Category Archives: reviews

Free ebooks

Posted by on April 14, 2010 4 comments

I just thought I would share some of the sites I have found for downloading free ebooks. That is fiction ebooks and not reference ebooks as there are hundreds of sites offering reference ebooks as PDF files. With a few of the sites below they are just hosting ebook versions of classic books that are now out of copyright. Most sites just use the books from Project Gutenberg and reformat them for better reading. Quite a few of them give you a choice of what format you want to download the ebook in be it PDF, epub or just plain old txt. If you are looking for more original and modern stories to read then I recommend the first two links, Online Novels and Feedbooks.

Online Novels – Just discovered this excellent source of free ebooks novels.
Feedbooks – Not only does this site have the classics it’s also a good place to find new and original works.
getfreeebooks – Haven’t tried this site yet but looks promising.
ManyBooks – not looked at this site much but seems to have a good mix of classics and modern works.
Project Gutenberg – The main source of classics and they have their own proof readers. Poor formatting in their ebooks though.
epubBooks – Classics from Gutenberg but formatted for better reading and all in the epub format.

MobileRead also has a forum dedicated to free ebooks.

If you are lucky your local library might support the lending of ebooks using Overdrive. Have a look at http://search.overdrive.com/ to see if your local library is part of it.

Anyway if you know of any good sites for free ebooks from new authors then please share them.

Install Several Programs With One Installer

Posted by on November 2, 2009 2 comments
Some of the software Ninite offers

Some of the software Ninite offers

Have you just installed/reinstalled Xp, Vista or Windows 7? Need to install programs but don’t want to sit there manually installing them? Then try Ninite Easy PC Setup. Ninite makes installing multiple applications simple. You just go to their site, select the applications you want to install and then click Get Installer at the bottom. It will then download a small program which you will need to run as administrator so it can install the programs. The installer then downloads the install packages for your chosen programs and silently installs them. You can even suggest other programs for them to add to their list. They promise they only install the chosen program and not any of the rubbish a lot of the program installers try to add such as toolbars.

“We install apps with default settings and say “no” to browser toolbars and other junk.”

So basically you
1 – Go to the Ninite Easy PC Setup site.
2 – Select the programs you want to install.
3 – Download their installer.
4 – Run the installr as administrator.
5 – Go do something less boring whilst their installer does all the work for you.

Just to add you will need cookies enabled to be able to download the instaler.

GI Joe Movie

Posted by on August 17, 2009 3 comments

Just been to see the GI Joe movie and it’s not to bad if you disengage your brain. Plenty of action and occasional humour.

BUT…

If you do engage your brains you’ll wonder things like…
1 – The plane was just doing 180 turns on the spot so why weren’t the people even dizzy when they got out given they should be unconcious?
2 – Why, when the Baroness lives in France, does she speak to the French people in English? :roll:
3 – Why is the US President English 😕
4 – Who the hell would join a military force where all the soldiers are referred to as ‘Joes’ 😯
5 – In a force made up of soldiers from around the world why did nobody ever ask ‘What did he say?’ when the British bloke gave orders with a really strong Cockney accent? 😆

Still not to bad as brainless movies go and obviously meant to be the first of many or possibly the pilot for a TV series.

Rising Antivirus Review

Posted by on April 19, 2009 21 comments

I recently decided to try / review a new anti virus program I had heard about called Rising Antivirus. Now my first issue with this anti virus is the fact that the installer is over 60MB and the download was slow as hell. Took me around 30 minutes to download and I’m on a 20Mb connection. Once installed it takes over 200MB of hard drive space. First thing I did was run an update and it seemed to me that every component had an update and given I had only just downloaded the program this seems excessive. Next I ran a scan of the local drives. After twenty minutes I stopped it as it had only done about 5% and was saying it had over an hour left to go. Given this was my laptop with little on it this was far from acceptible.

Now we get to the main reason I swiftly uninstalled it. I downloaded the Eicar test file which is a standard file that all antivirus programs recognise as a test file so you can test if your antivirus is working or not. So I put the eicar.com file on my desktop and ran it. Rising Antivirus did absolutely nothing. I can accept it not detecting it during the download because my favourite free antivirus, AntiVir, only scans files when they are opened or read. To not detect the test file when run makes me wonder what else it doesn’t detect. I told it to scan the eicar.com file and it alerted me that it was a virus (well a test file which is what it should report it as) but not even a beep from Rising Antivirus when I run the file. In fact I had to turn Rising’s detection level up to high to get it to report it as a virus when I opened it. Even then I could see the command window in the background that eicar.com opens so I’m not even sure that if it had been a virus Rising Antivirus would of stopped it doing anything.

So my advice is avoid this anti virus like the plague. The best free anti virus, in my opinion, is AntiVir and the next best free one is Avast. I can no longer even recommend AVG as third place because all reports say as of version 8 AVG has become a resource hog that slows your computer down.

Far Cry Movie

Posted by on April 2, 2009 No comments

I’ve just watched the Far Cry movie and I have to say that it wasn’t as bad as some people make out. In fact it’s pretty good. Most people just see that it’s made by Uwe Boll and think it’s going to be rubbish without even watching it just because quite a lot of Uwe Bolls movies are exceptionally dire (Postal anyone?). So what if it doesn’t stick excatly to the script of the game? What movie based on a computer game ever has? And if it had what would be the point in watching it as you’d know the story from the game.

OK I’ll admit the CGI of the helicopter crashing could of been better but I have seen worse. Other than that I was quite impressed. The acting is pretty good all round and the story not only makes sense and keeps to the rough plot of the game but it also doesn’t slow down to the point you’re bored.

So if you’re after a movie that doesn’t require to much brain power then give Far Cry a go.

To all the people on IMDB who rated it low what planet are you on or do yo ujust see the Uwe Boll name and automatically give it a low rating without actually watching it?

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