If you’ve worked on Mandriva Linux, you’ve probably played Frozen Bubble. I remember the first time I played it a few years ago; I decided to keep Linux just for this game. =P
The game features penguins shooting coloured frozen bubbles to form groups of the same colour so they disappear. The object is to clear the whole screen before a bubble passes the line at the bottom. The game features 100 levels and includes a level editor.
Originally for Linux, Frozen Bubble is now available for Windows, Symbian S60 mobile phones, and even Mac. Besides that, there’s also a browser version of the game that can be played on your browser provided you have the Java Applet installed.
Choose your Frozen Bubble:
Linux (Mandriva, Slackware, Gentoo, OpenSUSE, Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora Core)
Twitter2GTalk is a great way of showing your latest tweet as your GTalk status. The service takes your last tweet and shows it up as your GTalk status, albeit a few minutes later.
All you need to do is to login to their site with your GTalk login and enter your Twitter username in the settings page. It doesn’t even ask for your password. So feel free to spread the word about @hgeek =P
P.S. – see the email address in the image? Feel free to add me on GTalk anytime if you want to. =)
Increasing productivity (or as some of us call it – becoming lazy) is always on the mind of anybody. We’ve already written about using keyboard shortcuts to launch programs, now with EscapeClose Pro you can use certain keys to do some trivial tasks like closing and minimizing windows.
EscapeClose Pro’s primary task is to close a window when the Escape key is closed. It can however, do a lot more than just that. Below is a list of shortcut keys that EscapeClose Pro has:
Hitting the tilde (~) key will minimize the running app or all the apps. You choose.
The ‘Escape’ key can be used to close a window.
To select all files in Windows Explorer, the asterisk (*) key can be used.
‘+’ or ‘-’ can be used to select and deselect files respectively.
Pressing ‘F11′ will make any application switch to Maximized view.
There are different “modes” for each task. For instance, selecting ‘Mode 1 (close Esc)’ will make the mouse pointer jump to the Close (X) button on the top right of a window when the Escape key is pressed. Under ‘Mode 2′, hitting the Escape key will directly close the application.
The best feature I liked about the software was that it made it easier for me to maximize and minimize applications by hitting the (~) and ‘F11′ keys respectively. Quite a time saver, given that my caption buttons are the size of an ant.
Other features include completely hiding a window (did not work with Firefox). Pressing the tilde and escape keys will completely hide a window or restore it to the system tray (based on what you choose). How’s that for hiding programs that don’t minimize to the system tray? =)
Adobe Photoshop costs a bomb, and while some people find it easier to crack it rather than buying it, it still takes up a lot of system resources. How about using an alternative that’s just under 700KB and comes free to use?
Fotografix is a nice little free alternative to the mighty Photoshop. It has a lot of features, brushes, and built in scripts allowing you to start editing right away. Although it is no real alternative to a graphic designer, the rest of us who like to use Photoshop for some trivial tasks such as working with Layers or resizing/adjusting images, this software should just about be enough. It’s an excellent Microsoft Paint alternative as well, standing in at just about 700KB in size and consuming less than 4MB of memory. Pretty cool right?
DirHTML is a free portable program that creates a list of the content in a folder and saves it as an HTML page.
You can choose what type of files to include, which folders to exclude, the sorting of the output, the format of the output (XHTML 1.0, HTML 4.01, etc.), file date, file size, and lots more. You can also choose to save all these settings as a batch file so you can run it later in one click.
The HTML file output is pretty old school, but we’re not complaining. It does what it’s supposed to do. Check out the screenshot below.
Protect your USB drive from unauthorised file changes, malware, or simply to prevent accidental changes by using a portable write-protection software.
USB WriteProtector is a small (444KB uncompressed) and portable (no installation needed) software that runs off your USB drive and prevents files being written to it or modified. It can help protect your drive from those annoying virus that affect portable drives, and it can also save you from accidentally making modifications to files or losing them altogether.
Just extract the file and copy it to your USB drive along with the ‘Languages’ folder containing the English language file (the original language is German). You can then run it and choose to enable or disable write-protection. Unplug your USB drive from the system and plug it back again for the write protection to be enabled. (Removal is not necessary for removing the write protection.)
For added security and ease, you can rename the executable to anything you want (I named it “usb.exe”) and hide it. It can then be run from the command line like so: X:\usb.exe /on /nogui
Love downloading free iPhone apps? Here’s a way to get notified either by email or sms when a paid app is available for free.
I absolutely love downloading free iPhone apps (who doesn’t). But it’s hard to keep tab of which app goes free and when. By using Google and Feed My Inbox, you can get SMS or email alerts when an app is available for free.
Google SMS: This service has currently been made available only for Indian mobile subscribers and is still a Labs feature. So we might not really know whether this will be around few months from now. Until then, Indian users can subscribe to this SMS channel. Around 3-4 SMS are sent each day, depending upon the number of apps that become free and also the number of SMS you’ve limited Google sending you.
How would you like to create a .exe video file that executes in any Windows operating system without the need for an additional codec to be installed? Sounds good for distributing videos right?
Create. Click. Watch.
MakeInstantPlayer is a little software that converts any given video file into a .exe (executable) file with all the necessary codecs installed. Just choose the video, press the button, and you have a file that can be run without the need for any additional media players. It’s that simple.
Additional features include the ability to open a webpage at the end of the video, choose a splash image (this is seen while the player initializes), and set an icon for the executable file. Check out the screenshot for more features and options.
Increasing productivity (or as some of us call it – becoming lazy) is always on the mind of anybody. We’ve already written about 
Protect your USB drive from unauthorised file changes, malware, or simply to prevent accidental changes by using a portable write-protection software.
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