www.google.com/history

While this is part of the Google Account series of posts, it’s probably more likely a feature that many users will wish to disable, especially those with privacy concerns. On the other hand, many people will probably find it interesting and useful at times as well. In a nutshell, Google Web History basically logs all of your Google searches for the past 2 years (you must be logged in to your Google Account) and let’s you look through these logs. It also uses that information to provide you with some extra features such as displaying your search trends and tailoring your future search results according to your tastes. It will even recommend you links it thinks you will like.

For anyone concerned with privacy and security, the above YouTube clip is from Google and shows how you can stop the service, as well as deleting individual search history items or your entire web history if you wish. Although the probably biggest risk of other people seeing your Google Web History is them knowing your log-in details, so always remember to log-out on public computers and use good passwords.

This article is part of a series showing you stuff you can do with your Google Account.

www.bootdisk.com

This is a really handy site with a huge range of different boot disks available to download. Now not everyone needs this sort of thing but for those who do, they’ll find boot disks for DOS, Windows9X/Me/NT/2K/XP, different Linux variations, driver free disks for anyone who is flashing their BIOS and more. There is also some good guides (including how to boot from a CD) and links to handy sites for drivers and DLL files. They also have a utilities page that links to a whole heap of different system utilities.

DVD Decrypter is a great program for backing up video DVDs to your hard drive. The download is less than 1MB but there is no official site anymore, you can find plenty of mirrors on Google but here is a good one - www.dvddecrypter.org.uk

Features include;

• Decrypt copy-protected movies
• Burn decrypted DVDs to blank discs
• Change the region settings on DVD files
• The ability to backup to an ISO image (which you can use with Alcohol 52%)
• Stream ripping and more!

It is starting to age (the last release was in 2005) but it’s still holds up as an excellent program. A more detailed guide for using DVD Decrypter can be found here at the doom9 site

zamzar.com

I’m a big fan of webware and Zamzar.com is a tremendously useful website that’s allows you to convert files into different formats, all online and all for free. It supports a huge number of formats including different media formats for images, sound and video plus other files like Office documents (2007 & earlier versions) as well as zip, tar, rar and other archive files. It even does half-decent PDF to DOC conversion.

The process couldn’t be simpler. You just browse for the file you want to convert, select the format you want it to turn into and enter your email address. Once you hit the convert button, the file will upload and moments later you will receive an email with the converted file attached.

You can also add a bookmark that you can click anytime you are on a site that has a file you want to convert, a YouTube video for example, so you can just click your bookmark and it will search the page for any files that can be downloaded and converted.

There are a couple of issues to be considered though. Zamzar is still in Beta and the site does have some pop-up ads (most of which the Firefox pop-up blocker will take care of). Those are minor issues though and the ability to convert files without have to download and install specific software more than makes up for them.