Mailfriends: Penpals, Postcards, Chat, Find friends for Free !

I would like to suggest you a very interesting site to find penpals and friends from all around the world. The name of that website is Mailfriends, it exists since 1998 and actually there are about 15000 active profiles!

It is absolutely FREE to create your own profile, and when you get a username, you can watch all the other people profile, send them private messages, and vote for their pictures and maybe one day you will be the hottest user of the website.

There is also a channel section in which every country of the world has its own discussion point!
and.. finally the main feature of the site is the chance to start a penpal friendship with a person from a far country! And well.. you can also find someone from your area for a dating day.

Of course to create your profile on that site, it's absolutely free.

Have fun.

Xampp: PHP + MySQL + Apache + Perl (and other stuff...) for Free!

If you are a beginner, experienced or advanced coder you can find XAMPP really useful for your development job related to PHP or Perl scripting.

XAMPP offers a very easy to install environment in which you can create quickly your next web site.

Here you can find the list of the FREE software packages included in XAMPP: Apache HTTPD, MySQL, PHP, Perl, FileZilla FTP Server, phpMyAdmin OpenSSL, Freetype, Webalizer, mod_perl, eAccelerator, mcrypt, SQLite, Mercury Mail Transport System, fake sendmail for windows, FPDF Class



After the installation of XAMPP you can load all the service with the "xampp_start.exe" command and in few seconds all the services will be up.

When the services are started, you can browse on "http://localhost/xampp/index.php" to access the control panel of XAMPP.



On the Status page you can watch the status of every service and see what is actually de-activated.



If you click on the PhpMyAdmin link in the menu, a new windows opens with the great PhpMyAdmin database development tools.
With PhpMyAdmin it is possible to generate automatically all the SQL scripts to operate in an easy way on the MySQL database: you can create a new database, define new tables and references between primary keys and foreign keys.

Another great feature of XAMPP is the chance to quickly switch from a PHP5 installation to a PHP4 installation. This is really useful when you need to test your script on both version to identify eventual problems that may occur.

You can get XAMPP for Windows through this link, for the Linux version you can choose this second link, but really on Linux there are many other chances to get a full installation of the "LAMP" package, so you can usually use the ready package in your distribution.

Have fun.
Fabio

AVG Free: Advanced Antivirus Software for Free !

Probably many people already know Grisoft AVG Free software.
It's an advanced antivirus solution, that allows you to protect your Windows based personal computer from any kind of virus, trojan, malware attack.

The best feature of AVG.. is that is is FREE of charge for personal use! You can download it from the Grisoft website, the installation is really easy and quick and also a non-expert user is able to do it!

All the antivirus updates are quickly downloaded from the Grisoft server, and the updates installation is automated.

I suggest you to immediatly uninstall your useless Norton antivirus.. and give a try to the wonderful and free Grisoft solution.

Have fun!

Fabio

SopCast: P2P TV Streaming for Free !

In this days I was looking for a way to watch over Internet the matches of the FIFA World Cup.
Finally I have found a very interesting software named Sopcast. It is based on a Peer To Peer (P2P) Streaming Technlogies that allows people to watch video streams generated by a "seed user" that introduces in Internet the video stream collected by its local source.

It's very easy to install Sopcast, first of all you should download here the file, than launch the installation and start the program.

You can login in it as an "anonymous user" or as a "registered user", in this second case you will be allowed to watch a richer selection of streaming content.

After the login procedure, you can open the Channel List tab, where there is the list of all the avaiable channels.

Beside the channel name there is a number that represents the number of users that are watching that stream in that specific moment. Larger is this number, higher is the chance to find a good stream uploader with an high-bandwitdth connection near you!

In order to watch the FIFA World Cup, I absolutely suggest you to choose the CCTV5 channel, that transmit all the matches!

I hope to have given you an interesting tip.
You can also visit the Sopcast website.

Have Fun.

Fabio

7-Zip: High Compression Ratio for Free!

In this last days I tried the 7-ZIP software, and I was really amazed by its features!

It allows you to compress every kind of file with very high compression ratio, much more than WinRar, WinZip or every other kind of common zipping software.

From an original file of about 89,4 megabytes, I obtained with WinRar a file of 9,72 megabytes and with 7-Zip, the resulting file size is only 3,62 megabytes !!!
It's about 3 times more powerful than WinRar.

And the most important thing about 7-ZIP is that it is absolutely FREE !!!
I suggest you to check out this wonderful software, you can download it for free from this link from the Sourceforge archive.

You can also visit the 7-ZIP homepage on its offical website.

Have fun.

Fabio