SPACE SOLAR STORM CORONAL MASS EJECTION

A Raging Solar Storm Is Hitting the Earth Right Now

The largest solar storm since 2005 is now in progress, causing fluctuations on the power grid and disruptions to the Global Positioning System. The ongoing strong proton storm is in full fury. And it's getting stronger; a Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) impact also impacting us, traveling at 1,400 miles per second.

The radiation and geomagnetic storm caused by this CME are normal—about 2,000 geomagnetic storms happen in every 11-year solar cycle—but proton storms are very rare. Only a couple of dozen happen per solar cycle. This one—ranking S3 on a 5-level scale—is dangerous.

The storm has already affected air traffic and may affect satellites. On a telephone interview, NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center physicist Doug Biesecker told me that, fortunately, there are measures to avoid most dangers.

http://gizmodo.com/5878656/how-this-huge-solar-storm-is-going-to-affect-you

In the wake of Megaupload crackdown, fear forces similar sites to shutter sharing services?

The Feds put the smackdown on Megaupload and its whole executive team last week, charging them with criminal charges for copyright infringement and racketeering in addition to conspiracy to commit copyright infringement and money laundering. As a result, it appears that several other cloud locker companies have curbed their sharing ways to avoid similar DOJ entanglements. FileSonic and Fileserve have eliminated file sharing from their service menus, and Uploaded.to is no longer available to those of us in the US. Naturally, none of these companies have said that Megaupload's legal problems are the reason for the changes, but the timing suggests it's more than mere coincidence. Disagree? Feel free to speculate about the possibilities in the comments below, and let us know if any other online storage services have made similar moves while you're at it.

In the wake of Megaupload crackdown, fear forces similar sites to shutter sharing services? originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 23 Jan 2012 19:42:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink Techdirt | Digital Trends | Email this | Comments

Magnetic soap could make your next oil spill less oily

Instead of spending millions upon millions to clean up the next oil spill, why don't we just all pitch in and buy some soap? That's basically what researchers at the University of Bristol are proposing, with a new kind of soap that's apparently like no other. This soap, you see, is magnetic, which means it could be easily removed from water without leaving behind any hazardous chemicals -- a potentially major selling point for cleanup crews and environmentalists alike. To create it, the team collected water with chlorine and bromine ions, and used it to dissolve iron particles, creating a metallic core. They proceeded to test their creation by placing the soapy particles within a test tube, underneath layers of water and oil. Much to their delight, they were able to remove the particles with only a magnet, ostensibly providing a template upon which disaster response crews may build.

Magnetic soap could make your next oil spill less oily originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 24 Jan 2012 16:24:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink | New Scientist | Email this | Comments

Researchers develop 'wireless optical brain router' to manipulate brain cells

Optogenetics might be a relatively unknown area of neuroscience, but it's one that, thanks to some new research, could soon find itself (and its rodental subjects) in the spotlight. For the uninitiated, it's the practice of manipulating animal cells using light (with a little help from gene therapy). Until now, optogenetic equipment has been large and unwieldy, making testing on subjects (read: rats) painstaking. Startup, Kendall Research, has changed all this, creating wireless prototypes that weigh just three grams (0.11 ounces). By eschewing bulky Lasers for LEDs and Laser diodes, the equipment is small enough that it can be attached to the rodents. At that point, their brain function can be manipulated with the touch of a button, and different parts can be stimulated without breeding mutant variants -- a controversial practice that doesn't even yield results in real time. The "router" is powered wirelessly by super capacitors below test area, and researchers can conduct experiments remotely, even automatically. Human applications for this are still some way off, but we're sure our future overlords will make good use of it.

Researchers develop 'wireless optical brain router' to manipulate brain cells originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 24 Jan 2012 18:58:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink ExtremeTech | Technology Review | Email this | Comments

Evolution Is the Greatest Show On Earth—And This Video Is Pretty Cool Too.

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Evolution Is the Greatest Show On Earth—And This Video Is Pretty Cool Too

If you liked Carl Sagan's autotuned music videos celebrating the wonders of the cosmos, you will like this one celebrating the wonders of evolution too, featuring David Attenborough, Richard Dawkins and Bill Nye.

It's the latest part of the Symphony of Science, created by musician John D. Boswell. [Symphony of Science]

Creating The Annotated Sword of Shannara: Part I « Del Rey and Spectra - Science Fiction and Fantasy Books, Graphic Novels, and More

Creating The Annotated Sword of Shannara: Part I « Del Rey and Spectra - Science Fiction and Fantasy Books, Graphic Novels, and More.



April 1977 saw publication of The Sword of Shannara by Terry Brooks.

It was an important book in the fantasy genre, maybe one of the most important. Before The Sword of Shannara, epic/high fantasy did not exist beyond Lord of the Rings. Publishers did not think readers wanted more of what J.R.R. Tolkien offered in his opus. The quest. The dark lord bent on conquering the world. The everyman going up against the gravest of evils. The hero’s journey. The magic. The talismans. The races. All of it.

Those publishers were wrong, of course. But in the mid-1970s, Lester del Rey and his wife Judy-Lynn were willing to take a chance. They knew readers wanted more epic/high fantasy. They looked for a great debut novel to launch a new imprint at Random House called Del Rey Books. It didn’t take long. They found The Sword of Shannara by Terry Brooks.

Thirty-five years have passed since Sword’s publication. Thirty-five years is an important anniversary. Don’t tell Terry. He’s in denial about the passage of time. Ha! But seriously, this is a significant moment because Sword—whether for good or bad—influenced the genre for decades to come and gave dozens of writers the platform to break into the industry.

In November 2011, Del Rey Books asked me if I’d be interested in contributing annotations to a 35th anniversary hardcover edition of The Sword of Shannara. Terry is in the middle of arguably the busiest writing year of his career and adding one more project—no matter its significance—would put him over the edge for deadlines. Therefore, he suggested I help annotate Sword. I’ve been Terry’s webmaster and continuity editor for almost thirteen years and know his first book better than most. And over the years, I’ve heard him talk about Sword more times than I can remember, and each time I absorb a little tidbit that the fans don’t know.

As of last week, I finished my initial draft of annotations I’ll be contributing. I’ve also asked Terry dozens of written questions in relation to those annotations which should lead to at least 100 additional comments from Terry that the fans will be interested in knowing.

Here is the first, unedited annotation:

Here begins The Sword of Shannara, which took Terry more than seven years to write. Terry drew on inspiration from the European adventure storytellers Sir Walter Scott, Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Alexander Dumas, but it was only after reading The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien that Terry realized the fantasy genre held the grand tapestry he needed to tell the tale of The Sword of Shannara.

More on this throughout the year. I’ll be writing several posts like this one, highlighting the various steps we are taking to publish this book. Next up? Terry and I sit down to edit the first draft and he gives me his annotations.

Needless to say, it has been a fun project to tackle. The Sword of Shannara is the reason I am able to do what I do for a living. Without Terry and the Del Reys, I would likely be a bio-chemist or a doctor.

Movie Explorer Puts Order Into Your Movie Collection

With hard drives and storage devices growing bigger by the year, it is only natural that computer users start to put more data on their computer systems. The shift from highly compressed movie formats to high definition formats takes its toll as well, as movies may now need Gigabytes of storage space instead of Megabytes.

If you have lots of movies on your computer you’d probably want a tool that provides you with an overview of your collection. Some of you may store all their movies in a neatly nested directory structure, while others have them stored on multiple drives and maybe even external hard drives or optical discs.

Movie Explorer is a new software that is currently under heavy development. The developers have just released a beta version of the program that offers only some of the functionality that its developers intent to ship the first stable version with.

When you first start the program – installation is not required – you will notice that it automatically crawls the My Videos folders on your hard drive. If you are storing your movies there you do not need to do anything else. The program takes care of everything, from identifying movies to retrieving movie covers and information from movie databases such as IMDB.

If you do not store your movies there, you need to point Movie Explorer into the right direction. Click on the wrench in the upper right corner of the screen and select options from the menu.

Switch to Categories here and add your custom folders to the program. Categories allow you to categorize movies. This may be useful if you want to create different movie groups, for instance movies appropriate for children and all other movies.



You may notice that some movies have not been identified correctly. The program will notify you about it with an error message in your movie listing. The beta version has no user interface options to select movies manually from one of the connected databases. The only option right now is to edit the database XML file in the program folder. Just hop over to IMDB, locate your movie manually and take note of the unique ID displayed in the title on the site. Copy the ID and paste it into the IMDB line of the XML file.

This is not the most comfortable option, and future versions will support those capabilities natively.

A search at the top allows you to search for a specific movie in various ways. You can naturally search for a specific title, but also for a director, year or genre among other things.

Movies can be played directly from the program interface. All you need to do is to click on the file name to play it in the default media player.

Movie Explorer is a promising program that could really simplify things for users who want to put order into their movie collection. The program is only available for Windows. Interested users can download the latest version from the official program website. (via Instant Fundas)

Sweden Recognises New File-Sharing Religion

When the next national census arrives on your doormat you now have another option to enter for religion other than Jedi, at least that is if you live in Sweden. On its third attempt the church of “kopyacting” has been officially recognised as a religion by the Swedish government.

The church is founded on the belief of sharing information and holds CTRL+C and CTRL+V as sacred symbols. They say they do not promote or condone illegal file-sharing but are pleased that file-sharing generally has now been given “religious protection”.

In a statement the leader of the church, a 19 year old philosophy student, Isak Gerson said “For the Church of Kopimism, information is holy and copying is a sacrament. Information holds a value, in itself and in what it contains and the value multiplies through copying. Therefore copying is central for the organisation and its members.”

Despite this unexpected turn of events the Swedish government said that it wouldn’t mean illegal file-sharing was about to be legalised and music analyst Mark Mulligan told the BBC ”It doesn’t mean that illegal file-sharing will become legal, any more than if ‘Jedi’ was recognised as a religion everyone would be walking around with light sabres. In some ways these guys are looking outdated. File-sharing as a means to pirate content is becoming yesterday’s technology.”

Whatever you might think of this new religion its recognition does at least help provide encouragement for those people who believe freedom of expression and freedoms to worship are being stifled. In this respect it has to be a good thing.

File sharing generally is a “religious ceremony” according to the church and it comes at a time when the US government’s controversial Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is causing concern and argument across the pond.

How To Run The Advanced Disk Cleanup Version In Windows

The Disk Cleanup tool offers a great way to quickly free up some disk space by deleting temporary files that are no longer needed. It is in no way as complete or thorough as third party tools like CCleaner, but it gets the job done and does not require you to install another software on the system for that operation.

Most users do not know that Microsoft has integrated an advanced version of the cleanup tool in the Windows operating system. The core reason for that is that it can only be started from the command prompt, and not from menus or by clicking on a program icon on the desktop.

Lets first take a look at the standard version of Disk Cleanup. One of the easiest ways to start the Disk Cleanup is to use the shortcut Windows-r to bring up the run box, enter cleanmgr in there and tap on the enter key afterwards. This opens the program right away. There are other ways to launch it, for instance by entering disk cleanup in the start menu search form.

The standard Disk Cleanup tool can delete the following temporary files on the system. Included in the deletion are temporary files, thumbnails, or downloaded programs.



Check out How To Clean Hard Drives In Windows 7 for general information about the cleanup software.

Compare that to the options the advanced cleanup tool offers.



Included now are debug dump files, system and user queued error reporting files, files discarded by Windows upgrade or setup and windows upgrade log files.

Here is how you can load the advanced Disk Cleanup Tool in Windows. Open the run prompt again with Windows-r. Now run the following command to bring up the advanced version.

Cleanmgr /sageset:65535 & /sagerun:65535

Just click ok afterwards to load the advanced Disk Cleanup Tool interface.



Note that not all items are selected by default, which means that you need to look through the options to enable and disable items until you are satisfied with the selection.

How To Verify If An E-mail Address Exists

Sometimes you may want to make sure that an e-mail address exists before you start sending out messages to that address. While you could simply send a test message to the address and see if it bounces off the mail server, you’d may want to try a sneakier solution so that the recipient does not know about it. It should be clear that the recipient will receive the test message if the e-mail address exist.

Before we look at a tool that allows you to verify e-mail addresses, we should for a moment look at reasons for verifying addresses. A common reason is a mailing list that you want to clean up, another if you can only remember part of the e-mail address and not all of it.

EToolz is a free portable program for the Windows operating system that can verify if e-mail addresses exist. While it does not work for all messages, it works fine for many including Google E-Mail addresses (Gmail that is), and not for others like Microsoft’s Hotmail.

Switch to the Mail-Check tab of the program once you have started it. Here you need to key in the e-mail address you want to test, and optionally sender and server information as well as a timeout for the connection.



Click the start button once you have entered and modified all parameters to your liking. The program will then try to establish a connection with the selected e-mail address which may or may not work. Gmail will for instance let you know if sender and recipient are accepted. Even better, you will sometimes get information why it is not accepted, for instance if the email account is over quota like in the example on the screenshot above.

Not being able to test multiple e-mail addresses at once is one of the downsides of the program. You can download it from the developer website. Please note that the initial interface language is set to German. Click on Extras > Sprache / Language to change it to English or another of the supported languages.

Display Your Internet Connection Speed In Your Taskbar

Sometimes you may want to display information about your Internet connection right on the desktop, for instance to test the speed of a new dedicated server that you just bought, or to make sure that you are uploading or downloading at full speed. Having direct access to realtime stats can also be helpful if you are troubleshooting a particular connection.

We have reviewed programs in the past that display the network traffic in the taskbar and on the desktop, with Net Traffic being one of them.

NetSpeedMonitor is another professionally looking option for the Windows operating system. And unlike Net Traffic, it displays the upload and download bandwidth right in the taskbar.

The network monitor can keep a history of the network adapters upload and download speed which it will do by default. You can disable that during setup and later on in the options, which you may want to do if you are only interested in realtime connection speed information.



The program displays the upload and download bandwidth in kbit per second. You can customize the layout in the program options. Here it is possible to change the font type and size, rendering, prefixes, and the bitrate among other things.

The traffic history can be used to check a system’s monthly bandwidth utilization which can be useful to check that you do not hit bandwidth caps or to troubleshoot recurring issues with the Internet connection.

A data traffic menu is activated if traffic is logged on the system which details sent, received and total traffic per day or month.



The data is populated automatically when the program is running and monitoring is enabled. Monitoring can be turned off, which can be useful if you are working with a laptop in multiple locations and do only want to monitor traffic in some locations.

NetSpeedMonitor can display the list of active connections in another program window. Here you see the process, local and remote IP as well as the state of the connection.



The only downside here is that traffic information are not displayed in the window.

Windows users who like to display realtime traffic information in their taskbar, and those who want to record the bandwidth utilization of their Internet connection, can download the latest version of NetSpeedMonitor from the developer website.

Minimap Sidebar, Address Lookup, Directions The Easy Way

Many Internet users use the Internet to lookup addresses or get driving directions. They usually open a maps service, such as Google Maps or Bing Maps for that. It often means juggling around with multiple websites, if they have found the address on another website.
A simple example is a new shop that you just discovered in your home town that is listing an address but not a map on the shop website. Another that you are scouting places for your next trip to Europe and want to find out how far off they are from the hotel you are staying in.

Minimap Sidebar is a Firefox extension with a rich feature set. The extension displays a map in the browser’s sidebar by default which you can use to lookup addresses effortlessly. All it takes is to drag and drop the address into the minimap to have the add-on center on that location on the map.

The map behaves exactly as you would expect it to. You can use the mouse wheel to zoom in or out, hold down the mouse to move around on the map or use controls at the top of the sidebar window to change the map type, toggle traffic information or to add location information manually to the map.

Even better, places are saved automatically so that you can switch through all of them in a heartbeat. That’s useful for Internet users who often need to lookup addresses on map services such as Google Maps, Yahoo Maps, Open Street Map or other services, and those who are creating a list of places to visit.



Minimap Sidebar uses Google Maps by default, with options to switch to Open Street Map instead. Locations can also be opened in tabs or as an overlay preview right on the page the address is displayed on.



And if you do not have an address that you can copy and paste, you can alternatively type in address information manually for the exact same functionality. Once an address has been located on the map, you can open one or multiple services in tabs for more information about the address. Supported services include Google Earth, Flickr, Panoramio or loc.alize.us.

What is more, you can set a home address to speed up retrieving driving information to other locations you have added to the extension.

Export options allow you to export the location as KML, CSV, GPX or minimap files, get a location’s geohash link or latitude and longitude, or search for the place on Amazon, ebay, Maps.com or upcoming.com (events).

The extension supports geo tagging, which means that it will automatically discover if a website you visit supports the technology.

Minimap Sidebar is a useful extension for Internet users who need to lookup addresses or get directions regularly. Instead of having to open a maps website next to the current website, they can now handle everything in one browser window.

Firefox users can download and install the Minimap Sidebar extension from the official Mozilla Firefox add-ons repository.

Microsoft Outlook Email Signature Creator

Email signatures are automatically added to emails. They often contain additional contact information, for instance the senders phone number, messenger chat name or address, and sometimes disclaimers and other legal notifications.

Creating a basic signature is actually pretty easy even though the process has changed with every new version of Outlook. You can create a new signature in Outlook 2010 by switching to the Message tab and selecting Signature > Signatures from the Include group there in the ribbon at the top of the program window.

Click on the E-Mail Signature tab there and select New, type a name and click OK. Start entering your signature text under Edit signature and use formatting and styles from the available selection. You can add an electronic business card, hyperlink or picture to the signature optionally. A click on OK saves it in the program.

You can then associate the signature with an e-mail account by selecting Choose default signature in the E-mail account list in the Signatures menu, or insert signatures manually into messages.

Microsoft Outlook Email Signature Creator is a handy tool that allows you to create professionally looking email signatures in a heartbeat.

The program displays a set of forms for you to fill out on start. Here you can add your name and job title, telephone, mobile and Fax, e-mail and web address, street address, footer or terms and a logo or picture.



A click on preview loads the created signature in the default web browser. The Outlook signature generator offers four different color schemes, blue, red, green and black, with the blue scheme selected by default.



You can furthermore change the text size from small to medium or large.

Once you are satisfied with the creation you can create the signature with a click on Create It. Microsoft Outlook Email Signature Creator can either create and install the signature automatically into Outlook, or only create the signature so that it is up to you to integrate it into Microsoft’s messaging software. Users who use a different email software may use the second option to create a signature for their email program.

Windows users can download the program from the official website. The software requires the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0, and is compatible with Outlook 2003, 2007 and 2010 running on all versions of Windows from Windows XP on.

RogueKiller, Remove Rogue Security Software On Your PC

[security]
Rogueware, or rogue security software, is a class of malicious software that disguises itself as legit security software. These programs often have the look and feel of antivirus applications, but instead of protecting the computer from malicious software, they do the exact opposite. The majority of rogue applications fake infections of the system to scare users into paying for a necessary upgrade to remove the infection from their computer system.

It is sometimes difficulty to remove rogueware from a PC, as they may block legit antivirus software and important system tools from running on it while the rogue software is running.

RogueKiller is a free small program that analyzes the system for rogue software. It works in this regard similar to Fake Antivirus Remover, a program which we have reviewed in the past here on Ghacks. The program scans known rogueware locations, including running processes, the Windows Registry, drivers, the hosts file and the master boot record.

The following screen is displayed after you start the portable software.



The developer suggests to close all other programs running on the system before you start the program. First thing that you may want to do then is to scan the system. Just press 1 on the keyboard and hit enter afterwards to run the scan. This takes less than a minute, and a protocol is displayed as a text document afterwards.

This protocol lists relevant findings sorted by type.



The program detects dozens of rogue antivirus software including MicroVaccine, CheckSpeed, ProtectCop, SmartSafer or MicroPC. You may need to analyze the text file to see if the rogue software has modified core system settings and locations. The program ships with options to delete or repair some of them automatically. This includes options to delete Registry settings, fixing the host file and proxy setting, and fixing the domain namer server settings.

The software is fully portable and compatible with recent 32-bit and 64-bit editions of the Microsoft Windows operating system. You can download the latest version of Rogue Killer from the French developer website.

SearchMyFiles, A Versatile Desktop Search for Windows

SearchMyFile is a portable desktop search software for the Windows operating system. The program’s portable nature ensures that searches do not leave traces on the system the program is executed on. And while that may slow down result generation a bit, it is still faster than many other programs that you can use to search for files and folders in Windows.

When you first start the program you will notice that two program windows are opened. The first window lets you configure the search parameters, the second displays the results.



When you look at the search window, you will notice that it offers a lot of search options. You only need to select at least one base folder for the search though to get started, as everything else is optional. The program supports multiple base folders for the search, as well as file, folder and extension exclusions. You could for instance search only for doc or docx files on all hard drives and partitions connected to the computer. And while those options are handy enough, you can use the program to search for file contents in text or binary form as well.

That’s still not everything there is to search. How does searching in alternate data streams sound? Or parameters that take the file size, file attributes or creation, modification or access time into consideration?

SearchMyFiles stops by default after the first ten thousand matching files it finds, with an option to set a different limit or no limit at all.

The Search Mode menu defines how results are displayed in the search window.

• Standard Search – Displays a list of files matching the query.


• Duplicate Search Mode – Will display only duplicate files in the search results.


• Non-Duplicates Search Mode – Displays all files that are unique.


• Summary Mode – Displays information for each folder included in the scan.

All search modes share the same layout. Details are displayed for each result, including the file or folder name, location on the computer, size and time related information.

The program comes with the usual Nirsoft tools to create HTML reports and to export the data to text, xml or csv files.

One interesting option, available under Options > Open File on Double Click, allows you to open any file in the search results listing with a double-click. This can be handy to verify duplicate files or to open the file that you were looking for.

A command line version supporting the majority of search parameters is available as well.

Windows users can download Search My Files from the official Nirsoft website. The program is offered as a 32-bit and 64-bit version.

11 Outstanding Pictures from Kevin McNeal

Kevin McNeal is a 40-year-old professional landscape photographer from the Pacific Northwest. He has lived there for the last six years after working on a cruise ship. Now he lives and travels the world, exploring some of the most stunning places. Kevin is a self-taught photographer who has now been doing photography for six years, and learned from reading books and following his favorite photographers on the internet. He made a serious promise to travel two hundred plus days a year, in an attempt see as many locations as possible. Kevin is also associated with the guys at Photocascadia, which features some great landscape photographers from the Pacific Northwest.

To see more of Kevin and his work, check out his Flickr Photostream.



Maroon Bells Sunrise, Colorado Rockies



Painted Light Ruby Beach Olympic National Park



Mt Shukasan From Picture Lake In Winter



Vancouver-Mt Seymour Provincial Park BC Canada



Jefferson Park Wilderness



Bonsai Rock At Lake Tahoe



Nova Scotia Fall Colors, Canada



The Ramparts Tonquin Valley, Jasper, Canada



Mt Assiniboine, British Columbia, Canada



Canadian Rockies Light



Colorado Fall Colors Mixed With Snow

Mount an ISO Image – The Easiest Way How To

Mount an ISO Image – The Easiest Way [How To]

via Windows Tools, Help & Guides | Mintywhite.com by Taylor Ling on 1/10/12

Got an ISO image file (ISO, CUE, NRG, MDS, MDF, CCD, IMG) but doesn’t know how to use it? These image files are (usually) a complete copy of an optical disc and requires a virtual drive to mount and use them.

The easiest way – WinCDEmu

If you need a simple solution to mount an ISO image, this is the best that you can have - WinCDEmu. WinCDEmu is an open-source CD/DVD/BD emulator which allows you to mount optical disc images with just a few clicks, and you can easily unmount them.

Installation is really simple. Just click download WinCDEmu, double click the downloaded file and click Install. Once you are done with the installation settings and you are almost there. Windows Installer will most probably ask for the installation of SysProgs Storage Controllers driver – don’t worry, just install it. And that’s it.

How to mount ISO image?

To mount an ISO image, just double click on the ISO image file. And you are done. Isn’t that amazing? If you need some extra options (choosing virtual drive letter, disable autorun etc.) for the mounting, right click on the ISO image, then choose Select drive letter & mount, and a small dialog will appear. Click OK after you done with the settings and the image file will be mounted immediately.

And to unmount ISO image?

Just double click on the same ISO image file! It’s really this simple. Alternatively, you can right click on the virtual drive and select Eject.

What’s more?

Even though it is open source and free, WinCDEmu is an excellent piece of nifty tool.

• Supports unlimited virtual drives


• Lightweight


• No rebooting is required after installation


• Release drive letter when not in use


• Portable version is available

One more thing…

With WinCDEmu, you can also create ISO image file for your data disc (eg. Microsoft Windows installation disc, Microsoft Office installation disc etc.) as a backup or for future use. Simply insert the disc to your optical drive, then right click on it in Windows Explorer, and select Create ISO image. The next thing you know is your data disc has turned into an ISO image file.

Hope this is helpful for you. To download WinCDEmu, visit their page in sourceforge and look for the latest version. For portable version, you can get it here.

Other Options

If you’re looking for a more complete feature set or something a little more tech-user-friendly (is there such a thing?), consider the following options:

• DAEMON tools


• Slysoft Virtual CloneDrive


• PowerISO

Get FREE books (Password: mintywhiteBooks)

© Windows Guides, 2012. Rich Robinson | Mount an ISO Image – The Easiest Way [How To]

About ghost301

Biomedical Engineer graduate in Malaysia, currently Software Application Engineer and UI/UX Designer in Materialise. Graphic Design/UI/UX/Tech/Formula 1/Gadget/Android/iOS Enthusiast. Windows Guides writer (mintywhite.com) and run Techie Talkz.

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Nick Mason on Unreleased Pink Floyd Music

Ladies and gentlemen, its Nick Mason!
Pink Floyd drummer and archivist Nick Mason will be on the airwaves on Monday 2nd January 2012 at 7:15pm GMT. He will be appearing on Front Row presented by John Wilson.They will be revisiting their old recordings and reassessing the out-takes left in the vaults and consider why some tracks - and in some cases even complete albums - lie unreleased for years.

Also on the program are musicians including Kate Bush, Brian Wilson, Ray Davies of The Kinks and Nile Rodgers of Chic.

It is quite fitting that Nick should be featured on the programme given that Pink Floyd are currently re-releasing their albums in Experience and Immersion editions to fans. These new versions of the albums, of course, feature live concert recordings, archived video recordings including The Wall in Earls Court in the forthcoming The Wall Immersion Boxset and other materials that have been dug up out of the archives and had the dust blown off!

If you are interested in reading more about the Why Pink Floyd release schedule, then take a look at our Why Pink Floyd page.

You can listen to Radio 4 anywhere in the world online and in the UK on the radio, Sky, Cable and DAB. Find out how to listen to Radio 4.

What Next?

Go and view our treasure trove of Pink Floyd Photos!

Come and talk with us on the Pink Floyd Forum.

Look at the upcoming Roger Waters Tour 2012 dates and read about the possibility of Roger Waters touring Europe in 2013!

Source [ BBC Radio 4
]

DISCLAIMER: Please notice that the article above is syndicated from Neptune Pink Floyd and was originally published on 12-31-2011 12:31 PM. As such, APFFN is not responsible for its content. Read the original article here.

Rush Named Best Live Act of 2011

Planet Rock recently conducted a poll asking readers to select, among other categories, the best Live Act of 2011. Coming out on top was, of course, Rush :-)

Rush have got nothing left to prove. Their devoted fan base will turn out to see them whenever they can, and their albums will always sell. After nearly 40 years in the business you would think that they might be starting to rest on their laurels.

Wrong.

The Time Machine Tour 2011 may be their best live show for two decades, and that's saying something because most of their other tours have been pretty damn special too.

A three hour set included two songs from their forthcoming album, Clockwork Angels, some of their greatest hits, oh, and the WHOLE OF MOVING PICTURES, all played to perfection.

If you saw Rush this year then than none of this comes as a surprise. The likelihood is that the show you saw is your favourite show of the year. We know this because that's what EVERYONE says who managed to catch one of the band's gigs in 2011.

Exhilarating, remarkable, spectacular... none of these words can quite capture what makes a Rush concert so special, but one thing is for certain - if you missed the band this time round then you seriously missed out.

Thanks to RushFanForever for passing along the news.

http://news.cygnus-x1.net/2011/12/rush-named-best-live-act-of-2011.html

11 Mystical Pictures of Nature from Moonlight Photography

Fantasy writers often use nature for inspiration, but nature photographers can also use fantasy to enhance their pictures. Deborah from Moonlight Photography uses effects such as light accents and unique coloring to make her photos seem mystical, like scenes from a fairy tale.


Birds Birds Birds



The Magic Begins



Winter's Magic



Waiting for Spring



Flurries



Monsoon



A Little Midnight Magic



Fairy Wings



Winter Solstice



Captured



One Enchanted Evening