Have you ever wondered what is contained in the food you eat? The USDA National Nutrient Database can help you find out. Developed by the USDA Nutrient Data Laboratory, the program contains an extensive database of foods and their contents. The software is very simple to use and definitely has enough data to satisfy the most curious ones. In my opinion it is probably the best tool I know of to evaluate the nutritional value of different foods.
An online version exists at http://www.nal.usda.gov/fnic/foodcomp/search/, but I find it more convenient to have a desktop edition installed, so it is available without an internet connection.
Did you know that many antivirus companies are offering free rescue CDs you can download and use to clean your computer from viruses and spyware? Such CDs are especially useful when you cannot boot your computer due to a virus infection or in some cases the virus cannot be cleaned, because some windows components that are currently running are infected. In other cases malware can prevent antivirus systems from running. Here is a list of some of the popular choices out there.
- Kaspersky - about 100MB and my personal favorite used on the computers at my home: Download Kaspersky Rescue CD. The disk is Linux Kaspersky 2008 engine based and features virus definitions update function, which is very important, so you don’t have to build the rescue cd every time the virus definitions change.
Note: If you own 2009 KAV or KIS you can build such a disk yourself directly from the Kaspersky interface.
- BitDefender – about 228MB. Download BitDefender Rescue CD 2.0 . It is also a linux based solution. Similarly to Kaspersky it offers automatic virus definitions update. Also a very good antivirus. Another nice feature is that the CD includes a memory test (Memtest86+), which is a nice addition.
- VBA32 – abot 75MB. Download VBA32 Rescue Live CD. I recently stumbled across this rescue CD. Linux based and has a text mode interface. The small download size makes it useful and also can update virus signatures from internet.
- Avira AntiVir – about 45MB. Download Avira AntiVir Rescue CD. An excellent antivirus, also linux based rescue CD. Its small size allows very fast boot and download, although it doesn’t support online signatures update. Another nice feature is that it comes as an executable, that burns itself to a CD or writes an .iso image. Avira also offer a free antivirus system to install on your computer.
- F-Secure – about 222MB. Again a Linux based Rescue CD. Donwload F-Secure Rescue CD 3.01. Good antivirus system, but a very large download file. It also features virus signatures update over internet, so you’d only need to download it once.
Hopefully this information will help you the next time your computer gets infected. I would rather try more than one antivirus in such case, instead of relying on just one. All things considered all of the above are very good products, so take your pick.
Following an earlier post about SIW for a software to use as a hardware detection here is a great portable alternative. HWiNFO32 Features very comprehensive hardware detection set. It can also monitor various sensors on your computer (like temperatures, voltages, etc.). Contains some basic benchmarking, which can be useful.
Overall a very useful program to have on your USB Drive.
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays! Be healthy and have lots of fun this holiday season.
December 22nd, 2008
12:01 am
Math
Engauge Digitizer can help you quickly digitize scanned charts, plots and maps into numeric data. The workflow is easy to follow and includes the following steps:
- Import an image file to digitize.
- Pick three points on the axises to define the X and Y axis (those can be for cartesian, polar, linear and logarithmic graphs).
- You can clean-up your image by features like automatic grid removal, and discretize. The discretize is very helpful in cleaning up the image, where you can specify various thresholds with real time preview of the image.
- You then face two choices – manual and automatic digitizing process.
- Finally when happy with the results – you can export the data to a .csv file to be processed with other software.
Overall I find it a very useful freeware program especially for engineers, scientists and students, where very often it is helpful to digitize data from a plot, scanned from a book. It is a powerful software with a very good set of automatic detection tools.
Have you ever wondered what is contained in the food you eat? The USDA National Nutrient Database can help you find out. Developed by the USDA Nutrient Data Laboratory, the program contains an extensive database of foods and their contents. The software is very simple to use and definitely has enough data to satisfy the most curious ones. In my opinion it is probably the best tool I know of to evaluate the nutritional value of different foods.
