Filed under: Lists

Despite what you may have heard in the last two weeks, Digg is not dead. It is, however, a very different service than when it started. What used to be a great place to find interesting links and hilarious commentary has become, for almost all intents and purposes, a Twitter clone.

Digg isn't about to shut its doors, but I do get the feeling that regular, loyal Diggers are looking to take their custom elsewhere. Judging by the 'Reddit incident' on Monday, where Digg users revolted in favor of Reddit, it looks like a mass exodus might already have begun.

So, if you're a disenfranchised Digger, or if you're just looking for the best of the rest when it comes to social news aggregators and content discovery, take a look at this list of alternatives!

Download Squad contributor Mark Bowytz decided to go freestyle with this rundown of Android apps -- please enjoy his geeky thriller ... and the apps, of course!

Agent McCormick is to meet an informant who has some secrets to share about his Android phone...but will they make it out alive?


The air in the Imperial Palace restaurant was a pungent mixture of fried dumplings and chemical fumes wafting in from the nearby industrial park.

Though the room was dimly lit and cast in a red glow from the Chinese lanterns and other East Asian chotchkies hanging from the walls, Agent McCormick found the informant who had called him the week before; he was a bookish young man who nearly knocked over his bowl of wonton soup upon being discovered.

"I was never here, got it?" asked the informant.

"Sure, sure, but why are they after you? What do you know?"

The informant nervously glanced around and withdrew a slender, dark, and shiny object from his coat pocket.

"This phone...," he began while sliding a finger to unlock the screen, "... this Android phone. Sure, it does phone calls, messaging, and social networks, but it can do more ... LOTS more."

Chances are good that you use more than one gadget to help with schoolwork. If you have a laptop or desktop computer and do-it-all smartphone at your disposal there are some great applications which can be a huge help at school regardless of which device you've got your hands on.

From taking notes in class to accessing files at home to staving off forgetfulness, these five highly-useful apps are ready to lend you a hand at all times!

Dropbox
Those of you who need to work on projects with other classmates should definitely check out Dropbox. A free 2GB account gives you plenty of space to store and share documents, images, lecture recordings, or just about anything else. DropBox offers desktop apps for Windows, Mac, and Linux and mobile apps for Android, Blackberry, and iPhone -- plus there's a handy web interface. For anywhere, anytime access to files, Dropbox is an excellent choice.

It's just about that time of year again -- time for millions of students to put their noses to the grindstone and head back to school for another year of academic excitement!

Few learning tools are as versatile as your trusty laptop or desktop computer -- and your Web browser is likely one of the most-used programs on it. If Google Chrome is your browser of choice, there are loads of useful add-on enhancements in the Extensions Gallery which can turn Chrome into a powerful tool for staying focused and productive while tackling your coursework.

Take the jump and have a look at thirteen Chrome extensions I've found useful... and be sure to share your own picks in the comments!

CD Art Display is a great little utility that puts the album art for the music you're listening to right on your desktop. It works with numerous players (iTunes, Foobar2000, Winamp, Helium, Windows Media Player, and more), and it shows you the album art for whatever track is currently playing with a beautiful skin. The art has to be in the album's folder, but if you don't already have it, CD Art Display can help you find it (it has a feature for automatically downloading covers).

Since it already interfaces with your player, CD Art Display also lets you switch to the next or previous track, pause/play, change the volume, and even rate the song and find and display its lyrics (right in the program, not in a pop-up browser window). It's pretty neat stuff!

CD Art Display isn't new; the last stable version (2.0.1) was released on September 8, 2009. The program is certainly not dead, though; CD Art Display 3.0 Beta was last updated on July 12, so it seems like development is definitely ongoing.

There are currently over 200 skins in the official gallery, so picking nine was tricky. However, I used the program's built-in browser to go through lots and lots of skins, installing and testing, until I found nine skins that I really liked. You can check them out after the jump!

As a relative newcomer to the world of web development, it sometimes seems to me as though there is a gulf in the field: The "pros" versus the "wannabe developers". As if there's a tight-knit clique of developers, all well-versed in arcane stuff like advanced user scripts, HTML5, or Ruby on Rails -- and then there's the "rest of the world", composed of mere mortals just trying to hack something together that would somehow display and sort of work across multiple browsers.

So the question becomes: How do I bridge the gap? How can I become a decent, skilled JavaScript developer without spending a boatload of money?

After the fold you can see my take on that issue, consisting of one piece of advice and five resources which I find useful in this quest!

I think the need for music and rhythm is one of the most basic human needs; and as we evolve, so evolve our ways of hunting and gathering this precious commodity.

In this post, I've gathered 10 great places to expand your musical horizons: free, legal ways to discover music online, which work everywhere (not only in the US or in Europe)!

Not all of the sites below actually let you listen to music – they are not all players; but they can all help you find the next big thing, or just a tune to groove to.

Let's get started!

Uvumi

Uvumi is one of my favorite players in this space. You probably won't find much music you already know there; it's a community for budding artists, which lets them put their music online, be discovered and get direct feedback from their listeners.

I've covered Uvumi in detail, but if I had to sum it up in brief, I'd have to say that what impressed me most about the site is how well-managed it is. Marshall (the guy behind the site) seems to be taking both the listeners and the artists really seriously, and there's a true sense of community once you get into it.

YouTube Disco

When was the last time you listened to some music on YouTube? Probably sometime today or yesterday, right? It's something most of us do on a routine basis, and there's a whole cottage industry of mashups which use YouTube as a music repository and dish out recommendations.

And then there's Youtube's own Music Discovery Project. It's pretty much what you would expect, and it's certainly worth knowing about.

To see eight other ways to find and listen to music online (and a bonus mention!), keep on reading after the fold.

Disk2vhd (pictured above)
Need an easy way to convert a physical machine to a virtual one? Fire up Disk2vhd and create a snapshot of any system running Windows XP or later -- including server OSes and x64 builds. Partition structure is retained, and you can even save your VHD to the same drive you're backing up.

I've been using Windows 7 ever since test version became available. It's packed with useful features -- features power users and our Download Squad readers are probably familiar with. Average users, however, aren't quite as quick on the uptake. Most of my retail customers, for example, haven't even discovered that they can pin items to the taskbar. Heck, many of them don't know about the great carry-over features from previous Windows versions.

There are way more than five features average users should become familiar with. To start, I'll mention five basic features that can save time, protect valuable data, and keep malware and viruses at bay. Power users, share 'em with your friends!

Purchasing software for your business can take a pretty big bite out of your budget, but finding programs that you're actually allowed to use on a home business computer can be tricky. There's a lot of free software out there, but much of it is only free for personal use -- and you can't use it legally on your business systems.

Here's a list of 13 great, free programs that you can definitely use. Doing so could also help your small or home business save some serious cash.

Microsoft Security Essentials
Antivirus software is a good place to start, and Microsoft Security Essentials is an excellent option. It's been rated very highly in head-to-head tests and is every bit as good (if not better) than programs like Norton Antivirus, AVG, and Avast. Best of all, Security Essentials is free "for use in your home-based small business," as specified in the license agreement.

Download Squad's regular readers are smarter than the average bear when it comes to software. You're familiar with the apps we review -- or brave enough to go try them out if you haven't. Your friends and family probably aren't quite as up to speed, and they should be. There are loads of excellent free programs out there that could be saving them time and preventing headaches -- if they only had the right tools!

Let's check out five programs that they should know about...

CCleaner (pictured above)
There are banner ads all over the place for tune-up programs and registry repair or cleaning apps, but most of them are about as useful as lips on a chicken. CCleaner, on the other hand is great at what it does. Two quick scans with CCleaner can rid your system of gigabytes of temporary files and tidy up crud hiding inside your Windows registry. CCleaner also lets you create a backup of the registry data it removes so that you can put it back if something goes wrong.

One thing to know about: the normal CCleaner installer offers the Ask.com toolbar. Simply uncheck the boxes when they appear to avoid installing it, or download the Slim installer instead.

Google Chrome is already an extremely secure Web browser. Armed with its exploit-thwarting sandbox, Chrome remained untested at Pwn2Own this year, while other browsers were hacked within minutes.

Still, it never hurts to bolster your defenses, and there are plenty of good options for doing just that over in the official Google Chrome Extensions Gallery. Let's take a look at nine which are well worth installing -- see you after the break, Chrome fans!

A lot of people use the Internet to find porn.

A lot of people use Firefox (go download Firefox 3.6!)

In fact, I'd go as far to suggest that porn surfers -- or at least the search for naughty, illicit, adult-only material -- account for Firefox's biggest market demographic. The 'young' Internet -- blogs, social networks, porn -- is predominantly ruled by the spotty teenagers of the browser world: Firefox and Chrome. Internet Explorer's total market share is larger, but corporations, geriatrics and aging family computers -- i.e. the non-porn world -- account for most of that.

I'm not expecting you to raise your hand or even nod your agreement, but let's face it: most of us, at some time or another, will search for porn. It makes sense to be prepared for such an eventuality -- I think we all know the perils of loud, auto-playing sex music or aggressive pop-ups of hairy, German MILFs that just. won't. close.

Note: all of the links in this feature are safe. Don't worry: you should be fine to read this at work.

1. Back up my important files regularly. I've always sucked at doing this, and it's time to change that. With so many good online options (like Mozy, Backblaze, and Carbonite) and external hard drives being so cheap, there's really no excuse for operating without a good set up backups.
2. Keep my operating system, applications, and plugins updated. I'm good with keeping my OS up to date - Windows does that for me. Antivirus programs? They take care of themselves, too.
   
   Other applications are another story - if a program doesn't auto-update like (Firefox, Google Chrome, or uTorrent, for example) I often forget to check to see if there are newer versions available.
   
   I'm also guilty of clicking away alerts from plugins like Java and Adobe Flash player, and that has to stop. Installing their updates is a big part of keeping a system secure, and it takes very little time.
   
   A program like the File Hippo Update Checker or Update Notifier can be a big help.