Freeware World

Google Reader has already a handy feature to share interesting articles and blog posts in an easy way: the Share link that appears below each item. With this link, as we explained before, Google Reader marks those items as shared and puts them online on an automatically generated web page. However I tend to star items more than to share them - I just find it easier to manage starred articles later on when I want to read or reuse them for any purpose, like Favorites. And the good thing is that starred items can also be shared… even on Twitter! All you need is three user accounts (one for Google Reader, one for Twitter and one for Twitterfeed) and follow these simple steps:

1. The starred items feed is set to Private by default, so first of all you need to go to Settings > Folders and tags and mark it as “Public” from the drop-down menu.

2. Click the View public page link. This will open a website generated by Google Reader with all the items you’ve starred. Right click the Atom feed link and copy the URL.

3. Go to your Twitterfeed account and set up a new feed with the URL you just copied. Tweak settings according to your needs (update frequency, post prefix, number of posts to be published) but try not to take over your follower’s timeline with too many starred items.

4. Twitterfeed will take a while to check your feed and update it for the first time. From that moment on, all the items you star on Google Reader will be automatically published on Twitter.

This afternoon I claimed ownership of The Pentagon, Windsor Castle, and Camp Nou, home of FC Barcelona. Don’t worry, I’m not part of some evil terrorist plot, I’m just playing the new Buzz graffiti game that’s sweeping the World*. The object of the game is to be the first to tag a famous building, government office or monument, using the new Google Buzz feature within Google Maps for Mobile.

Google’s new Buzz geo-tagging feature has today been added to the latest versions of Google Maps for iPhone, Android, Windows Mobile and Symbian devices. It allows you to post details of where you are and what doing, for the whole World to see. Your phone will auto-detect your location and you can simply hit the ‘Add Buzz’ button to put your comment on the map.

More interestingly though, you can now search Google Maps for any company or famous building and get an option to ‘Buzz about this place’. And this is where the game comes in. According to the rules of Buzz graffiti, if no one has buzzed about it before, you can claim control of it simply by tagging it with a comment to the effect that you’re the new owner. OK, so go get the new Google Maps for your mobile and start tagging. I’m off to take over all the Starbucks in my town…

*Actually, I’m the only competitor in Buzz graffiti at the moment, but all the more reason for you to start playing, before I take over the planet - mwah hah hah hah!

As Jon already pointed out, today is Clean Out Your Computer Day, which makes it the perfect time to review some useful applications and routines for spring cleaning your Windows computer. That said, I hope you don’t limit these routines to one single day every year; all computers can benefit largely from frequent cleaning sessions, in terms of drive space, speed and performance. Here we go!

1. If you install new software apps quite often, you should probably check the list of installed programs on your system and start cleaning there. Ask yourself whether you still need that 500 MB program you haven’t used lately, and don’t be afraid to uninstall anything you don’t need anymore.

2. After months browsing the web, your browser history files and cache memory will have surely reached a huge size. Trim those down the easy way by using the browser’s own history manager (Tools > Clear Recent History in Firefox) or using a third-party app such as Free Windows Sweeper.

3. Check the folder where you save all the files you download from the web, and make sure you clean them up. Keeping a program’s executable file after it’s been installed is just a waste of space!

4. Use disk analysis tools like SpaceSniffer to locate the largest files and folders on your system, and decide whether you need to keep them or not. Maybe it would be a good idea to store those gigabytes of old photos somewhere else…

5. Last but not least, use your favorite cleaning tool to get rid of any other additional junk data your computer has been storing in the background, such as Windows temporary files, recent document lists, log files and more.

These are by no means the only tips we’ve we’ve got about computer spring cleaning. If all this isn’t enough for you, check our previous posts about how to recover hard drive space, five tools to clean up your computer, cleaning tips for a faster PC, how to free up disk space with Scanner, how to use a USB memory device to clean your PC and how to configure advanced options in CCleaner.

What about you? Do you have any other personal routines for computer maintenance?

Because they’re amazing, you might think you never have to think about spring cleaning your Mac, but it’s still a good idea to keep things in order. The second Tuesday of February is Clean Out Your Computer Day, so today’s a good day to start!

There are some myths about optimizing your system, and perhaps the most damaging is that of cache cleaning. Tools like Cache Out X will find and ‘clean’ your various caches, some of which may look pretty big. While that may save you disk space for a few moments, it’s a bad idea. Cache files in OSX are created precisely to speed up performance, so if you delete them, the system will have to recreate them, actually slowing you down!

That’s not to say there aren’t things you can do, so here’s some good advice:

1: If your browser is slow, perhaps it’s time to delete its history, cache and cookies? A year’s worth of browsing with a saved history and cache will seriously decrease efficiency. Instead of relying on the history, bookmark your favorite sites, then hit clean (File>Delete Cache in Safari, Tools>Clear Recent History in Firefox).

2: If you’re running any OSX up to 10.5 (Leopard), and you turn off your Mac at night, there are some scripts that perform clean up tasks automatically in the early hour of the morning - they clear up any unnecessary log files and system cache. Left in sleep mode, they’ll run when you wake up the computer but if you turn off your Mac they won’t. You can’t do any harm by running these scripts anyway, and doing so is really simple:

Open Terminal (look in Applications>Utilities) and enter the following text exactly: sudo periodic daily weekly monthly. You’ll then be asked for your system password - enter it, and hit return. You won’t see anything happening, but it will finish when the blinking prompt reappears.

3: Run Disk Utility. Found in Applications>Utilities again, this will just make sure your directories are in order, and keep things running smoothly. It’s easy to use - click on your Hard drive in the Disk Utility window, then click Verify Disk, wait for the process to finish the click Repair. Repeat for Verify Disk Permissions. It may not speed your system up, but it won’t do any harm.

4: Clean out your folders. Over time it’s easy to let your pictures, documents and downloads folders get messy. Take time every month to clear them out. It makes finding things easier, and will free up some hard drive space. Go through your applications folder and delete apps you never use - they’re a waste of space!

Do you have any other cleaning routines?

I was surprised to learn that the new version of Firefox is 15% faster than the previous version. When I say surprised I actually mean I didn’t believe a word of it. I decided to challenge this figure by putting Firefox 3.5 and Firefox 3.6 up against each other in a series of three benchmarking tests. I also included comparisons with the latest versions of Chrome, Opera and Internet Explorer. In the name of transparency, I’ve decided to explain the benchmarking process for each of the three tests I applied. Why not try it for yourself and see which of your web browsers runs the best?

Test One:  Peacekeeper Browser Benchmark

Peacekeeper is a free service that puts your browser through its paces in a series of thorough tests. It checks performance in the following areas: rendering, social networking, complex graphics, data, Document Object Model operations, and text parsing. Each test takes about five minutes and simple involves hitting a button on the Peacekeeper site in the browser you want to test. To make a fair test you should ensure that you just have one tab or window open, and disable or uninstall any extensions you have running.

Peacemaker gives each browser an overall performance score, and you can view a more detailed breakdown of how that score was arrived at by clicking the ‘Details’ link on the graph. Here’s the graph generated by the browser tests I performed:

Test Two: SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark

The second test I performed was the same one run by Computerworld in its tests on Firefox 3.5 and 3.6. The SunSpider JavaScript benchmark is a utility that tests the speed of a browser by running a series of JavaScripts and measuring the speed at which the software process them. It breaks the results down into a series of different categories based on the scripts it ran. These results are a little harder to interpret than the Peacekeeper test, but you can look at the total time and use this as your benchmark for comparing the browsers. Here are the overall times (fastest first) for the browsers I tested:

• Chrome 4.0 - 649.4ms

• Firefox 3.6 - 1415ms

• Firefox 3.5 - 1700ms

• Opera 10.10 - 3051ms

• Internet Explorer 8 - 6346.2ms

Test Three: The Acid 3 Test

The third and final test is much quicker and simpler than the previous two. The Acid 3 Test is used to measure a browser’s compliance with web standards, particularly relating to the Document Object Model and JavaScript. To pass the test a browser needs to attain a score of 100/100 and the final image it displays must match the reference image.

Of the five browsers we tested, only Google Chrome and Opera attained the maximum 100 out of 100. Firefox 3.6 (94) and Firefox 3.5 (93) both almost made the grade. Microsoft should hang its head in shame though, because IE8 only scored a measely 20 out of 100, meaning it falls way short of standards compliance.

Analyzing the results

Our benchmarking supports Computerworld’s claim that Firefox 3.6 is much faster than version 3.5. In fact, according to the SunSpider test we ran, the newer release comes out 17% quicker than the previous version. It’s still not as speedy as Chrome though, which was more than twice as fast as Firefox, and way ahead of Opera and IE.

What’s more, the Mozilla browser performs very well against its competitors in the Peacekeeper benchmark. Again, it’s only Chrome that pips the latest version of Firefox. And again, Internet Explorer is left floundering in final place, this time in a test than examines the overall capabilities of the browser.

So, my advice based on these results is to upgrade to Firefox 3.6 if you haven’t already done so. Better still, install Chrome and use that to browse the web instead. Having said this, ut’s definitely worth running the benchmark tests on your own browsers because the results can vary considerably depending on your setup, the amount of extensions that you have installed, the OS you’re using, etc.

Last night I was reviewing messages in my Gmail account, trying to get them all sorted out and reach the much-coveted inbox zero. I needed Gmail to display only my unread emails so that I could process them one by one, when I realized Gmail didn’t have that option anywhere. Sure you can select all unread messages, but that’s of little use if they’re all scattered over a dozen pages. So I started searching for a solution, and only a few minutes after I found Gmail Advanced Search.

The advanced search options in Gmail let you use special words or symbols – called operators - to filter the messages displayed on your web browsers. It’s a quicker, more accurate way to find certain messages. You can filter you inbox to display only unread emails, only starred emails or only emails that came from a specific sender. What’s more, you can combine different operators and create super-refined filters like “messages from Peter with the word ‘dinner’ in the subject”.

These are some of the most useful operators you can use in Gmail:

• from: - displays messages received from a certain sender: from:peter
• to: - displays messages sent to a specific recipient: to:john 
• subject: - displays messages with certain words in the subject: subject:bbq
• label: - displays messages filed under specific labels: label:work
• in:(inbox, trash, spam) - displays all messages stored in any of those locations: in:trash
• is:(starred, unread) - displays messages you’ve starred or haven’t read yet: is:unread
• filename: - displays messages with a specific attachment: filename:softonic.pdf

One of the great things about Snow Leopard is that you no longer need Cisco’s VPN Client to connect over a private network. Snow Leopard has its own Cisco VPN network configuration tool that works within OS X 10.6. Cisco’s VPN client doesn’t even work with Snow Leopard so if you’ve still got it on your system, you can dump it in the Trash. However, setting up a Cisco VPN network might be a little tricky for those doing it for the first time so here is a simple guide.

Go to System Preferences and select Network:

Use the “+” symbol at the bottom of the list of network connections on the left-hand side to add a new network.

Next to Interface select VPN and next to VPN Type, select Cisco IPSec:

You then need to configure it. For this you will need the .PCF file that you uploaded to your old Cisco VPN client. Open it with Text Editor. You have to copy some of these details into the configuration boxes.

In the .PCF file, you will find your Server Address usually something like Host=345.535.453.7

Account Name is the your personal login name you usually used for your Cisco VPN Connection listed in your PCF file as something like Username=Joe.Bloggs.

Finally Password is your own personal password. It doesn’t matter if you enter this now as you’ll be asked for it again later anyway.

Then you need to setup the Authentication Settings.

The Shared Secret is an encrypted password you’ll find listed next to enc_GroupPwd= in the .PCF file. You need to decrypt it to Plaintext which you can do by using this decoder to convert it. The result should be displayed something like: Plaintext password: 89fdfsPdfs1D9itr

Finally, Group Name is located in your .PCF file next to GroupName= and is the generic group name that all VPN users on your company network use (such as “Teleworking” or “Softonic”).

And that’s just about it. It’s a good idea to make sure the check box Show VPN status in menu bar is ticked in the network setup dialog box as you can then quickly connect and disconnect your Cisco VPN network and see how long you’ve been connected:

I can’t say I’ve noticed any major speed improvements in the VPN since I switched to Snow Leopard but its nice to know that I need one less application to connect to a private network and thus, one more badly needed space in my Dock.

Today sees the arrival of another edition of Softonic’s software blog, OnSoftware. That’s right: fr.onsoftware.com has launched!

We’re very pleased to welcome our French colleagues to the blogosphere. They’re all experienced software journalists with Softonic.fr already… and they’ve really been chomping at the bit to get their blog online.

As you’ll expect, they’ll be providing the very best software coverage, tips, tricks, advice and more… just in French! So whether you’re a French speaker or you’re still learning, check out fr.onsoftware.com and let the guys know what you think!

I’m planning to visit Japan this year, and as part of my preparations for the trip I’d like to learn a bit of Japanese – at least some basic words and sentences to move around the country. Before starting with vocabulary though, you must learn the two Japanese alphabets, hiragana and katakana; luckily there are dozens of online resources that can help you with this task. The only thing you need to do is configuring your computer to display Japanese characters, and you’ll be ready to go!

Setting up Windows XP to display Japanese – and other Asian languages – properly involves a bit of tweaking, and requires the Windows XP CD as well. Simply follow these steps:

1. Open the Control Panel (Start menu > Control Panel)

2. Click the Regional and Language Options icon and go to the Languages tab. Tick the Install files for East Asian Languages option and hit OK. Follow on-screen instructions and insert the Windows XP CD when prompted.

3. Once the installation is finished, and after the correspondent system restart, go back to the same dialog window mentioned before and in the Languages tab, click the Details button.

4. Here you’ll see all the configured input languages for your computer. To include Japanese (or whatever Asian language you want to add) among these, hit the Add button and select it from the drop-down menu. Click OK on this windows and all previous ones.

5. From now on you’ll be able to switch between different input languages using the Language bar in the taskbar (if you can’t see the Language bar, right click anywhere on the taskbar and select Toolbars > Language bar).

Note that some specific languages may need further configuration in terms of the character set to use as input, punctuation mode, conversions, dictionaries and auto-correct options. Once everything’s set up according to your needs, you’ll be able to use Asian languages on your computer.

When you install Windows XP for the first time – or perform a clean reinstallation from scratch – you usually get a bunch of default icons on your desktop, namely My Computer, My Documents, My Network Places, Internet Explorer and the Recycle Bin. These are special system shortcuts, different from standard desktop shortcuts, and have their own tweaking options to hide them or bring them back in case they’re lost.

If you want to recover those lost system icons, right click anywhere on the desktop to open the Display Properties window, select the Desktop tab and click the Customize Desktop button. This will open the Desktop Items window, where you can see a box containing all these special system icons, and small checkboxes to enable or disable them. Now simply select which icons should be displayed and which ones should be kept hidden, or hit the Restore Default button to go back to the standard configuration.

Incidentally, the Desktop Items window also lets you change the icon in these special system shortcuts. It’s as easy as selecting the icon you want to customize, click Change Icon and select a new one.