MakeUseOf.com: “DOWNLOAD Lockdown: Secure Your Files With TrueCrypt” plus 13 more

DOWNLOAD Lockdown: Secure Your Files With TrueCrypt
Cool Websites and Tools [July 11th]
How to Reduce Facebook Photo Tagging Clutter
3 Ways Reddit Can Help Those In Need
Top 8 Websites To Find The Most Priceless & Viral Images
5 Fun & Useful Terminal Commands You Can Use More Than Once [Mac & Linux]
Kick It Old-School With Classic Free Sierra Adventure Games, Tributes & Remakes [Browser, Windows & Mac]
Hot Tech Deals – Trend Micro Titanium Internet Security Software + more
How To Enhance Your Windows Experience With AquaSnap (Not Only in Windows 7!)
5 Personal Finance Sites That Will Help Get You In Shape
8 “Best Online Investing Websites” to Improve Your Gains
Facebook Video Calling Scam Rides Official Announcement’s Coattails [News]
How To Make GNOME Applications Look Like KDE Applications With Oxygen-GTK [Linux]
Getting Started with the Internet of Things eBook [Giveaway]

DOWNLOAD Lockdown: Secure Your Files With TrueCrypt

Posted: 12 Jul 2011 06:31 AM PDT

To really keep your data safe, you need to encrypt it. Not sure how to start? You need to read “Lockdown: Secure your Files With TrueCrypt”, by author Lachlan Roy.

Encryption is used all the time, often without you even realising it. Whenever you buy something online and make a transaction, all your details are heavily encrypted until they reach the other end, making sure that no third party could be listening in. If you use instant messaging programs it is possible to create an encryption tunnel to ensure that only you and the person you’re talking to can see the messages.

In this manual we’ll be talking about local file encryption – that is, encrypting files on a hard drive (or encrypting the entire hard drive). The files are safe as long as they are kept in the encrypted area.

DOWNLOAD Lockdown: Secure Your Files with TrueCrypt
Having trouble downloading? Right-click the link, then click "Save As…"

Read now on Scribd

In this guide you’ll learn about:

Installing and using TrueCrypt.
Types of encryption, including virtual encrypted disks and system encryption.
Picking a good encryption password.
The importance of locking your computer.

DOWNLOAD Lockdown: Secure Your Files with TrueCrypt
Having trouble downloading? Right-click the link, then click "Save As…"

Read now on Scribd

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More articles about: ebooks, encryption, hide, privacy, security, security tips

Add Your Website Here!

These are just half of the websites that we discovered in the last couple of days. If you want us to send you daily round-ups of all cool websites we come across, leave your email here. Or follow us via RSS feed.

Prevent your friends from seeing the photos you are tagged in:

As far as I know, you can’t completely disable the feature and avoid being tagged. However you can reduce the clutter by not sending your friends a public update once you are tagged.

Here’s how you can find the option:

Click “Account” in the top-right corner and there “Privacy Settings”;
Scroll down a bit to a little blue link “Customize Settings”:

Now click “Edit” button next to “Photos and videos you’re tagged in” and select “Customize“:

There you will be able to set that the photos you are tagged in are only visible to you.

As you can see from the screenshot above, you can also hide those photos (which are uploaded by someone else and thus are not under your control) from some of your contacts. This way you can protect your privacy by preventing your parents or boss from seeing some (possibly embarrassing) photos before you login to remove the tag.

Disable Photo Tag Auto-Suggestions

When any of your friends upload photos to his Facebook profile, he will be prompted to tag you if any person on their photos looks *like* you.

This is a comparatively new feature that is called “tag suggestions” and is aimed to “make tagging multiple photos even more convenient.” It uses face recognition technology to automatically find one and the same person on all photos you upload and prompt you to tag that person with one click.

You may be OK with that but you should know that you can turn this feature off any time (in case you don’t want to be tagged too often): in the same section of your Privacy settings click “Edit” button next to “Suggest photos of me to friends” (and disable auto-suggestions there).

Are you aware of any other Facebook settings to control the photo tagging feature? Please share your thoughts in the comments!

Lastly, here are a few more essential Facebook privacy settings you should be aware of:

Image Credit:Facebook Blog

More articles about: Facebook, photo albums, photo sharing, photos, privacy, tagging

Some Pointers

Let’s be straight about a few things. The people of Reddit typically want to look after those who are already existing members of its online community. Furthermore, they will only provide relief if you can prove that you genuinely need it. That is really sad to say, but we all know that the Internet is full of liars. Consider the last time you received an email from that Nigerian prince. You really should refer to our wide assortment of work concerning internet scams.

All in all, if you are not a Redditor, it would be best to try one of these options:

Find a friend who is a Redditor who can go speak to the masses on your behalf.
Include yourself in the community prior to requesting assistance and just wait it out.
Using a new account, ask for help, provide some proof, and hope for the best.

Also, if you are already a Redditor, do not make a throwaway account for this type of request. This is one situation where Reddit karma pays off. Reddit can be a nice community, but it also isn’t afraid to unleash its cyber-missiles on those who may be even the most innocent of users. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

In MakeUseOf’s past article concerning Reddit - 5 Cool Things You Should Know about Reddit - the sections known among the general community as “subreddits” are lightly touched upon. Below, MakeUseOf provides you with three different subreddits that are good to remember.

r/Assistance

reddit help

This subreddit is for the general requests and offers on Reddit. Here you can find anything ranging from requests to relieve medical needs all the way to support with housing troubles.

Often, there will be those that cannot assist you financially, but they will provide you with advice that can help you get around any financial woes. Sometimes that is better than anyone sending a few dollars your way. However, since this subreddit is full of people trying to do goodwill unto others, they do not like to be conned, so be prepared with some proof it you really need some help.

Submitting a scan of some medical documents or even a picture of your damaged home should be good enough. Even better, place a handwritten sign featuring your username next to both types of images while creating them.

r/Food_Pantry

reddit review

No one should have to go hungry, and Reddit makes sure of that with r/Food_Pantry. The formula of this subreddit is quite similar to r/Assistance, but the primary focus is on giving away food.

As the Internet’s soup kitchen, users take on a high responsibility of caring for the public. On this subreddit, you will find generous Redditors openly offering gift cards, pre-bought food items, and whatever else people might lack.

Redditors in need can request help by making a simple post explaining their situation and general location. Those that see the post can offer their assistance by shipping non-perishables or working with local grocery stores that are able to deliver.

r/Random_Acts_of_Pizza

reddit review

While pizza may not appeal to the lactose intolerant or picky six-year-olds, I think we can all agree that it is a standard food that is cheap, filling, and plentiful. Although it is in the same spirit of r/Food_Pantry, this subreddit is a little bit more lighthearted than its other philanthropic counterparts, and it offers a more open environment for making requests.

Basically, if you are hungry and can’t afford a hot meal, just make a post explaining what’s all going on. Let Reddit do the rest. There is no shame in asking for a pizza here, but it helps if you keep the “pay it forward” mentality.

Pizza donors primarily use two methods to send you pizza. For instance, they may just call it in themselves if they are in your area, or if you are at a distance, they will send you an eGift Card for the pizza place of your choice. Also, if there are any other delivery services in your areas, this Reddit can adjust to whatever your starving palate desires.

Conclusion

reddit help

To recap, Reddit is a site that is chock-full of generally good folks. Even in the midst of the heavy debates and questionable controversy that may end up on the site, it is quite obvious that those items can be set aside to aid someone. Also, if you want to check out some success stories about how people have helped others, take a gander at r/TodayYouTomorrowMe.

So why don’t you tell us what you think of the helpful sections of Reddit? Have you ever received help from one of the subreddits? Have you ever given help to someone?

Image Credits: click, BuckEyeGold

More articles about: aggregator, charity, meme, news, social media, web trends

theCHIVE

priceless images
theCHIVE is a booming photoblog with many recurring posts, most of which are collections of hilarious, bizarre or otherwise, potentially viral images. Some of these posts include the Daily Afternoon Randomness, which is a highly popular set of either edited or unedited, random and funny pictures, as well as the Daily Morning Awesomeness, another popular post with a variety of either inspiring, cool or sometimes, even jaw-dropping but hilarious images.

There are also other sections on the site, which feature themed posts for certain weekdays, viral videos, as well as, photos of random hot girls or actual female readers of the site that may sometimes be NSFW. The site's also done pretty well when it comes to donating to readers, or Chivers, in need, but it has also created some Internet hoaxes that have even fooled network shows and other media outlets. Still, theCHIVE is highly addicting and serves a ton of photo galleries that will satisfy the palate of those who are hungry for raw comedy in picture form.

BuzzFeed

crazy priceless images

BuzzFeed shows viral videos, images, links and general content in real-time, submitted by the staff and users of the site, which was actually started by a cofounder of the Huffington Post. The posts range from human interest stories to celebrity gossip news. You will still catch plenty of funny pictures for different types of humor on this site, as well as interesting and useful information once in a while.

Cracked

crazy priceless images

Cracked started out as a humor magazine, first released in 1958, and eventually saw itself on the web, continuing the works of the print edition (which was discontinued in 2007). It features lots of compilations (e.g. 8 Historic Symbols That Mean The Opposite Of What You Think), weekly image manipulation contests, and daily contests to allow users to submit their creative captions to bizarre photos.

CollegeHumor

crazy priceless images

This site has been active for 7+ years and is known for having plenty of helpful articles for college survival, and creating original comedy shorts, like the web series Jake and Amir, and ones even including celebrities, such as Michael C. Hall (the lead of Dexter) and Malin Akerman (from Watchmen). When it comes to funny pictures, CollegeHumor also has picture galleries with lots of bizarre and hilarious images you can't miss.

FailBlog & Icanhascheezburger [Both From Cheezburger Network]

viral images

FailBlog features lots of hilarious videos and pictures that can either belong in the fail, the more intense "epic fail", or win categories. The site's Youtube channel has over a million subscribers and it's almost like a "America's Funniest Videos" show for Youtube. Icanhascheezburger is of course, its sister site that shows cat pictures with witty captions in lolspeak, generally for different categories. These "kitteh" videos and images have exploded on the web in the recent years because there's always a new cat video or photo these days, but it never gets old to see some cute animals doing
innocent and hilarious things.

viral images

Funny Or Die

viral images

Founded by comedian and actor Will Ferrell, Funny Or Die, launched this website to feature comedy shorts submitted by users, and sometimes, even original short films starring Ferrell and his colleagues, and sometimes even other actors. Though the site is known for its video content, it also has photo caption contests for users to vote on and funny picture galleries to entertain everyone.

Geeky Fun

priceless images Our site co-founder, Kaly, has been scouring the web in search of hilarious pictures and posting them for a while, so be sure to check out our very own Geeky Fun section. It's mostly material that even tech-savvy users can enjoy. If you use Google Reader or any other feed reader, add the Geeky Fun RSS feed! You won't regret it!

Did we miss any site? Let us know in the comments!

Image Credit: Scott Clark

More articles about: comedy, fun, humor, images, Interesting, news, photos, popular, social media, web trends

SSH

This can be used to securely remotely login to another device which has remote login enabled. It is commonly used to login to jailbroken iPhones and send files. It is also used to repair computers without a display attached or to make sure they are still working. SSH can also be used to tunnel web traffic.

If you’re on OS X, you must make sure that remote login is turned on in the computer you want to remotely login to. You can do this by going to the Sharing pane in System Preferences, then ticking the “Remote Login” checkbox. Note down the bit in quotes after, “To log in to this computer remotely…”

mac terminal commands That’s what you have to type into the terminal to log in to that account on that computer. To login using SSH, simply type:

ssh user@host

Where host is the IP. Then verify that you want to connect and enter the remote computer’s password. From there, you can issue commands from the Terminal remotely.

For Ubuntu, just install OpenSSH, by using:

sudo apt-get install openssh-server

Then check your IP address by clicking nteworking icon on the menu bar, then clicking “Connection Information”. Check your IP address (not the “broadcast” one) and note it down.

ubuntu terminal commands

To login remotely, type in the same as before.

say [OS X Only]

This is limited to OS X machines. Sorry, Linux users. But for you Mac users, say just makes your Mac speak. You would type in:

say TYPE IN SCRIPT HERE

No quotation marks are needed to enclose the speech or anything. Alternatively, you could first type in say, press return, and then everything you type after that is what the Mac will say. This can be use to make your Mac sing as well, if you type this:

say -v Cellos "TYPE IN SCRIPT HERE"

Just add -v to change the voice to a voice of your choice. This time, you’ll need the quotation marks.

mv + cp

This command is very useful for moving things. But this is easier to do in the file browser, why the CLI? Well, if you put a dot in front of a file with most UNIX-like systems, like Linux and all POSIX-compliant systems, like OS X it hides the file. With OS X, you cannot just add a dot. It doesn’t allow you to. So use the Terminal to hide your top secret project, because mv is also used to rename files. cp can copy files if you want.

mv ~/Desktop/sourcename.txt ~/Documents/destinationname.txt

With Linux, you must put the two locations in single quotes.

cd

To navigate to a location on your Terminal, just type:

cd location

You can also drag the folder to the Terminal window after typing cd and then press Enter.

ubuntu terminal commands

This shortcut works on both OS X and Linux, though it’s a tiny bit easier on OS X. To navigate to your home folder, just type:

cd

ls

Use ls to see the contents of a directory. First you must cd into the location. Then just type:

ls

This even allows you to see invisible files. Now, can you see how the last three commands link to each other? Now you can find files you hid. If you forget the filenames exactly, this will help you. Now you can restore the hidden files, using the mv command to remove the dot.

mac terminal commands

Conclusion

What do you think? Have you ever used the command line before? If not, did you find these tools easy to use? What other command line tools can you recommend? Tell us by commenting below!

More articles about: command line, commands, terminal, terminal tips

Old-School Originals @ Sarien.net

Hosting a smattering of classic Sierra adventure games that you can enjoy from the comfort of your browser, Sarien is the place to begin if you’ve never played any of the original Quest series of games. There are three flavours to enjoy, starting off with King’s Quest: Quest for the Crown. In addition to the original, Space Quest I: The Sarien Encounter and Police Quest: In Pursuit of the Death Angel are also present.
sierra games
As this is a Sierra-themed vault of video gaming goodness, both The Black Cauldron (a Disney film given the Sierra treatment) and Gold Rush! are included too. We’re very lucky that Sarien is still serving up tasty, retro content as the website came under legal scrutiny from Activision in the past, a blip that took 2 years to resolve.
sierra old games download
Why not spend an afternoon pretending it’s still the 80s by watching The Breakfast Club and checking out a few of the links below?

Note: Sarien have a mobile site that is optimized for the iPad, and works a treat.

King’s Quest Remakes by AGD Interactive

Anonymous Game Developers Interactive have been hard at work taking the original King’s Quest trilogy and injecting new life and compatibility into the series with their faithful remakes. Best of all the team have released them for free, and they’re all compatible with both Windows and Mac OS X machines.
sierra old games download
Each game is accompanied by its own introduction, FAQ and hints collection, whilst at the same time keeping in-line with the originals despite the obvious changes. For an overview of the third game in the trilogy, check out Angela’s article. Another Sierra adventure game, Quest for Glory II has also been revamped and released for free by AGD Interactive.

You can download full versions of each adventure at the following links:

The Silver Lining

Originally titled King’s Quest IX: Every Cloak Has A Silver Lining, this fan-made continuation of the King’s Quest series was forced to change its name by Vivendi Games and Activision due to its completely unofficial nature (nice try guys).
sierra games
There are currently three episodes available: What is Decreed Must Be, Two Households and My Only Love Sprung From My Only Hate. Two more additions to the series are planned and slated for a 2011 release, which makes for quite a lot of free entertainment.

You can grab individual episodes from the links below for the Windows operating system:

Conclusion

In many ways it’s a shame that this breed of graphical adventure is endangered. ADG Interactive are attempting to bring back the genre with its remakes and recent seperate commercial release, but 2D adventures are always going to be niche.

If you enjoy this kind of game and would like the opportunity to play more then you’ll probably want to read all about SCUMMVM, a point-and-click adventure game emulator which supports a considerable amount of the Sierra back catalogue.

Do you have any favourite Sierra games? Any favourites from this article? Love your SCUMM? Let us know in the comments!

More articles about: cross platform, fun, game reviews, ipad games, old-school, online games, rpg

Getting Started

To get started, you will first need to download AquaSnap from the developer’s website. You can choose between an installer and a portable version, and the software is also available in an impressive number of languages. There is a catch to this, though, as AquaSnap will automatically detect you system’s language and use that. There’s no apparent way to change the interface language manually.

aquasnap review

After you install it, AquaSnap will load automatically, and you can start using it right away. In order to configure AquaSnap, you can access the settings simply by double clicking the tray icon. If you don’t wish to have a tray icon, you can access the settings from the start menu.

aquasnap windows 7

Snapping Windows

AquaSnap offers various settings options for snapping windows. The default settings are very similar to Windows’ built-in Aero Snap feature, but let’s play with these a little bit and see what we can get out of them.

aquasnap windows 7

After you access the settings, go to the “AquaSnap” tab to change the snapping options. AquaSnap offers three pre-set settings (AquaSnap, Simple and Advanced), where advanced give you 8 different snapping options for your windows. Using this setting, you can easily work on 4 different windows simply by dragging them to the four corners of the screen.

aquasnap windows 7

There’s also a custom setting, which you can use to set the snapping option to your exact liking (like getting a window in fullscreen when you drag it the bottom, for example).

aquasnap windows

AquaSnap’s snapping even works with internal windows in Multiple Document Interface (MDI) programs such as Excel, and you can configure this to behave differently from your independent windows.

aquasnap windows

Shaking and Stretching

Besides snapping, AquaSnap offers several other useful features. In the “AquaShake” tab you’ll be able to change Windows’s native Aero Shake feature. Here you can get a window to stay always on top every time you shake it (shaking it again will release it). You can control the sensitivity (sensibility?) of the shaking detection and even the opacity of the always-on-top window. You can also choose to leave Aero Shake as it is (minimizes all other windows), or disable it altogether.

aquasnap windows

What’s cool about this feature is that you can also control the opacity of the always-on-top window. I found this especially useful for when I needed to work on several windows, and still have something stay always on top, like a chat window, without having it blocking my view of the other windows. You can see how this looks in the screenshot.

The “AquaStretch” tab allows you to “stretch” windows after dragging them into a corner. This means that you have a window at the bottom right corner and then stretch over the whole right side. You can do this by double clicking the window when your cursor is placed at the top of the window and turns into the two-sided white arrow which is usually used for changing the window’s size. Of course you can also do this simply by dragging the window to the right. If this sounds a bit vague, you can look at the screenshot below to get a better idea.

Appearance

The last two tabs we will look at are the “AquaGlass” tab and the appearance tab. The “AquaGlass” tabs lets you choose the opacity of a window when you move it. If you so choose, every time you move a window, it will turn semi-transparent so you can see everything that’s going on behind it. This is very useful if you’re working with a lot of open windows.

In the “appearance” tab you can change the color and opacity of the snap indicator, or even disable it altogether. The default color scheme is quite nice, but I always like it when programs give me a choice. After all, don’t we all want our systems to look as original as possible, even when using a very common operating system?

aquasnap review

Conclusion

Windows 7′s default features are pretty cool. Even without installing anything, you can still do some pretty handy things with it. But AquaSnap provides a very needed extra touch for those of us who work with many open windows or those who like exciting things to happen when they shake a window.

I’m definitely keeping AquaSnap installed on my system, but would love to hear of more of these little things that can make the Windows experience better. Do you know of any? Let us know in the comments!

More articles about: desktop search, productivity, Windows 7

The Simple Dollar

Trent Hamm's The Simple Dollar personal finance blog site emerged out his personal experiences of a "financial meltdown" starting back in April of 2006. He started his blog "to tell the world about what [he] had learned and help people to who were struggling with the same things."

personal finance sites

Hamm, the authorThe Simple Dollar: How One Man Wiped Out His Debts and Achieved the Life of His Dreams, writes about an extremely wide range of topics, from cooking recipes that keep you from wasting money on going out to eat, to 25 Revised Rules to Grow Rich By. Other subjects on the site include bad spending habits, dealing with debt, living frugally, grocery shopping, and organizing your money.

The ChristianPF

Bob Lotich's The Christian Personal Finance features a large collection of daily posts about budgeting, banking, jobs and careers, debt elimination, insurance, investing, making and saving money, and free stuff.

finance sites

His site is geared towards people of the Christian faith, but I think it can appeal to anyone. Some of his popular articles include, How to Pay Your Mortgage Off Early, 20 Best Ways to Save Money, Get Out of Debt, 25 Top Paying Jobs Without Degree, 15 Ways to Cut Your Expenses, 250 Bible Verses About Money, and Why You Need an Emergency Fund.

MintLife Blog

I've recommended Mint.com's online financial management system as an effective way to develop and monitor your personal financial budget. Mint.com also includes a much re-tweeted blog site called MintLife.

finance sites

Recent MintLife articles include When Does It Make Sense to Refinance?, Support Your Local Business—Invest in It, Impulse Savings: Use Your Shopping Habit to Feather Your Nest Egg, and Investing 101: Understanding Core Earnings. MintiLife is definitely worth subscribing to or at least having on your Twitter follow list.

GetRich Slowly

GetRich Slowly has been selected as one of Time Magazine's best blogs of 2011. The site features daily personal finance information on maintaining a savings account, CD rates, home and mortgage, dealing with credit cards, insurance, and getting out of debt.

finance sites

When you subscribe to the sites email newsletter you will receive a copy of his free ebook, Learn Hot to Make Your Money Work Harder for You.
finance web sites
Spending a weekend reading articles from this and other sites will provide you with the personal finance education that you never received in school.

I Will Teach You To Be Rich

New York Times bestselling author, Ramit Sethi takes a slightly different approach to personal finance.

Sethi, whose site hosts 250,000 readers per month, doesn't focus on small frugal ways to get financially in shape; instead, his approach is for you to spend money consciously and invest in things that will make you money—so you're not trying to build a nest egg simply by skipping those Starbuck lattes you're hooked on.
finance web sites
Sethi uses a mixture of blog posts and self-made videos to provide tips and financial insight on categories including earning money, buying a home, credit card perks, how to negotiate deals, automating your finances, starting a business, and the psychology of money. You definitely want to have Sethi’s site on your RSS feed.

Worthy Mentions

Other worthy mentions for good personal fiance sites include: The Digerati Life, a site for digital and technological savvy readers that provides information and tips about credit cards, best brokers, savings, mortgage, and refinancing rates.

FinanceDad is produced by Mark, an Accounting Manager for a large company in St. Louis, MO.
finance web sites
His site focuses on frugal living, retirement planning, and investing, and it contains hundred articles on money saving tips and strategies.

If your income is very limited, you will definitely want to subscribe to the The Frugal Life which features hundred of tips on living within your means. The site contains articles on practical topics such as auto savings, getting rid of clutter, do-it-yourself how-tos, home business ideas, and saving on your utilities.

The sites listed above are among my personal finds; I'm sure there are others that should be on the list. Let us know which personal finance sites you subscribe to.

For other MUO articles on personal finance, start with these posts:

Image Credit: Shutterstock.com

More articles about: finance, money, money management, save money

Wikinvest

Wikinvest always deserves a mention whenever you talk about online investing aids. Wikinvest Portfolio Manager is a comprehensive website that lets you make the most use of your online investment portfolios. The site's data import tools allow you to easily and quickly setup your portfolio account by bringing in data from external brokerage sites with a few clicks. You not only get to see all your accounts in one place but also have easy access to portfolio analytical tools supported by real time data and visualizations. Wikis also cover company reviews and performance metrics, making your investment decisions all the more sounder. The Money School is where you should go if you are just starting out with personal finance and investing.

StockMapper

best investment websites

Stock heat maps are visual aids which constantly update and tell you what's going up and what's down in the financial markets. StockMapper is a collection of many such heat maps which reflect the volatility of today's financial markets. The stock heat maps cover some of the major exchanges like NASDAQ, NYSE, and Eurotrac. You can use the heat maps as a 'dashboard' and apply filters to get the information you want according to all the relevant indices (there's a 3-D map too). Clicking on the color coded stock points also brings up news feeds related to that particular stock or company.

FINVIZ

best investment websites

This site is another stock visualization tool. The stock screener also works with various filters and you can even create your own custom screeners and map it to the online portfolio for the stocks you want to focus on. You can save them as presets and use them later too. The web app supports multiple charts with which you can monitor aspects like different sectors, futures and forex markets, or high performing stocks easily (among other things).

Guru Focus

best investment websites

Learning how the best investors invest can fast track you and your investment pile. The site doesn’t have a direct portfolio management tool but it's job is to guide you to pick the right stocks. The site serves investment ideas through financial news, insights, and commentaries. The site is not about short term investing. The Real Time Guru Picks is a membership based feature but most parts of the website are free.

Stockpickr

investing websites

The site is part of The Street network of financial information websites. It also found a place in Times annual list of best websites (2007). As the name says, all the financial hints on the site comes from tracking the portfolios of many of the top mutual and hedge funds and super investors like Warren Buffett, Wally Weitz, and George Soros. The articles that fall under Stock Ideas are must read for helpful insights. If you have time on your hands checkout The Stock Game for some real-time simulated stock trading.

Yahoo Finance

investing websites

Yahoo Finance along with Wikinvest finds a place on our 107 Best Websites on The Web list. Along with financial headlines, you get you get free stock quotes, portfolio management resources, international market data, message boards, and mortgage rates. Also, Yahoo Finance is localized just like its main portal for some major countries around the world. Some new features to look at include the streaming codes, smart lookup for to find quotes faster, a new personal finance section, and more. Then of course, there's the Experts panel and Money Guides among the tools.

Financial Times

investing websites

This top-notch publication needs no introduction. For worldwide coverage of the latest financial trends, this publication is the one to read. But then it also covers regional markets like Asia, the Middle East, and India just as well. Don't forget to check out the lineup of tools (as in the screenshot) or the many blogs that are on the second tier of the website.

MarketWatch

best online investing websites

Anything from Wall Street Journal is a must read if you want to invest wisely. Apart from the topics, companies, people, investment aids, and markets in the news, do take a look at the podcasts and the Virtual Stock Exchange Game. The section on investments has a range of tools that could help to make your decisions more carefully planned out. For instance, the list of top IPO performers (and worst too), mutual fund comparisons, and the other screening tools are worth a bookmark. The My Portfolio section is lets you track your investments.

The eight sites and their investment tools are for the serious investor. You would need a fair degree of know-how to tackle the data that's thrown out. Reading our other wealth related articles could lay the groundwork. Here are some of them:

When it comes to investing, which are the financial websites you follow?

Image Credit: Shutterstock

More articles about: finance, money, money management, stock market, tracking tools

About Oxygen-GTK

The package we’re talking about is called Oxygen-GTK.The aim of this package is to visually integrate GNOME apps with KDE’s main theme, called Oxygen. Why is this project different than all the other attempts to visually match KDE? Aside from the fact that this package actually works as people might expect, there’s really nothing too much fancy about it. Other projects tended to use outside theme engines (neither GTK nor Qt), and the final results were never more than a nice attempt (in my personal experience). Oxygen-GTK takes the simple approach of using the GTK engine to look almost exactly like the default Qt version. The only inconsistency I ever found so far was that menu items were more spaced out. That was it.

Installation

To get Oxygen-GTK on your system, you can go to your package manager and search for oxygen-gtk. Unless your distro has strange naming schemes on many packages, you should be able to find it right there. If not, just search with ‘oxygen’ and scroll around.

gnome kde applications
You can also download the latest files yourself, but note that your distro should have the latest version that goes with your version of KDE.

The latest version of Oxygen-GTK that is being offered (v1.1.0 at the time of this article) is actually meant for KDE 4.7, which at the time of this article hasn’t yet been released as stable. For future versions of Oxygen-GTK, please read the information on the download page to make certain you’re using the correct version. If you downloaded your own copy instead of installing the package, you can extract the contents of the download to /home/<username>/.local so that the system correctly identifies that it exists on your system.

Configuration

gnome kde applications
Once that is installed, you’re not done yet. Even though the package is installed the system does not know that it should use it instead of the current “ugly” theme for GNOME apps. To finalize the changes, you’ll need to go into your Desktop/System Settings, then Application Appearance, and finally GTK+ Style. Here you need to change the widget style to oxygen-gtk. Hit Apply, and now you can open any GNOME application and see that it visually fits right along all your other applications!

Conclusion

make gnome look like kde
Oxygen-GTK is a great way to get the best of both worlds and to enjoy your desktop experience. Remember that this is a way to visually integrate GNOME apps to the KDE desktop, but GNOME applications may still operate under settings stored and changed by GNOME tools. The KDE Control Panel may not be able to change a setting that will affect GNOME apps. However, KDE apps will always follow the changes.

Are you someone who’d like to use KDE but still keep the GNOME apps? Would a solution like this allow you to make the switch? What would you like to see happen? Let us know in the comments!

How do I win a copy?

It’s simple, just follow the instructions.

Step 1: Fill in the giveaway form

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The giveaway code required to activate the form is available from Friday’s newsletter or on our Facebook page.

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Tuesday, July 12, 2011