Whether you got a shiny new flash drive over the holidays or your old thumb drive is looking for a new lease on life, pack it full of goodness with these five killer portable applications. Earlier this week we asked you to share which programs you've stashed on your thumb drive that you can't live without. The votes have been tallied, and now we're back with the five most popular portable apps.

Portable Firefox

Lifehacker readers love their Firefox, and with Portable Firefox, you can take your web browsing experience and all of the accompanying tweaks and extensions you've come to know and love with you wherever you go. All of your customizations—including extensions, bookmarks, and configuration file edits—can be applied to the portable version. Minor changes under the hood of Portable Firefox make it more suitable for flash drive usage, such as the default disabling of read/write intensive disk caching. It also respects its boundaries as a portable application, forgoing the usual check to make sure it is the default browser. After you download a copy of Firefox portable, make sure to enable Flash support, customize your portable Firefox, and learn how to sync your Firefox installations.

KeePass

Using the same tired password for everything is a big security risk and so last century. KeePass is an excellent password-management tool—in fact, it topped the list of the five best password managers—and is naturally portable, requiring no modifications to live on your thumb drive. Beyond its primary function of securely organizing and storing your passwords, it also has a host of handy features, like secure password generation—even HAL wouldn't guess the password for your Match.com account is $s2k230!nE$g^8GD@gNygh(hFod0*2E. KeePass also supports great plugins that do everything from automatically filling in password fields for you to importing your login information from other applications like Firefox.

VLC Portable

VLC is an open-source and cross-platform media player packed with features. Even if you never used it for anything more than enjoying some media saved on your flash drive, you'd be quite pleased. Beyond basic media playback, VLC can play ripped DVDs, stream media, and fix desynchronized video and audio. If you're curious whether or not VLC will playback the media you throw at it, check out the sizable list of compatible formats it supports; you'll be hard pressed to find something you can't watch with VLC.

TrueCrypt

Although hindered by the pesky need for administrative privilege or a prior installation on the computer in question—TrueCrypt has to load a device driver for it's on-the-fly encryption and decryption—TrueCrypt remains a reader favorite for thumb drives. In areas where you control the computers or have a friendly local administrator, it's tough to beat the privacy benefits of TrueCrypt. TrueCrypt creates encrypted file containers that function as independent disk volumes. You could easily create a 2GB container on your 4GB flash drive and stash all your private data in it so that—in the event that you lost your thumb drive—no one could access your personal data. Programs and media can all be loaded from the container—once you supply the password and mount it of course—just like they can be from the unencrypted portion of the flash drive. For a more thorough overview of how TrueCrypt works and how to use it, check out Gina's previous guide to encrypting your data with TrueCrypt.

Portable Thunderbird

While many users get their email fix through of a combination of Firefox Portable and a web-based email service, many of you put in a passionate vote for Thunderbird as a portable email solution. Portable Thunderbird has all the features you'd expect from a standalone email client. It supports IMAP and POP3 servers, has tabbed message browsing, advanced folder management, and the kind of extensibility that everyone has come to love in its sibling Firefox. Short of having to comply with the whims of some mad corporate-IT-manager, most users will have a hard time finding reasons not to use Portable Thunderbird for their stand alone mail-application needs. After downloading Thunderbird, be sure to check out our roundup of eight killer Thunderbird extensions, how to embed a web page—such as a TiddlyWiki—in Thunderbird, and how to sync your Pocket PC with Thunderbird.
Now that you've seen the, interestingly enough, entirely open-source list of most loved applications it's time to vote for your favorite:

Whether or not your favorite program made the list this week, we'd love to hear about the portable programs that make your life easier. Sound off in the comments and share the portable app wealth with your fellow readers.

source:lifehacker

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Whether you got a shiny new flash drive over the holidays or your old thumb drive is looking for a new lease on life, pack it full of goodness with these five killer portable applications. Earlier this week we asked you to share which programs you've stashed on your thumb drive that you can't live without. The votes have been tallied, and now we're back with the five most popular portable apps.

Portable Firefox

Lifehacker readers love their Firefox, and with Portable Firefox, you can take your web browsing experience and all of the accompanying tweaks and extensions you've come to know and love with you wherever you go. All of your customizations—including extensions, bookmarks, and configuration file edits—can be applied to the portable version. Minor changes under the hood of Portable Firefox make it more suitable for flash drive usage, such as the default disabling of read/write intensive disk caching. It also respects its boundaries as a portable application, forgoing the usual check to make sure it is the default browser. After you download a copy of Firefox portable, make sure to enable Flash support, customize your portable Firefox, and learn how to sync your Firefox installations.

KeePass

Using the same tired password for everything is a big security risk and so last century. KeePass is an excellent password-management tool—in fact, it topped the list of the five best password managers—and is naturally portable, requiring no modifications to live on your thumb drive. Beyond its primary function of securely organizing and storing your passwords, it also has a host of handy features, like secure password generation—even HAL wouldn't guess the password for your Match.com account is $s2k230!nE$g^8GD@gNygh(hFod0*2E. KeePass also supports great plugins that do everything from automatically filling in password fields for you to importing your login information from other applications like Firefox.

VLC Portable

VLC is an open-source and cross-platform media player packed with features. Even if you never used it for anything more than enjoying some media saved on your flash drive, you'd be quite pleased. Beyond basic media playback, VLC can play ripped DVDs, stream media, and fix desynchronized video and audio. If you're curious whether or not VLC will playback the media you throw at it, check out the sizable list of compatible formats it supports; you'll be hard pressed to find something you can't watch with VLC.

TrueCrypt

Although hindered by the pesky need for administrative privilege or a prior installation on the computer in question—TrueCrypt has to load a device driver for it's on-the-fly encryption and decryption—TrueCrypt remains a reader favorite for thumb drives. In areas where you control the computers or have a friendly local administrator, it's tough to beat the privacy benefits of TrueCrypt. TrueCrypt creates encrypted file containers that function as independent disk volumes. You could easily create a 2GB container on your 4GB flash drive and stash all your private data in it so that—in the event that you lost your thumb drive—no one could access your personal data. Programs and media can all be loaded from the container—once you supply the password and mount it of course—just like they can be from the unencrypted portion of the flash drive. For a more thorough overview of how TrueCrypt works and how to use it, check out Gina's previous guide to encrypting your data with TrueCrypt.

Portable Thunderbird

While many users get their email fix through of a combination of Firefox Portable and a web-based email service, many of you put in a passionate vote for Thunderbird as a portable email solution. Portable Thunderbird has all the features you'd expect from a standalone email client. It supports IMAP and POP3 servers, has tabbed message browsing, advanced folder management, and the kind of extensibility that everyone has come to love in its sibling Firefox. Short of having to comply with the whims of some mad corporate-IT-manager, most users will have a hard time finding reasons not to use Portable Thunderbird for their stand alone mail-application needs. After downloading Thunderbird, be sure to check out our roundup of eight killer Thunderbird extensions, how to embed a web page—such as a TiddlyWiki—in Thunderbird, and how to sync your Pocket PC with Thunderbird.
Now that you've seen the, interestingly enough, entirely open-source list of most loved applications it's time to vote for your favorite:

Whether or not your favorite program made the list this week, we'd love to hear about the portable programs that make your life easier. Sound off in the comments and share the portable app wealth with your fellow readers.

source:lifehacker

Read more >>

Store Web Pages for Offline Viewing

If you have Google Desktop running in the background, you already have a local copy of all web pages that you have recently opened / read in any browser on your computer. You can click "Browse Timeline" inside Google Desktop and your web history will be listed in reverse chronological order - the most recently visited websites will be listed at the top.
The problem with web history in Google Desktop is that it can get cluttered too easily and finding relevant pages from the history may require some effort.  In that case you may install Scrapbook for Firefox and only save relevant web pages that you intend to read in an offline environment.
Scrabbook, like Google Notebook, is primarily for organizing web research but it’s an excellent offline browser as well. You can specify the depth level and all target links from the current web page (up to that level) will be saved offline automatically. For instance, you want to read all stories on the CNN and BBC website offline. Capture the home page with Scrapbook and set the depth as 1 - it will then save full text of all the front page stories as well.
Scrapbook can export all the web captures as an HTML web page so you can easily read the saved content on a mobile phone or your PDA. Another popular tool for downloading web pages in Firefox is DownloadThemAll.
The limitation with either of the above tools is that they work only in Firefox and also require some manual work. What if you want to read all front stories from all major news websites while offline? All news sites provide RSS feeds but they aren’t full text so you have no option but to scrap content from the main website in order to read it offline.
HTTrack is a free website copying software where you can create download jobs and execute them whenever you go online. For example you can create a single download job for all news websites (like BBC, NYT, etc.), set the depth limit as 1 and get an offline version all the front news stories in one go. You can also save this job and re-execute it anytime later either manually or set it up as a scheduled task.
Another good alternative to HTTrack is wget available for Mac, Windows and Linux. You don’t have to spend time learning the complicated command line switches of wget as there are nice GUI apps available both for Mac (CocoaWget) and Windows (WinWget).

Download Blogs for Offline Reading

Blogs, or websites that offers RSS feeds, are much easy to handle and save because we know exactly what stuff has changed since we last visited that site.
There are two categories of blog readers - (a) Addicts or people who are subscribed to several hundred feeds and want to read them all while offline and (b) Casual Readers or people who follow only a dozen or so feeds.
Casual readers can simply add their favorites feeds to Tabbloid and download them all as a PDF newsletter (example).
For people who fall in the category of addicts, the solution that will work best is a dedicated offline reader that can pre-fetch all the new articles and here are some good choices:
My first recommendation has always been FeedDemon - it’s fast, rich in features and the upcoming v2.8 is even better since it lets you export unread items as an HTML web page that can be read on any device.
If you are subscribed to feeds in Google Reader, you can either try RSS Bandit or  Scoop - these are desktop based readers that work in offline mode and can synchronize with your Google Reader subscriptions. If you are on Bloglines, a similar solution for you exists in the form of GreatNews - a desktop RSS reader that is also portable. Google Gears is another solution for Google Reader users but it has limitations.
The advantage with either of the above solutions is that they all support synchronization - so if you mark an item as read in an offline environment, the change will get propagated when you go online next so there’s no double work.

Saving Blogs & Web Pages for Mobile Phones

If you plan to save web pages for offline viewing on a mobile device (with a small screen), I would recommend Web2Book - it not only downloads multiple web pages and blogs in one go but also converts them into formats like HTML or PDF that are supported on almost every mobile device.
Web pages saved with Web2Book can be easily read on ebook devices like the Microsoft Reader or the new Sony Reader. Another option for mobile devices is Plucker - it’s an offline browser available both for Windows Mobile and Palm based PDAs.
If you are an iPod owner (the old models, not the latest iPod touch), you can even turn your MP3 player into a notes reader and read web pages as plain text.
Drawloop, an online service that I mentioned in the previous Adobe PDF guide,  too can join multiple web pages and save them in a single PDF file like in this example where you have the home pages of three news websites saved in a single file.
source:labnol

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Windows only: Free app Install-It puts a small auto-starting application on any removable drive that makes installing applications a double-click affair.
After downloading the Install-It package, you'll want to extract its files to somewhere you can reach, like your desktop, and open up the Install.ini file in your favorite text editor. This file is simply a list of program descriptions and the locations of their installer files. If you're creating a disc full of useful installers, just replace the default examples with your chosen verbiage for each app and the location/names of the setup files. You separate those two items with a comma, using slashes where necessary, and end each line with a semi-colon.
Here's an example Install.ini I made for a supposed Windows XP re-installation:

Copy all your installer files and Install-It's files into a CD-burning app, such as CDBurnerXP, and fire away.
Now you've got a CD that, on most computers, will pop up with a list of programs that can be installed without anyone having to guess which icon or cryptic filename means. If a computer isn't set to auto-start when it detects an autorun.inf file, though, you'll have to point the computer to install.exe—not a problem, though, if you've put each application in its own directory.
Install-It is a free download for Windows systems only.
Install-It [via The Red Ferret Journal

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Have you ever encountered problems in identifying what fonts is being used in an image? Of course fonts being used in popular movie banners can be found easily because you have the keyword but what if you found a free template and the font is not included? You either recreate the buttons with your own fonts replacing the original, or try posting in forums and hope that someone would have seen that font before and let you know what is the font name. There are so many fonts, maybe hundred of thousands fonts available on the internet and to identify an unknown font is definitely NOT an easy task!

If you need to identify a font, don’t despair. I have found 2 methods that is able to help you identify an unknown font. If it is not able to help you identify the font, it will at least help you narrow down to the closest ones.

Identifont, a free service offered to help you identify fonts by answering a series of simple questions about its appearance.

 

[ Identify Unknown Fonts with Identifont ]

 

Images can be color or black & white, and they don’t have to be very high quality (although that helps). Even a digital photograph of some lettering you like can be accepted. Accuracy of results is unprecedented by previous automatic systems. [ Identify Unknown Fonts with WhatTheFont ]
Finally, if WhatTheFont system is unable to give you a good match of the font you’re looking for, you can then submit your image to WhatTheFont Forum to have your image viewed by font geeks the world over.

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Just days after popular social networking tool Twitter was hit was a phishing scam, the company is now trying to clean up a mess surrounding a separate hacking attack.

Over the weekend, some Twitter users received scam tweets, or direct messages, to visit certain sites or blogs. The URL in the message redirected users to a bogus login page in an attempt to steal login credentials for a phishing scheme. Monday, thing got worse as Twitter officials revealed several high profile accounts, such as those of Britney Spears and Barack Obama were hacked.

"It appears someone gained access to the tools Twitter uses to control its millions of accounts," explained Graham Cluley, a senior technology consultant at security firm Sophos PLC. "Internal tools used by the tech support team were compromised. It's not clear if it was an inside job, or outside hacker. Twitter does say they think it was an individual."
The hack, according to Cluley, is much more serious than the earlier phishing attack because it was compromise of the system that potentially exposed all Twitter users to the following dangers.

Fraudalent password use If you gain access to someone's Twitter account, you might be able to gain access to their password, said Cluley.
"We know that 41 percent of people admit to using the same password on every web site and account that they access," he said.
Hackers, while gaining access to something seemingly simply like a username and password to one account may very well be able to use the information to gain access to more important information, such as your bank account.
Malware Infection Twitter officials said 33 accounts had been attacked in the latest hack, including high-profile users such as Britney Spears and Barack Obama. The hackers used their temporary access to send offensive messages. CNN journalist Rick Sanchez found his account had been hacked with a message that read "i am high on crack right now might not be coming to work today."
The damage could have been much worse, said Cluley, if the hacker had decided to take a different approach.
"Imagine if instead, in the case of Britney Spears account for example, that the hacker had posted a link that said: 'Here's my new video. Click on this link.' Imagine how many people would have clicked on that and it could have pointed to malware? And Barack Obama is one of the most followed people on Twitter. If he said: 'I've just made a new speech. Check it out.' a lot of people would click on that link and get infected."

source:network world

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As the investigation into the leak of college entrance exam results rolls on, prosecutors said yesterday that the computer server at the Korea Institute for Curriculum and Evaluation, which administers the exam, had been hacked over 200 times. Not only the test results but also the institute’s internal information was stolen.

According to prosecution and police sources, a manager at a public relations firm called Inuni Co. whose surname is Kim accessed the institute’s server over 200 times between August 2007 and December 2008.

A detention warrant was filed against Kim on charges of breaking information and network laws but it was rejected by the court.

Kim easily broke into the server. In August 2007, he accessed an employee’s e-mail account at the institute. Kim obtained the e-mail ID from a press release, and the password was the same as the ID.

Kim tried to log in to e-mail accounts of other institute employees over 50 times. One of his successes was with the account of someone in the institute’s administrative office. The employee used a password identical to the romanized spelling of his name.

One of the employee’s e-mails contained an attached file containing the passwords of five other employees at the institute. The employee temporarily managed the other employees’ e-mail access information because he dealt with changes in the institute’s server. Their passwords were identical to the last seven digits of their residential identification numbers.

In this way, Kim downloaded 16 types of internal information from the institute. Among the materials downloaded were plans to grade answer sheets from the 2009 College Scholastic Ability Test, scoring schedules and the number of students who missed the test.

“Kim could look at the Korea Institute for Curriculum and Evaluation’s internal information by accessing the e-mail of seven employees,” a prosecutor said.

Kim passed the information on to VisangEdu, a private education company. VisangEdu made the CSAT score analysis public on Dec. 9, a day before the CSAT results were announced.

Kim accessed the institute’s server four times on Dec. 10 after the institute requested a probe into this case.

As the investigation closed in on him, Kim destroyed a memo containing the IDs and passwords of the seven employees. Prosecutors plan to decide what kinds of charges they will file against Kim and a VisangEdu director whose surname is Jin this week.

source:click here

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