Archive for the ‘Guides and Articles’ Category

How To Create Protected PDFs Using Adobe Acrobat Pro

So you have purchased Adobe Acrobat Pro (AAP) but do not know how to fully use it. Today we will be going over a simple function of AAP which eludes new users.

The forte of PDF documents is the security and protection they offer. If you want to restrict viewing of your document, you can assign your PDF a password which will be required if anybody wants to view the included contents. But what if you do not want to password protect your file and just want to restrict the printing rights?

There could be many reasons for doing this. Perhaps you are a book author and are sending your book (or an excerpt) to somebody for reading. You want them to be able to read it but not print the material out and show it to other on paper. In such circumstances you need to protect your PDF document.

In this tutorial we will assume that you already have created your own PDF document. Here are the steps you need to take in order to protect it:

  1. Open your document with AAP.
  2. From the main menu on top, go into Advance -> Security -> Encrypt with Password.
  3. Click on ‘Yes’ in the Dialog Box that which follows.
  4. Now specify the Acrobat versions your document can be opened with, the level of encryption your PDF has, any password that should be given to open the file, and whether or not printing is enabled. You can also specify a password to re-enable printing if you have disabled it. Once you have set all these options, click on ‘OK’.
  5. You will be asked to retype the password and shown a summary of your policy. Click on ‘Finish’ and your policy would have been created.
  6. From now on, whenever you want to enable this policy on a particular PDF document, open the document and go into Advance -> Security -> .

In those five simple steps you will be able to secure your PDF documents and make the most of your purchases AAP.

Learn How To Use Google Wave: Comprehensive Wave Guide

Gina Trapani (The founding editor of Lifehacker.com) along-with Adam Pash (Editor for Lifehacker) released a comprehensive online user manual on Google Wave.

Google Wave is a new web-based collaboration tool that’s notoriously difficult to understand. This guide will help. Here you’ll learn how to use Google Wave to get things done with your group. Because Wave is such a new product that’s evolving quickly, this guidebook is a work in progress that will update in concert with Wave as it grows and changes. Read more about The Complete Guide to Google Wave.

Table of Contents are:

Googlewave

Check it out here

The Next Level in Podcasting Convenience

Podcasts are an exciting way to capture our experiences and feelings in a way that written/typed text is simply unable to. That is why podcasting is becoming an increasingly common means of expression.

Users from all over the world share audio, text, and photo updates on the go, either using their PCs or their cellphones. While there are a number of freewares and softwares which allow you to create podcasts via your cellphone, most of them require detailed registration processes and/or complicated steps. BlogTalkRadio has released a utility called CinchCast which allows the user to create podcasts with the only first step being creating an account.

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The homepage looks exactly like in the screenshot pasted above. After the simple registration, the fun begins.

Making an audio podcast is extremely simple and shows up in your feed almost instantly after you are done recording. The audio quality is as good as a telephonic conversation, and clarity for such a system is fitting.

The user can make his “Cinchs” using any phone, and calling the number provided on the website.

The podcasts can also be shared on popular social networking websites like Facebook and Twitter. In fact, if you already have an account on these two networks, you need not register for a new account on CinchCast; you can use your Facebook or Twitter login information to sign into CinchCast.

Being the free and fast service that it is, CinchCast can be a mighty weapon for the podcaster, therefore making it a tool which should not be missed.

Combine Multiple Sites Into A Single URL

Reading the title, you might think, “How’s that even possible?”

Well, with Nice Sharing, combining multiple sites into a single URL is very much possible.

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The screenshot above is how the homepage looks like. You can enter the URLs of the webpages you want to combine and then select the setting according to which they will be shown e.g. should the separation be horizontal or vertical, how much area should each page cover, etc.

As an example I merged Yahoo and Vimeo together using the default settings of Nice Sharing to get the following result:

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Pretty neat, right? I can simultaneously access both pages without having to deal with multiple browser windows or tabs.

Nice Sharing generates a URL which you can use to view the webpages you want combined. The author of Nice Sharing states on the website that it conceptualized out of the desire to play background music to a Picasa or Flickr albums, something which Nice Sharing is able to do. All you do is put your album on website 1, put your music on website 2 (Youtube, mp3 file), check mark the ‘Hidden’ checkbox for website 2, and create the link. Viola!

Nice Sharing has enable multiple webpage-viewing on a single page; it has tackled an every day problem in an extremely creative way, for which it gets a well deserved two thumbs up!

17 Essential Linux Resources That You Shouldn’t Miss

Linux is one of our favorite topics, have covered some nifty topics on linux in the past. Today, we are covering a Wide Collection of Linux Apps which include Image Viewers, Video Editors, News Aggregators, Backup Tools & Guides etc. Credit goes to all the people who have put maximum effort to gather these various application in their own specific categories.  You may also want to check out our “Linux” Category for more awesome stuff.

Top 10 Free Video Editors for Ubuntu Linux

avid

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Parenting 2.0: Essential Websites for Educating Kids Through the Internet

Educating kids is not a easy task. Even if you’ve put them in an awesome school, you still need to teach them stuff while keeping in mind, the fun factor. Yes, that’s one proven way of teaching kids. Nowadays, the internet offers so much (keeping in mind the topic) that can help you take the books burden off your children and let them learn the easy way. These resources include games, videos and pictures to help them out. My daughter loves the computer, she’s always running in to watch her favorite cartoons and what not. I usually (after a while) utilize that time and show her cool educational websites where she can spend her time learning and having fun at the same time.

I’ve compiled a list of some nifty websites which can help your kids learn and enjoy their homework the easy way. Let’s begin;

PBS Kids

PBSkids

PBS Kids has attractive and colorful interface, all based on flash. They provide an environment which is interactive and a fun place for children to learn. They offer cool games, videos, music and coloring activities which can enhance the knowledge for those youngsters who visit.

Yahoo Kids

Yahoo Kids

Yahoo kids offers a lot for children which includes fun / educational resources. It allows you to Play games, Watch music videos, Check out movies, Learn about science, Read jokes, Send ecards, Learn Internet Safety,  Get homework help, Look up words, Ask questions, Explore an encyclopedia and more. Recommended age (accordingly) is 6 or above.

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Fantastic RSS Readers to replace Google Reader

I’ve used google reader, loved it but there was something missing for me, maybe the interface wasn’t that handy. After having a discussion with a good friend Victor & checking out suggestions, I came with a cool list of RSS readers. These readers are mostly desktop based and are feature rich. Check them out and do chip in with your suggestions through comments.

1- NewzCrawler:

NewzCrawler is something I would say “Awesome”! – A great feed reader with a simple interface, loads of features, a built-in browser and much more.  After my first install, it automatically started downloading news from the list of default channels, related to News, Movies, Sports, Technology, Science, Blogs, Podcasts and other Miscellaneous stuff.

NewzCrawler

As mentioned earlier, the interface is really simple, you can add new channels in a minute or less. Adding those channels isn’t hard either, right click on a folder and add new, it will take you to the screen where you can enter newsfeed channel url if you know the exact location of the RSS newsfeed channel, create a search result channel which helps you if you want to monitor a specific or set of keywords search results on websites like yahoo, feester etc. It also gives you the ability to subscribe to a regular blog, some maybe located at service like blogger, Livejournal, AOL journal etc.

Another feature that you may like is it’s headline bar, you’ll see a small news ticker which displays latest news from different websites in real time. It doesn’t take much space & you can turn it off if you want to. You can download the trial version and try it out, if you think it’s something you want, buy it for $24.95 (not expensive).

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Programming Your Own Chat Bot – The Logic

I was reading and confronted this amazing article by the programmers of the Chat Bot RoboMatic X1. Ehab El-agizy a Egyptian freelance programmer & team who are interested in AI and Chat Bots developing. They came up with this guide, presenting the logic behind creating your own chat bot.

Introduction:

Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology provides techniques for developing computer programs for carrying out  variety of tasks, simulating the intelligent way of problem solving by humans. The problems that humans solve in their day-to-day life are of a wide variety in different domains. Though the domains are different and also the method, AI technology provides a set of formalisms to represent the problems and also the techniques for solving them. What AI technology provides us is what is described in the above sentences. Based on this, it is very difficult to precisely define the term artificial intelligence.

As you know the chat bot is a chatting robot that can understand what you are saying, analyze it and give you a suitable response, it’s considered to be serious branch in AI developing as the purpose from programming a chat bot is to help people in getting info like:

Selling chat bots: helps people to know item prices and offers.
Supporting chat bots: you may find this kind of chat bots in websites which offers products and services.
Help desk (information desk) chat bots: you may find it in large libraries websites or programs.
Entertaining chat bots: This only made for fun and for chating.

In 1966, Eliza, the first chat bot, was created by Joseph Weizenbaum. In this article we are going to discuss how to build your chat bot, how to increase its ability to understand, how to make your bot able to do some operations which helps you in your daily life and finally tips & tricks to make your chat bot almost real like human. We are going to focus on logics only so any programmer can program our logics into any programming language.

Building your own Chat Bot:

Before building your chat bot, you have to understand that any chat bot consists of three main parts:

Input text: where you are going to write what you want to say to your chat bot.
Sending button: so you can send your input to be analyzed before getting the output.
Output text: where your chat bot is going to give a response.

The most important part is the sending button as it contains all the processes which analyze your input before copying the result to the output, so I will call the sending button the Artificial Intelligence Base (AI Base).

The AI Base Principles:

Any dialogue has beginning and ending like saying “Hello”-”Hey”-”Good morning”-”Hi, how are you?” … etc, we always hear this sentences when two persons start talking. There is also other situations which don’t need this sentences to begin like “Excuse me, what is the time?” … etc, in other hand we hear other sentences like “I have to go now” – “bye, see you later” – “I’ll call you later” – “looking forward to see you” … etc, these sentences usually used to end the conversation.

Figure 1: shows some sentences which affect the chat bot impressions, each impression is a file which contains all the sentences which lead to this impression. +Continue Reading

How to play Street Fighter 3 on your PC (Emulated)

Did you love the retro version of all those arcade games? if you did, you must’ve liked Street Fighter.. I’ve been a big fan of that game, we usually play it over at my place with friends coming over (still) and we have a great time. You can play Street fighter on your computer (older versions, champion edition etc) using Mame32 emulator etc easily (I’ll cover those soon) but Street Fighter 3 doesn’t work on that. NeoRage doesn’t support it either so lets take a look at something that does.

Street Fighter 3

It’s called the “CPS3 Emulator” (Capcom Play System 3). It’s a simple emulator designed for very specific games which are

  1. JoJo Bizarre Adventure (3 Parts)
  2. Street Fighter 3 (4 Parts)
  3. Warzard / Red Earth

I’m not sure if there are any more games for this emulator but I’m assuming there aren’t. Anyway, let me show you a simple guide on how to play Street Fighter III 3rd Strike: Fight for the future on your pc.
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How to install and Update 1.23 Warcraft TFT Patch

Alright, as every one know Warcraft 1.23 Patch has been released (You can download TFT 1.23 Patch here). Now suppose you have downloaded the patch, here’s how you can update your current version (1.22). Before that, I should mention that if you have original warcraft, just connect to any battle.net realm and your patch will automatically download and update your game, if not, here’s what you should do.

There are 2 patches available, 1 updates 1.22 to 1.23, it’s on couple of mb’s. You can download that and apply to get updated. The 59 MB 1.23 Patch comprises of all the changes etc if you are looking to update a new installation and is best for that case.

Problems:

You may confront situations like

Blizzard BNUpdate v2.133 compiled on Aug 21 2008
Log created at 1:09 pm on 03/22/2009

This patch upgrades Warcraft III The Frozen Throne from the previous version.

ERROR: unable to apply patch to file ‘c:\program files/warcraft III\worldedit.exe’

RESULT: Patch failed

etc. That happens when you don’t have the game “Installed” in your system or you have applied a no-cd Crack which basically tempers the game a bit and the patch can’t find the files to update. Also, when a game is copied to your system, it’s details are not in the registry so it won’t update the game.

Solution to that problem is to reinstall everything. Let me write a small step by step guide to that.

1- Uninstall Warcraft RoC / TFT.

2- Install Warcraft RoC (Reign of Chaos)

3- Install TFT (The Frozen Throne)

4- Download the 1.23 version patch (latest)

5- Run it and it will update your game without any problem.

Keep in mind, don’t apply any cd-cracks before all of this. Though, when you’re done, you can and it won’t have any problems. Also backup all the files that the crack replaces so in case another patch comes in, you can just replace the original files back and update. Problems always arises when you don’t have the game in your registry (Proper installation, not copied) and it’s running on a no-cd crack.

I hope this helps and if you have any trouble, just shoot a comment here.