter a domain name or a range of IP addresses.

For this demonstration I went with scanning a single computer.

The scanning options are straightforward, although not necessarily clear for the inexperienced user. If you don’t understand what some of the options mean, click the > Scanning Options link at the bottom for detailed explanations. The information will load in a separate Internet Explorer window.

The scan merely takes a few seconds and returns an overview of issues found in different categories. Each item is scored and a summary of the result is provided, along with links to further information material.

Checks that were passed receive a green score, items that could not be checked are marked with a grey minus, room for improvements is highlighted by a blue score, a yellow score indicates a non-critical vulnerability and a red score alerts the user to a failed check and thus a critical security issue. Follow the respective links for detailed information about what was scanned or instructions on how an issue can be corrected.

All reports are saved and can be accessed at a later time for reference. You can also print or copy your report to the clipboard.

Conclusion

Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer is a very good tool to quickly get an overview of security-related settings on your Windows machine. Instructions for correcting detected security misconfigurations are very clear and should therefore be easy to follow for the average user. Overall, the documentation is surprisingly detailed and well done, almost as if Microsoft expected non-IT folks to use this tool.

It must be said though that fixing most configurations does require some basic understanding of how Windows works. For example an issue with the file system is not necessarily security relevant and the instructions do not provide information on how to find the drive that doesn’t run NTFS. Moreover, some issues require advanced knowledge and should be left to the experts to be fixed, for example setting a password expiration.

For more information, also have a look at this article from Microsoft Patterns & Practices: How To Use the Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer.

What is your opinion? Do you think this is a useful tool? Please share your thoughts!

Split Large Files with GSplit

GSplit is a free file utility that helps you to split your big files into smaller files called pieces like zip archives or self-extracting archives. If you want to send big file to your friend over the internet or want to copy to any removable memory drive, you can try this free file splitter. Now you don’t have to worry about sending big files via instant messaging, online hosting services or email as you have GSplit to help you. You can easily split large files and send them over the internet.

You can split your files in two different ways, disk spanned or blocked. If you want to split files on your available free disk space then you should go for the disk spanned option. GSplit will automatically calculate the free disk space and split files accordingly. If you want to split files and create a set of same sized files, you should try the blocked option. This free file splitter also works as a file joiner, You can use this small freeware to join all the pieces back together. You can also perform fast checks to check CRC32, offset and size to detect corrupted files. It also helps you to make sure that your files can be successfully restored by a user.

This free file splitter comes with simple and intuitive user interface and can split large files bigger than 4 GB. You can split multiple files at the same time to save time. This free file utility is available in multiple languages so you can use this software in your own language. You can keep track of estimated and elapsed time while uniting or splitting files with this freeware. You can also pause the splitting operation if you want. If you don’t want to install this software, you can download the portable version of this great free file splitter.

If you are looking for a software to split PDF files, you can try Junko, Adolix Split Merge PDF and I Love PDF reviewed by us.

Features of GSplit:

• Split big files bigger than 4 GB
• Detect corrupted files by performing fast checks
• Two different file splitting options to choose from
• Available in multiple languages
• Supports all Windows OS

GSplit is available for download gdgsoft’s website. It’s only 1506 KB in size and supports all Windows OS. Download GSplit Free.

Share Speakers Over Your Network with Share Speaker Player

Share Speaker Player is a freeware that works as a free music manager and allows you to share speakers with high quality over network. You can play songs from one PC on others without even copying the music files. You don’t have to face those infringing copyright things when copying music files once you start using this awesome software that allows you to share speakers in local area network. You can even control the playlist remotely and share songs resource with this free music sharing software.

If you own only one set of speakers, you can share it with all the PC’s you have using this free music sharing software. You don’t even need any extra couplers, switches or cables to do that as it allows you to share speakers over network. Just play music directly on other PC’s without pulling out or plugging the speaker line. You don’t even have to copy the music files to these PC’s to play them. What you only need is a set of speakers and your friends, colleagues or family members can play their music on your PC and share your speakers easily with this freeware.

Share Speaker Player is an easy-to-use application that comes with lots of features. You can play audio files on local PC or other PC’s with speakers over network. You can remotely control the playlist, adjust volume of your PC with this free music sharing software. You can refuse or accept other users who can modify or play in local host. When other users open their Share Speaker Player from their PC, their IP addresses will be displayed in the computer list of your PC. When they close the software, their IP address will disappear from the list. Moreover, you can play all kinds of audio formats with Windows Media Player.

If you love music, you can also try GinoPlayer, MP3 Diags and AudioShell reviewed by us.

Features of Share Speaker Player:

• Play music files on your PC or other computers with just one set of speaker over network
• Control playlist or adjust volume remotely
• Track other IP addresses when other users open this software from their PC
• Supports all audio formats supported by Windows Media Player

Share Speaker Player is available for download at Extend Office’s website. It’s only 1.1MB in size and supports Windows 7, Vista, Xp, 2003 and 2008. Download Share Speaker Player Free.

Outdoor Navigation For Android – The Swiss Army Knife For Travelers

Outdoor Navigation is an all-in-one navigation assistance suite for Windows Mobile, iOS, Windows Phone 7 and now, for Android as well. And as per the convention of most other multiplatform apps, only Outdoor Navigation’s Android variant has a limited, ad-supported free version (and not just a trial, as for the WP7 variant) in addition to a paid full version. What remains constant across all supported platforms is the app’s attractive interface and the vast assortment of navigation assistance, tracking, monitoring and analysis tools that it comes packed with. More after the break.





In addition to being easy on the eyes, the interface seems well though out. Even with all the features that the app has to offer, one finds it hard to get lost or confused.

The app allows navigation through online street and satellite Google Maps. To find a route to a location of your choice, select Map form the app’s homes screen, hit Menu, tap Search and enter its name into the search box that appears at the bottom of the screen. The app adds a marker for the place on the map once it is located. Tap the marker and the app calculates a route for you based on the Routing Type selected from within Settings > Routing.

The map interface displays your current latitude–longitude (geographic coordinates), speed, altitude, ETE (Estimated Time Enroute) and distance to destination beside the compass in the top left corner of the screen.



Alternatively, you can hold down on any point on the map to set a starting and ending point for your route or to add POIs (Points Of Interest). And if you run into trouble along the way, you can always send an SOS message containing your current GPS coordinates to a trusted friend via SMS (add-on required for email). Said feature can be set up from within Settings > Sos.

The app records your movements and computes average speed, ascent rate, distance traveled, and several other similar variables in real-time while within Trip Tools > Trip Computer. The values of said variables are displayed in tiles, one for each. You can change the variable assigned to a tile simply by holding down on it and selecting one from the list of variables that is displayed.



Once a route is calculated, the Trip Manager begins recording your track progress, allowing you to stop, pause or resume the recording, view and save recent routes, view and delete POIs, attach a photo to POIs and edit their descriptions and share both your routes and POIs with your friends.

And that’s not all the app has to offer. We’ve just scratched the surface. Also, the free version for Android is severely limited in functionality. You can, however, purchase the missing features from the Market (Add-ons), each of which will set you back $1.49 ($2.99 for the US-exclusive Terrain Intelligence add-on). Alternatively, you can buy the $4.99 pro version to have access to all of the mentioned features.

Following are the add-ons/features that come packed with the pro version.

• Outdoor Chart
• Outdoor Compass (Unlocks all options of the Compass feature)
• Outdoor Share (Unlocks all options of the Trip Manager > Share feature)
• Outdoor SOS (Unlocks all options of the SOS feature)
• Outdoor Speedometer
• US Terrain Intelligence (location specific, USA only)

You can grab the app from the Android Market for free via the provided link or QR code.

Free

Pro

Download Outdoor Navigation (Free)

Download Outdoor Navigation Pro (Paid)

Office Tab: Open Multiple Documents in a Single Window

Office Tab Free Edition is a great free Microsoft Office plug-in that allows you to bring tabbed user interface to your Microsoft Office 2003, 2007 and 2010. Microsoft Office does not support opening multiple documents in a single window for editing and viewing. But if we can add tabbed user interface to Microsoft Office, we can greatly increase our workflow and productivity. And that’s where this free Microsoft Office extension can help you. This free MS Office extension comes with Word Tab, PowerPoint Tab and Excel Tab.

You can use this free Microsoft Office plug-in just like you use IE 8, Google Chrome or Firefox. Office Tab Free Edition comes with powerful setting center where you can configure office tab settings in the way you want. You can choose settings like enable/disable separate tabs, display the bar to the left/right/top/below position, customize the tab colors and choose the tab style. You can hide the tab bars if you want when there is only one tab. You can also assign a shortcut key to show and hide the bar. You can also customize tab appearance by choosing the colors and styles of tabs. You can also change the length and font style of tabs. Once you are done customizing, restart MS Office to apply the changes.

Office Tabs Free Edition comes with easy-to-use interface and lets you open multiple documents in tabs in a single window. It’s really easy to install and it takes only a couple of minutes to install this free Microsoft Office extension. It also comes with useful context menu that can be accessed by right-clicking on a tab. This free MS Office plug-in is based on Microsoft Office-Add-in technology so it’s really easy to add with Microsoft Office. The free version comes with limited functions. If you want tabs for Visio and Project, you can try Office Tab Enterprise or Professional.

If you are looking for a desktop client for Dropbox or Google Docs, you can also try Joukuu, Gladinet and Syncdocs.

Features of Office Tab Free Edition:

• All-in-one Setting Center: Office Tab Free Edition comes with powerful setting center. You can configure Office Tab settings in the way you want with this setting center. You can customize your tab’s style and color, move the tab where you want and enable or disable separate tabs.

• Easy-to-use: This free MS Office plug-in uses Microsoft Office-Add-in technology and it’s really easy to install. You can add this tabbed interface to open multiple documents in a single window. Each file will appear as a new tab in your MS Office application.

• Useful Context Menu: Office Tab Free Edition comes with useful context menu that can be accessed by just right-clicking on a tab. You can also assign plenty of shortcuts to make this plug-in more useful.

Office Tab Free Edition is available for download at Extend Office’s website and it’s only 3.2MB in size. You can use it with Microsoft Office 2003, 2007 and 2010. Download Office Tab Free Edition Free.

Customize Your Browser’s Start Page To Look Like The Windows 8 Theme

From a design point of view, I think Microsoft took a bold move by creating their own mobile user interface instead of trying to blatantly copy the iOS look and feel like everybody else. We will still have to wait and see whether or not the UI will help Windows Mobile survive the competitive phone market, but many people think this new design is unique and good looking. Microsoft also takes the design one step further by implementing it as “Metro” – the UI of the future Windows 8.

If you like Windows’ new user interface design, you can implement that look on your browser’s start page with the help of Eight. It’s a Windows 8 start page theme which will give you more than just eye candy. Eight allows you to customize its elements to suit your needs. The last update of Eight is compatible with Firefox 4.0.1, Chrome 12, Opera 11.11, and Internet Explorer 8.

Using Eight

The concept of the start page has become popular for the past several years in the browser world. Every time a user opens a new tab, they will see a graphical list of the sites they visited the most. So instead of repeatedly typing in the URLs of those favorite sites, users can just click on the sites on the start page.

For the following walkthrough, I used Firefox. But the steps should be more or less the same under any other compatible browser.

• Replacing your browser’s default Windows 8 start page with Eight is easy. First, you have to download the 2.5MB theme package (top right of the page under “Add To Favorites“) and extract it to a folder in your computer. Please make sure that this folder will not be moved or changed in the future, since doing so will break the file path used by your browser.

• Then, use the “File – Open File” menu in your browser to navigate to and open the “index.htm” inside Eight’s folder. Close all other opened tabs before you continue.

• To set Eight as the default start page, go to “Preferences – General” (under Tools menu in Windows or the Firefox menu in Mac) and choose “Show my home page” from “Startup – When Firefox starts“.

• Then, click the “Use current pages” button, and close the Preferences window. If you have other open tabs while doing this, other tabs will also be recorded as the home page. So make sure they are closed.

Now, every time you open your browser, Eight will show up. You can click on one of the links to open the URL destination.

Customizing Eight

Eight comes with twelve default pre-set links: YouTube, Yahoo!, Facebook, BBC News, CNN, Grooveshark, Last.fm, DeviantArt, Twitter, Wikipedia, iTunes, and Google. Users can quickly go to those sites by clicking on the visual links. But everybody has their own preferences, and luckily Eight is fully customizable. You can change the destination links, logos, and even the background color of each visual link according to your preferences.

If you want to customize Eight, you can find a very short explanation in the Readme.txt file inside Eight’s folder. But let’s now replace one of the visual links (thumbnails) with MakeUseOf’s link, so we can fully understand how the process works.

• First, let’s open the “Sketch.jpg” file for our guidance. We can see the reference number, location, and maximum icon size for each thumbnail.

• Let’s pick one square as the location for the MakeUseOf visual link. I picked box number 10 because I want the largest possible size but I don’t want to replace Google (box number 6). This means I should put the logo inside a 420 x 205 pixel image area with a transparent background. You can use any decent image application to prepare the thumbnail. The instructions suggest that you use a white logo for clarity, but you can use any kind of color for your logo. Give a name to your thumbnail logo and put the image file inside the thumbs folder.
• The next step is to open the “source.xml” file using a simple text editor to edit the source parameters.

• Find the entry that you want to edit and change the name, URL, and image name. You’ll see the new thumbnail after refreshing the page. You can repeat the process to change the other thumbnails. Please note that the numbering in the source starts with 0 while in the sketch, it starts with 1.

Customizing thumbnails in Eight is not difficult, but the setting up could take up to a couple of hours, especially the image editing process. However, once everything is set up, all of your favorite sites will be on the tip of your mouse.

Do you use a start page? Would you try Eight? Do you know any other similar tools? Tell us what you think and share your opinions using the comments below.