I have been using AVG for a good number of years now and it has worked trouble-free for me. Out of the blue, a couple of days ago, a strange thing began happening to my AVG 8 Free Edition antivirus. It would refuse to update itself. A popup kept appearing saying Update failed. The connection with update server has failed.

Initially, I thought it was just due to the update server being too busy, with AVG boasting over 80 millions users worldwide. The next day, the symptoms were exactly the same, and I thought there was something wrong with my Internet connection, or perhaps the updater was being blocked by the firewall. I quickly ruled that out when it still would not update even using my wireless connection at home.

A search on Google revealed many other disgruntled users with the same problem, but no solution was to be seen. I then decided to check through every option in the Tools…Advanced Settings menu in AVG. Under the Update settings, I discovered that a checkbox saying ‘Use dial-up connections’  had somehow become selected. I unchecked this and restarted AVG, and voila! It was hungrily downloading the updates it had been deprived of the past few days.

So if you don’t know why your AVG 8 antivirus decides to stop updating all of a sudden, double check this setting to make sure it didn’t get switched on somehow.

If you were to do a Google search to look for a solution to forward SMS messages on your iPhone, you will see a whole bunch of different software designed to do this task. Some of these include SMSD, iSMS and WeTool. Some of them cost money while others are free.

This post is intended to focus on WeTool, a simple straightforward application designed to forward SMS messages on the iPhone plus other great features. Best of all, its FREE. This post will walk you through how to install this free iPhone SMS forwarding application on your iPhone, step-by-step.

WeTool is designed and developed by Aaron Jang, over at www.weiphone.com. If you go to this page, however, chances are you will not be able to make anything out as its written in the Chinese character set. This fact alone may scare some people away, wondering whether WeTool is really compatible with their iPhone. But the good news is, while it may not be easy to locate the software on WEIphone.com, it is really simple to install it, and yes, the interface is completely in English.

Some of the features of WeTool is as follows:

• Forwarding of SMS messages
• Sending SMS to multiple recipients
• Deleting individual SMS messages
• Deleting individual call entries (recieved, made, missed)
• 18 cool screen transition effects

At the time of writing, the latest version is 0.3.7.1 .The installation procedure is very simple, as follows:

1. Launch Installer on your iPhone
2. Tap sources, then edit, then add
3. Type in http://app.weiphone.com/installer/ in the prompt
4. Tap OK, the Installer Sources will refresh
5. Tap Install, then tap All Packages
6. Look for WeTool 0.3.7.1 (or a later version)
7. Tap Install

Once it downloads and installs, you will have a new program called WeTool which you can then use either as your primary SMS application or use it in conjunction with the default iPhone SMS application.

Adobe PDF is perhaps one of the most ubiquitous file formats on the Internet today. It allows users with the Adobe Reader (or other PDF compliant reader software) to view and print (if allowed) PDF documents. The beauty of the PDF format is that it can be created from any originating file format, be it Microsoft Word, Adobe Photoshop, vector images, PowerPoint slideshows, Websites. Anything at all that can be printed out by your computer, can be converted into a PDF document. The best part of the conversion is that the layout of the original document, along with its fonts is retained so your readers get to see your content exactly the way you created it, without having to have the originating software.

While viewing PDF documents is free with the Adobe Reader, Adobe charges big money for its Adobe Acrobat software which is their solution to creating PDF documents. But we don’t want to have to pay to create PDF documents, do we? So I scoured the web and discovered that there are in fact a few free PDF creation tools available for FREE!

BullZip is perhaps the best of the lot, and is downloadable free of charge from here : http://www.bullzip.com/products/pdf/info.php. It works just like Adobe Acrobat, since installs as a printer driver. The generated PDFs do not contain any kind of advertising or popups which is a major plus point for this program. The only limitation is that its FREE for personal and commercial use for up to 10 users. In most cases, this is not a limitation anyway.

BullZip’s features include :

• Print to PDF from almost any Windows program
• Runs on Microsoft Windows 2000/XP/XP x64/2003/2003 x64/Vista/Vista x64/2008
• Supports 64-bit operating systems
• Direct output to the same file each time or prompt for destination
• Control if the printer should ask if you want to see the resulting PDF document
• Control output and prompts programmatically
• Setup can run unattended
• Graphical user interface
• Password protect PDF documents
• 128/40 bit encryption
• Quality settings (screen, printer, ebook, prepress)
• Set document properties, Watermark text, size, rotation, and transparency.
• Superimpose/background documents.
• Appending/prepending documents.
• User interface control.
• Command line interface to all settings.
• COM/ActiveX interface for programmatic control.
• Support for Citrix MetaFrame
• Support for Windows Terminal Server
• Multiple output types supported: BMP, JPEG, PCX, PDF, PNG, and TIFF.

So, if you are looking for the perfect solution to being able to create PDF documents from any Windows program for FREE and without any hassle or limitations, go get BullZip. You will thank yourself you did.

We are all familiar with Tag Clouds on blogs… The more a particular topic gets written about in a blog, the larger its size is, relative to the size of other tags. Its really a clever representation of the metadata of a blog, a nice visual summary, if you like.

Wordle.net is a word cloud creation software written by Jonathan Feinberg. The basic idea behind this software is to key in a bunch of words, specify color, font and layout options and a visually appealing word cloud is generated. You are free to use the word cloud in any which way you desire. Looking at the default color and font themes, it is easy to guess that t-shirt designs was among the main uses Jonathan had in mind when creating this.

There is also a Gallery section which allows people to showcase their beautiful creations on the website. Its a good idea to go through these to get ideas and to help you with your own creative process.

Interestingly, the use of this software has gone beyond the initial purpose the author had in mind. He has received numerous inquiries from teachers and those in the education field for permission to use this software as an educational tool. This naturally came with requests to have some form of censorship, as currently the content in the Gallery is not moderated. Quite unsurprisingly, this is not an easy to do task, since at the time of writing his software gets about 3 Wordle generation requests per minute.

If you do not have a bunch of text you can think of immediately, some of the things you could do is paste in an entire chapter of an ebook to see which are the words which are repeated more often (they will have a larger relative size). Or better still, Wordle supports RSS feeds, which means all you have to do is key in the path to the RSS feed your favorite blog and it will automagically generate a beautiful word cloud from the contents of that blog.

The fonts used in the system are not only pretty to look at, they also support international character sets. Therefore, its possible to use the system out of the box with other character sets such as Arabic, Devanagri and Hebrew.

So, what are you waiting for, head over to Wordle.net and unleash your creative genius!

Lots of people have asked me if its possible to download videos from YouTube and how to go about doing it. Yes, indeed its possible, in fact there are two ways of doing it. A) The free, but lengthy way; B) The cheap and quick way. Lets look at option A first (Click here to skip to the cheap and quick way)

OPTION A) The free but lengthy way

STEP 1 : Identifying the video

Identify the full address of the video which you want to download including the YouTube address (eg : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5P6UU6m3cqk. You can get this from the address bar at the top of your browser window or by clicking on the More Info link at the right hand bar, from the URL box. Copy this address and have it ready to be used in the next step.

STEP 2 : Preparing for download

Open up a new browser window or tab and go to http://keepvid.com/. Here you will need to paste the address of the video you copied in STEP 1 into the box which says “URL”. Next click on the download button on the right hand side of the box DO NOT click on the Download, Convert and Play icons they are just advertisements.

STEP 3 : Downloading the video

Depending on the video you have chosen, you will be shown links which allow you to download the video file directly in a green box at the bottom of the page. Here you can choose to download either the low quality (FLV) format video or high quality (MPEG 4) format video by right clicking on the relevant link and choosing Save As. If you choose the Low Quality (FLV) option, you will have to rename the file from get_video to something else with an FLV extension, for example you may call the video “funny.flv”

STEP 4 : Playing the video

Depending on the video format you saved your file in Step 3, you will either need to have an FLV player to view the lower quality video file you downloaded in the FLV format, or an MPEG 4 player to view the high quality video file. FLV Player is a good player to use to view FLV video files. Apple Quicktime and many other video players are able to handle MPEG 4 videos without problems. Enjoy!

OPTION B) The cheap and quick way

STEP 1 : Download VideoPiggy

If you do not want the hassle of performing the steps above each time you need to download a video from YouTube, and want a quick and easy way to get your YouTube videos, I recommend VideoPiggy, an excellent piece of software which will make it effortless to download videos from YouTube and to convert them into any format you choose for various applications (such as inserting into PowerPoint presentations). Video Piggy will also download videos from other video servers including Google Video, Metacafe and MySpaceTV!

Click here to get VideoPiggy now!

If you are like most people, you have a digital camera and constantly download your pictures from the camera into the My Pictures folder in your computer. Depending on how organized you are, you either save your pictures according to date or title; or do not bother with organizing them at all.

No matter how you currently organize your photographs, Picasa, a free photo management software from Google is set to revolutionize the way you manage your photographs on your computer. In a nutshell, Picasa allows you to locate and organize all the photos on your computer, edit and add effects to your photographs with a few simple clicks, and share your photos with others through email, prints and on the web. If you have a PC running Windows 2000/Windows XP, with at least Internet Explorer 5.0, you are all set to start using Picasa!

The very first time you run Picasa, its powerful indexing system scans each and every image on your computer, and automatically sorts them by date. You may even discover photographs you had long forgotten about. The next time you run Picasa, it will intelligently and quickly find and add newly added photographs to its collection.

Picasa makes it easy to rename photograps one at a time, or all at once. This is a useful feature and allows users to assign more meaningful names to their photographs. These photos can then be organized into albums, much like traditional printed photographs. One major difference though, is that Picasa allows users to place a photograph into multiple albums. It does this without actually making multiple copies of the photos, only by adding new references to the same photograph. This feature is not only powerful, its intelligent implementation reduces hard disk space utilization as well.

If that’s not enough, Picasa also includes fun photo effects which can turn ordinary photographs into works of art at the click of button. Some of these include sepia-tone, black and white, warmify, or even more advanced effects which let you vary the degree with which the effects are applied.

Download Picasa today and you will discover why its really the only photo management software you will ever need on your desktop computer. To read even more about this amazing software, head over to the Picasa Product Tour.

If you are like me, each time you format a PC and reinstall Windows on it, there seems to be a fixed set of programs which are absolutely necessary to be installed next. I thought it could be useful for me to document these programs in this post for the benefit of all. If you have other useful programs which you simply must install after having performed a clean install of Windows, please feel free to drop a comment.

The very first thing would be to install the various drivers, including the display, network, sound and other device drivers. If you are having a standard desktop PC built in recent times, you will realize that most of the components within your CPU are built-in to your motherboard. In this case, all you will need to look for will be the motherboard setup CD which will contain the drivers you need.

Next would be to install a productivity suite, such as Microsoft Office, Lotus SmartSuite or even an Open-Source suite, such as Open Office. This will provide you with basic functionality to perform tasks such as word processing, spreadsheet-related work and some record keeping. Many versions of today’s productivity suites come with a host of other applications to complement these basic tasks, which may include desktop publishing applications, diagramming applications and web development tools.

Perhaps the two most important programs no one can do without on a PC today is an anti-virus program as well as anti-spyware program. Personally, I use AVG Free Edition, which suits my needs perfectly. It is absolutely free, updated regularly and does not hog my computer’s resources when it runs. Granted, it may miss a virus now and then compared to other more popular anti-virus programs in the market, but it is usually able to catch up within a couple of definition updates.

As for anti-spyware, I would highly recommend using Spybot Search and Destroy, in combination with Lavasoft’s AdAware Free Edition. When used together, I have found that these programs are able to detect and clean practically any kind of spyware, malware or trojan ever created. The effectiveness of these two programs even rivals some of the commercial anti-virus programs. However, for these programs to be effective, you will need to regularly update the definitions and perform a full system scan at least once a week, especially if you actively surf the Internet.

There are other software which I have found to be very useful and I routinely install them after installation of Windows. Adobe Reader is an absolute necessity that you cannot do without nowadays. It lets you view documents in PDF format, which has become the ubiquitous format for downloading documents on the Web such as product manuals, research papers,and a wide variety of other kinds of documents. Another essential software is a file compression and decompression utility. Personally, I favor WinZip, despite Windows’ built-in support for compressed files and folders. There are other compression formats as well, including TAR, RAR and GZIP, but WinZip handles most compression formats extremely well and I have personally developed a preference for it.

If you have a DVD or CD burner installed in your desktop or laptop, I would personally recommend Nero which comes with a whole range of other useful applications such as Nero Wave Editor and Nero Cover Designer within the Enterprise Edition. Many DVD and CD burners also come pre-bundled with a cut-down version of Nero, called Nero XPress which is very easy to use and allows users to burn files and make copies of CDs or DVDs easily.

Finally, another piece of software which I recommend you to get is XP Codec Pack. Essentially it is one of the most complete codec packs on the Internet which will let you view audio and video files encoded with practically any codec in the market. This is especially useful if you do not have a DVD decoder installed on your computer, since Windows XP does not come with a DVD decoder. This is a much better alternative than having to fork out money unncessarily for a standalone DVD player such as WinDVD or PowerDVD when in fact, all you need is a simple codec, and Windows Media Player or any other media player you use will be able to play your audio and video content perfectly.

So that wraps up this post and I hope that you found the information I shared here useful. If there is any other software which you find useful and are sure to install whenever you set up a fresh installation of Windows, feel free to share with all of us.