Whether you are looking for a way to get in touch with someone you missed on a chat room or simply just looking for information about some of the local computers on a network, you can used the Advanced IP Scanner 1.5 to get all of the lowdown that you could possibly want.  You can actually use its amazing and user friendly interface to do everything in a breeze and when you take a look at the Advanced IP Scanner 1.5 in relation to other stuff that’s out there, it really becomes a no brainer as to which software type is better.

The 1.5 version comes with an updated interface, more online help functions, improved scanning ability, optimized speed and a lot of odds and ends fixed up here and there.  You can actually use the scanner with one-click methodology as a lot of its more important functions are actually accessible through one click.  It is a very impressive piece of software that people have been using to help themselves for a very long time now and it only gets more impressive with each new release.
 
More information about it can be found at http://www.radmin.com/radmin/utility 

If you are a web designer looking for creating those stunning animated images for your website then you should definitely try out the Longtion Gif Animator. Loaded with interesting features this piece of creative software allows you create seamless animations for your website with effortless ease. It provides support for multiple file types and achieves a high degree of compression while creating the images; thus reducing files sizes and making your web pages load faster.

The software is a breeze to install and the navigation menu is quite neat. The software has an attractive look and feel.  With easy controls even an average user can create professional looking animations. You can make Slide Show style Gifs or even Text Style Gifs. One just needs to click on the New Gif tab and then select the frame sizes. Next just use the Add frame options to add all the pictures that you wish to put into different frames. In few moments your basic animated Gif file is ready. Now for getting the professional touch, the software has tabs like Frame property and competent image editing tools. You can easily set the frame properties including transparency options. It also has the options for placing time intervals between two successive frames used in the animation. Next with image editing tools you can crop images, draw lines and make host of other changes as required. The tool has decent features that are required for creating good Gif animations. It also comes in handy for novice users who may want to use it for creating animations for their profile homepages.

The software comes with a Help section which though lacks details. Also the software itself could do well with more animation styles and effects. Overall the software is worth a try if wish to quickly create Gif animations.

(More Info and Download)

Many people absolutely hate the idea of having to use a paper dictionary and thesaurus.  First of all, you’d have to shuffle through both of them separately and that could waste a lot of time, but also flipping through a bunch of pages looking for one specific word is a time consuming process that could make you less productive in the future.

The solution?  Take the dictionary and thesaurus to the electronic realm!  And that’s exactly what’s been done here with TheSage’s English Dictionary and Thesaurus.  It is a multifaceted software program with a complete dictionary and thesaurus of the English language.  What’s even better is that it runs locally on your computer so you don’t even have to be connected to the Internet in order to use it.

You can not only search thousands of different entries with just one convenient search bar, but you can actually use wildcards and anagrams in your search; not to mention that the software itself keeps a history of searches for you to refer back to at a later date. You can even go ahead and customize the look of the dictionary program to make it look exactly how you want.  It’s simply fantastic!
 
More information can be found at http://www.sequencepublishing.com/thesage.html
 

KoolIM is a site that allows you instant access to your instant messengers. There’s no extra software to download or anything, you just go to the KoolIM website. It’s perfect for when you’re at an internet cafe computer that doesn’t have your usual IM client installed, or maybe you’re just a neat freak and you don’t really wanna bother installing several IM clients to clutter up your pc.

You can easily sign on to AIM, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, Google Talk, and ICQ using your existing screen names and passwords. So if you use different computers a lot and just want to use the regular basic features of instant messaging, its worth checking out.

Go here and see for yourself. It even works from behind firewalls or proxy servers!

Scribd is a very interesting site for anyone who likes to read a lot! So if you are the type of person who spends a lot of time at the library or reading stuff at magazine racks without actually buying anything, this site is something you’ll love spending time at!

Scribd enables anyone to upload any kind of document for easy online browsing by visitors to the Scribd site. Multiple document formats are supported. There’s a lot of interesting and random documents to be viewed ranging from photos, ebooks, classic books, serious stuff, humorous stuff and random things of almost any subject you can think of. The site also has several different language versions.

The simplest way to describe it is that it’s like the YouTube of documents. Check it out for yourself, but be warned, you could be there for quite a while once you get stuck into something!

Here is a really useful tool for opera users, it’s called oSync.

This cool tool provides a simple and secure way to synchronize Opera bookmarks between computers. You will also love the fact that it can backup your bookmarks or publish them as HTML and clean up bloated bookmark files. And when it comes to the synchronizing, it really delivers in style, it can be completely automated and is aimed to be as transparent as possible for the user.

It is now also available on Opera Mini, meaning you can now use it on your mobile phone since Opera Mini is a free mobile browser.

For free download of o Sync visit http://osync.sourceforge.net/index2.html

Here is a freeware that comes highly recommended, it is called Movable Type. If you want the best of professional grade blogging, you need to check out this software.

Movable Type is the platform that invented professional-grade blogging, powering the biggest and most successful blogs for pro bloggers, publishers, organizations, enterprises and businesses of any size. Of course blogging is fast evolving but so is Movable Type as it leads the way with reliable service, outstanding performance and continuous innovation.

The latest version is Movable Type 4.0; Go check it out at http://www.movabletype.com/

It’s common knowledge that having an anti virus program is a very important part of computer security. If you want a second opinion for peace of mind in knowing that your computer is virus free, F-Secure online scanner is an online anti virus scanner that does exactly this without the need for installing yet another program (Installing multiple anti virus programs can cause conflicts with each other anyway).

You simply go to the webpage and follow the instructions to allow the ActiveX control to load (supports Internet Explorer only right now). Then it begins downloading the necessary scanning stuff (around 22 MB).

When it’s done scanning, it will give you the option of cleaning anything bad it finds and/or sending it for further analysis.
I almost forgot to mention that it also scans for spyware and rootkits.

It’s a useful online tool and second opinion on the security of your computer. Check it out here.

The Sans Internet Storm Centre has warned of an email scam that lures users with the promise of a free iPhone.

One e-mail claims you have ‘won a new iPhone’. Clicking on the link however brings you to a page that attempts to exploit a number of well known Internet Explorer vulnerabilities and then downloads a malicious executable ‘sys—-.exe’. This executable installs itself as a service and upon review appears to be a spam bot.  Anti virus coverage was very spotty this morning but has improved during the day. 

Another scam aims to convince readers they need to go and buy an iPhone on what appears to be an Apple site (faked using a browser helper object). Naturally the site does not belong to Apple and you end up paying someone in Latvia. Sunbelt has a great writeup on this here. Thanks to roseman for the link.

(via Sans Internet Storm Centre)

Experts are warning of a bogus Microsoft security bulletin that contains malware designed to take control of the user’s PC.

The emails contain the header ‘Microsoft Security Bulletin MS07-0065’ and come with Microsoft logos and a layout very similar to the Microsoft web page.

Recipients are told that a zero-day flaw in Outlook has already been exploited to infect over 100,000 machines, and the email contains a link to the ‘patch’ for the problem.

“Security bulletins from Microsoft describing vulnerabilities in its software are a common occurrence, so it comes as no surprise to see hackers adopting this kind of disguise in their attempt to infect Windows PCs,” said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos.

“The irony is that, as awareness of computer security issues and the need for patching against vulnerabilities have risen, social engineering tricks which pose as critical software fixes are likely to succeed in conning the public.”

The link in fact downloads the Behav-112 Trojan, which allows the computer to be operated remotely to send spam or take part in distributed denial-of-service attacks.

The emails have been widely spammed out over the past few days. (more…)