Mobile Applications for Apple, Android, Symbian, Windows

The table below is a list of FREE mobile applications for these platforms:
And = Android
App = Apple
Sym = Symbian
Win = Windows

Please let me know if you know of other good free applications.

In the table, the first 4 columns show which platform the application is for. The mobile application names are given and a brief description for the mobile applications is given unless it is a well know application.




And App Sym Win Mobile App

x 0 0 0 3G Watchdog

x 0 0 0 Picsay - picture editor

x 0 0 0 Backgrounds

x 0 0 0 BBC News

x 0 0 0 Twidroid - twitter app

x 0 0 0 Dolphin Browser

x 0 0 0 Jewels  - game

x 0 0 0 Task Manager

x 0 0 0 Sweetdreams - organise email, phone calls, etc

x 0 0 0 Barcode Scanner

x 0 0 0 Quickpedia

x 0 0 0 Uber Keyboard

x 0 0 0 Locale - using GPS

x 0 0 0 Plink Art - camera for paintings
x 0 0 0 Double Twist - Multimedia player for photo, music, video

x x x x Rebtel - international calling

x x x x Trapster - GPS for speed camera

x x x 0 Shazam - identify songs

x x x 0 Facebook

x x x 0 Tunewiki - media app

x x 0 0 ISP Usage

x x 0 0 Google

x x 0 0 Last.FM

x x 0 0 Photoshop.com Mobile

x x 0 0 Bigoven - cooking recipes

x x 0 0 Around Me - GPS to locate ATMs, shops, etc

x x 0 x Evernote - note taking

x x 0 x Aloqa - using GPS

x 0 x x Wavesecure - security for smartphone

0 x 0 0 Echofon for Twitter
0 x 0 0 Mobyko - transfer phone contacts
0 x 0 0 Flickr - for photos
0 x 0 0 Logitech Touch Mouse
0 x 0 0 Audiboo - audio blogging
0 x 0 0 Units - conversion
0 x 0 0 Metro - public transport
0 x 0 0 Blurb - make phone to banner
0 x 0 0 Ski and Snow Report

0 x 0 0 TVGuide

0 x 0 0 ABC - news service

0 x 0 0 My First Words Lite - educational

0 x 0 0 Wordweb

0 x 0 0 Kindle for Iphone

0 x 0 0 Ebay

0 x 0 0 Domain - real estate search

0 x 0 0 Seadragon - artwork

0 x 0 0 Simplify Music 2 - stream music PC-iPhone

0 x 0 0 Ozweather

0 x 0 0 Currency

0 x 0 0 Filmtrailer

0 x 0 0 Time Magazine

0 x 0 0 Tripit - travel itineraries to iPhone

0 x 0 0 Tip and Split - calculates tips at restaurant

0 x 0 0 Lasoo - shopping app

0 x 0 0 Paypal

0 x 0 0 Gorillacam - camear app

0 x 0 0 Epicurious - cooking recipes

0 0 x 0 Ovi Maps 3

0 x x 0 Fring - phone and video calls via wifi

0 0 x x Opera Mobile browser

0 x x x Skype

0 0 0 x Live Mesh - file synchronisation

Android Apps

Dolphin Browser HD

Amazon Kindle

Google Sky Map

Google Maps
Google Translate

YouTube
Instant Heart Rate

One Note - with access to cloud storage via SkyDrive
http://windowsteamblog.com/windows_live/b/windowslive/archive/2012/02/07/connect-your-android-device-to-skydrive-with-onenote-and-other-apps.aspx

Navigation
How to make use of navigation from FREE apps.
GPS - needed to locate where the device is. Do not need WiFi or internet
Maps - Needed to show the map of where you are and where to go. Google Maps have the ability to cache maps and can be useful later when there is no internet connection.
Navigation - this software calculates where you are to where you want to go.

This site explains the requirements for navigation apps in much greater details.
http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/maps/rkSBMoJD14s

Other navigations and map apps are:
Navit
Route 66 Maps and Navigation,
MapsWithMe

Adobe Flash
Apple does not support Adobe flash on its devices.
The latest Android JellyBean is also dropping its support for Flash.
But it may yet be possible to install flash by yourself. This website seems to have a step to step guide on installing flash for Android devices.
http://www.itpro.co.uk/641869/installing-adobe-flash-on-android-jelly-bean-devices

Fortran Debugging, Threading, Optimising articles

This post is a quick summary to some online articles which I find useful. Only the extract are given below. The full articles can be found in their original sources via their URL.


Threading Fortran applications for parallel performance on multi-core systems

Most processors now come with multiple cores, and future increases in performance are expected to come mostly from increases in core count. Performance sensitive applications that neglect the opportunities presented by additional cores will soon be left behind. This article discusses ways for an existing, serial Fortran application to take advantage of these opportunities on a single, shared memory system with multiple cores. Issues addressed include data layout, thread safety, performance and debugging. Intel provides software tools that can help in the development of robust, parallel applications that scale well.

Levels of Parallelism

1 SIMD instructions
2 Instruction level
3 Threading (usually shared memory)
4 Distributed memory clusters
5 “embarassingly parallel” multiprocessing

Ways to Introduce Threading

1 Threaded libraries, e.g. Intel® MKL
2 Auto-parallelization by the compiler
3 Asynchronous I/O (very specialized; see compiler documentation)
4 Native threads
5 OpenMP

Intel® Math Kernel Library
1 Many components of MKL have threaded versions
2 Link threaded or non-threaded interface
3 Set the number of threads

Example: PARDISO (Parallel Direct Sparse Solver)
1 Solver for large, sparse symmetric and antisymmetric systems of linear equations on shared memory systems
2 For algorithms, see http://www.pardiso-project.org

Auto-parallelization

1 The compiler can thread simple loops automatically
2 Based on the same RTL threading calls as OpenMP:

Conditions for Auto-parallelization

1 Loop count known at entry (no DO WHILE)
2 Loop iterations are independent
3 Enough work to amortize parallel overhead
4 Conditions for OpenMP loops are similar
5 Directives may be used to guide the compiler:

Example: matrix multiply


OPENMP - advantages

1 Standardized API based on compiler directives

OpenMP Programming Model

Fork-Join Parallelism:

1 Master thread spawns a team of threads as needed

Note that Intel’s implementation of OpenMP creates a separate monitor thread in addition to any user threads.


OPENMP – where to thread

1 Start by mapping out high level structure
2 Where does your program spend the most time?
3 Prefer data parallelism
4 Favor coarse grain (high level) parallelism

Example: Square_Charge

1 calculates the electrostatic potential at a series of points in a plane
   due to a uniform square distribution of charge


Openmp: How do threads interact?

1 OpenMP is a shared memory model
2 Unintended sharing of data causes race conditions:
3 To control race conditions…
4 Synchronization is expensive so…

OPENMP – data

1 Identify which data are shared between threads, which need a separate copy for each thread

2 It’s helpful (but not required) to make shared data explicitly global in Modules or common blocks,
   thread private data as local and automatic.

3 Dynamic allocation is OK (malloc, ALLOCATE)

4 Each thread gets its own private stack, but the heap is shared by all threads

OPENMP – data scoping

1 Distinguish lexically explicit parallel regions from the “dynamic extent” (Functions or subroutines called from within an explicit parallel region. These might contain no OpenMP directives or only “orphaned” OpenMP directives)

2 Lexically explicit: !$OMP PARALLEL to !$OMP END PARALLEL


Thread Safety

1 A threadsafe function can be called simultaneously from multiple threads, and still give correct results
2 ifort serial defaults:
3 When compiling with –openmp, default changes

Making a function thread safe

1 With the compiler
2 In source code
3 In either case:
4 OpenMP has various synchronization constructs to protect operations that are potentially unsafe

Thread Safe Libraries

1 The Intel® Math Kernel library is threadsafe
2 The Intel Fortran runtime library has two versions

Performance considerations

1 Start with optimized serial code, vectorized inner loops, etc. (-O3 –xsse4.2 –ipo …)
2 Ensure sufficient parallel work
3 Minimize data sharing between threads
4 Avoid false sharing of cache lines
5 Scheduling options

Timers for threaded apps

1 The Fortran standard timer CPU_TIME returns “processor time”
2 The Fortran intrinsic subroutine SYSTEM_CLOCK returns data from the real time clock
3 dclock (Intel-specific function) can also be used

Thread Affinity Interface

1 Allows OpenMP threads to be bound to physical or logical cores

NUMA considerations

1 Want memory allocated “close” to where it will be used
2 Remember to set KMP_AFFINITY


Common problems

1 Insufficient stack size
2 For whole program (shared + local data):
3 For individual thread (thread local data only)

Tips for Debugging OpenMP apps

1 Run with OMP_NUM_THREADS=1
2 Build with -openmp-stubs -auto
3 If works without –auto, implicates changed memory model
4 If debugging with PRINT statements
5 Debug with –O0 –openmp

Floating-Point Reproducibility

1 Runs of the same executable with different numbers of threads may give slightly different answers
2 Floating point reductions are still not strictly reproducible in OpenMP, even for same number of threads

Intel-specific Environment Variables

1 KMP_SETTINGS = 0 | 1
2 KMP_VERSION = off | on
3 KMP_LIBRARY = turnaround | throughput | serial
4 KMP_BLOCKTIME
5 KMP_AFFINITY (See main documentation for full API)
6 KMP_MONITOR_STACKSIZE
7 KMP_CPUINFO_FILE

Tools for Debugging OpenMP apps

1 The compiler source checker (‘parallel lint’)
2 Updated Intel Parallel Debugger, idb (Linux) and Intel Parallel Debugger Extension (on Windows)

Intel® Thread Checker
1 Unified set of tools that pinpoint hard-to-find errors in multi-threaded applications
2 Display data at the Linux command line or via a Windows GUI

Intel® Thread Profiler
1 Features & Benefits

Summary
Intel software tools provide extensive support for threading applications to take advantage of multi-core architectures.
Advice and background information are provided for a variety of issues that may arise when threading a Fortran application.





Tips for Debugging Run-time Failures in Applications Built with the Intel(R) Fortran Compiler

Your app builds successfully, but crashes at runtime. What Next? Try some useful Intel compiler diagnostic options before launching into lengthy debugger sessions.

1) Build with /traceback (Windows*) or –traceback (Linux* or Mac OS* X).

2) Build with /gen-interfaces /warn:interfaces (Windows) or –gen-interfaces –warn interfaces (Linux or Mac OS X).

3) Try building and running with /check (Windows) or –check (Linux and Mac OS X).

4) Build your program, including the main routine, with /fpe:0 (Windows) or –fpe0 (Linux or Mac OS X).

5) If your application fails early on with a segmentation fault, you might be exceeding the default maximum stack size. On Linux or Mac OS X, try setting
ulimit –s unlimited (bash) or limit stacksize unlimited (C shell)

6) Use the compiler provided interfaces. If you call run-time library functions, build with
      USE IFLPORT
If you call OpenMP run-time library functions, compile with
      USE OMP_LIB
If you call functions from MKL or IMSL*, USE the corresponding module(s).

7) Look carefully for any error messages in your output log file.

8) If you are building an application using OpenMP*, check out the advice under “Tips for Debugging OpenMP Apps” at http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/threading-fortran-applications-for-parallel-performance-on-multi-core-systems/


9) For Windows, see the section Building Applications / Debugging in the main compiler documentation. For Linux or Mac OS X, see the documentation for the Intel(R) Debugger (idb).

Cheat Sheets

This article will collect the cheat sheets I've found useful.

CSS - Cascading Style Sheet
CSS 2 Help Sheet
CSS 3 Help Sheet
CSS 3 Cheat Sheet
DevCheatSheet’s CSS3 Cheat Sheets
CSS3 Color Names (CodeNique)
CSS3 – Information and samples (Robert Nyman)





HTML 
HTML 5 Cheat Sheet
DevCheatSheet’s HTML5 Cheat Sheets  with 22 cheat sheets
Browser Compatibility Charts  (MediaLoot)
HTML5 – Information and samples for HTML5 and related APIs (Robert Nyman)
HTML5/CSS3 Cheatsheet (Stories In Flight)
HTML Cheat Sheet for Transition to HTML 5 (html-5.com)
W3C cheatsheet (W3C)





Editors
VI Cheat Sheet

How to create an Ebook and Ebook cover

The article consists of links to resources available on the internet. There are a lot of links out there but many are just viral marketing and not useful at all. The aim of this article is to provide only the useful links and tips without costing you a cent.

To create an Ebook cover:
http://3d-pack.com/ - 3d package is a 3d-box graphic generator. 3d package lets you instantly create 3d-box images online, free! Just upload pictures for cover and sides and then get 3d-box in you favorite image format (JPG, GIF, PNG supported).

Ebook writing guides:
http://multiebook.com/write-and-create-ebook/how-to-write-and-create-ebook.html - a very comprehensive no nonsense article on how to create ebook.

Possible Viral Ebook marketing, but worth a look on their webpage just to get inspiration and ideas:
http://www.databasedesign-resource.com/free-ebook.html
http://www.guidetoebookmarketing.com/ebook-articles.php

My experience so far:
1. The 3d-pack.com site is quite amazing after ours of sifting through the internet and also trying my own design using OpenOffice Draw.
2. In terms of producing PDF files, the best free tool so far is OpenOffice Suite. There is an Export functionality to PDFs which has a multitude of options when exporting to PDFs. ..... hope to add more details here later ....


Ebook Real Life Examples:
http://investbuygoldbullion.inspiriting.com/AdditionalMaterials.html - this Ebook is about all you need to know about investing in gold. The author sells directly from his website as well as offering affiliate program for other sellers via e-junkie

Articles
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-2040044/Kindle-How-make-million-writing-e-book.html
https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/KDPSelect

PC PRO / PC WORLD / PC AUTHORITY Articles

This article will be a collection of interesting things found in the PC Authority magazine (may be related to the PC Pro magazine).

Features
May 2010  the-dark-side-of-the-web - web surfing anonymously using FreeNet, TOR, or Blog anonymously using TOR.


Software - mostly Free
May 2010 - Vue Pioneer - Free software to create 3D worlds
May 2010 - fontjazz - A javascript based system for creating fancy fonts on webpages, but renders it as text so that it can be picked up by search engines.
May 2010 - PortableApps - a suite of software that can fit and RUN in a USB stick. This is also highly configurable and allow other software to be added.
May 2010 - DosBox - An open source DOS emulator for BeOS, Linux, Mac OS X, OS/2, and Windows. Primarily focuses on running DOS Games.

How to Connect to Telstra Remote Working Solution (TRWS) on a corporate laptop.

This short guide shows how to setup VPN connection using a laptop configured to use Telstra Remote Working Solution.

Before going through this setup, the following pre-requisites need to be satisfied:

1. Your laptop has the TRWS installed and is running Windows.
2.  The connection is intended to use your laptop to connect to your home wireless network. The TRWS software will then provide a VPN tunnel through your home WiFi network, into the public internet, and securely into your corporate network,
3. Your home WiFi network is already setup and you have these information: WiFi SSID, WiFi Security Mode and WiFi password.
4. RSA SecureID token Device. This device is on all the time and a number is displayed, which changes after a certain amount of time.

The following steps will help setup the connection for the first time. The login steps below need to be done each time you login again.

1.    1.      Switch on Laptop.

2.   2. Look for the physical switch for the WiFi on the actual laptop. Its location is different for different laptop  models. Ensure this is switched on.

3.    3. When the laptop booted and is ready for work, then open up the TRWS application  either by:

i)                    Start – All Programs – Telstra – TRWS; or

ii)                  Click on the TRWS icon on the desktop.

4.    4.   From the TRWS, click Settings – Login Information.

5.    5.   In the Login Information, fill in the Username, Password, click Save Password and select the relevant country. Click OK.

6.      6. Go back to the TRWS dialog, click Settings – Connection Strings.

s

7.   7.   In the Connection Strings, click on the WLAN.

8.   8.   Under the WLAN tab, select the Device for your WiFi hardware on your laptop. Then click the Add button. The Add Personal Network dialog appears.

9.  9.    Fill in the SSID box and the Security box with the WEP, WPA or WPA2 password. The type of Security would depend on how your home WiFi is configured.

10  10.  Under the SSID, there is a checkbox called “Non-Broadcast”. If your WiFi Network is usually hidden, then please tick this checkbox. Click OK to finish with the Add Personal Network dialog.

11  11.  Going back to the WLAN tab, your WiFi network should be listed (not necessarily connected) in the Personal Networks box.

12  12.  Put a tick in the “Display all WLAN networks” box.

13  13.  At this stage, if the home WiFi is hidden based on SSID, make sure it is set to Not Hidden or Unhide. It can be set to Hidden again at the end of this guide. You may need the help of your home WiFi administrator for this.

14  14.  Click OK to finish with the Connection Strings dialog.

15  15.  At the TRWS main dialog, your home WiFi network may appear in the list under Phonebook – Available Networks. Double click on your WiFi network in the list.

16  16.  If it does not appear in the list, then under the menu, select Bookmarks – select your WiFi list under there. If it does not appear here either, then check that the WiFi network is Not Hidden.

17  17.  Also, to check that the WiFi adapter hardware inside the laptop is working, under the Phonebook – Available Networks, there should be a list of WiFi networks possibly from your neighbours. This just shows the WiFi in your laptop is working.

18.  If the previous steps have been successful, that just means that the laptop is connected to your home network. To establish a VPN (Virtual Private Connection) to your company,  the following extra steps are needed. A dialog to establish a VPN appears. Click OK. Go to step 21.

     19.  If the above dialog does not appear automatically after 5 minutes of connection, then go to the Taskbar in Windows and look for a yellow padlock icon. Double click on this to open up the VPN client connection status.

      20.  In the VPN client status dialog above, double click on the connection entry, eg “cbamras”. This will open up the dialog in step 18. Click on the network option and click OK.

      21.  Another dialog appears to login to the VPN. The user name is “r” plus your normal username in the company. The password is your normal password in the company plus the numbers in the RSA Secure ID token. These instructions may differ for different corporations.

22.  At this stage you have connected to both the internet and your corporate VPN.

      23.  Some other notes:

       -  to browse the internet, you may need to give your corporate username and password, if it a corporate web proxy is used.

24. How to Reset Network password
On the occasion that your user password has been changed at the network, and your laptop password is out of sync, here are the steps to change the password on the laptop:
- Switch on the laptop and boot until the Windows login prompt.
- Login to Windows using the old password.
- Connect to the office network using Telstra RAS as described in this article.
- Once the laptop has established connection with the office network, the press Ctrl-Alt-Del and Lock the computer.
- Unlock the computer by   Ctrl-Alt-Del  and then enter the old password.
- Then press again Ctrl-Alt-Del and Lock the computer.
- This time, unlock the computer using the new password on the network.
- The laptop should now have the same password as the network.

On Cloud Computing

This post is a collection of interesting links on the subject of Cloud Computing (CC). Please feel free to add your links by submitting a comment.


U.S. Department of Energy Asks, Is Cloud Computing Fast Enough for Science?
With cloud computing gaining acceptance in the business world, the U.S. Department of Energy wants to know if cloud computing can also meet the needs of the scientific computing. The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) has launched Magellan, a cloud computing testbed to explore this question, with facilities that will test the effectiveness of cloud computing for scientific projects..........



Virtualization and cloud security modeled on NAC - introduces the use of Network Access Control to address security issue in CC.
      Network Access Control - a method of controlling network security.

Australian Cost of Data Breach report released - "PGP CEO Phillip Dunkelberger told iTnews that organisations operating in the cloud incurred higher costs because of issues to do with territorial jurisdictions, and additional investigation and consulting fees."  


Cloud computing putting data at increased risk

"Hacking attempts double in two years, says latest PwC report. Nearly two thirds of companies have detected attempts to break into their networks in the past year, double that of two years ago, according to the latest biennial Information Security Breaches Survey from PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC)."

A list of Cloud related technologies, providers,etc

http://www.cloudsigma.com 
http://gridspot.com 
http://www.profitbricks.com 
https://developers.google.com/appengine/kb/billing#time_granularity_instance_pricing 
https://cloud.google.com/pricing/compute-engine 
“50% of the time the site is down in seconds, even when we’ve contacted site owners 
and they’ve told us everything will be fine. It’s often an unprecedented amount of traf-fic, and they don’t have the required capacity.” Stephen Fry, actor and widely followed 
Twitter user, London, U.K.; http://tinyurl.com/StephenFrySeconds 
http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/public/servers/techdetails/ 
http://www.gogrid.com 
https://cloud.google.com/pricing/compute-engine 
http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/newsletters/2012/08/14/august-2012/ 
http://aws.amazon.com/ebs/ 
https://developers.google.com/appengine/kb/billing 
Greg D’Alesandre, Google App Engine; http://tinyurl.com/D-Alesandre 
https://www.dotcloud.com/pricing.html 
https://cloud.google.com/pricing/ 
http://tinyurl.com/cloud-price-war 
http://openstack.org 
James Hamilton, Amazon Web Services, slide: “Amazon Cycle of Innovation”; 
http://tinyurl.com/james-hamilton 
http://spotcloud.com 
http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/reserved-instances/marketplace/ 
http://www.cloudsigma.com/cloud-computing/what-is-the-cloud/171 
http://www.cloudsigma.com/about-us/press-releases/242 
http://tinyurl.com/6fusion-CME 
http://docs.dotcloud.com/0.9/faq/ 

http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/reserved-instances/marketplace/

Online Scan - Websites

Infected websites can be sources of driveby infections or hijacks. You only need to go to those infected websites without clicking anything else and your PC will get infected. There are online scanning tools that check websites if they are safe or not. I suppose none of the scanning tools is 100% accurate so it may be good to scan using a few such website scanning tools.

This page aims to list a collection of useful online tools that is able to scan websites, given a specific URL / website address. These scanning tools are useful when you need to check if a website is safe from malware, hijacks, or other types of infection. 

If you are looking for free antivirus that provides online scans of your actual computer / PC, rather than websites, then go to Online Scan - Antivirus

The website helps to decide that a website is safe to visit and share information with.

https://www.ssltrust.com.au/ssl-tools/website-security-check

https://retire.insecurity.today/   EXCELLENT
Check your site for javascript libraries with known vulnerabilities, especially Cross Site Scripting.

Unmask Parasites

http://www.unmaskparasites.com/

Phistank
http://www.phishtank.com/

AVG Online Web Page Scanner
http://www.avg.com.au/resources/web-page-scanner/
http://www.avgthreatlabs.com/sitereports/


ScanURL
http://scanurl.net/

Vscan URL Void
http://vscan.urlvoid.com/
https://www.urlvoid.com/

Virus Total
https://www.virustotal.com/gui/home/url

Zulu URL Risk Analyzer
https://zulu.zscaler.com/

Online Link Scan
http://onlinelinkscan.com/



7 Tools to Scan Websites for Viruses and Malware
http://www.lostintechnology.com/internet-tools/7-tools-to-scan-websites-for-viruses-and-malware/

This is a from another article ..... Basically the four links are:

http://g.s.scandoo.com

http://webmaster.live.com/

http://www.siteadvisor.com/analysis/

Blog on Googleonlinesecurity

http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=http://www.example.com

*** replace www.example.com with your website

Another set of online IP scanning tools found in Dec 2017:

https://zeltser.com/lookup-malicious-websites/
http://www.urlvoid.com/
http://www.brightcloud.com/tools/url-ip-lookup.php
https://search.deepviz.com
https://exchange.xforce.ibmcloud.com/
https://mxtoolbox.com/SuperTool.aspx
http://www.ipvoid.com/ip-blacklist-check/
http://www.reputationauthority.org

---------------

Detect If Your Web Pages Link to Infected Sites or Serve Malware Themselves

WRITTEN BY AMIT AGARWAL ON NOVEMBER 26, 2008

http://www.labnol.org/internet/detect-webpages-that-serve-malware/5597/

Find Security Holes in your Website

1. Scandoo Google Search – Scandoo is a wrapper around Google Search that adds visual hints in search results so you can easily know if the target page is safe or not.

Here’s how you can use Scandoo to detect problems with your own site. Just type site:domain.com in the search box and it will show the safety rating of every web page on your site. So if I were the owner of warez.com, this is what I would see on my screen:

2. Live Webmaster Tools – You can add your site to Live Webmaster and then use the Crawl Issues section to find out about all pages on your site that are possibly infected with malware. The tool will also help you learn about external links on your site that point to pages hosting malware.

3. McAfee Site Advisor - Type in the address of your website and Site Advisor will prepare a very detailed report of possible issues. You will know if that site points to some bad neighborhood or if there are any links to executables and zip files that are infected with virus or spyware. This tool was developed at MIT and later acquired by McAfee.

4. Google Safe Browsing – Add your own website URL to the Safe Browsing diagnostic page and it will tell you if Google has classified that site under malware. If the site is flagged as suspicious, the best option it fix the pages and request a review of your site using Google Webmaster Tools.

While Google will only tell you if the site is infected, you really need to verify the site with Live Search in order to find out about all the different web pages that are infected or may be linking to bad content.

Tools for Windows

Below is a list of Windows tools. Please let me know if you find other useful ones.

Also here are some sites which feature collection of useful software:
100 Portable Apps for your USB Stick (for Mac and Win)
PortableApps.com - features a collection of program fitted onto a USB stick.
ROEMware - a categorized minimalist set of applications for OEM builders.

System / Memory Scanner - online tool. This is not restricted to Windows. Just go to the website and it will scan your memory configuration and system statistics.

Process Explorer - "Task Manager on steroids". It can replace Task Manager or run side by side with it, but either way it's an absolute must-have for technically savvy users. When you launch Process Explorer, you'll see a tree view of processes; they're nominally organized by which process spawned which, but you can click on the column headers to change the sorting as you please. The top portion of the window has four graphs: CPU usage, commit history, I/O bytes history, and physical memory history. Click on one to bring up a full-sized window view that's akin to the Performance tab in Task Manager -- but with a level of detail and insight into what programs are doing that Task Manager doesn't even come close to providing.

System Information for Windows - lists application license keys, probes installed hardware, fetches device temperatures, catalogs installed multimedia codecs -- the list seems endless.

BlueScreenView - When a BSOD occurs the results are, whenever possible, saved into a dump file that can be examined later. BlueScreenView scans your system for these files and produces a report from them, which you can read within BlueScreenView itself or save to HTML for separate analysis. Each line in the report describes the BSOD's crash code, the time and date of its occurrence, any parameters that might have been passed with the crash (useful for debugging), and a slew of other minor details. The results are searchable, so you can hunt for a particular crash code, driver, or DLL that you think might be present.

Autoruns -- probes your system and dumps out lists of programs and system components that start automatically, without user intervention -- from apps in your Startup folder to scheduled tasks, from services to device drivers, from Sidebar gadgets to codecs. By default it dumps out data pertinent to the current user context, but the program's User menu lets you switch contexts. (You'll need to run the program as Administrator, though.)

 WinDirStat - generates easy-to-understand graphical reports about disk usage, allowing you to see at a glance which individual files or folders hidden deep within a directory tree may be gobbling up dozens of gigabytes.




 Unlocker, Determine which process has a lock on which file, and let you release it either by killing the file handle or the offending process.

OpenedFilesView Determine which process has a lock on which file, and let you release it either by killing the file handle or the offending process.

How to Secure your Computer

The following list various methods and software*** that can be applied to secure your computer.

1.Use a Firewall - see Firewall Testing (Hardening)
Software: Comodo Firewall, Zone Alarm
To configure firewall, it is useful to know the port numbers of common services. This can be found from IANA in:
www.iana.org/assignments/port-numbers
Your own IP address can also be discovered using: http://whatismyipaddress.com


2. Use Anti-Virus software
Software: Avast, Avira, AVG
Testing of antivirus software can be performed using the following tools:
- EICAR - www.eicar.org/anti_virus_test_file.htm - Provides a standardized test file for signature based virus detection software.
- Spycar - www.spycar.org - Spycar is a suite of tools designed to mimic spyware-like behavior, but in a benign form.

3. Use Anti-Spyware
Software:  Spybot Search and Destroy, SuperAntiSpyware

4. DNS Routing and protection - setup your DNS to be routed over a DNS provider with filtering and protection.
OpenDNS

5. Use a password manager to manage multiple passwords
Software: KeePass
Testing passwords can be accomplished using these tools:
SecurityStats - http://securitystats.com/tools/password.php

6. Browser Plugin Protection
Software: Web of Trust, McAfee Site Advisor

7. Encrypt your files on your computer.
Software: TrueCrypt

8. Securing your websites.
Using SSL: How to implement SSL in IIS
Testing Tools:
Goolag Scanner (www.goolag.org) provides one more tool for web site owners to patch up their online properties. It is powered by Google to help see if your sites are vulnerable to a hacking attempt. By typing in a domain name it may return site vulnerabilities. The tool makes “it easy for unskilled users to track down vulnerabilities and sensitive information on specific Web sites or broad Web domains.” The tool uses the Google Custom Search engine and has a detailed specification (http://www.goolag.org/specifications.html) on how it works.


9. Disable Autorun to prevent attack from infected USB or other removable drives.

Click the Start button, then Run and enter “gpedit.msc” without the quotes
Go to Computer Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> System
Scroll down to “Turn off Autoplay” and double click on it
Click on the “Enabled” radio button, then for “Turn off Autoplay on” select “All drives”

10. Use portable Linux which runs entirely from the CD or DVD without accessing the hard drive. The distributions are:

Google Chrome OS - developed by Google. Intended to run on Netbook and allow user to interact with web applications. The standalone DVD is available to use as a standalone OS without installation

Lightweight Portable Security (LSP) - developed by the USA's Department of Defence, is a small Linux live CD focusing on privacy and security, for  this reason, it boots from a CD and executes from RAM, providing a web browser, a file manager and some interesing tools. LPS-Public turns an untrusted system into a trusted network client.

11. Check various alert service websites:
Stay Smart Online

12. How to Lock Down Linux - short article with a few basic essentials to secure Linux.

*** This article, writer and blog does not recommend the use of the software above and is not liable for anything. The list of software is represents the authors personal opinions.

13. To check suspicious behaviour, there is a range of tools, collectively called Sysinternals, which is now available from Microsoft. Here is a presentation on how to use Sysinternals by its creator Mark Russinovich, entitled:
Malware Hunting with the Sysinternals Tools
Date: June 12, 2012 from 3:15PM to 4:30PM

14. Security on USB.

Ghost USB honeypot (http://www.honeynet.org/node/871)
This is currently a research project to identify malware on a PC that tries to infect any connected USB. Here is a description from its website.
----------------
"Ghost is a honeypot for malware that uses USB storage devices for propagation. It is able to capture such malware without any further knowledge - especially, it doesn't need signatures or the like to accomplish its task.
Detection is achieved by emulating a USB flash drive on Windows systems and observing the emulated device. The assumption is that on an infected machine the malware will eventually copy itself to the removable device."

15. Social Network
For Facebook and Twitter and perhaps some other social networking sites, there are profile scanners available to scan links, newsfeeds, messages, such as the free one from Eset https://socialmediascanner.eset.com/.

How to Capture Picture Perfect Photos

This is a summary of the article from PCAuthority, Mar 2010.

1. Turn off flash for indoor photographs, otherwise the subject will look artificially bright. An alternative is to use a flash filters.
2. Turn on flash outdoors, so that the surrounding lights will not overwhelm the light on the subject.
3. Try out the scenes modes. Most modern digital cameras come with various pre-configured scene modes. Experiment with it a little to see which suits the conditions.
4. Edit the photo with software. The two highly recommended software which are free, are:
     - Paint.Net : http://www.getpaint.net/
     - GIMP: http://www.gimp.org/

The following combination of steps in photo editing helps improve most photos.
a) Levels and Curves
    GIMP: select Colours | Levels.  Adjust the Input Levels Histogram.
    Paint.Net: select Adjustment | Levels.
b) Color Adjustment
    GIMP: select Colours | Hue-Saturation. Adjust the Saturation to 10-20.
    Paint.Net: select Adjustment | Hue-Saturation.
c) Sharpening
    GIMP: select Filters | Enhance | Unsharp Mask. Try 0.1, 1.0, 0.0 for Radius, Amount and Threshold respectively.
    Paint.Net: select Effects | Photo | Sharpen.

There is a whole list of effects available in most editing software, but try the ones above first to make the photo look really good.

Added 20 Dec 2014

Photo editing tips for photos taken with bad lighting
1. Use Unsharp Mask or similar feature
2. Then choose Gamma Correction for either underexposure or overexposure
3. If there is no Gamma Correction, or no good results, choose Brightness/Contrast instead.
4. Color Balancing used to fix colors problems like skin tones.
5. To reduce pixelation, use Noise Filter - Edge Preserving Smooth
6. Then increase Saturation to restore vibrant colors.