Bloodrop greatly simplifies the process of sharing a file in your Dropbox public folder when using a Mac. It’s a small system dock application that enables you to share files to your public folder by simply dragging and dropping them onto the dock icon.

This copies the file to your Dropbox public folder and adds the all important public link to the clipboard, ready for you to paste it into an IM conversation or an email.

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Editor: Ryan DeJonghe responded to our request for Kinect stories in celebration of the technology's one-year anniversary. Would you like to get fit? He has a group of 1,400 using Xbox 360 and Kinect to do just that.

I’ve always been a fan of video games and technology. Anything that would marry the two would be icing on the cake. Starting out on the NES, I hooked up every accessory available, from Broderbund’s U-Force controller to the Miracle Piano Teaching System. So naturally, when Microsoft announced they were releasing a product that would be able to track your entire body, I was first in line.

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Time is definitely money when it comes to providing support in a medium to large enterprise. Auslogics OnCluster ensures that downtimes, slow PCs and frustrated employees calling the support desk are kept to the bare minimum by providing easy to supply centralized maintenance and real time support.

Auslogics OnCluster is based upon the company’s very successful range of home maintenance and support products that help automate common tasks like finding and removing registry and hard drive errors and defragmenting them both.

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One of the curses of modern day life is remembering, storing and managing passwords. Whether you use a password manager, store passwords in your browser or try to remember the lot, there are always challenges. Storing in your browser is the easiest option, but how can you be sure that they’re safe? Secure Login for Firefox is a very handy extra layer of security.

Like Opera’s magic wand, Secure Login helps you to log into sites where you’ve already saved your username and password in Firefox. If you have an account stored, when you rest the mouse pointer over the key icon to the left of the address bar, you’ll see if it's available to login. Just click this button to securely authenticate yourself on this site.

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It can be frustrating moving from computer to computer, finding the apps you use on one computer aren’t available on another, or that your carefully crafted settings aren’t in place when you switch to another machine. It’s why portable apps -- applications that are self-contained within a single folder -- are so popular, liberating you from a single PC by allowing you to run them from a USB drive.

Ceedo Personal enables you to carry a PC around in your pocket or at least the most useful parts of it. You can’t fit a keyboard, monitor or printer on a standard flash drive, but there’s plenty of room on one for a range of personal documents, photos and music and with Ceedo you can carry your programs around with you as well.

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Twelfth in a series. Here’s a dirty little secret: I’m still using Windows XP.

That’s right. A technology analyst -- independent, mind you; not working for a firm that requires a specific load -- and I’m voluntarily using XP. In fact, I’m writing this article on it. I’ve been using it so long, I almost stopped noticing, and as XP crossed the 10-year anniversary of its official launch this week, I thought some about my own experiences with it.

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FinalWire has announced the release of the latest version of its diagnostics and benchmarking program, AIDA64 v2.00, which is great news for anyone who wants to ensure that their PCs are running smoothly.

The diagnostic software enables you to identify any malfunctioning components so you can replace them if necessary. Benchmarking enables you to see if your system is performing as well as it can, and if it isn’t you can take some steps to correct the problem.

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BurnAware 4, which ships in Free, Home and Professional flavors, is the latest version of the lightweight but powerful burning tool that handles a wide variety of discs.

Burnaware Free handles most common disc based tasks. You can copy data to all types of CD, DVD and Blu-ray discs, subject to the limitations of your drive. It supports bootable and multi-session discs and it’s possible to make audio discs and disc copies.

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A new version of Android will be available in November, initally on the Samsung Galaxy Nexus smartphone. Much of the analysis of this Ice Cream Sandwich version of Android is focused on the implications of it running on both smartphones and tablets, where older versions of Android ran on one or the other (1), as well as shiny new gimmicks such as face recognition to unlock a handset.

This unification of smartphones and tablets is a red herring. Other things matter much more for Android. Android tablets are failing in the market, while Google’s smartphones sell in enormous numbers. This is a major issue for Google.

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It’s hard to believe that WinZip, the stalwart archive program, has reached its sixteenth release with the latest update, which picks up a range of new features. The ZIP format is getting pretty elderly now and other more efficient compression standards have overtaken it, but it’s still a popular choice. WinZip 16 adds a few more carrots to tempt users by making full use of today’s 64-bit processors and adding the ability to zip directly to Blu-ray disc amongst other new features.

Also new is the ability to avoid email size limits and send files of up to 2GB directly. There’s no need to worry about the limits set by your email provider as the program integrates fully with ZipSend, a web based delivery service that stores your file and shares a direct download link with your email contact. All this is done seamlessly so there’s no need to interrupt your work and switch to a different program. It’s also possible to share Zip files on Facebook directly from the WinZip window.

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Virtual environments on a Mac are often used for running alternative operating systems like Windows or Linux. Most often this is to run software that simply won’t work under OS X no matter how hard you try to persuade it.

Sometimes, however, it’s desirable to run a Mac inside a Mac, which is where free Paragon Virtualization Manager for Mac OS X comes in. This may be handy for testing new software in an isolated environment to avoid damaging your Mac or you might want to clone your system to a removable disk for backup purposes.

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We could all be more organized. Some people find organization easy and manage to naturally live in a world of clipboards, charts and tick boxes. For the rest of us it’s not always a breeze to impose some semblance of order onto our lives and getting stuff done is usually a bit of a struggle.

If you need all the help you can get to stay on track, then you may find the approach suggested by David Allen of GTD (getting things done) helpful. This is a set of guiding principles that help you to manage the mess of personal and work tasks that occupy most of our lives and many geeks have embraced it, and can be embraced through your PC in the form of open-source freebie, GeeTeeDee, which runs in Windows and Linux.

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Defragmenting data is a lot like eating bran. We know that we should do it to keep our systems regular, but it always seems like a lot of hassle for the limited potential benefits. It’s not easy to know how much a defrag will really help. Even when you’ve done one you could be excused for wondering if it’s made any difference at all.

With this in mind, take a look at a brand new tool from German-based O&O Software. O&O SpeedCheck 2.0 is a free stand-alone program that enables you to test your system to find out how it performs with highly fragmented data compared to defragmented files. It simulates reading from disk without affecting any of your existing files.

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2BrightSparks has just released SyncBackSE 6, and it boasts a raft of new features. These include the ability to detect changes in the case of file and folder names, SmartSync options to skip or ignore specified changes and the ability to use Windows 7 taskbar features amongst many more.

You can test all the new features alongside its existing functionality with a free 30-day trial. SyncBackSE helps you to protect data via backup and synchronization profiles, which enables you to create a back-up copy of your data in a variety of different locations; helpful wizards guide you through the process of both backup and restore.

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The only way to stop your PC’s performance degrading over time is to stop using it. That’s not really a practical option, so the next best thing is to use suitable optimization software that reduces clutter and ensures that all systems are running as well as they can be.

The latest release of TuneUp Utilities 2012 provides you with over 30 different tools for optimizing and maintaining your Windows machine to keep it humming along nicely. It costs $49.95, but a free trial is available for testing purposes prior to purchase.

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