Best Game recently

If you are looking for an addictive and humongous game to play, definitely buy Dragon Age Origins. If you want a free preview, try their flash game Dragon Age Journeys. I promise, the original game is well worth, with lots of new downloadable content coming up from Bioware.

Firefox Add-ons

Must-have firefox add-ons:

• Xmarks (formerly Foxmarks): A very easy to use bookmark synchronization tool. Extremely useful if you use multiple computers. Keeps a version history of your bookmarks, can synchronize automatically upon exiting firefox, and can keep multiple bookmark profiles (work, home, etc.).
• AutoCopy: Copies the selected text to clipboard. Saves an incredible amount of time and frustration during copy-paste operations.
• CustomizeGoogle: Tired of all the ads on google, or want to change how clean gmail looks, then this is perfect for you.
• Adblock Plus: Ads are gone. I cannot surf the Internet without this add-on; pages look really bad and packed without it.
• Personal Menu: IE- or Chrome-like menu instead of the menu bar on top. Saves space. Note, if you just want to gain some screen real estate, you can use the lighter extension named Hide Menubar. In both, pressing "Alt" reveals the menu bar.
  

I try to keep my add-ons to a minimum to keep firefox fast. Comment down if you have other favorites and suggestions...

iPhone apps

My list of suggested applications (subject to change):

• Usual recommendations: Facebook, Skype, Yelp, Dropbox (see http://geekxperts.blogspot.com/2009/11/online-storage-and-backup.html).
  
• For IM: Nimbuzz. It is free and lets you join multiple accounts at once. It has a "stay online" period of up to 30 minutes after you close the app that pushes new message alerts.
  
• For text messaging: TextPlus. This one is free, and lets you send text messages as a group. Great way to reach multiple friends at once. It has push.
• For music: Pandora, Last.fm, and maybe imeem.
• For movies: Flixster. You can link it to your Facebook and Netflix accounts.

Now some extra interesting stuff:

• For reading books: Wattpad, Stanza. Both offer lots of free books, and a good reading experience.
• Cheap games: Tap Tap Revenge 3. You can try Tap Tap Revenge 2 before buying this one. But if you like version 2, you won't be disappointed to buy version 3 for just $0.99.
• For remote controlling your computer: AirMouse. This one I really love. Especially when watching a movie or listening to music, you can easily pause, rewind, etc. Also offers a nice touchpad mouse, and some programmable buttons.
  

Vista Services Optimizer settings

I promised to give you suggested settings for Vista Services Optimizer in another post: http://geekxperts.blogspot.com/2009/11/optimize-windows-vista7.html

Here they are (Manual Optimization settings. Click to enlarge):

What is Google Chrome OS?

Today Google open-sourced Chromium OS project, but it will be available for customers this time next year. There are no conventional desktop applications and everything takes place within the browser. They really focus on the boot time and try to convince users that they don't need a full operating system since most user only need (and mostly use) a browser.

There is also a video that tells a few things about Google Chrome OS.



For more information, visit the original Google Blog (Releasing the Chromium OS open source project) and Chromium OS website (http://www.chromium.org/chromium-os).

Virtual Machines

If you know about virtual machines (that lets you run another operating system on top of one, at the same time), then you probably know about VMware. Their products are mostly paid, but they have a free VMware Player which can run virtual machines created by others. Yet, you cannot even easily modify the virtual machine settings such as the amount of memory.

A competitive free alternative to VMware is Sun VirtualBox. Since version 3 of VirtualBox, their performance benchmarks are similar, it also supports multiple virtual CPUs, shared folders between the guest machine and the host, and various operating systems. It has a very nice seamless mode, similar to VMware Fusion on Mac, that windows from both machines are displayed on the same desktop. With VirtualBox tools, seamless mouse and keyboard integration is perfect. You can create your own virtual machines, or download pre-made images.

Hint: Use fixed-size virtual hard disks. With dynamic ones, the hard disk gets big fast, and then there are painful tricks to shrink the size, and they don't always work. You can always add more virtual hard disks later on.

Online Storage and Backup

I tried multiple tools and web sites for online storage. Dropbox is the best one I have found.

It synchronizes your files online, and keeps versions for 30 days (the paid version keeps unlimited history of versions and deleted files). It is extremely easy to use: After installation it creates a Dropbox folder. Just copy any files you want to that folder, and they are synchronized. You don’t need to change anything, just change the folder name you use. Their iPhone application is also very nice. Furthermore, the fact that they keep your data encrypted with your password on Amazon S3 servers sounds like a good reason to trust them.

The default is 2GB free space if you join on
http://www.getdropbox.com/
If you join through an invitation, you get extra 250MB. I have multiple invitations. Just drop a comment and specify a way to reach you (e.g., twitter DM) and I can send you the invitation. I'll check it often, so you should get the invitation soon.

Windows and Mac versions are easy to install. Linux version is also easy if you have root access. For using it under linux with no root access, download it from (or find a newer build in the forums):

http://forums.getdropbox.com/topic.php?id=12922&replies=67#post-81845
Unzip, untar and run
~/.dropbox-dist/dropbox