We all love customizing our PCs to get that perfect personal setup. If you’re looking for an easy way to tweak your Windows taskbar without digging through registry files, let me introduce you to the Ultimate Taskbar Controller. It takes the tedious work out of customization and lets you instantly tweak your taskbar exactly the way you want it. Want to hide the clock? Need more space between the volume icon and the time? Want to completely remove the notification area? This tool handles it all.

Getting started is incredibly simple. Just grab the application from this link and run it. You’ll see a clean checklist of options. Check the boxes for the features you want to enable, and uncheck the ones you want to hide. You should see the changes happen immediately! If your taskbar doesn’t update right away, just log off and log back in, or restart your PC to force the changes to take effect. It’s fully compatible with Windows XP, Vista, and Windows 7.

Download Ultimate Taskbar Controller

Windows Media Player comes built into Windows, but it’s notorious for not being able to play every media format out there. That’s why so many of us have shifted to VLC. VLC is a fantastic, free media player that handles almost anything you throw at it. But what happens on that rare occasion when even VLC struggles to play a file?

Let me introduce you to UMPlayer (Universal Media Player), another free and open-source alternative. The most impressive thing about UMPlayer is that it comes packed with over 270 built-in audio and video codecs. It handles nearly every media format imaginable, including AAC, AC3, ASF, AVI, DIVX, FLV, H.263, Matroska, MOV, MP3, MP4, MPEG, OGG, QT, RealMedia, VOB, Vorbis, WAV, WMA, WMV, XVID, and a whole lot more. Plus, UMPlayer is portable, meaning you can drop it onto a pen drive and run it anywhere without installing it.

Continue reading UMPlayer: Play Anything →

Security matters. We constantly hear stories about someone’s Facebook account getting hacked or a Gmail password being stolen. It’s an unfortunate reality of living online. But I recently stumbled across something incredibly useful for locking down your accounts: MyPermissions.

At first glance, MyPermissions doesn’t look like much—it’s essentially just a page with eight links. But that’s exactly why it’s great. They don’t ask for your passwords, you don’t need to create a username, and there’s absolutely no sign-up process.

All you have to do is head over to their site:
MyPermissions.org

When you get there, you’ll see a clean interface that looks like this:

The next steps couldn’t be simpler:

• Just click on the icon for the social network you want to check. It’ll take you straight to the permissions page where you can see exactly which third-party apps have access to your profile data.
• From there, just revoke access for any apps you no longer use or that look suspicious.

Continue reading MyPermissions : Check Who Is Accessing Your Social Profiles →