TechZilo

How to watch US Open tennis live online

Sumesh P — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 02:58:10 +0000

US Open is the final tennis grand slam of the year, and features the top players fighting out for over a million dollars in winners’ purse in men’s and women’s events. Tennis aficionados look forward to the event every year, as the hard court even offers fast, flowing tennis play.

As is usual for most sporting events, television broadcasts are not available in some regions. The only alternative may be to watch US Open on a live video stream online. There are countless websites that offer paid memberships to view the US Open online – we suggest staying as far away from them as you can. There are sufficient number of free sources to watch US Open, some of which are mentioned below.

Also see our guides on watching EPL, Spanish League, Italian Serie A online and Champions League online.

Watch US Open online: MyP2P

MyP2P.eu is a website that offers live video streams of various sports (not restricted to tennis) using P2P technology. Visit the software section of MyP2P and install the required software (the TCP/IP patch and a P2P client).

Then, visit the MyP2P Tennis live feeds page.

Note that this requires Windows, so if you are on a different operating system, try the next two methods (both of which are not dependent on any particular OS).

US Open online video: U stream.tv

Streaming site Ustream.tv has a page dedicated to live tennis videos. You can catch up with the latest US Open matches from that page.

US Open live stream: Justin.tv

Justin.tv is another live streaming website with a section for US Open live streams.

US Open: history and records

World number 1 Roger Federer is the undisputed king of US Open, having won it for the last 5 years. Federer’s shots and style of play seems to suit the fast hard courts perfectly, helping him win even in those years where he was off color and out of form and lost in the othe grand slams.

This year, Federer faces a greater challange, as Rafael Nadal, his nemesis, has improved his game tremendously. Novak Djokovic, another of the talented young stars, also poses a considerable threat. If the top seeds have favorable results, Federer will face Djokovic in the semi finals, and possibly Nadal in finals.

Please report if you found any of the above methods unusable. What are your favorite ways to view US Open tennis online? Tell us with a comment below.

An original article by TechZilo

How to watch US Open tennis live online

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11 beautiful Ubuntu Linux themes

Sumesh P — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 01:25:41 +0000

Ubuntu is a popular Linux distribution – among the most user-friendly (although Linux Mint etc. are better in that regard) of all. Like any other Linux flavour, it is open-source and has a huge community behind it. Being open-source, Ubuntu can be customized extensively.

Unfortunately, for an OS that holds such promise, Ubuntu’s appearance (or themes) have always fallen short of expectation. Default theme revamps were promised several times, only to be pushed to the next release due to time constraints. This has not stopped talented artists from creating their own themes for Ubuntu.

Themes in Ubuntu are a combination of several things: GTK theme, login theme, icons, wallpapers etc. You can read the instructions to install an Ubuntu theme if you do not how.

Here is a little collection of Ubuntu themes that I liked – among those included are dark themes, glossy and non-glossy, and some Mac OS X look-alikes.

Free Ubuntu themes

Mac 4 Lin theme
If you like Mac OS X interface, this theme is worth a try. It skins just about every part of Ubuntu, and is being actively developed.

Glow
A set of several themes (with 8 variations): Cinder (grey), Fire (red), Flower (pink), Grass (green), Ice (silver blue), Lava (darker orange), Sand (orange), and Water (blue). Each variation contains light and dark versions.

Moomex (dark theme)
A beautiful dark theme. Some elements look like Mac OS X.

Linux Mint

Dust Cold

Schwermetall

Aurora Detour

Dust Mac

Burn Orange Ice theme
Orange theme with custom panel background, Metacity theme and emerald theme.

Soffice
A Clearlooks theme (also runs on Aurora engine).

Ubuntu Blue Mod

xl Monochrome

You can find more themes at the Gnome Look website (assuming you use GNOME. If you don’t know what that is, you are probably running GNOME, so do not worry about it).

An original article by TechZilo

11 beautiful Ubuntu Linux themes

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Install Ubuntu Linux themes

Sumesh P — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 01:23:41 +0000

Instructions for beginners in Linux have always been scarce/hard to find. When I started out in Linux, I actually gave up twice and went back to Windows, before returning a third time and using it full-time for months. So many actions were unexplained, and it is not practical to ask several dozen doubts in the Ubuntu forum. Installing themes was one such action.

While writing a post rounding up Linux themes, I realized that many readers may have never installed an Ubuntu theme before, and may find instructions for the same helpful.

If you have any doubts, post them in comments below.

Ubuntu themes installation instructions

I assume that you would already have downloaded the theme, you can look at our roundup of beautiful Ubuntu Linux themes.

Themes are usually a tar.gz, or a zip file with a tar.gz inside it.

If it is a tar.gz file, do NOT extract it. Skip the next step.

If it is a zip file, extract it to get the tar.gz file – it contains the theme files and maybe, a readme file.

We need to install the theme now – right-click anywhere on the desktop (other than on icons, of course) and click Change Desktop Background. Click the Theme tab in the window that comes up.

Click Instal button (in lower right). Point to the tar.gz theme file you downloaded in step 1 and click Open.

Note that some themes might require you to install components manually. In that case, there would be install instructions either inside the downloaded files (as readme.txt or something), or on the webpage you downloaded the theme from.

An original article by TechZilo

Install Ubuntu Linux themes

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Check Places Firefox addon checks offline and duplicate bookmarks

Sumesh P — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 01:31:13 +0000

Check Places is a Firefox addon that checks your bookmarks for offline webpages and duplicates. Once it checks all the bookmarks (which takes little time), you can delete all the broken bookmarks, or choose to delete them selectively.

CheckPlaces is an experimental addon, so you have to tick a checkbox and install it. However, it worked flawlessly for me on Firefox 3, so the experimental status should not really be a worry.

Check Places gives you options to check for offline bookmarks, duplicates or both. To avoid the addon hanging up for a long time when checking for offline pages, you can set a timeout – the duration depending on your network speed and latency. The default, 60 seconds, should be large enough for all.

If you have bookmarked duplicates intentionally, you can tell Check Places to exclude folders while checking. Alternatively, you can check only the specified folders.

Download Check Places Firefox extension

An original article by TechZilo

Check Places Firefox addon checks offline and duplicate bookmarks

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Recover accidentally deleted Textmate bundles

Sumesh P — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 11:33:33 +0000

Textmate is a popular code editor for Mac OS X. It supports bundles, which are customizations for particular languages (say HTML, or Ruby on Rails).

Textmate includes a default set of bundles, and you can download bundles for other languages easily.

You can also delete bundles that you do not want to use – for example, if you are a PHP programmer, you may not want bundles for other programming languages.

What if you deleted a bundle by accident, or learnt a new language for which you deleted the bundles in Textmate earlier? A simple Terminal command can bring them back.

Ensure that TextMate is not running, then enter the command below to reset deleted bundles (ie. recover deleted bundles):

defaults delete com.macromates.textmate OakBundleManagerDeletedBundles

An original article by TechZilo

Recover accidentally deleted Textmate bundles

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Make Locomotive use MAMP’s MySQL install

Sumesh P — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 09:57:17 +0000

Locomotive is a standalone, all-in-one package of Ruby on Rails for Mac OS X. Instead of downloading source, compiling and installing various packages (Ruby, RubyGems, Rails), you can simply download the Locomotive app and start developing Rails software.

Only it isn’t quite easy.

SQLite3 is the default database for Rails 2, so you have to manually download and install MySQL. Whoops, there goes Locomotive’s standalone promise.

If you are a designer/developer, chances are you use a local server setup to develop and test code before deploying them on production servers. MAMP is another standalone package that bundles PHP, MySQL and Apache in an easy-to-use package. If you have MAMP on your Mac, then you can configure Locomotive to use the MySQL installation of MAMP.

Configure Locomotive to use MAMP’s MySQL install

Two easy steps will ensure that your Rails applications can use MAMP’s MySQL. Unfortunately, one of these steps have to be done for each of your Rails applications, the other two are system-wide changes.

Step 1
Open Locomotive Preferences and add to your “Additional Path” :

/Applications/MAMP/db/mysql/

Step 2
In the database.yml file (in config folder) for your Rails app, add the line below for your development database:

socket: /Applications/MAMP/tmp/mysql/mysql.sock

Bonus tip: If you are not comfortable messing with the command line (more so because our tweak to use MAMP’s MySQL introduces more complexity to the commands used), use a database management software to create, edit and delete MySQL databases. I use Sequel Pro.

An original article by TechZilo

Make Locomotive use MAMP’s MySQL install

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Get Mac OS X-style system alerts with Growl for Windows

Sumesh P — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 12:41:53 +0000

Mac OS X has had system alerts with Growl, a Mac-exclusive app until recently. However, with Ubuntu getting native system alert system, and Windows users can now install Growl for Windows for system notifications.
Growl is a a beta software as of now, and hence may have some quirks. There were a few memory corruption errors when I installed it, but was otherwise working fine. The graphics used in it looks inferior compared to the Mac OS X version, but it will noly improve as time goes.

Growl plugins

You can view plugins for Growl on downloads page.
As of now, there are plugins for iTunes, Firefox, Outlook, Visual Studio etc. As it is being developed, support for applicatoins will only increase.

Snarl is a Growl-alternative that has been around for longer and appears more polished – if you find Growl quirky, you might want to give Snarl a try.

An original article by TechZilo

Get Mac OS X-style system alerts with Growl for Windows

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Reclaim hard drive space on Mac OS X by deleting language files

Sumesh P — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 11:55:50 +0000

Monolingual is a free and open-source application to remove unnecessary language files from Mac OS X. Depending on the computer and options you choose, you can clear out files worth 100 MB to over one GB.

Although hard drive sizes are increasing and it is not uncommon to find over a terabyte of storage on computers, you wouldn’t want to waste 1 GB or more on files that are never used, would you? Monolingual would be particularly beneficial for those with limited hard drive space – typically laptop users and those with older hard drives.

As with anything that modifies or removes data, Monolingual should be used with care. If you are careless and end up choosing wrong options, you may render your software or even Mac OS X itself unusable.

Download the latest version of Monolingual on this page.

Choosing language files for deletion

Although I am not a native English-speaker, I use English on Mac OS X. Depending on what language you use, uncheck only that in the Monolingual options page. Remember that Monolingual removes those languages which are checked.

Uncheck AppleKeyboardLayouts and anything else you do not need.

If you use a PowerPC Mac, uncheck only architectures named PowerPC. Else uncheck only Intel 32 bit and 64 bit.

Then, hit enter. Monolingual will take some time to remove files – wait patiently.

An original article by TechZilo

Reclaim hard drive space on Mac OS X by deleting language files

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View your clipboard history with Clipbox

Sumesh P — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 17:11:01 +0000

Clipbox is a free, open-source clipboard utility for Windows. It holds text you copied (writes to disk). It is a very simple tool, with minimal resource usage.

The advantage of writing to disk is that you can recover copied data even if your computer hangs or crashes. It works with only does plain text. In its window, the clipboard entries can be viewed and recovered.

It is portable software and does not require installation. It does not add any entries to your registry either.

Download Clipbox

An original article by TechZilo

View your clipboard history with Clipbox

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Convert MKV videos to MP4 files on Mac OS X

Sumesh P — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 10:33:23 +0000

.mkv (Matroska Video) is a popular format for online video distribution (particularly through BitTorrent networks and all). It is an open and free container format. One of its advantages is that it can keep a number of video, audio, picture subtitle components in just one file.

One popular use of .mkv files is to store high-definition (HD) videos, in formats like H.264. Matroska video files end with the extension .mkv (may also contain audio and subtitle), while audio only files are .mka and subtitle files are .mks Typically, you would find a .mkv file – that is also what I have come across.

MKV container format is a fork of another format, after disagreements between its founders regarding some technical decisions. Most users of the original format moved to .mkv format after its developer went inactive, and .mkv has gained popularity ever since.

You can play .mkv files in Mac OS X using VLC player without downloading any additional codecs, but what if you need to convert and keep the file as a .mp4 video, for example, to play on other devices (like PS 3, iPod, Apple TV, iPhone etc.)?

Most solutions online (which also happen to be outdated and impractical) require Quicktime Pro and Perian, or other expensive mkv video converters, or has severe restrictions regarding the encoding types allowed within the .mkv container format. Some others use the command-line utilities, which may be acceptable if you are a total geek, or uses Windows software, in which case you will need access to Windows via Bootcamp/virtualization or a PC.

You have come to the right place if you are looking for an mkv to mp4 converter – this guide shows you how to convert .mkv video files to .mp4 files using a single open-source and free software, Handbrake.

Convert .mkv to .mp4

The latest version of Handbrake (0.93 or above) allows MKV source files. Then, you can convert the file to various supported formats like any other conversion using Handbrake. Note that Handbrake may have to re-encode and/or re-compress videos, and if this is the case, be prepared to leave your Mac on for processing for a considerable amount of time, as it will be time and resource-hungry.

Download Handbrake.

Open Handbrake, and you will be asked to enter a source. Select a file and continue with the conversion process.

I will update this post if I find any good tweaks or settings regarding the conversion. Meanwhile, leave a comment here if you have any difficulty in converting .mkv files to .mp4 and using it.

An original article by TechZilo

Convert MKV videos to MP4 files on Mac OS X

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Free Hulu video download / converter

Sumesh P — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 11:28:37 +0000

Hulu is a video streaming site that has gained popularity recently. Unlike YouTube and similar services, Hulu hosts legal, licensed content and serves video only to visitors from USA.

This tutorial will show you how to download and (optionally) convert Hulu videos to formats like MPEG, WMA, DivX or 3GP (suited for mobile phones). We will be using the aptly titled Hulu Video Downloader. It is free to use for normal videos, and you need to purchase a Pro version license only for HD downloading.

Also see:

Download and convert Hulu videos

Getting a video to your computer is as easy as pasting the URL of the video into the application window and hitting Start. The video file will be downloaded into the folder of your choice. It shows you size and length of a file before you start downloading. Hulu Video Downloader supports simultaneous downloads. They can then be put into your iPod, Zune, PSP, mobile phones etc. easily. Hulu Video Downloader works on Windows 2000, XP, 2003, Vista.

Download Hulu Video Downloader and install it. You will need to click Next a few times – there are no settings that require tweaking. Once installation is complete, it will show you a confirmation window – uncheck all options except “Launch Hulu Video Downloader” and click Finish.

Open Hulu Video Downloader and enter the URL of the Hulu page on which contains the video you need. Choose the folder to download into and select Hulu.com in the Download From option.

If you want to convert the video for easier playback, choose MPEG 2 format (works best in most cases).

Click “Add” to begin downloading.

Note: Hulu videos cannot be accessed outside USA, so downloads will not work either. However, I will be sharing a trick to access and YouTube videos soon, so stay tuned

An original article by TechZilo

Free Hulu video download / converter

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Foobar: free, lightweight media player

Sumesh P — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 01:39:16 +0000

Foobar is a free media player for Windows. Foobar is more than just play good audio.

It has good audio quality – I say ‘good’ because I am not an audiophile. Several users (some of which are audiophiles and sound professionals) say it has better audio quality than other players like iTunes, WinAmp etc. provided the hardware is good and remains the same. It also has support for ripping and conversion, batch editing ID3 tags.

Unlike a lot of media players that add features and get bloated, Foobar is noted for its excellent resource management. Startup time is minimal, it manages large media libraries without any lag or performance issues.

The interface is customizable. There are also customizable shortcuts, so if you do not like any of the defaults, just edit them to suit your tastes (or habits with your previous media player of choice).

There are lots of components (which are like plugins) to add and extent features not present by default in Foobar. The component architecture is open, so if you are a programmer, you could code your own. This puts it above a lot of closed media players – because users know best the features required by them, and often, closed source players lag behind in feature implementation.

It has support for a wide variety of formats – MP3, MP4, AAC, WMA, Vorbis, FLAC, WAV and AIFF. There are components for even more formats.

Download Foobar

An original article by TechZilo

Foobar: free, lightweight media player

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Easy, uncluttered, free image host: Pictamatic

Sumesh P — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 01:33:40 +0000

Yesterday, I had written about Pict.com, a free image host as being ridiculously easy, minimalist and uncluttered.

I was wrong.

After seeing Pictamatic, a free image host, that is.

Pictamatic is the Google of free image hosting – it does not even have a logo at the top (the logo is at the bottom of the page). It has only preview squares (clicking on which gives you a file upload box), and links to FAQ, and upload from a URL.

There is not even a sign up link – the sign up link on the home page takes you to the FAQ which explains why you do not even need a registration. Once you upload a bunch of images and click ‘Save these images’ , you get a permanent link saved and sent to your email ID. Accessing your images is as easy as bookmarking that link. Registration can’t get any simpler than that – I hope more sites learn from Pictamatic.

Pictamatic uses Flash 9 if available, and allows multiple image uploads. At the time of writing, I did not have Flash 9, so it showed me a little warning tucked into the top right corner ‘no Flash 9 installed – no batch uploading’ along with a link to the FAQ.

Also, the FAQ section of Pictamatic is excellent – clicking on a ‘why’ link from somewhere on the site takes you to the FAQ, and brings the section in question to the top of the page in a little animation, and highlights it. No more scrolling through hundreds of questions to find an answer if you disturbed the page anchor link by impatiently scrolling before page load is complete.

Visit Pictamatic

An original article by TechZilo

Easy, uncluttered, free image host: Pictamatic

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Pict: Easy, free image hosting service

Sumesh P — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 01:14:04 +0000

Pict is a free and well designed image hosting service.

Unlike other image hosts which show you ads above, beside and beneath images (and in some cases, even over the image in an overlay), Pict is ad-free. This may not last long, and for the sake of the site, I hope they put up some advertisers (or find another revenue source), but from the view of a user, it is a welcome change.

The site does not require sign up – in fact, they do not even mention the advantages of signing up (eg. the site remembers your uploaded images). It is ridiculously easy to begin hosting images – the home page contains a bunch of squares, clicking on which will give you the file upload box.

Here’s the kicker – you can upload multiple images simultaneously, and everything is done via AJAX, so you do not even have to reload the page. There are options to save the images via email, upload image using a URL and bulk delete your uploaded images.

Visit Pict

An original article by TechZilo

Pict: Easy, free image hosting service

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Close out known vulnerabilities with Windows Worms Doors Cleaner

Sumesh P — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 01:11:43 +0000

Windows Worms Doors Cleaner is a handy utility to close unsafe and known vulnerable aspects of Windows, like services and ports.

Windows, being the most widely used operating system, also happens to have tons of known vulnerabilities. Microsoft usually fixes them by pushing out updates, but there are known vulnerabilities, information being widely available on the web. Many popular and destructive worms use vulnerabilities in Windows services. They also disable registry editing, so fixing them would be a pain.

This is where Windows Worms Doors Cleaner comes in: it disables vulnerable services and processes, checks process names with lists of known worms and monitors svchost.exe memory usage levels.

The user interface for Windows Worms Doors Cleaner is relatively good, providing you information about what services and ports are disabled, a button to re-enable them and a link to the official Microsoft security bulletin.

When it finds that something is to be disabled, it modifies existing registry entries instead of creating new ones, so you do not have to worry about a bloated registry after using it for some time.

Download Windows Worms Doors Cleaner

An original article by TechZilo

Close out known vulnerabilities with Windows Worms Doors Cleaner

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