If you had lost some very important data, or if you see that your computer is simply dying, the following recovery tools will be indispensable for you. You’d better burn yourself several of these useful tools before the disastrous thing happens.

Windows Recovery - this utility will backup your entire Windows, partition table and so on. So you can recover your corrupt Windows and partition table. You can also use this utility to backup your important data before reinstalling Windows, or transfer your data to extended devices when your windows crashed or hard disk was damaged.

O&O DiskRecovery 4 - functionality begins where other programs leave off. This software combs every sector of a hard disk, memory card, or digital camera to find lost files. Even when files systems are formatted or destroyed, it is possible to reconstruct once deleted data. Over 350 file types can be recognized and restored, including Word documents, Excel workbooks, Access databases, and virtually every sort of commonly used graphics, photo, movie, and music formats.

SuperDuper is a program that makes recovery painless, because it makes creating a fully bootable backup painless. Its incredibly clear, friendly interface is understandable, easy to use, and SuperDuper’s built-in scheduler makes it trivial to back up automatically. And it runs beautifully on both Intel and Power PC Macs. It is an indispensable tool, specially if your hard drive starts making that horrible clicking noise, your most important day-to-day application isn’t working with the system update you just applied, or you need to restore a stable copy of your system, but don’t want to lose what you’ve been working on, or other similar cases.

The Ultimate Boot CD will be of great help if you want to run floppy-based diagnostic tools from CDROM drives, consolidate as many diagnostic tools as possible into one bootable CD. Avoid digging into the dusty box to look for the right floppy disk, but simply run them all from a single CD.
Now you can run Ultimate Boot CD from your USB memory stick. A script on the CD prepares your USB memory stick so that it can be used on newer machines that supports booting from USB devices.

KNOPPIX is a bootable CD with a collection of GNU/Linux software, automatic hardware detection, and support for many graphics cards, sound cards, SCSI and USB devices and other peripherals. It can be used as a Linux demo, educational CD, rescue system, or adapted and used as a platform for commercial software product demos. It is not necessary to install anything on a hard disk. Due to on-the-fly decompression, the CD can have up to 2 GB of executable software installed on it.

Ghost for Linux is a hard disk and partition imaging and cloning tool similar to Norton Ghost. The created images are optionally compressed and transferred to an FTP server instead of cloning locally.

GParted Live CD aims to be fast, small in size (~50mb), and use minimal resources to get that disk partitioned the way you want it. GParted Live CD is based on Gentoo-catalyst, and uses Xorg, the lightweight Fluxbox window manager,
and the latest 2.6 Linux Kernel. The CD also offers the following programs: parted and fdisk vi, ntfs-3g, partimage, testdisk, Terminal and Midnight Commander.

SystemRescueCd is a Linux system on a bootable CD-ROM for repairing your system and recovering your data after a crash. It aims to provide an easy way to carry out admin tasks on your computer, such as creating and editing the partitions of the hard disk.

The Magical Jelly Bean Key Finder is a freeware utility that retrieves your Product Key (cd key) used to install windows from your registry. It has the options to copy the key to clipboard, save it to a text file, or print it for safekeeping. It works on Windows 95, 98, ME, NT4, 2000, XP, Server 2003, Windows Vista, Office 97, Office XP, and Office 2003.

Undelete Plus is a quick and effective way to retrieve accidentally deleted files, files removed from the Recycle Bin, in a DOS window, from a network drive, from Windows Explorer with the SHIFT key held down.
It works under Win 95/98/Me/NT/2000/XP/2003/Vista operating systems. The program supports all Windows file systems for hard and floppy drives.

System Information for Windows is a tool that gathers detailed information about your system properties and settings and displays it in an extremely comprehensible manner.
It can create a report file (CSV, HTML, TXT or XML), and is able to run in batch mode (for Asset Inventory Tracking, Software and Hardware Inventory, PC Audit, Software Audit, Software License Compliance Management).

USB PC Repair Kit is a list of programs. The programs are loaded onto a USB Pen Drive to help fix your computer. The Kit contains the programs that can tell you if you really need to reboot after installing a program or permanently erase sensitive data from your hard drive that may still exist after using the windows delete feature.

TestDisk is a powerful free data recovery software. It was primarily designed to help recover lost partitions and/or make non-booting disks bootable again when these symptoms are caused by faulty software, certain types of viruses or human error (such as accidentally deleting your Partition Table). Partition table recovery using TestDisk is really easy.

FSBackup is a shell script that automates the execution of backups using the tar archiving utility. It is designed for use by technically knowledgeable users (programmers, system administrators, or other power users), for backing up a small network or individual computers.

Corruption Corrector is a program designed for fixing corrupt files. It is for situations when you have (downloaded) many copies of the same file, but all of the copies are a bit corrupt. If the corruptions are in different parts of the file, it is possible to combine the good bytes from each file and get an uncorrupted copy of the file.

myrescue is a program to rescue the still-readable data from a damaged hard disk. It is similar in purpose to dd_rescue, but it tries to quickly get out of damaged areas to first handle the not yet damaged part of the disk and return later.

Relax and Recover is a highly modular disaster recovery framework for GNU/Linux based systems, but can be easily extended to other UNIX alike systems. The disaster recovery information (and maybe the backups) can be stored via the network, local on hard disks or USB devices, DVD/CD-R, tape, etc. The result is also a bootable image that is capable of booting via PXE, DVD/CD and tape (OBDR).

Well-readable and logically-structured code is necessary not merely for outlook. It speeds considerably bug hunting. If you are a developer and are working in the group, there arises another important aspect. The code should be clean and understandable by other developers you are working with.

Before using these tools and services make sure you have a backup of your data.

1. Quick Highlighter can format source codes written in over 85 languages - among them PHP, Ruby, HTML, JavaScript, Perl, Python, Smarty, XML, CSS, Delphi, C++, and more. The tool formats source code and highlights inbuilt keywords, data types etc.

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Podcast Creation Guides

iLounge Guide to Podcast Creation creating podcasts isn’t a simple matter, either isn’t it a too hard one. The following guide is a step-by-step instruction including all elements you need to create a simple podcast.

Podcasting Legal Guide will inform you about legal issues relevant to podcasting in this Creative Commons guide.

Podcast Offline Creation Software

Adobe Soundbooth software lets you take command of your audio in film, video, and Adobe Flash software projects. Use on-clip controls to make fast edits and intuitive, task-based tools to clean up recordings, polish voice-overs, customize music, modify sound effects, apply high-quality filters, and much more.

Audacity is free, open source software for recording and editing sounds. It is available for Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux, and other operating systems. You can use Audacity to record live audio, convert tapes and records into digital recordings or CDs, edit Ogg Vorbis, MP3, and WAV sound files, cut, copy, splice, and mix sounds together, change the speed or pitch of a recording.

Propaganda software is a powerful tool you can use to create audio shows that sound professionally produced with a minimum of effort. Whether you’re new to podcasting or an experienced broadcaster, Propaganda can simplify and streamline the podcast production process for you.

SnapKast is software solution for fast, easy MP3 audio and MPEG-4 video content creation and delivery. Sessions are shared online, delivered via RSS podcasts, and played back on any computer or podcatching device, e.g. iPod, Zune, PSP.

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If you associate torrents only with illegal downloads, this article will help you to get rid of this misconception. This file sharing technology may be used for legal distribution. The following tools will help you to get started with torrenting.

Distribution Sites Of Legal Content

BitTorrent is the global standard for delivering high-quality files over the Internet. BitTorrent provides a better digital entertainment experience for the community of over 150 million users. With thousands of newly-released movies, TV shows, music tracks, and popular PC games available for download, you can easily find what you want.

bt.etree.org is provided for sharing the live concert recordings of trade friendly artists.

BTSharp is the easiest way to integrate highly scalable peer-to-peer content distribution into your .NET application. It is a .NET library that allows you to seamlessly integrate native peer-to-peer support for scalable content distribution into your applications. BTSharp includes: a BTClient that supports P2P scalable content distribution; a stand-alone tracker for private file transfers, support for reliable file transfers provided by Seeder Servers.

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If you are a college student, you will certainly need the following Web tools, that can make the process of learning much easier. They will definitely save your time and efforts. And the most important thing is that they are absolutely free.

Writing tools

Book Finder: A one-stop ecommerce search engine that searches over 125 million books for sale — new, used, rare, out-of-print, and textbooks. Save your time and money by searching every major catalog online, find out which booksellers are offering the best prices and selection. When you find a book you like, you can buy it directly from the original seller; BookFinder never charges a markup. If you are one of those poor students who struggles for money, this site is for you. You can compare prices that are offered by different sellers and pick up the cheapest item.

MynoteIT: A fantastic new social search learning tool. It is useful for both high school and college students. MynoteIT allows to take and store your notes online, edit and revise notes with peers, look-up and define words with your Workspace Utilities. You can share notes with your friends and groups. With MynoteIT you can keep track of what you have to do, and what you’ve done, and be sure that you’ll never forget about homework or a quiz.

Ottobib: With Ottobib the process of making a bibliography becomes faster and easier. This webpage allows the reader to see the books, their covers, links to Amazon or other online references.

Google Docs: Google Docs & Spreadsheets is a free web-based word processing and spreadsheet program that keeps documents current and lets the people you choose update files from their own computers. You can, for example, coordinate your student group’s homework assignments, access your family to-do list from work or home, or collaborate with remote colleagues on a new business plan.
Google Docs & Spreadsheets allows you to import your existing documents and spreadsheets, or to create new ones from scratch. You can edit your documents from anywhere. Google Docs & Spreadsheets accepts most popular file formats, including DOC, XLS, ODT, ODS, RTF, CSV, etc. Besides, you can publish your documents and spreadsheets online with one click, as normal-looking web pages, without having to learn anything new.

Zoho Show: Zoho allows you to create and share presentations online. It possesses a number of benefits. You can access, import and edit presentations from anywhere. It allows to share your presentations with your friends and colleagues both in private or make it public for all. Check out for other benefits.

SpellJax: Not sure about spelling of some of the words? Check your spelling online with SpellJax, an Ajax-powered spell checker.

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