Software | I'm Just Sharing

Two Free Programs, Two Great Chess Sites

Posted by Mitch Mitchell on May 27, 2010

As the title says, today I’m going to introduce two free programs you might not know about, and then talk about two free chess sites that those of you who like playing chess might enjoy, and I’ll have something else for you at the end.

The first is a free PDF program called doPDF. Obviously what it lets you do is print pdf files from any program on your computer. I’d been looking for one of these for a long time, because the one I had was free as long as you wanted to look at an ad every time you created a pdf. That wouldn’t have been so bad, except it opened up IE every single time, and if I was creating a bunch of pdfs, or needed to make corrections on one, that just got tiring after awhile. Anyway, there are no frills with the program, but at least it lets you save your pdf wherever you want to.

The next program is something from a company called Brothersoft. The program is called Convert MP4 to MP3. Plain and simple, that’s also what it does. Once again this was something I’d been looking for. Through a script from Greasemonkey, which you can use with Firefox, I can actually download movies in an MP4 format from YouTube. However, many times I’m downloading the video because I really want the song, and I’d been wanting to add those songs to my music database. So I found this program, totally freeware, and you can convert multiple files at a time. Works very fast as well, and since the download from YouTube is the highest quality download, what you end up getting after the conversion is high quality as well. That is, as long as the original version was high quality to begin with.

Done with programs; now onto chess. It’s one of the few games I play online, probably because it’s not something that you have to sit down and play live with someone, although there are sites that do that. For both of these sites, you get to make your move, then go about your life until you get an email notification that there’s been a move in a game you’re playing. I love that.

The first site I’m going to mention is called Scheming Mind, and it’s a site created by a friend of mine named Austin Lockwood; I’m not quite sure where he’s from, but the site is located somewhere in Europe. Anyway, it’s a free chess site as long as you play fewer than 10 games at a time. If you want to play unlimited games, it’s only $20 a year, and trust me he’s not getting rich off the site.

Sire and I play here, and I think it works for us because not only can we talk during the games, but every message we write is saved so we can go back and read them again, or address them after a move so we can take some time to think about things. The site also offers multiple types of games and different speeds of games, so that you can have as many as 30 days for each player to make a single move or as few as 5 days. You can join tournaments, though if you’re playing for free you can only join one tournament at a time. You can also ask the site to suggest a player based on ranking criteria, then select someone who they suggest or ask for more suggestions. However, sometimes it’s a hit or miss as to whether you’ll be playing that game, since people can reject you. Overall I love the site.

The other chess site is called Net-Chess, and I like this site as well, but for a different reason. With this site you can play as many games as you want to, but you’ll also find that it can be overwhelming if you’re not paying attention to how you’re joining the games. Every game you get into is some kind of mini tournament. You can decide how many games you’re going to play against each opponent if you create the tournament, or you can join a tournament that fits your ranking; you’ll establish a real ranking after you’ve played so many games.

The overwhelming part is that you might not be paying attention and suddenly find yourself playing upwards of 40 or more games at one time. True, you get to make each individual move at your leisure, but for some folks, like myself, that’s a few too many games at once. I like to have 20 going when I can, mainly because some people won’t ever start the games every though they signed up, and some people will forget, being overwhelmed, and they’ll lose on time. As long as they’ve made 10 moves in the game, if they time out you automatically get both the win and the points, and points are given based on your rank and the rank of your opponent at the time.

There are the two free programs and the two chess sites. The final thing is a little motivational thing from a blog friend named Marelisa, whom I’ve mentioned thrice before, once within a post on great posts, once highlighting her blog on Blog Day 2009, and later on a post on creativity. Anyway she’s got another great post, short by her standards, titled 525+ Bucket List Ideas, somewhat based on the movie The Bucket List. Yeah, that’s pretty comprehensive, but that’s kind of her point, that there are limitless opportunities for all of us to find within ourselves to try if we’re predisposed to do it.

There you go; don’t ever say I don’t provide any value to anyone! lol

Software, Web Stuff | 12 Comments

Zone Alarm Issues You Should Know About

Posted by Mitch Mitchell on May 13, 2010

I’ve always liked Zone Alarm a lot. For those of you who aren’t familiar with this, it’s a firewall program, free or paid, that blocks signals from activating nasty things on your computer, as well as hides your ports. It also prevents programs that get onto your computer that you don’t know about from loading without your knowledge. I mentioned it in my post on Best Free Software almost a full year ago, along with Comodo, another free firewall program.

I hadn’t been able to use it ever since I got this computer last December because the computer was 64-bit, and Zone Alarm hadn’t decided if they were going to go that route. Lo and behold Windows 7 came out, was 64-bit, and Zone Alarm, knowing it was coming, saw the writing on the wall and came along into the future. Still, I didn’t immediately load it. I decided to add it two weeks ago when, for whatever reason, Comodo, which I’d been using, stopped updating itself. I went to the forums, and it seems the only thing I could do was unload it and load the updated version. I decided if I had to unload it I might as well pop Zone Alarm on.

I loaded Zone Alarm and it was a snap. I saw that they had added some goofy toolbar, and I’m not one of those people who likes adding all those stupid toolbars from all these programs so I told it I didn’t want it. Unfortunately, it seems that if you tell the program you don’t want it that it loads it anyway, just doesn’t show it. I didn’t know that at the time, and only learned about it this week.

Why did I learn about it this week? For whatever reason my Palm suddenly wouldn’t sync with the computer. Also, Firefox started acting really goofy as well. At times it would suddenly stop working, and when I closed it, seems it wouldn’t fully close. Then I would try to reboot the computer and that wasn’t happening either. I was getting this message saying “forcefield.exe” was preventing the shutdown.

Forcefield? You know I started wondering which alien force had invaded my computer, or whether there were some superheroes battling bad guys. I finally looked it up and it seems that’s the program Zone Alarm loads onto your computer as the toolbar. And, for whatever reason, it messes things up drastically. I went into “msconfig” and told it not to load anymore, yet when I rebooted, there it was again. I finally thought to check my Programs area in control panel, and there it was, all the way at the bottom. I uninstalled that, and things have been great ever since. My main concern was that Zone Alarm would still work, and it seems to be working just fine.

Since I’ve recommended the program I figure it’s time to remind you of the underline. If you see a blue underline, that means it’s a link to a product. Zone Alarm is free as a firewall, but you can also purchase the product as it also has an antivirus and anti-spyware program that’s part of the paid product. And, of course, there are some other products; gotta take advantage of those special words here and there, right?

Software | 6 Comments

Dragon 10 Software Review

Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Jan 8, 2010

As y’all know, I do a lot of writing. I even wrote a real book, which is the second book listed over there to the left, Embrace The Lead.

When I wrote that book, I didn’t quite finish it by typing. I started out that way, then 9/11 hit and I got discouraged from doing anything. Then my dad got sick and I was inspired to get it finished so he could read at least some of it.

I knew that I needed some help in getting it done. So, I bought a voice recognition program, and with its assistance I was able to get the book done in record time. Voice recognition software pretty much writes down what you say; at least what it thinks you say. The first program I used, which wasn’t great, did okay for the most part, as all I then had to do was go back and edit things.

A year later I bought my first Dragon software program, which worked much better, and I loved it. I only had to use the one program, which I used often enough, until I bought my present computer. Vista, it turns out, isn’t compatible with Dragon 8. But now that I’m writing as much as I am and earning money from it, I knew I had to get the updated version at some point, and now I have it, Dragon Naturally Speaking 10.

Here’s the first thing you need to know; this sucker is huge! It’s going to take up to 1.5 GB of space on your hard drive. I guess with what it does that’s not so bad. It’s going to grow, however, but I’ll come back to that. Anyway, because it’s so big, it’s going to take awhile for it to load onto your computer. You know how you’ll often get that message about “it could take several minutes to load onto your computer”, but then the programs load really fast? This one took about 45 minutes to load; at one point I wondered whether it had frozen up.

When it’s finally ready, it doesn’t just start like some programs, so you’ll have to start the program. It will ask you a couple of questions, including whether you want to register it or not, and it also asks you if you want to activate the program. I recommend getting that out of the way so it never asks you that question again.

Next it’s time to do some testing. It will test your microphone to make sure it works with the program. It gives you a headset with a microphone that you can plug into jacks, but I wanted to use my USB headset instead, and it works just fine. It will test voice levels.

Then it’s time to get a sample of your reading and speaking patterns. I chose the very elementary first sample, as there are a bunch of them, just so I could get started. You read the entire sample, then it takes some time in processing how you read; it’s this file that’s going to get bigger and bigger as you go along, because not only will it grow as you do more testing, but every once in awhile, and it will ask you how often you want to do it, the program goes back and looks for new things you’ve produced so it can add to the file. You can read more samples or come back to it later on, and I recommend you eventually get through as many of them as you can because the more it can recognize your speech patterns, the more accurate it will be.

One last thing before you get to actually do something is it does a scan of documents in your computer to try to get a sample of not only how your words flow on paper, but adds some words that you have in documents that it might not have. For instance, my wife’s name is Robyn, obviously with a “y”, and it picks that up and knows when to use that as opposed to the bird.

Then you can finally go for it. You’ll see a little window, which you can close and just use the icon in your taskbar. Here’s the thing. You can read your words into anything. You can use it to write your blog right into the program. You can use it in Microsoft Word, email, Wordpad, etc. Anything where you usually have to type words, you can use Dragon instead. And I have to tell you, from only my first reading, it did really well. A few times when I spoke really fast it messed up, but that’s understandable since I only did the one training with it. I’m actually using it now to write this post; how neat is that?

Of course, it’s not totally as easy as that for new people. There are many commands you’ll want to learn to use it with much more efficiency so that you don’t have to keep coming to the keyboard. Things such as “capitalize that”, “scratch that (that will erase the last phrase you said), “correct that”, etc. But they’re easy things to learn and remember.

Do I recommend Dragon? Wholeheartedly! It makes the writing process easier for anyone who says they hate typing or that the words they’re thinking never seem to show up on paper the same way. I will admit that when I’m using the program I speak in phrases right now, because, oddly enough, I actually type faster on some things than I speak, and you might decide to do that yourself, or once you feel that it’s got your speech patterns down just go for it. If you do a lot of writing of any type, this bad boy is the way to go.

Software | 17 Comments

Subtle Tech Racism

Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Jan 6, 2010

I was reading a post by Adria Richards of But You’re A Girl on a topic called Is Google Voice Racist, and knew I had to comment on it. However, since she uses Disqus, and you know how I feel about Disque and blogs that use that kind of commenting system (I found another one called Intense Debate that’s like it that I don’t like either”, and I mentioned that I was clearing away iritations in 2010, I don’t want to comment there, so my comment will be here. By the way, you need to read some of the comments on her post also; quite telling, I might add.

Her gripe is that a girlfriend sent her a message and said “Hey Girlfriend”, but Google interpreted that as “Hey Negro.” Okay, what the heck is that about? She then posted a video that I’ve seen before, and commented on the post where I saw it, where HP has this new face recognition software that will have the camera follow you around, but, at least for many, it doesn’t work on black people. I mean, just because we’re tired of being followed around in stores doesn’t mean we don’t want software to work like it’s supposed to.

There’s always been things like this that pop up from time to time online and in software. Those of us who are offended find it either racist or bigoted. Those who aren’t say they don’t see it and wonder why we always say it’s racist or bigoted. Those who aren’t offended are never minority, by the way; that seems to figure when it comes to trying to identify racism or bigotry.

First off, I don’t see race everywhere, though some of my friends think I do. But I call things out whenever I need to. For instance, through this blog and my business blog I’ve called out people for many things. Back before the last presidential election I called people out for overt racism against Barack Obama and Muslims in a post called What, A Muslim Can’t Be President? I called out racism by the New York Post after they posted a cartoon equating President Obama to a monkey. I actually talked about the topic of what a racist is, because so many people throw the word around way too often. And I had to join Rachel Maddow in her smackdown of Pat Buchanan when he made a bunch of racist statements on her show earlier this year. I’ve even addressed it here, with my strangely named President Obama Calls Limbaugh A Racist post.

But these types of things just keep coming up over and over. There was one Microsoft software program where, if you typed in a certain thing asking about black people, a picture of a monkey came up. There was also a specific search term for Michelle Obama kept bringing up a picture of her with a monkey face. Even now there’s another Microsoft program running in Poland and another photography program. Sorry folks, but that’s racism no matter how you slice it.

Here’s my issue. There’s always going to be racism; I understand that. I don’t like it, but as long as there are people who look and act different and everything else isn’t equal. What I’d like is a little bit more accountability for when these things happen, then a little bit more support from people who may not be directly affected by it, but know something bad when they see it. Adria didn’t deserve to have the one guy say she was wrong and that’s just how software works; that was probably one of the more moronic things I’ve seen in a long time. It can’t always be minorities looking at something and saying it’s racist or bigoted or whatever; someone else has to step forward, in higher numbers than what happens now, and call those perpetrating this mess out on it.

And, by the way, not only racism. Add sexism, homophobia, and other intolerances to the list as well.

Race Relations | 20 Comments

Mailwasher

Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Dec 14, 2009

I’ve been told that if you write a review post about a product that it will drive sales of that product, especially if what you have to say is very good and very true. Let’s see how true that premise is.

Back when I was warning y’all about hidden messages in email, I mentioned Mailwasher for the first time. I even pointed you to a review I wrote about it on another site. I’m writing this review that I hope will end up being different than the previous review, since I’m not going back to look at it before I write this one. And I have this program and I’m always telling people about this product and I’ve purchased this bad boy, so now I’ve just fulfilled the FTC thing that everyone is so worried about (except me; I probably won’t write about it, though).

Mailwasher is a software program that allows you to check your email while it’s still on the server. It doesn’t care what you use as an email program, so no worries there. However, by checking email while it’s still on the server, you get to decide what you’re downloading to your computer and what you don’t want to download to your computer. You get to see the links that are hidden in email while it’s still on the server to validate whether those emails are true or not. You can add as many of your email addresses as you need to, but I’ll talk about that one because if you have email being redirected you won’t have to add those email addresses.

Let’s start with what it looks like. Here’s a screenshot of the program in use:

Actually, the way you’re looking at it here is pretty small, but you can right-click on it and open it up to see it better. And I apologize to John now for now long it’s going to take to download this one for him.

There are some other categories you can have, but these are the ones I use, and I feel they’re the most important. You can also move the categories around if you want to. That first column is probably the most important because that’s the one where you can train Mailwasher on what should be blacklisted and what should be made friendly. The status box tells you what it thinks the email coming in is. It has its own way of determining what it considers as spam or junk, and it’s pretty good.

If you look at that last column, you see where I have two separate classes, personal and second account. Though I have lots of email addresses, I have all of them directed to one of two accounts, both through my internet provider, which is Road Runner. I have two separate email addresses for that. That’s important because when you create your accounts, you need to put in your username and password so that it can check your email while it’s still out on the server.

Now, for the bottom part of the program. That’s where you’ll see what you’ve been sent. You can see as much or as little as you want to see there. I have mine set to give me 445 lines of data, which is more than some might like, and less than others might like. But that’s where you’ll see any links that might be embedded in an email, and where you’ll see some of those strange words that you know means that’s an email with images and hidden stuff that might contain viruses or malware. If a friend is sending an attachment you won’t see that, but at the top you have a column that tells you how big the email you’re getting is, and you can pretty much bet that any email more than 200K has an attachment of some type.

I’ve been using this program for about 5 years now. I’ve only had one email slip through in all that time that had a virus on it, and that wasn’t the program’s fault, but timing. Once you delete all the email you don’t want anymore, you should then download your email. However, sometimes a new email is coming through at the same time and will slip through; nothing you can do about that. I swear by this program, and I really do believe that anyone, from those of us with a bit more web savvy than others, or those with very little savvy whatsoever, should be using this bad boy. Every time I learn that someone has a virus on their computer, I think of Mailwasher and ask why they don’t have it.

Probably because they haven’t read this review. Now that you’ve read it, think about your safety and see if you believe you could use a little bit of help. Trust me, the price is worth it.

And there you go. Now, let’s see what happens.