Google Book Downloader Downloads Books to PDF

Windows: Thanks to Google's drive to add more and more books to the Google Books project, including thousands of public domain volumes, you'll find quite a nice selection to choose from. Google Book Downloader helps you download them to PDF.

Update: I have come to know that use of this application is locking some users out of Google Books because downloading full books from the service is a violation of their terms of service.
Let's get one thing out of the way from the start. Google Book Downloader will not let you pirate books. Apparently this app attempts to download more than the allotted preview of limited-preview books—hence the removal of the link and the lockout by Google. It will however let you download books that are flagged as full-access, such as books in the public domain and books with limited-preview—although you'll only get the preview parts, not the entire book.

While using the application isn't as simple as say, right clicking on a file and saving it, the difficulty level isn't high. Once you've installed the application, fire it up, and feed it some books you want to download. Although the instructions for the Add dialogue box indicate you can use ISBN numbers. Since you're already searching Google Books to find the books you want, you might as well cut and paste the URL for the book at Google Books—that method never failed.

Once you've added your books they'll appear in the download queue. From there start the downloads and let it go. Occasionally as the application pulls down data you'll need to enter a captcha to keep the pipeline open, but other than that it's an unattended process.

Google Book Downloader is freeware, Windows only and requires .Net Framework 3.5 SP1 or above.

Microsoft Office Web Apps Will Be Available to Everyone

Microsoft offered up a Technical Preview of its web-based Office offerings yesterday, but the invites are long since gone. The good news is that anyone who can get a Windows Live sign-in will eventually have access to stripped-down office apps.

ReadWriteWeb notes that a limited preview is being offered to "partners" at the moment, with greater beta availability coming this fall. In the preview, Word documents are read-only, but can be shared and commented on, while PowerPoint and Excel's web versions allow for some basic online editing by anyone the creator gives access to.

Eventually, Office Web Apps will be available to anyone using Hotmail, Windows Live Messenger, and other Live services.



Want a shot at earlier availability? Sign up for a beta preview at the Office 2010 site.

Move From Blogger to WordPress Without Losing Google Rank

Your experiment in blogging has really taken off, so you're itching to move from Blogger to a self-hosted WordPress installation. Luckily, you can do so without losing the traffic you worked so hard to build.

The last thing you want, when moving your blog to a new home, is to tank your Google ranking and traffic flow. At Digital Inspiration, they've put together a step by step guide to transplanting your Blogger-based and hosted blog to a self-hosted WordPress installation—without leaving your rank and traffic behind. This quick video explains the process:

The video covers all of the steps, but if you're going to be transplanting your blog, i would suggest visiting Digital Inspiration and reviewing the detailed step by step instructions to make sure you don't miss anything critical. Have experience moving blogs to new hosts and platforms? Sound off in the comments with your tips, warning, and horror stories.

Pingdom Uptime - Monitoring Service

The popular web site uptime-monitoring service Pingdom is now offering free accounts.

The free account provides monitoring for a single web site, 20 SMS alerts—you can purchase more if you need them—and unlimited email alerts. If you want to monitor multiple sites and have access to the advanced features you'll still need a premium account.

PINGDOM

Microsoft Offers 90-Day Trial of Windows 7 Enterprise RTM

Disappointed you missed out on taking Windows 7 for a spin? Want to put it through the paces before committing to purchasing it? Microsoft is offering a free 90-day trial of Windows 7 Enterprise, no strings attached.

No need to worry about waiting in line for a download or scrounging for a license key. You can download the 32-bit and 64-bit, both with the license key packaged in the download.

WINDOWS 7 (90 DAYS TRIAL)

Google Voice Message Playback comes to Gmail

If you're both a Gmail and Google Voice user, you should be thrilled with the latest feature from Gmail Labs: The Google Voice Player feature embeds a voicemail player inside Gmail so you can listen to new messages directly inside Gmail.

To enable it, just hit up the Labs link in Gmail, find the Google Voice player in mail feature, click enable, and save your changes. Now not only can you read your transcribed voicemail from directly inside Gmail—you can listen to it, too. In fact, your message status will even sync to Google Voice, so if you've listened to it in Gmail, it'll show as listened to in Google Voice, too.

iPhone and iPod touch OS 3.1 Available for Download

iPhone/iPod touch only: Apple today announced an update to iPhone OS 3.1, introducing a new "Genius" recommendation feature for the App Store, bug fixes and performance boosters, and several other small but worthwhile updates.

It's also added a Ringtone section to the App Store on your device (for a whopping $1.29 a pop— [Windows guide; Mac guide]). Other than that, Apple's not promising a lot from this update other than support for the newly released iTunes 9, its new features (e.g., Genius Mixes), and a few other nice tweaks. Below is a quick look at some of the other most notable updates from the release notes:

- Save video from Mail and MMS into Camera Roll (We'll believe the MMS saving when we finally see MMS)
- Option to "Save as new clip" when trimming a video on iPhone 3GS
- Better iPhone 3G Wi-Fi performance when Bluetooth is turned on
- Paste phone numbers into the Keypad
- Anti-phishing features in Safari
- Improved Exchange calendar syncing and invitation handling
- Hit up iTunes, plug in your device, and click the Check for Updates button to get started on the 240+MB download.

Yahoo Mail Filters Your Inbox by Contacts and Connections

Yahoo's email service rolled out an interesting new feature today that filters your inbox to show only emails from contacts or "connections" to help you get to your most important emails first.

The new filtering features appear in a View From bar right above your inbox. When you view messages from contacts,

Yahoo Mail will display emails only from people you've manually added to your contact list. The slightly broader filter, called Connections, denotes people you've conversed with frequently but never manually added as a contact. You can still see your standard inbox that includes every email, but if you've got an inbox full of email and you want to get to the email you care about most first, filtering by either contacts or connections is a smart way to quickly get there.

Good on Yahoo Mail with this one; it's a feature we'd love to see rolled into other email apps out there. (You listening, Gmail?) If you don't immediately see the update in your Yahoo Mail account, take note: This feature will roll out in the next few weeks to both Classic and the new Yahoo! Mail users who have the Smarter Inbox features enabled. To get these new features, first create a Profile at profiles.yahoo.com and then log back into Yahoo! Mail. Only users in the US and Australia can get it now, but users from many more countries will be eligible soon.

Format a USB Drive as NTFS in Windows XP

Windows XP only: Today's USB flash drives are huge, but they come formatted with the FAT32 limit of 4GB files—if you want to format them as NTFS under Windows XP you'll need a little trick.

Windows XP does have the ability to format drives with the NTFS file system, but you wouldn't know it by looking at the format dialog—normally the option is disabled. To enable it, open up Device Manager and find your USB drive, go to the Properties -> Policies tab and then choose "Optimize for performance". Once you've done this, you'll see the NTFS option in the format dialog.

Readers should be warned, however, that once you've enabled write caching you will need to use the Safely Remove Hardware dialog to avoid losing data—though once you format the drive as NTFS you can switch the write caching back off.

The choice between NTFS and FAT32 isn't cut-and-dry—while NTFS does allow larger file sizes, encryption, compression, and permissions, there's a lot more overhead to using it—and more importantly it won't really work on non-Windows systems. Hit the link for the full walk-through and more information about the pros and cons.

Gmail Search Autocomplete Makes Searching Your Inbox a Breeze

Gmail Labs has released a great new Search Autocomplete feature today that offers search suggestions for all kinds of Gmail searches, from simple search-by-contacts to more advanced search queries—like for specific attachments.

The autocomplete is very smart, too, so when you want to search for a specific attachment type—like photos—you can just choose the has photos autocomplete, and

Gmail will generate the much more complicated filename:(jpg OR jpeg OR png) search operators. Handy, huh?

Likewise, it'll autogenerate the before and after date operators for you (before:yyyy/mm/dd), which have always been too complicated to remember all that well. As always, to enable this feature, just point your browser to Gmail Labs, enable Search Autocomplete, save your changes, and enjoy.

MindRaider Organizes and Visualizes Any Note Style

Windows/Mac/Linux: MindRaider wants to be the place you stash all your sudden thoughts, organizational notes, and inter-connected ideas. That's because it offers links, visualizations, and other tools to help you make sense of it all.

From the outset, MindRaider, a Java app that can run on any system that supports Java, looks like a kind of multi-window outlining program. And it is, in a way, but the idea is to use it as an uber-outline. You can attach files to

notes, or create symbolic links to local files. You can inter-link notes, documents, and outlines, use contextual tagging for an extra layer of finding something later, and use any of the pre-defined categories to segment out your ideas into broad containers. It supports a huge range of note formats, from simple text file to TWiki exports, and has a number of visualizations that help you kinetically wheel your thoughts around and pick what to fill out next.

Honestly? It's an application that would take more than just a glance and quick twiddle with to get comfortable and productive in. That sounds like a deal-breaker to most idealistic productivity minds, of course, but it looks like MindRaider can be pretty powerful, once you get your system rolling with it.

MindRaider is a free download, works wherever Java does.

Download Link : http://mindraider.sourceforge.net/