You can start an application remotely with the help of DropBox and AutoHotkey. DropBox is a cloud-based service that lets you keep your files on a remote server so that you can access them from any computer running any operating system. Well, by any…at HowToPlaza we’ve just tried it on Ubuntu and Windows XP. AutoHotkey on the other hand is an open source utility for Windows and you can use it to automate many Windows tasks and create keyboard shortcut keys.

In order to use the combination of DropBox and AutoHotkey to start an application remotely both these utilities must be installed on your PC (where you want to run the application) and they should be actively running. When you install and run AutoHotkey the scripts used can be run as executables.

The DropBox installation program will create a folder where you’ll normally store all the files that you want to syncronize with your cloud-based account.

For this example, let’s suppose you want to run FireFox remotely. You can create an AutoHotkey containing the following lines:

Loop
{
Sleep, 180000
Reload
}

store it in your DropBox folder and then double-click on it. It’ll start running. 180000 makes sure the file is reloaded every 3 minutes (3×60 seconds x 1000 milliseconds).

Leave your computer on and let your script run.

Now suppose you are in another city and you would like to launch FireFox from there. This is just for explanation and no purpose is actually solved by merely launching the browser like this. Anyway, using the other computer or laptop that you have with you at the remote location you go to the folder having the synchronized versions of your DropBox files. From there you open the above mentioned AutoHotkey file and add the following line above the Loop:

Run, “firefox.exe”

So now the file becomes:

Run, “firefox.exe”
Loop
{
Sleep, 180000
Reload
}

Save the file. After 3 minutes FireFox will be remotely launched. Remember to remove the line running FireFox after 3 minutes and then save the script, otherwise it’ll keep launching FireFox every 3 minutes.

So this is how you can start an application remotely, using DropBox and AutoHotkey.

Are you spending tons of money on commercial software for business and personal use? You can save lots of money using open source software. Our entire group of blogs is managed by open source software whether we’re using

• Operating system
• Word processing and spreadsheets
• Email management
• Image editing
• Accounting
• and whatever else needed to manage a small business

Why use open source software

Using open source software doesn’t necessarily mean using cheap, low-quality software. Of course commercial software comes with lots of extra bells and whistles, but they are just that, bells and whistles. For true performance you can really depend on open source software.

Some of the benefits of using open source software are:

• You don’t have to pay license fee to use them
• You can tinker with the source code and customize software to your own specific needs
• You never have to pay when you upgrade
• Open source software does not require expensive hardware upgrades
• Online support is easily available
• Open source software keeps you safe from proprietary restrictions

9 open source alternatives of your everyday software applications

• Ubuntu. It is a Linux based operating system and can easily be the best Windows alternative. It is totally GUI and some claim it’s even easier to use. All our current writers at HowToPlaza use Ubuntu. You can easily download the ISO image, burn it on a CD and install it on a non-Windows partition. But we’d advise do it with an experienced person because you may end up formatting your hard-disk and losing all your data. You can read how to install Ubuntu 10.04 on a USB drive http://www.howtoplaza.com/how-to-install-ubuntu-10-04-on-a-usb-drive. A good thing about installing Ubuntu is that once you are through with the installation, pretty much everything you need to work is already installed.
• OpenOffice. It is one of the oldest MS Office alternatives containing all office applications like word processor, spreadsheets, presentation and database. It may not look as cool as, say, MS Office 2010 but it is a lot less resource hungry and you can immediately download it and start using it. It is available both for Windows and Linux based systems.
• Thunderbird. Are you a big fan of Outlook? Then you’ll definitely like Thunderbird, a Mozilla foundation desktop email client that pretty much does everything a contemporary email application must do.
• GIMP. Do you think Photoshop for you is an overkill? Then you must give GIM a try. It’s an advanced open source image editing tool. Although there are many Windows-based free image editing utilities you’ll need to rely on GIMP if you decide to switch over to Ubuntu from Widows. Read how to use GIMP like Photoshop http://www.howtoplaza.com/how-to-use-gimp-like-photoshop.
• PDFCreator. You can create PDF files from any program that allows you to take printouts. No need to purchase the expensive Adobe PDF creator.
• GNUCash. It is a free source small business accounting application. It helps you manage your personal and business accounting.
• FileZilla. Need to upload and download lots of files from an FTP server. FileZilla FTP client is a free source utility that you can use to connect to your FTP server and manage your files and hosting. For instance if you are planning to install WordPress under your domain you’ll need FileZilla to upload your files.
• VLC. VLC plays pretty much every video codec and media format. It is available for almost all operating systems.
• Audacity. This free source software is for recording sounds. It is an advanced as well as basic recording software — depends on what you are trying to achieve. You can record sound using your standard microphone and you can also record streaming audio. The recorded files can then be exported as mp3 files.

These are not all the free source applications you may need in order to manage your everyday tasks but these are fundamental functions that you perform through your PC on a daily basis.

Sometimes you need to launch a computer application from a remote location using another computer. Although there are many standalone applications that help you remotely control and maintain a PC, with the help of DropBox and AutoHotkey you can perform a simple task as starting your torrent program or computer-supported answering machine, or even your music player to freak out your family members by simply writing an AutoHotkey script, storing it in your DropBox folder and then running it from there.

If you’re wondering what’s DropBox, you can read this tutorial on how to use DropBox from your Ubuntu desktop (although the current tutorial is just Windows based). AutoHotkey is an open source utility for Windows and you can use it to automate many Windows tasks and create keyboard shortcut keys.

In order to run a computer program remotely, you need to create a small AutoHotkey script containing the following lines:

Loop
{
Sleep, 300000
Reload
}

Save this script in your DropBox folder and add it to the list of your startup programs so that it starts running each time you switch on your computer. If you don’t want to restart your computer right now, you can simply double-click and start it — remember that AutoHotkey must already be running in order to run the script as an executable file. All it does is, it executes itself (not the killing sort of execution) after every 5 minutes. You can reduce the time according to your convenience. Wondering what’s the big deal here?

When you’re on a remote computer, you simply need to log into your DropBox account or go the folder where you keep your DropBox files and open this file in a text editor. Suppose you want to launch the VLC player with a file “ghostsounds.mp3″ you add this line before the Loop command.

Run, “C:\Program Files\VideoLAN\VLC\vlc.exe” “C:\Shady Files\ghostsounds.mp3″
Loop
{
Sleep, 300000
Reload
}

Since the AutoHotkey file is executing every 5 minutes, the VLC media player will be launched and it will start playing the file ghostsounds.mp3. Just make sure you either remove this new line or comment it out using “;” after 5 minutes so that it doesn’t launch the program again.

Similarly, you can use this combination of DropBox and AutoHotkey to launch any number of applications in your absence (and claim innocence at the same time).

This tip was taken from this link.

After downloading YouTube videos you can easily edit them using the Windows Movie Maker. Of course the Windows movie editing tool can handle only particular formats of video files and you can just shuffle around frames and add captions to various frames, still, a lot can be achieved through these basic editing facilities.

In order to edit a YouTube video in Windows Movie maker first of all you need the video on your local drive, that is, you need to download the video. There are many online and offline tools and utilities that let you download videos from YouTube and other streaming video websites. Here’s a good FireFox video downloading addon that lets you download the videos from the browser itself.

Once the video is on your hard drive, you’ll need to convert it into a Windows Movie Maker friendly format. The file is downloaded in most of the cases as an FLV file. The WMM works best with AVI and and WMV files so it’s better that you use a video converting software that converts FLV files to either AVI or WMV files. You can try Free Video Converter: it can handle almost all video formats and creates decent files after conversion.

Once you have converted the FLV file that you have downloaded from YouTube, you can simply import the video into Windows Media Player. With Windows Media Player you can apply effects like transition, captions, credits, and the others available with the software.

Please share in the comments section your favorite YouTube downoaders and video converters.

If you can synchronize MS Office and Google Docs you can bring the best of word processing and other office related tools to your desktop. Google Docs is a great online collaboration tool. You can work on a document or a spreadsheet with your team members working from various locations. But then it doesn’t have the massive array of features that MS Office has. Although you might not need all the features and Google Docs must be sufficient enough, if you are used to working in the Office environment, it’s better to synchronize MS Office and Google Docs so that you can work on your online documents in a desktop environment.

One of the tools that synchronize both the tools is OffiSync that can work with almost all contemporary versions of MS Office. You can read a nice review at this Life Hacker blog post. You can find another good review at this ReadWriteWeb link.

Although the automatic Windows updater keeps your software up-to-date and takes care of many vulnerability and security holes, it can be nagging because often the Windows updates makes you reboot your system in the midst of doing something important.

Stopping or turning off the automatic Windows updates doesn’t mean you don’t need those updates. It’s just that you should be able to update your system as and when you want to. Just remember to update regularly.

You can stop or turn off Windows automatic updates by going to the Control Panel and then to System. In the System window go the “Automatic Updates” tab and then select the radio button that says “Turn off Automatic Updates”.

Turn off automatic updates in Windows

Press OK and you’re done. No more Windows updates bothering you at unseemly times.

Dropbox is a great online file storage facility and you can easily use it on Ubuntu desktop. Although Ubuntu has its own file sharing cloud facility called Ubuntu one, many people prefer to use Dropbox as you can use it on multiple operating systems. The free version gives you 2 GB of free space.

In order to use Dropbox on Ubuntu desktop first of all you must have an account with the cloud based service. If you are logged in you can download the Dropbox software from there, or you can download it from their home page. In fact, you don’t even need an account to download the Dropbox software, as you are given this option once you have installed this tool on your Ubuntu desktop.

Once you have downloaded the .deb file, it installs the package, and once it has installed, it takes a while to download the remaining files and complete the setup. The time duration depends on your network connections and traffic at that time.

During installation the Dropbox software asks you where you would like to keep the dropbox folder. It’s preferable to keep it either on your Desktop or home folder from where you can easily access it.

After installing you are given the option of either creating a new account or logging into your existing account. Once you have logged in a Dropbox icon appears on your status bar. If you have many files on the Dropbox server it may take some time to sync them with your Ubuntu desktop. Once they have synced, you can easily access your Dropbox files from your Ubuntu Desktop.

Google Apps (http://google.com/a) provides some great small business solutions and one of them is the Google Apps POP3 email. With Google Apps email you can have Google manage your personal or business email account instead of your web host. One of its greatest benefits is that you can use the friendly Gmail interface to manage your business emails, but some prefer POP settings so that they can use desktop email clients like Outlook, Thunderbird to manage their emails.

In order to setup or configure your POP3 account settings you first need to log into your Google Apps email account, click Settings and go to the “Forwarding and POP/IMAP” tab and activate the POP downloading feature as shown in the image:

Without activating it here you won’t be able to use your desktop email account to download and send your emails.

Once you have saved the settings, launch your favorite desktop email application and start the process of adding a new email account. Just enter the following information:

• Account name: youremail@yourdomain.com
• Email address: youremail@yourdomain.com
• Password: the Google Apps email password
• Incoming mail (POP3): pop.gmail.com
• Outgoing mail (SMTP): smtp.gmail.com
• Use SSL: yes
• Use Authentication: yes
• POP port: 995
• Port for TLS/STARTTLS: 587
• Port for SSL: 465

This is all you need to setup or configure your POP3 account with Google Apps email account. You may not need all this information, but whenever, wherever you need, this is all you need.

You can find more information on this link.

Whenever you are searching the Internet, your browser, whether FireFox or some other browser, saves your browsing history for many purposes. For instance, it caches images and text to increase load speed if you happen to visit the same web page again. It also saves your links history so whenever you begin to type a URL in the location bar the recently-visited links begin to show up.

There are many advantages of storing your browsing history but you may have to delete it for various reasons. Maybe you don’t want anybody to know what all websites you’ve been visiting. At home you wouldn’t like your kids or your spouse to know what all you’ve been doing online. Whatever is the reason, you can easily delete your browsing or Internet history in FireFox.

In the menu, click Tools, and then Clear Recent History… you can also invoke this by pressing Ctrl Shift Del

You come across this window:

As you can see by default you can clear the Recent history of the last one hour. If you expand the Details dropdown you can individually select in FireFox what sort of browsing history you want to delete.

You can easily see that you can delete browsing and download history, you can delete the information you have submitted through forms and the search engines, you can also delete cookies and cache. You can eliminate active logins too, but this means wherever you need to login you’ll have to enter your user name and password again.

You can also easily change the time range:

After selecting the time range and the sort of browsing history you’d like to delete, you click Clear Now.

This is how you delete your browsing or Internet history in FirFox.

Do you have some computer files that you need to hide? Have you been storing information on your computer that you wouldn’t like people to access easily? It’s very easy to make documents and spreadsheets password protected but when it comes to images and video files, it becomes a bit difficult to hide them.

Suppose you’ve been downloading naughty images and videos from the Internet and you would like to keep them on your computer, yet hidden from your spouse and kids (or parents, or siblings). The old method is to hide them in a folder that is deep inside an array of other folders, something like C:f1f2f3f4the-naughty-file. To add more camouflage you can even change the name of the file.

But this is not a safe way to hide your computer files. Modern operating systems these days make it very easy to find all sorts of files on your hard drive. The best way to hide you computer files is to encrypt them, but foolproof encryption facility doesn’t come with every operating system.

So what do you do? There is a very simple way out. Compression utilities like WinZip and 7Zip allow you to password protect your compressed files. All you have to do is, move all the computer files you want to hide to a particular folder. Then you compress that folder and while compressing it, encrypt it with a password. When the compression is done, delete the original files. You can also make settings that if someone views the contents of the compressed files even the names of the files don’t show up.

This doesn’t mean your computer files are totally safe now. But it takes a very advanced or expensive technology to excess your files now.