Sumatra 1.0 is a Blazing Fast Replacement for Adobe Reader

courtesy of lifehacker.com

Windows only: The Sumatra PDF Viewer is a tiny, open-source, portable, and, most of all, lightning-quick replacement for the bloated Adobe Reader we’ve all learned to replace. It’s only a 1.2 MB download, so why not give it a try?

Sumatra opened every PDF we threw at it without any issues, along with a table of contents in the left pane if available. You can head into the Options to choose the default layout and zoom, or choose whether to have the sidebar display automatically. Want to copy text to the clipboard? Just hold down the Ctrl key and select the text with your mouse, then use Ctrl+C to copy it. There’s even a full set of hotkeys, including Gmail-style navigation. It’s not as full-featured as Reader or Foxit, but if all you are doing is reading PDFs, it’s definitely worth a look.

With giant hard drives and dirt-cheap memory these days, perhaps the biggest reason to switch to an alternative to Adobe Reader isn’t even the bloat anymore—it’s the non-stop security holes that seem to plague the popular reader, leaving you vulnerable to drive-by attacks. If Sumatra isn’t for you, at least check out one of the other five best PDF readers.

Sumatra is a free download for Windows only. If you plan to keep Adobe Reader installed, be sure to check out the manual for instructions on using Sumatra as your default viewer when reading PDFs from the web.

Sumatra [via Download Squad]

LockThis! Password Protects Your Open Programs

courtesy of lifehacker.com

Windows only: If you’ve ever wanted to keep a program safe from prying eyes but don’t want to close it, free utility LockThis! will let you easily protect any open program, so that un-minimizing it requires a password.

LockThis! is extremely easy to use—to lock an application, all you need to do is press Ctrl while minimizing the window that you want protected. It will ask you for your admin password (which by default is LockThis! but can be changed from the admin window), and then keep the window minimized until you want it open again.

You can use your admin password for all protected programs, set a separate password for all programs, or specify the password on a per-program basis as you minimize them. It’s up to you. It runs in the system tray, staying out of your way except to prompt for passwords—even if you try to open the admin window or exit LockThis!, it will prompt you for your admin password so no one can just shut it off.

LockThis! is a free download, Windows only.

LockThis! [via Life Rocks 2.0]

Xbox 360 Update Impressions – Twitter, Facebook, Last.FM, and More

I just loaded up my Xbox 360 recently only to discover some nice new additions to the Xbox Live service. The addition of Twitter, Facebook, Last.FM, and Zune Video marketplace adds a whole new dimension in having the Xbox 360 as an ultimate source of rich media in your living room. Listed below is my shared experience with these additions. Twitter and Facebook are displayed in the community section, where you currently also find the “Game with Fame” events. The Zune Marketplace is the first thing that pops up when you’re on the Music and Video section, and Last.fm is the second item listed in the music section. You can find the news feed at the end of the Inside Xbox section.

Twitter: As I’m not really a twitter addict, I chose to make this application my first choice when reviewing the new apps from the dashboard update. I love how the present Twitter in this space. Not only is it a stylized version of the front page, but it brings most of its useful functions to an easy to navigate area. It also runs as soon as you boot it, unlike Facebook and Last.fm, which requires you to download small applications to install. Your Twitter feed will update every minute or so, but it also allows you to manually update your tweets by pressing Y. All of the updates to twitter must be manually entered by the user (so no auto-spamming of your twitter feed). One disadvantage here is the Xbox 360’s twitter app’s inability to click on links. Because of the lack of a web browser, the twitter app doesn’t allow you to click on links. This is one of the main features of Twitter. Hopefully they can rig-a-ma-roll something here in the future. Also, there’s no notification of how many characters you have left when you’re typing out a tweet. This should be a simple software update fix, so hopefully Microsoft can get the ball rolling on this.

Facebook: Now on to Facebook. This was the 2^nd app I loaded from the Xbox 360. Overall, it’s a nice clean looking app. It allows for a great way to share pics from your photo album onto your TV. Even though the pictures are not as sharp as it would be on a regular computer, it’s a good alternative nonetheless. This app also allows you to post updates, and comment on other friend’s comments and/or updates. One of the few downsides of this app is its inability to access videos, apps or links from your Facebook feed or a friends Facebook feed. Because of the lack of a web browser, many key features like these suffer because of the lack of a web browser. I can only hope Microsoft comes up with a solution to this as I can see this becoming big turn off to the service.

Last.fm: Last.Fm is a nice little app for me. Not only do I love listening to steaming radio, but for a tailored music experience all from the Xbox Dashboard, there’s nothing better (until Pandora gets added of course). The service is just like Pandora where you would enter a list of favorite artists and create what they call ‘Stations”. The stations feature these favorite artists and similar sounding artists. When the songs play, you have the option of pulling up an information window, or you can let a slideshow of user-uploaded pics play. While you can’t play music outside of the program into games (which I hope changes soon), Last.fm on the Xbox 360 could be pretty useful as background music and visuals during a party or while doing chores. Still, it’s not quite as cool as Pandora, which has a more streamlined interface and the ability to pause tracks.

Zune & News: I’m not sure on this one. Although you can stream 1080p videos instantly, I don’t have a Zune to fully test this service with. The News feeds were buried in the Xbox Dashboard because, for now, there’s no interesting content for the service yet (aside from a few MSNBC news clips, as well as animated Dilbert and New Yorker comics). Overall, these were some good additions to the Xbox live service. I’m looking forward to more new compelling features and updates in the future.

Shape Collage Online Makes Great Photo Collages in Your Browser

Courtesy of lifehacker.com

Web application Shape Collage quickly turns your online photos into embeddable photo collages with nothing more than a few clicks. It’s a interesting way to showcase your pictures online without a lot of work.

Click here for more

Convert Outlook Emails to Plain Text, One-by-One or Permanently

Courtesy of lifehacker.com

Wired’s How-To Wiki points out that HTML emails rendered by Outlook are not only occasionally hard to format, they’ll look different (and broken) in many clients. They follow up with tips on turning some or all emails to plain text.

If you’re generally emailing inside a closed circle with Outlook users, HTML-formatted emails are probably fine. But reaching outside Outlook’s very specific HTML confines can cause broken graphics and strange formatting. Hit the link for the menu options and shortcuts that set Outlook 2003 and 2007 to send in “the telegram simplicity of raw text that ensures your message will be received clearly on any device.”

Change from HTML to Plain Text in Outlook [ Wired How-To Wiki]

Chrome OS Virtual Machine Build Ready for Your Testing

Courtesy of lifehacker.com

If you’re aching to try out Chrome OS after taking a glimpse earlier today, friendly power user Mark Renouf has compiled a VMware image of Chrome OS for testing out in your virtual machine environment.

While Chrome OS is far from ready for the regular user, lots of us are aching to play around a little with Google’s young operating system. This virtual machine-friendly build looks like a good way to do just that, and you can grab it via BitTorrent now. From The Pirate Bay page:

This is a ChromeOS image converted to VMware .vmdk file.

It was built from instructions provided on the ChromiumOS developers site:

http://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/chromium-os/building-chromium-os/build-instructions

Built from sources retreived on 11/19/2009, following the announcement of the opening of the ChromeOS source code.

Shared user password (for sudo, etc is ‘chromeos’)

If you give it a download and try it out, let’s hear how it worked for you (and share any images you manage to grab) in the comments.

Update: Alternately, you can download a VMware build directly from web site gdgt as well, “no strings attached” (as long as you don’t consider creating an account at gdgt and giving them your email address “strings”).

ChromeOS [The Pirate Bay via ironicsans]

Quick Steps Looks Like Office 2010’s Killer Feature

Courtesy of lifehacker.com

Microsoft’s Office 2010 has rolled out to trusted testers, and among the screenshots coming back, nothing seems so promising as the Quick Steps buttons. They’re like high-powered Send & Archive buttons that can be tweaked to do any multi-step action.

Sure, Office 2010 includes automatic SkyDrive document synchronization, native PDF creation, advanced video editing in PowerPoint, and a lot of other tweaks—detailed, in screenshots and text, by the Digital Inspiration blog.

But what’s really exciting to our email-handling reptile brains is the ability to create Quick Step buttons for any kind of email. You can create your own Send & Archive, but have it archive into any Outlook folder. You can also have Send & Delete, or bulk-forward messages to somebody with a subject of “FYI.” Six or more of your custom Quick Steps appear in the Office 2010 ribbon, and they seem fairly open-ended in what they can accomplish, as described at the Office Outlook Team Blog.

After trying this feature out myself today, I can safely say that this is a great new feature. Before I had a clunky solution where I would add seperate emails to my Outlook 2007 jumplists in Windows 7. I would then launch these emails from the jumplists to open predefined functions in Outlook (like a standard email template). The “Quick Steps” offer a great new time-saving function to Outlook ath I would recommend everyone give a whirl.

Microsoft Office 2010 – A Visual Guide to New Features of Office 2010 [Digital Inspiration

Office 2010 Professional Beta Available for Download

Courtesy of lifehacker.com

Windows: Wanna give Office 2010’s online document syncing, Windows 7 taskbar integration, and killer quick steps a go? Microsoft has thrown open the doors on a free beta of Office 2010 Professional—for those who can wait out the download.

As with the Windows 7 beta and most Microsoft offerings, this one requires grabbing a license key, registering or signing in with a Windows Live/Passport account, and fighting it out with the many others trying to grab the download from the servers. The download is 684 MB, and Microsoft is suggesting users uninstall previous versions of Office before downloading—as well as asking that you “don’t test Office Professional Plus 2010 Beta on your primary home or business PC.”

Okay, sure thing, Redmond. Let us know if you’ve grabbed the beta, or found any helpful mirror links, in the comments. Office 2010 Professional beta is a free download for Windows XP SP3 and later systems.

Microsoft Office 2010 Beta Professional Plus – Free Download [Site via Source]

SKTimeStamp Adjusts File Creation Dates

Windows only: Have you ever told a little white lie about when you started working on a project, hoping nobody would notice that the file timestamps disagree? SKTimeStamp helps you lie more effectively.

Once you’ve installed the explorer add-on, all you have to do is right-click on a file, choose the TimeStamps tab, change the dates to anything you want, and then click the Touch button. The file will magically appear to have been created or modified whenever you specified—though depending on the type of file some of the other metadata might rat you out. It’s no substitute for telling the truth, but it’s a great little tool just in case you ever need it.

SKTimeStamp is free and open source, available for Windows only. Hit the Simple Help link for a walk-through on how it works, or for more, check out how to power up Windows Explorer with free add-ons—if you aren’t already using an alternate file manager.

SKTimeStamp [via Simple Help]

Create Edible Gummy Shot Glasses

Trying to figure out what to serve your skittles-infused vodka in? Why, a flavored gummy shot glass, of course.

ShesParticular at tinkering haven Instructables uploaded a ridiculously simple tutorial on making your own gummy shot glasses. The gist of it: you use a silicone mold intended for making ice shot glasses, you microwave a bunch of gummi worms on a low heat to melt them, and then you pour the mixture into the molds. There are some details to refine the process included in her tutorial, but the basis of technique is executing gummi worms with a microwave. If you’d like finer control over the process than simply melting pre-made gummi worms, make sure to check out how to make your own gummy candies for a great tutorial covering the process of making gummy candies from scratch.

Gummi Shot Glasses [Instructables]