CDBurnerXP

I know there are a plethora of applications out there to help you burn CDs, and even tools inside Windows 10 to help with that too. However, sometimes you just want a simple software tool that does everything you want, does it simply and reliably, and doesn’t cost a fortune. Well, you’ll be happy to check out CDBurnerXP. Despite the name, it’s not made just for WIndows XP, it actually runs quite well on Windows 10 and packs a ton of features to boot. Aside from the normal ability to burn data and audio CDs, it can burn DVD and Blu-RAY discs as well. I haven’t tried all of those features out for myself, but for those times that I need to burn a disc on my Windows laptop, this is my go to tool. It is absolutely great! I recommend you check it out and see what you think.

Check out some good common sense blog security tips

Image: Hacker Inside LogoI couldn’t have said it much better myself, so I decided to link to this article rather than write my own version of it. Although, I might write a follow up that gets a little more in depth or something. However, that’s for another day, for now check out this post on the site “Spice Up Your Blog” where the author goes over “5 Ways Your Blog’s Design Is Making You Susceptible To A Hacker”.

Now this isn’t just for server operators, it focuses on things that also make a difference to those that run their own blog too. This is because a “Hacker”, or maybe a visitor with malicious intent, can wreak havoc on your blog even without touching the rest of the server. If they can get access to your database for example, you can kiss all of your posts, pages and pretty much everything else goodbye if they are feeling especially destructive. Even if they don’t destroy your data, they can post things on your blog that you don’t want, like advertisements; porn; we own you messages; what have you. Even worse, is when your site gets compromised and no one knows it. In these cases the hackers can do all sorts of fun things. One especially nasty trick I have seen is when they plant a virus alongside your sites files and then append a small bit of code to your pages so that your visitors get infected, talk about your reputation plummeting faster than a stone tossed out a window.

With all this in mind, take a look at the following page and see if any of the things they talk about there sound like they might be up your alley. It pays to be careful, I hope this helps!

5 Ways Your Blog’s Design Is Making You Susceptible To A Hacker

 

A free game and a quick link

And a heads up!  I added a link to the links section here on the Solarum site, and it made me want to drop a note up here to remind folk about that particular section.  The links section is where I post links to various and sundry things that appear to be useful or humorous to folk in one way or another.  So, you might want to check it out because you never know what you might find, like today where I just posted a link to a the great game Baseball Mogul version 6 since it has been released for free by the company that makes it.  Come back often and check that links section out, lots of goodies in there.

FREE software from SafelyRemove.com

Here you go folks!  There is an interesting program called USB Safely Remove, a self proclaimed must have if you frequently use such hotplug devices as: flash drives, USB\SATA drives, card readers and the like. Read more about it at:

http://safelyremove.com/

Download the program here:

http://safelyremove.com/usbsafelyremovesetup.exe

If you hurry, you can get a free license for version 4.1 of this software. Go to:

http://safelyremove.com/giveaway10K.htm

They are giving away 10,000 license keys and as of 10/2/2009 at 1740 hours, they still had some to give away, so get on over there and check it out.  I haven’t use it yet, but I just now downloaded it and got my key.  I’ll put up a review when I have played with it some.  Enjoy!

Disturbing News From Nero

I have been using Nero (Ahead Nero) Burning ROM for years as my preferred software for burning CD’s on Windows. The old versions of Adaptec CD Creator were pretty good, but when they spun it off to Roxio it went down hill so fast even my stomach dropped. Back to the point, I have been using and buying Nero for years and it’s always been a great product. As much for the CD burning tools and the other goodies they toss in. One thing that I especially liked was a tool called ImageDrive. For anyone that doesn’t know what that is, it’s a nifty tool like DaemonTools that lets you take an ISO file (or NRG) and mount it as a virtual CD drive. So Windows thinks it’s just another drive and you can use it as such. Great, huh?

Well, now comes the driver for this post. Recently I got a new Alienware computer that came with Vista. Funny how it would have cost me money to down grade to XP, but I digress. My Nero version 6 was not compatible with Vista, and Nero had no plans to make it so. Well, I thought, it had been a couple years so I payed up and got the latest and greatest version 8 so I would have full Vista goodness. Now, this was my fault initially because I made an assumption, and we all know how that goes. I just assumed that ImageDrive would work as it always had, but it didn’t. In fact, I didn’t even see it.

OK, I go do some digging on line and find that Nero 8 didn’t support ImageDrive on Vista. Well, it was new (Nero 8 and Vista too I guess), and it read like it was coming soon so I figured it was some kind of Windows thing and would be along shortly. Advance a few months and nothing, no word on it at all. Finally I email support and ask them about it, I really was missing this tool, and here is the reply that I got back.

Thank you for your e-mail and your interest in our software.

Unfortunately, Nero has dropped the imagedrive application from our software. Nero will no longer support this application.

If you have any further questions please do not hesitate to contact us.

Hmm. Gee, that’s nice. At this point I kinda felt cheated. Yeah, I know, I should have read up on it more before I bought it. However, I thought I had some trust built up with these guys. I have been buying their software for years now, several versions in fact. It wasn’t clearly stated that ImageDrive was gone for good, it was rather ambiguous. The point is that the version I had worked fine, they just made a decision that if you wanted to use it on Vista, you had to uprage. Then they didn’t tell me I was loosing functionality. So I had to pay more, and get less. I wrote back and told them that too, but I doubt I’ll hear anything back from them.

So, the end result of this post is that if you are a consumer, don’t by Nero if you want ImageDrive. If you don’t care about that, it’s still a great CD/DVD tool. If you are a business, take good care of your customers because we are a fickle bunch and once scorned we don’t come back easy.

By the way, before the flame comments start, I know I can just use DaemonTools or some such similar program. That though, wasn’t the point.