Comodo Firewall and AntiVirus

http://personalfirewall.comodo.com/

Today I am going to talk about Comodo Firewall and AntiVirus.  It was a replacement from Mcaffee which I got freely from Comcast as I found Mcaffee often failed and was very obtrusive.  That and it caused my computer to take a good 30 seconds to start up.  Comodo is what I currently use on my machine and has never failed me yet.  It was a product security challenge done on this site http://www.matousec.com/projects/proactive-security-challenge/results.php that convinced me to switch and tryit.  The software is free with premium options that are perfectly fine leaving out.  It does a great job laying low and being non obtrusive and so far hasn’t missed anything that has attacked my computer.  One problem I did have was it got in the way of punkbuster and I couldn’t play my COD WAW without going in and shutting down a feature called Defense+.  The Firewall can still remain active though.  Also it supports x64Vista which was a huge deal to me as very few Firewalls and AntiVirus do.  I am very impressed with this program and give it my full recommendation.

Netvibes

http://www.netvibes.com/#General

Netvibes is to this day the best startpage webpage I have ever seen on the web.  They provide a list of popular applications and what not to add to your startpage, and let you categorize things in different tabs.  I found myself almost never using my url bar because everything I ever needed to know or visited was on here!  My gmail, myspace, facebook, podcasts, newegg rss feeds, etc…   It is really useful and I personally prefer it over igoogle and other versions of this.  The only complaint I do have is that when you start to add multitudes of different things to your page, the loadup times can get a little slow though.  That should be expected though and other than that, I have no complaints and use it daily!

VLC Media player

http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

For me, VLC Media player is the ultimate portable media player.  I put it on my jumpdrive so I have it everywhere with me just incase I need to play a video file that wont work on wmp or itunes player that is on another machine.  It has saved me over and over again,  which is why I have chosen to review it on here.  VLC Media player is a cross platform open source multimedia player that is capable of reading most audio and video extensions.  I use Winamp on my home machine but VLC is my portable player and does a perfect job at being just that.  Never do I need go searching the internet for audio and video codecs, everything just always works and plays.  Not much more of a review is needed then that, everything just works and plays!

FFMPEG

http://ffmpeg.org/

Ffmpeg is the ultimate free audio and video file conversion tool! In fact I prefer it over the ones that you pay for.  For me it became the reason to delete multitudes of other shareware and freeware platform software and use only it.  What makes it free then?  It is the fact that it runs in a dos window.

Yikes Dos!  I don’t know Dos!

That is what I said at first when I saw it, but luckily a “I don’t have a clue what I’m doing so help me!” guide exists here at this link    http://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-doc.html

Once I skimmed through that and understood the basic functions of the program, I was set!  If you don’t want to read through all of that, I’ll jot down a quick starters guide that you can read here.

Download the program, and extract ffmpeg.exe to your start window.  For me, I’m on Vista, it was my User name window, mine being Wes.  For xp users it will be there C drive window I believe.  Next put what ever file you wish to convert into teh same location and open up the dos command prompt.  Type in       ffmpeg -i “File name.extension” “Desired File name.Desired Extention”               Include the quotes when you do it, and that will give you a basic file conversion.

All in all though this is an extremely useful program and of course it is free!  So get on it!

Sound Design/Synthesis and Mixing/Production and ‘How To’ Tutorials

For my first post, I decided I wanted to cover something that I have personally found to be very useful.  I am a musician and enjoy listening and playing music.  I play the keyboard for a band called Gordon Avenue here in Portland Oregon, and have been learning the ins and outs of my Analogue Synthesizer.  This is a very complicated instrument and was a bit overwhelming at first, but with the help of….

http://www.samplecraze.com/tutorial.php

I have been able to put myself on a good start towards learning the thing.  This website has tons of information!  Whether it is sound design, mixing, sampleing, etc… They may have a tutorial for you there.  Now the list on that site isn’t really extensive and you may not find what you are looking for there, but if you do, I guarantee that you will, like me, be drooling over the screen for not having to pay for information like that!  The tutorials are very user friendly and while reading, it almost felt like I had an instructor right by my side.  Check out the free tutorials there, you wont regret it!  Again that is

http://www.samplecraze.com/tutorial.php

Introduction

Hey everybody, so my first year of college is done and I have a nice long summer ahead of me, hence I decided I would start a new summer project. I decided I wanted to create this blog.  The goal of this blog is to be useful and informative to those people that haven’t quite dug deep into the internet and found all the abundance free tools and resources it offers.  I am a internet guru, and love aimlessly browsing for hours on end.  Because of this, I have come accross a wide range of interesting resources that are free and very handy.  Every couple days or so over the summer I plan on picking an item and sharing it on here so check back often if you want to stay updated!