Computerzworld

A very common, and bad, practice people have is setting up and using their wireless router with no password on it. This is very dangerous because anyone in range of your router could connect to and use any shared resources you have such as printers and files.

While you could put a password or security on each of the individual resources, it makes much more sense to password protect connection to your router. This article on PC Mech gives some very good information on what should be done to implement security on your wireless router.

If you do not want to put a password on your router, at the very least you should limit the number of IP’s assigned by your router to match the number of machines you have in your house. This way the router will not have any room to assign connection to a new device.

Have you ever wanted to learn to count in binary or octal? Probably not, but if you ever have the need to convert one number to a different base, then check out this online number base converter.

Usage is very self explanatory. Here are some common bases with respect to computer usage:

• Binary = Base 2
• Octal = Base 8
• Decimal = Base 10
• Hexadecimal (Hex) = Base 16

The calculator which ships with Windows is very useful for performing basic arithmetic and low-level scientific functions, however if you are looking for a more powerful calculator, check out Microsoft’s Power Calculator.

This calculator replacement offers advanced functionality such as graphing, variable storage and full equation writing. If you ever used a TI-8x calculator, the functions of the Power Calculator are similar (although not nearly as fully featured) with respect to the mathematical operations.

This tool is a free download, so if you think it will be useful to you give it a try.

If you are a Windows Media Player (WMP), Winamp, iTunes or some other variant of media player user looking for a great alternative, check out VLC.

VLC is a cross-platform (Windows, Mac, Linux, etc.) media player which can play the following formats, among others, right out of the box:

• MPEG-1
• MPEG-2
• MPEG-4
• DivX
• mp3
• Ogg Vorbis
• DVD
• VCD
• Various streaming protocols

Best of all, it is totally free. Give VLC a shot.

If you ever do presentations or demos where you are displaying your screen to others, a really useful feature is the ability to mark up or write directly on your screen to draw attention to certain areas. While a lot of commercial programs offer this functionality, a lightweight alternative which does basically the same thing is ZoomIt.

ZoomIt is a free utility which allows you to capture an image of your screen (via customizable hot-keys) and in real time, draw, type or zoom directly on the captured screen image. The really handy part is the capture process is seamless as no external program is opened. By pressing ESC you “unfreeze” the screen and all the markup disappears. This is extremely handy for doing presentations, especially if you use a tablet PC.

ZoomIt also offers a timer function where your computer can have a countdown. This would be useful if you wanted to do a presentation with interactive user exercises.

Either way, this is an extremely handy utility which doesn’t even need to be installed to run. Just double click it and go.