Quick tip for foobar2000 users. In my previous post, I've shown you on how to control Winamp playback from within any running applications or games. In this post, you will find the way on how to do the same thing from foobar2000. For those who don't know, foobar2000 is a light-weight audio player with advanced features.

foobar2000 have the ability to use 'global hotkey' to control the audio playback. You can use keyboard shortcuts to play, pause or move to next track of foobar2000 playlist from any running applications or games. Steps to enable global hotkeys in foobar2000.

1. Run foobar2000. Go to File > Preferences. Navigates to General > Keyboard shortcuts (1).

2. In this first example, I will add a global hotkey for 'Play or Pause' function. Click Add New (2) to create a new keyboard shortcut. In the action section, find the 'Play or Pause' (3). Click the Key area (4) and press the global hotkey that you want to be used for the function 'Play or Pause', in this example, I will use 'Ctrl+Alt+Enter' shortcut.

In my previous post I've mentioned on how to monitor bandwidth usage and download/upload transfer rate with NetLimiter 2 Monitor. In this post, you will find a similar software to show the report and monitor your bandwidth and transfer rate usage, and this software is simpler and it has a portable version. Networx, developed by SoftPerfect, is a simple and free, yet powerful utilities that allows you to monitor your bandwidth usage. You can use Networx to monitor your Internet bandwidth usage or other network connections.

With Networx, you can view your daily, weekly and monthly bandwidth usage statistics. Networx also have a small graph that will show you your current transfer rate. If your internet service provider (ISP) limits certain amount of bandwidth usage per month on your internet connection, you can use Networx to notify you when you are about to reach that limit. There are 4 useful small tools included in Networx; traceroute, ping, netstat (shows you the connections made by programs on your system) and speed meter (measures your network throughput).

Quick tip. Are you looking for an easy way to convert a PDF file to DOC (Word document)? Are you looking for a PDF to DOC converter that can preserve the exact formatting and images in the PDF file? Introducing PDFtoWord, an online service that will let you to convert any PDF files to DOC files (Word documents). PDFtoWord is developed by nitroPDFsoftware, the developer of PDF tool to create, edit, organize, secure and convert PDF files.

In my test, I've converted a notebook pricelist from Lowyat.net. The pricelist file is a PDF file and contains images and tables. You can see the result of the conversion in the images below:

PDF

DOC file, converted with PDFtoWord

As you can see, the exact format and images are preserved after the conversion. PDFtoWord is indeed a powerful PDF to DOC conversion tool.

How to Convert PDF file to DOC with PDFtoWord

1. Go to PDFtoWord website. First, we need to upload the PDF file that you want to convert (1) to PDFtoWorld website. Select the format that you want the PDF file to be converted to, in this case, DOC (2).

The most secured way to protect your login informations on various websites is by using different and secure passwords for different accounts. A secure password usually consists of combination of random letters, numbers, symbols, difficult to be guessed, complex, and lengthy password. So, you use a password generator to generate passwords for your logins, and your password for website-a.com is 'OtDaSOe9P2', and website-b.net is 'rRYp9UyRcxK8'. Obviously, we are not a computer to remember such passwords, unless you got an eidetic memory. If you are looking for password manager, KeePass can securely help you to store and manage your passwords.

KeePass (KeePass Password Safe) is a free, open source, light-weight and easy-to-use password manager. One of the best thing about KeePass is it is portable, so you can bring your password anyware securely in your USB stick. In this post, I will review the latest KeePass Professional Edition 2.07 beta.

Have you ever wonder why your hard disk space is being used up, and you are looking for a software to analyze what files are taking up your hard disk space. Try WinDirStat. WinDirStat is a free and open source tool that allows you to view disk usage statistics and analyze your hard drive space usage. WinDirStat is also small, it only take less than 800kb of space after it is installed on your system.

WinDirStat will visualize the files on your hard drive using colorful blocks. Each file is presented as a block. Blocks for larger files will be bigger than smaller files, so you can easily check what files are taking up your hard disk space. The files blocks are arranged according to the directories and subdirectories where they are stored. WinDirStat will also show you what types of files that occupy the most part of your hard disk space. Each file types are represented with a same color. When you select a directory or file in WinDirStat, the block that represent the directory or file will automatically highlighted for easy visual reference.

Process Explorer is a small powerful tool by Sysinternals that allows you to monitor the process that run on your Windows operating system. Process Explorer provides the same simple functionality like Windows Task Manager such as CPU and memory usage of a process or killing an application. What makes Process Explorer a powerful tool is it also provides some advanced functionality compared with Windows Task Manager.

You can use Process Explorer as the Windows Task Manager replacement if your Task Manager is being disabled somehow (by virus, worm, etc). I personally use Process Explorer to help me detects and remove malicious processes. Process Explorer has the built in function to make Process Explorer replaces the default Windows Task Manager. Open Process Explorer, go to Options > Replace Task Manager (1).

Process Explorer can display various information about a running process. For example, in TCP/IP tab of the process properties, we can know what ip the process is connected to. These informations can be useful if you are trying to diagnose an unknown process.