Matias Secure Pro wireless keyboard review: A power tool for the paranoid

Matias Secure Pro wireless keyboard $170.00 This quiet, portable, wireless mechanical keyboard boasts an over-the-top security feature. Our reviewer didn't like the feel of its switches, though, and it's very expensive.

The wireless Matias Secure Pro keyboard’s number-one claim to fame is its 128-bit AES encryption. I’ll get into that later. My favorite feature is that it’s quiet. You’d hardly know this was a mechanical keyboard from the sound it makes. It’s close to the volume level of a typical membrane keyboard, if a little sharper or clickier at times. You could use this board in any office or in a bedroom without disturbing a soul.

Be that as it may, I’m not a huge fan of typing on it.

Far from the ergonomic relief I expect from a mechanical keyboard, the Matias switches inside the Secure Pro made my fingers exhausted. And that’s saying something, considering I type on Cherry Blues on a daily basis. Those switches are known for their abnormally high resistance.

The Secure Pro scuttles most of the benefits of a mechanical keyboard. 

Activating a key on the Secure Pro reminds me of a rubber-dome keyboard. Significant resistance at the top begins to yield as you push past that initial hurdle—almost exactly like a membrane keyboard.

As a result, the Secure Pro scuttles most of the benefits of a mechanical keyboard. It’s too easy to bottom-out its keys, which is bad for your fingers and wrists. This keyboard isn’t pleasant to type on unless you prefer extremely high resistance. Even then, you’d probably be better served by a buckling-spring switch, which spreads resistance out over the path of the entire keystroke.

The Matias Secure Pro has two USB ports. You can use one to store its USB receiver while traveling, and the other can charge a USB device (but you'll need a supplemental power supply for the keyboard, which defeats its wireless feature).

I appreciated the muted click of the Secure Pro’s keys, as that provided a bit of tactile feedback, but this isn’t the sort of keyboard I’d pick up for my own day-to-day use. Keyboard preferences are a matter of highly individual taste, of course, so your perception could be very different.

More troubling is that I found myself constantly making typos with the Secure Pro. I don’t know whether it’s because the activation point is so high or because there’s so much resistance, but I dropped letters from my words semi-constantly. The space bar was particularly temperamental.

I also encountered a few issues with the keyboard’s 200MHz polling rate. While 200MHz is fine for most low-intensity uses, I did notice a slight lag while gaming. That’s to be expected from a wireless keyboard, and it explains why most gaming keyboards are wired.

It’s hard to convey how small the Secure Pro is, even for a keyboard without a dedicated numeric keypad. The keys aren’t as cramped as those on the typical laptop, but they’re definitely closer together than a standard desktop model's. Even after a few days' acclimation, I had difficulty getting my fingers properly aligned without looking down.

The flip side is that the Secure Pro is highly portable. While a bit heavy for its size, I could easily see myself taking this keyboard on the road when I wanted the comforts of a mechanical keyboard without hauling my larger desktop models around.

Despite its small design, I was disappointed with the awkward spacing of the media-control keys. You must hold down the Fn key to operate them, and the Play/Pause key is all the way across the board on the Esc key. The spacing makes it easier to remember which media tools are where without looking, but it’s almost impossible to operate them one-handed.

Volume-control buttons share space with the up/down arrow keys, so you must hold down another key to use them. 

The Secure Pro also has USB hubs on its casing, but they’re strictly for charging—there’s no mouse or data transfer here. Matias claims the battery inside the Secure Pro will last six months to a year on a single charge, though I obviously haven’t had a chance to test that claim. Charging a second USB device requires supplemental power (negating its wireless feature). There’s a handy battery indicator LED on the Caps Lock key, but there’s  strangely no indicator LED for Caps Lock status.

Getting back to the keyboard’s 128-bit AES encryption: When was the last time you worried about someone intercepting the data traveling from your wireless keyboard to your computer?

For me, the answer is “never.” And I’m sure even a few of our more security-minded readers find the question similarly perplexing. The signals wireless keyboards use are so weak that a hacker (or cracker, if you prefer that label for cybercriminals) would need to be in the same room—or at most, the next one over—to intercept its transmissions. What’s more, Logitech, Microsoft, and other modern manufacturers build wireless keyboards with signal encryption without boasting about it.

It’s highly unlikely that your keyboard will be the failure point in your data-security plan, but I’m not going to make fun of people who genuinely worry over such things. If you’re in that camp, the Secure Pro certainly holds up its end of the bargain. Matias claims the keyboard’s 128-bit AES encryption is the highest available on a wireless keyboard and would take “a billion-billion years to crack.”

The Matias Secure Pro is a well-built, quiet, portable mechanical keyboard with a robust—if perhaps over-the-top—security feature. I didn’t find that it provided the best typing experience, but your preferences might differ. No one would argue, however, that its $170 asking price is inexpensive.

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Four notepad apps to power up Windows' own WordPad

Four notepad apps to power up Windows' own WordPad

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Review: Digital Storm's Virtue delivers superior power in a midsize tower

Digital Storm Virtue $2,571.00 Powerful components and room to grow make the Virtue a great gaming desktop if the price tag doesn't manage to scare you away.

What’s in a name? HP goes for an emotion to describe its high-end computers: Envy. Acer conjures aggressiveness for its gaming PCs: Predator. And Dell uses a spelling-challenged acronym for its best PCs: XPS (Xtreme Performance System). What concept does Digital Storm seek to conjure with its pricey ($2200) Virtue midtower gaming rig—moral superiority?

The company’s actual goal isn’t quite that lofty. “We noticed there are not many PC manufacturers designing mid-tower gaming systems with the same ardor and attention that ultra-tower PCs receive,” Digital Storm’s director of product development, Rajeev Kuruppu, said when the Virtue was announced. “As its name suggests, Virtue represents a higher standard of PC gaming, both in terms of aesthetics and performance.”

Robert Cardin"Modest" might have been a better name for this PC, given its unassuming enclosure.

To reach that standard, Digital Storm packed an unlocked Intel Core i7-4770K CPU from Intel’s new Haswell family of processors, 16GB of DDR3-1600 memory, and Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 780 discrete graphics card into a compact steel-and-brushed-aluminum case. (The Virtue also comes with Windows 8.) The result is a compact gaming rig that delivered a very respectable Desktop WorldBench 8.1 score of 399. It fell just short of the cheaper Micro Express MicroFlex 47B’s score of 421, though the latter is a full-size tower and has a more powerful video card. Why? While neither manufacturer elected to overclock its system, Micro Express splurged with a 512GB SSD where Digital Storm provides just a 120GB SSD. As a result, the MicroFlex performed much better on our productivity benchmarks.

The Virtue looks much more interesting on the inside.

On the gaming front, the Virtue bested the MicroFlex 47B on both our synthetic and real-world benchmarks, delivering a 3DMark Cloud Gate score of 26214 versus the MicroFlex's 24864 at a resolution of 1920 by 1080 pixels. With real games and visual quality set to Ultra, the Virtue just missed reaching the coveted 60-frames-per-second mark with Dirt Showdown at 2560-by-1600-pixel resolution (it hit 57.3 fps, versus the MicroFlex 47B’s 41.4 fps). The same goes for BioShock Infinite at those settings: Digital Storm’s system reached an impressive 55.4 fps compared with the Micro Express tower’s frame rate of 46.9.

The Virtue can accommodate a second two-slot video card, but not more.

If you’re considering a midtower system, you probably don’t want a plus-size PC sucking up a lot of floor or desktop space. And if you want something small, you probably expect it to be quiet, too. Digital Storm accomplishes that goal in part with a Corsair H100i liquid-cooling system that consists of a CPU water block and a 240mm radiator mounted to the top of the case. This machine won’t keep you up at night or interfere with movie-watching or music-listening sessions.

Despite its smaller case dimensions (17.7 inches high by 17.7 inches long by 8.3 inches wide), the Virtue has plenty of room for expansion inside. If you want higher frame rates with games, throw in a second graphics card (you can configure the Asus Gryphon Z87 micro ATX motherboard to operate with one x16 PCIe 3.0 slot or two x8 PCIe 3.0 slots, and it supports both Nvidia’s SLI and AMD’s CrossFire multi-GPU standards). The system’s 1050-watt power supply, Corsair’s Pro Series HX1050, provides more than enough juice to support such a configuration.

Our test Virtue came with a 1TB, 7200-rpm WD Caviar Black hard drive in addition to a 120GB Corsair Neutron GTX SSD, leaving room for one additional 3.5-inch drive and three more SSDs. A Blu-ray player/DVD burner resides in one of the 5.25-inch drive bays (the second bay is mostly blocked by the radiator mounted on the top of the case).

Two USB 3.0 ports as well as microphone and headphone jacks are conveniently located on the front of the machine. Four additional USB 3.0 ports, four USB 2.0 ports, gigabit ethernet, S/PDIF out, and the usual analog audio ports are around back. The video card’s mounting bracket has ports (one each) for dual-link DVI, single-link DVI, HDMI, and DisplayPort.

The Virtue is jam-packed with quality components that enable it to deliver the performance of machines twice its physical size. Its dimensions and motherboard won’t let you go beyond two video cards, but it delivers solid performance on today’s games with the one card it has now. Gamers will love the Virtue, even if their wallets won't.

From PC World. Electronics product reviews and advice for best reference

Free Chrome extensions power up Gmail

Gmail offers powerful customization options even if you don’t install a single browser extension. You can switch keyboard shortcuts on and off, modify individual shortcuts, enable experimental features, and more.

But there are some things even Gmail’s extensive customization settings can’t do, and that’s where these free Chrome extensions shine. They range from gentle tweaks to a full-blown Gmail makeover. You decide how drastically you want to change Gmail.

Before changing Gmail or piling on the extensions, it’s a good idea to master what it can do straight out of the box. Keyboard shortcuts are one of Gmail’s best features: They let you compose, archive, forward, and reply to messages; move between labels; search; and more—all without reaching for your mouse.

Alas, they’re also hard to learn. After enabling keyboard shortcuts in the Settings screen, you can press the question-mark key on your keyboard to summon a semi-transparent overlay listing all shortcuts. But for many of us, looking at a long list isn’t the best way to learn—and KeyRocket for Gmail thinks it can do better.

Every time you use the mouse to do something your keyboard can do, KeyRocket for Gmail lets you know the keyboard shortcut.

KeyRocket sits in the background as you use Gmail and quietly watches your every move. As soon as you tick the checkbox next to a message, up pops a discreet notification informing you that you could have just pressed the X key on your keyboard to do the same thing. When you click the Reply button, KeyRocket informs you that pressing R on your keyboard would have worked just as well. Because the messages are contextual, they are much more useful than a help sheet: You learn in bite-size chunks, and only about those functions you actually use.

KeyRocket makes key combinations easy to learn.

The one shortcoming to this contextual coaching is that KeyRocket doesn’t learn as it watches you. It should be able to tell when you already know a shortcut and just prefer using the mouse every once in a while. For example, if I type the pound-symbol key (#) to delete a message most of the time, KeyRocket shouldn’t tell me about the ‘#’ shortcut every time I break from routine and use the mouse. Despite this minor flaw, however, KeyRocket is an excellent learning aid for Gmail.

Most emails consist of just plain text, although Gmail’s excellent message editor lets you do some formatting without reaching for the mouse (press Ctrl-K to insert a link, for instance). But sometimes you may want to use a bit of extra formatting—like, say, for a headline. Or perhaps you often email code snippets and would like to use some automatic syntax coloring. Markdown Here is an unobtrusive extension that lets you use the popular Markdown plain-text-to-HTML converter within Gmail to convert your text into well-formed HTML.

Markdown Here offers fine-grained settings for controlling the CSS that’s included with your formatted emails.

With Markdown Here, you can write an email using Markdown, and then press Ctrl-Alt-M and watch it transform into a beautiful, richly formatted message. You can apply syntax highlighting to code listings, use multiple levels of headlines, and more. Don’t like the formatting? Press the Markdown shortcut again (Ctrl-Alt-M), and your email reverts to plain text so that you can tweak it.

To format any Markdown text as HTML, simply select it, right-click, and click Markdown Toggle.

You can also use Markdown Here when replying to an email: Just highlight the part of the message you wish to format with Markdown, and press the key combination. That combination doesn’t have to be Markdown’s Ctrl-Alt-M; I like to use just Alt-M, and Markdown Here lets me customize that. And if you often email code snippets, you can even pick one of several themes for syntax-highlighted code.

Note that adding HTML and CSS to email messages can cause problems with some email clients, so if you’re using this for a mailing list, offer a plain-text version as well.

When I send an email, I often want to be reminded if the recipient hasn’t replied within a few days. Follow-up, unfortunately, is a feature that Gmail lacks. That’s why I was so happy to find Right Inbox for Gmail.

Right Inbox for Gmail makes it easy to specify when you want to be reminded of an email, and whether or not you want to track it.

Right Inbox for Gmail is just one option in a highly competitive market of email-reminder and follow-up services. There’s Boomerang, which is pretty costly if you’re using Google Apps ($15 per month). Followup.cc is client-agnostic, but that also means it doesn’t integrate into Gmail. Right Inbox for Gmail offers seamless integration and an affordable price. This $5-per-month service adds a couple of new buttons that blend in well with Gmail’s native ones. Click them, and presto: You can now follow up on and track emails.

When composing a new email, just click the Remind Me button to set a follow-up time. Right Inbox for Gmail offers several preconfigured times, ranging from a set number of hours to ‘tomorrow morning’ or ‘tomorrow afternoon’. You can’t configure your own favorite intervals (one of the service’s few annoyances), but you can pick other intervals using a calendar pop-up.

When a recipient opens your tracked email, Right Inbox for Gmail sends you a detailed report including the recipient’s location and IP address.

Right Inbox for Gmail also lets you schedule emails to be sent automatically at a later time.

You can also set email tracking to notify you when a recipient opens an email. Tracking uses a small, invisible image embedded into the email, so it works only if the recipient opts to display images included with the email (many email clients don’t display images by default).

Email notifications are like coffee: Some people can’t stand them, while others are addicted and even use notifications to wake them up in the morning. Those in the latter camp may like Checker Plus for Gmail. Like every other mail checker, it lets you know when new emails arrive ... but that’s where other email checkers stop and Checker Plus is just getting started.

Checker Plus for Gmail can read email notifications aloud—not a feature you’d want to use in a crowded office.

Checker Plus lives as a small button on the Chrome toolbar, showing a tiny unread message counter. Click the button, and a complete, working mini-Gmail interface pops up over the current window. You can view your inbox, archive messages, directly open them, and more.

Checker Plus also shows a pop-up window whenever a new email comes in. The pop-up includes the basic details of the email so you can decide whether to respond now or later. It can also chime an alert and read aloud some information about the email, so you know what it’s about even if you aren’t looking at your Web browser. By default, the read-aloud option is enabled only if your keyboard is inactive for a short period of time (you can adjust the interval).

Checker Plus lets you customize everything from the notification icon’s theme to the way summaries are formatted in the notifications.

Checker Plus’s rich customization options let you choose how you wish to be alerted (or interrupted). You can enable or disable chimes, text-to-speech, and pop-up notifications. You can set alerts for specific email labels, select a color scheme for the pop-up notifications, and even tweak the appearance of the toolbar icons in minute detail. It’s one of the most configurable Chrome extensions I’ve seen yet. Nevertheless, it’s still an email notifier, which can be as distracting as it is helpful.

All the extensions discussed so far sit on top of Gmail’s regular Web interface—some invisibly (like Markdown Here), and some subtly (like Right Inbox). If you were looking over someone’s shoulder while they used Gmail, you could easily miss them. This next one, however, might cause a few double-takes: Gmail Offline, an extension by Google, puts a completely different face on Gmail—one that resembles the Android tablet version.

Even if you’re working while connected, you may appreciate Gmail Offline’s clean, uncluttered looks.

To me, Gmail Offline is a bit of a misnomer. Yes, the extension lets you use Gmail without an Internet connection: When you’re offline, you can read your mail and write replies in an Outbox, where the messages are saved and then sent as soon as you’re connected. But that’s not the most noticeable thing about the extension.

Gmail Offline looks nothing like Gmail. It features a dual-pane interface, where you can toggle the left pane to show either messages or labels, while the right side shows the current thread, so you can move quickly between email conversations. This split view is now available on Gmail’s regular Web interface, but the aesthetic is completely different. Whereas the regular Gmail is flat and minimalistic, the Offline version is much more colorful, with subtle gradients and large, chunky buttons.

Gmail Offline can either be used as an alternative Gmail interface while connected, or as an offline client.

The regular version of Gmail supports far more shortcuts than Gmail Offline, but many of the essentials are here: You can compose a new message, reply, forward, archive, and more—all using the keyboard. Most of the shortcuts that are missing are for functions that Gmail Offline doesn’t have, such as chat.

Overall, Gmail Offline is an excellent addition to the regular Gmail client, and a new way to use a tool you probably depend on every day.

No matter how much you love Gmail, it could always do more for you...and with one or more of these helpers, it will. If you want a streamlined, offline-friendly Gmail, Gmail Offline is a good pick. Markdown Here enhances the look of the emails you send, and Right Inbox for Gmail tracks them. Checker Plus for Gmail alerts you to incoming missives. If you spend a little time with Keyrocket for Gmail, however, you may soon find you don’t need any more extensions at all.

Endlessly tweaking his workflow for comfort and efficiency, Erez is a freelance writer on a mission to discover the simplest, coolest, and most effective software and websites to make tomorrow happen today.
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Faster Than a PS3: Nvidia Mobile Keppler Graphics Will Power Next Tegra CPU

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Review: Primordial's Medusa packs plenty of power but lacks polish

If you live in a world where you can afford to drop $9556 on an enormous, water-cooled gaming PC with four (four!) discrete graphics cards, I envy you. But if you’re thinking of taking the plunge with Primordial Computers’ latest gaming machine, the Medusa, I’d encourage you to look before you leap.

As befits its name, the Medusa is a monstrous computer, with clear tubing snaking through its interior carrying neon-green-tinted coolant. The CPU and each of the system’s four (four!) GPUs have corrosion-resistant nickel-plated water blocks bolted to them. Apart from the absence of a custom paint job, the Medusa is the epitome of excess, with a strip of LED lights festooned around the interior of its gargantuan Corsair Obsidian Series 900D Super Tower case.

ROBERT CARDINPrimordial erred in failing to create some kind of mechanism to support the four Nvidia GeForce GTX Titan video cards that endow the Medusa with the power to crush gaming benchmarks.

But before I dive any deeper into this review, allow me to explain why the Medusa lacks polish: Nvidia’s GeForce GTX Titans are heavy in their own right. Add 10 pounds of nickel-plated cooling blocks distributed among the four, link them together for quad-SLI operation, and you end up with a behemoth. If one card sags, it pulls the other three along with it. And that’s just what happened as the Medusa sat in the PCWorld Labs: The video cards began to droop to such an alarming degree that we wedged a piece of Styrofoam beneath them to keep them from falling out of their PCIe slots. [Editor's note: Primordial Computers contacted us after this review was published to strongly disagree with our opinion that the Titan cards need additional support, and to point out that the machine is covered by a three-year warranty.]

Considering that the Medusa is a custom-built rig, Primordial should have come up with an attractive brace to support the cards and take the strain off of those slots. And that wasn’t the only thing to go south (pun intended) during my evaluation. The Velcro holding an LED light strip inside the case came unglued and fell off right before we packed the machine to send it back to Primordial.

The Series 900D case measures an impressive 25.6 inches tall by 27.2 inches deep. It will fit under a standard 30-inch-tall desk, but just barely. It has room inside for four 5.25-inch devices and up to six hard drives or solid-state drives. Our review unit featured two 120GB SSDs in RAID 0 for blazing-fast speed, supplemented by a 1TB, 7200-rpm hard drive for practical storage. Primordial also put a Blu-ray burner inside. A massive radiator, with three large cooling fans, was mounted inside the top of the case, with four more large fans mounted at the bottom. All the wiring was neatly tied away and hidden as well as possible.

ROBERT CARDINPrimordial's Medusa is a true beast of a PC.

Primordial decided to stick with Intel’s Sandy Bridge architecture, since that’s the company’s only CPU family with a hexacore processor (specifically, Intel’s Core i7-3930K stably overclocked to an impressive 4.5GHz and paired with 16GB of DDR3/1866 memory). But having more cores doesn’t automatically result in higher performance with every application.

The Medusa crushed the competition in the gaming-oriented portions of our testing suite, because those games and benchmarks could take full advantage of its plentiful CPU and GPU cores. With the 3DMark Fire Strike Extreme benchmark set at a resolution of 2560 by 1440 pixels, for instance, the Medusa racked up an impressive score of 12871. Compare that with the results we saw from the Haswell-powered Micro Express MicroFlex 47B, which came to us with just one Nvidia GeForce GTX 680 video card and scored 3393 on that same benchmark.

Switching to real-world game benchmarks, the Medusa delivered an impressive 125.9 frames per second in BioShock Infinite with visual quality set to Ultra and resolution at 2560 by 1600 pixels. The MicroFlex 47B was able to squeeze out just 46.9 frames per second at those settings. We were also able to set up a triple-head array of 30-inch displays to play Dirt Showdown—at resolution of 7680 by 1600 pixels, with maximum quality settings—at a stunning 46.6 frames per second.

Our reference desktop system, an Acer Aspire U all-in-one, was not capable of running BioShock Infinite at these settings. (Click to enlarge chart.)

But games are only one element of our benchmark suite. We include a host of other tests because we expect that you’ll also want to explore creative pursuits (such as editing digital photos and video, and transcoding audio and video files), surf the Web, and generally be productive with your new PC. After all, few people can afford to drop nearly $10K on a new computer just to play.

WorldBench 8.1, which considers performance with creative and productivity apps as well as games, demonstrates a quad-core Haswell can outperform a hexacore Sandy Bridge CPU.

On several of those nongaming benchmarks, the Medusa’s performance was closer to the middle of the pack, because not every app can take full advantage of six CPU cores and four video cards. The Medusa scored very high in GPU-accelerated image editing—no surprise—but it was slightly slower than the MicroFlex 47B at audio editing, and it was only on a par with that machine in our video-editing test. So when all was said and done, the Medusa delivered an impressive Desktop WorldBench 8.1 score of 385—which means that it was 3.85 times faster than our reference desktop—but the MicroFlex 47B topped it with a Desktop WorldBench 8.1 score of 421.

If you’re looking for a pure gaming rig, the Medusa delivers what you need. We haven’t tested anything faster. But anyone spending this kind of money on a new PC should expect polish as well as power. And on that front, the Medusa leaves us stone cold.

Editor's note: This story was updated on July 17, 2013 to add the manufacturer's rebuttal to our opinion of the need for additional for the four video cards. We also added the resolution used to test gaming across three monitors, and we corrected the review to indicate that the LED light strip fell off because the adhesive backing on the Velcro attached to the enclosure failed.

Sarah is a freelance writer and editor based in Silicon Valley. She has a love/hate relationship with social media and a bad habit of describing technology as "sexy."
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New Low Power Haswell Chips to Launch Later This Year

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From Laptopmagazine. Product reviews and advice for best reference

Power up your PDFs with these five free tools

There's no point to drowning in PDF features you don't want (and really, really don't want to pay for) when you can stock your toolbox with exactly what you require. These five freebies push the boundaries of what you can do with a PDF file.

Whether you long to edit, watermark, or otherwise tweak your PDF; add a Creative Commons license, or just cut your PDF down to size, one of these can make your PDFs what you want them to be...for free.

This portable app's website says "Bright Snippet Sire," but everybody calls it Briss. An open-source favorite, Briss crops a section of a PDF file and creates another PDF file of the cropped area. It's easy to use, and it's awfully handy.

Snipping out unwanted areas of a PDF—then saving to a new PDF—is Briss's specialty.

E-bookworms with e-readers have a particular need for Briss. To read a PDF on an e-reader, you normally have to format and convert it, and traditional ebook converters (such as ePub converters) frequently make a hash of PDF conversion. Briss converts two-column pages into single-column pages, cuts out the unnecessary margins, and automatically removes unwanted fluff, such as page numbers and chapter headings. You can successfully pass the resulting clean PDF through an ePub converter.

With Creative Commons licenses, you can distribute your creative work for free and specify the conditions under which it can be used. For example, you can offer your work free for use, provided you receive attribution. Or you can say that it's fine for personal or nonprofit projects to use your work, but that commercial ventures have to pay you. Attaching one of these licenses to the work removes any ambiguity or doubt as to the terms and conditions under which you share your work.

CC PDF Converter helps you find the best Creative Commons license for your creative work (in this case, "you" means Randall Munroe nd "your work" is the webcomic XKCD).

CC PDF Converter converts your Word document, Excel file, or Internet Explorer HTML file into a PDF doc...but it's no ordinary PDF. This free, open-source beta program asks you a series of questions about the type of license you want, then stamps a small but legible Creative Commons license on the pages.

Open-source developer Michael Schierl describes his jPDF Tweak as the "Swiss Army Knife for PDF Files," and it certainly lives up to that promise. With it, you can add watermarks, change the metadata, combine PDF files, encrypt files, make printable booklets, rotate pages, and more. I love this program so much that it has a permanent place on my PC (and there are Linux editions, too).

jPDF Tweak gives you a great deal of control over your images, and it's free and open source.

This Java-based portable app makes a nice addition to the road warrior's USB drive or Dropbox folder. Simply double-click the BAT file to run it. Then load the PDF file from your PC in the "input tab" and choose the next tab you need. When you've made changes, go to the "output" tab to generate your tweaked PDF.

Bear in mind, though, that if a PDF has existing restrictions protected by a password, that password will hold. jPDF Tweak does not allow you to remove or break the password.

PDFill is similar to jPDF Tweak, but with a nicer user interface. As well as the usual features, PDFill includes other goodies, such as file conversion and adding headers and footers. The only downside is that it costs $20 to work watermark-free.

If you don't mind a watermark on your saved files, then don't worry about this nag screen.

In a default installation, a PDF button appears inside Microsoft Word, Excel, and Powerpoint to start PDFill directly. You can also insert the same button into the Internet Explorer browser, and into the Quick Launch and SendTo functions of Windows.These integration options are voluntary and easy to de-select at installation.

PDFill consists of Editor, Writer, and Tools. Editor, whose interface resembles Microsoft Word 2003, is the paid $20 version of PDFill. If you decide not to pay, Editor remains fully functional, but it pops up a nag screen upon saving and stamps a watermark on files. PDFill Editor provides a variety of pro-level functions such as creating form fields; writing, drawing, or highlighting pages in a PDF; and exporting and importing form data; as well as the usual PDF file management tools, such as converting, cropping, and rotating.

PDFill Writer creates PDF files by attaching itself to your PC printer function. When you want to create a PDF, open your printer dialog box and choose the PDFill Writer as your printer.

The watermark an unregistered copy of PDFill Editor adds to saved files can be distracting.

PDFill Tools provides even more editing tools, some of which overlap with the paid Editor. This includes merging, splitting, watermarks, rotating, cropping and much more.

PDFill packs a punch when it comes to PDF editing functions, and the free version is fine for anyone who doesn't mind nag screens and watermarks. That said, the $20 full version is a really good deal, considering the features that you get.

For sheer handiness, it's hard to beat Debenu PDF Tools. It integrates into your Explorer right-click menu, so it's easy to go to town with the PDF editing.

Debenu PDF Tools puts an array of PDF functions in the right-click menu of File/Windows Explorer.

Right-clicking and scrolling down the Debenu menu reveals features such as converting a PDF to an image (and vice versa), combining multiple images into one PDF file instantly, converting a PDF to text, adding and removing passwords, removing all bookmarks or extracting them to a text file, adding or editing metadata, and much more. Any functions that won't work on the selected file are grayed out.

With the PDF Preview function, you can quickly open the file to get a sneak peek, which is nice if you don't have a PDF reader installed.

The Debenu PDF Tools menu has a good selection of features even in the free edition, but many more are available in the $59 Pro edition. Pro includes many more editing features such as adding, editing, extracting, splitting, and removing text and images; removing annotations; and applying digital signatures.

When you think of PDF, don't think of it as a restricted, locked-down file format manageable only with big-ticket Acrobat or still-pricey imitators. These five tools show you that whether you need a Creative Commons license, a PDF book converter, or a wide array of editing tools built into your Windows PC, you can have impressive PDF features for a fraction of the cost…or even for free.

Expatriate Scotsman now living in Wurzburg, Germany, freelance writer, frustrated future bestselling author, obsessed bibliophile. Other interests include trying to understand The Architect in the Matrix movies, decrypting codes and ciphers, and trying to persuade my landlord and my wife to let me have a Highland Cow for a pet.
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Review: Free Clipboard Help+Spell adds a lot of power to your clipboard

On their own, X, C, and V are just three random letters. But combine them with the Ctrl key, and you get one of the most iconic keystroke trios in the history of computing. Cutting, copying, and pasting data is something we all do on a daily basis, so doing it more efficiently can translate into major time savings. Clipboard Help+Spell is a donationware utility by Mouser that does just that.

You may recall developer Mouser from other hits such as Find and Run Robot, Snapshot Captor, and Web Link Captor. And indeed, Clipboard Help+Spell carries his distinctive style: comprehensive Options dialog, multiple interface layouts, and other niceties that add up to the feeling that if you just dig deep enough, you can get Clipboard Help+Spell to do just about anything.

Clipboard Help+Spell's default layout can appear confusing at first.

Much like competitor ArsClip, Clipboard Help+Spell features a powerful pop-up menu that lets you use most of the application's features without having to switch away from the program in use. The menu shows a list of recently copied text snippets, any of which take just a single keystroke to paste in at the cursor. You can also set aside a bunch of favorite clips so that you always have them handy, paste the current date and time in multiple formats, format selected text in various ways (such as title and sentence case), and many other features.

True to its name, Clipboard Help+Spell does contain a spellchecker, but it's not very visible in daily use.

One of the nicest Clipboard Help+Spell features is called the Stack. At any point during your work, you can pop open the menu and set a "start stack" marker. Clipboard Help+Spell then records the series of items you copy, and lets you paste them back in the same sequence, one by one. This is very useful when transferring information manually from a text document into a spreadsheet, for example. You can just focus on finding and copying the information, and paste it into the spreadsheet later. That’s much faster than having to constantly switch back and forth between the document and the spreadsheet.

Clipboard Help+Spell lets you quickly transform selected text in a number of sophisticated ways.

Clipboard Help+Spell does have a built-in spell-checker, but you can't use it through the pop-up menu: You need to switch to the program's main window and select a clip to work on. You can then read through the clip and hunt for words with a red squiggly underline (just like in Microsoft Word), or execute a spell-check on the snippet, which pops open a spelling dialog on every error. So, spellchecking is available, but it isn't the star of the show.

Like many of Mouser's utilities, Clipboard Help+Spell is brimming with customization settings and options.

In truth, most Clipboard Help+Spell users probably won't scratch the surface of this complex and powerful beast. But even if you only use 10% of what it has to offer, you'll still end up with a more powerful and flexible, clipboard. Try it out.

Note: The Download button on the Product Information page will download the software to your system.

Endlessly tweaking his workflow for comfort and efficiency, Erez is a freelance writer on a mission to discover the simplest, coolest, and most effective software and websites to make tomorrow happen today.
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HP Envy Phoenix h9-1420t review: Gaming power in a subtle form

By gaming standards, the HP Envy Phoenix h9-1420t's appearance is positively subdued. This midsize tower PC has some red backlighting and a clear pane so that you can gaze at the liquid cooling unit, but aside from that it could easily pass for a conventional HP desktop. Although it doesn't have much in the way of bling, the Phoenix delivers better-than-average performance at a cheaper-than-boutique price. Down-the-road upgrade options, on the other hand, are limited by its decidedly nonenthusiast motherboard.

Our $1840 h9-1420t test configuration sported an unlocked 3.5GHz Intel Core i7-3770K processor. Thanks to the liquid cooling unit, the system had no problem maintaining 4GHz, and it likely has at least a little more headroom. The Pegatron (that’s Asus’s OEM arm) 2AD5 motherboard offers minimal overclocking controls in its BIOS, but it isn't completely locked down. You can set each core's maximum frequency multiplier separately, but you get no provisions for tweaking the operating voltage, for instance. The board also has just a single full-size PCIe slot, so you can forget any dual-card graphics upgrade via SLI or CrossFire.

Fortunately, HP picked a strong graphics card, inserting an Nvidia GeForce GTX 680 with 2GB of GDDR5 memory. With that card in place, the Phoenix managed a playable frame rate in Dirt Showdown right up to the 2560 by 1600 resolution of our 30-inch test display. The game wasn’t as silky smooth at that resolution as it was at lower ones, but it was certainly playable. Should you decide to buy an h9-1420t online, HP allows you to customize the configuration to a degree, but your options don’t include Nvidia’s best GPU, the GeForce GTX 690.

The other core components on our test machine included 12GB of DDR3-1600 memory and a 2TB, 7200-rpm hard drive, which helped the h9-1420t produce a very good WorldBench 8 score of 87. A solid-state drive would have boosted the score even more, but that option wasn’t available when we ordered our evaluation unit. HP has since corrected that omission, but there’s no getting around that single multilane PCIe slot, which is a puzzling design decision in a PC whose primary reason for existence is performance.

While you can’t add a second video card, the system has lots of room for other components, including one open 5.25-inch drive bay and two free 3.5-inch drive bays, all of which are accessible from the front panel. The graphics card and the liquid cooling unit dominate the area over the motherboard, leaving only two x1 PCIe slots exposed (a third x1 PCIe slot is blocked).

Even though the h9-1420t doesn't have a lot of free slots, it does boast a ton of exterior ports. Slide down the front panel, and you'll find four USB 2.0 ports, as well as the usual array of memory card slots. On top of the front panel, facing rearward, are two USB 3.0 ports plus audio-in and -out. The PC has rear audio outputs to support up to a 7.1-channel surround system, plus an additional four USB 2.0 ports, two more USB 3.0 ports, a single gigabit ethernet port, and an optical S/PDIF port.

You also get two DVI ports, an HDMI port, and a DisplayPort connection on the back of the GTX 680, plus two capped DVI ports off the motherboard that are supported by the integrated Intel HD 4000 graphics (should you ever ditch the discrete GPU).

Most gamers will already have their favorite gaming peripherals, but HP does bundle a keyboard and mouse with the Phoenix. Both input devices are relatively lightweight with a serviceable feel, but no one would ever mistake them for gaming- or even business-grade models.

HP includes Adobe’s Photoshop Elements for editing photos and Premiere Elements for editing videos, but you’ll need to pay extra for Blu-ray player and disc-burning software. The company’s Quick Start app is provided to mimic the Start menu that Microsoft dumped from its latest OS. If you're looking for an even better Start replacement, check out Stardock's Start8 or Iobit's Start Menu 8; the former is $5, while the latter is free.

Our test configuration, with its upgraded video card, unlocked CPU, and midrange storage and memory options, costs $1840, but you can get into the h9-1420T for as little as $1150 with a slower GPU and a locked CPU. At the other end of the scale, you can configure the machine with 32GB of memory and a 4TB RAID 5 setup (three times 2TB, minus 33 percent for redundancy) and hit your bank account to the tune of $2740.

The Envy Phoenix series carries a healthy two-year parts-and-labor warranty, and HP offers extended warranties for up to four years, with on-site service, for less than $200.

If you're not dead set on your gaming PC looking as if it had just escaped from a sci-fi movie, and if you’re sure you’ll never want to upgrade to a dual-video-card setup, the HP Envy Phoenix h9-1420T will give you excellent overall performance and darn good gameplay. The warranty is comforting as well, but we're still wondering why the hardware options stop just shy of state-of-the-art.

Jon L. Jacobi has worked with computers since you flipped switches and punched cards to program them. He studied music at Julliard, and now he power mods his car for kicks.
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Samsung Galaxy S4 Benchmarked: Serious Power, Dim Display

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From Laptopmagazine. Product reviews and advice for best reference

Power through Gmail with 21 time-saving tricks

Gmail is the world's most popular email service, but some of its best features are hiding in plain sight, unknown to most users. Although Gmail provides unsurpassed search capabilities, great spam filtering, and loads of free storage (10GB at latest check), it also offers much more—and there's always room for improvement, too. With a little know-how and some key add-ons, you can make Google's webmail service jump through hoops in ways you never thought possible.

Tired of Gmail's threaded conversation view? Turn it off. Want to learn keyboard shortcuts? A pop-up cheat sheet is built right in. And wouldn’t it be nice if you could save attachments straight to your Dropbox account? Easy enough—with the right tool.

This guide will help Gmail novices and experts alike squeeze more from the service. Most of the tips are based on using Gmail in a Web browser, but be sure to see the "Gmail from the outside in" section to learn how to make the most of Gmail even when you’re not in your browser.

1. Search for big attachments

We quickly found messages containing the word "power" and 15MB of attachments.

Gmail is known for its robust search capabilities, and now it supports another handy search parameter: message size. So if you want to find, say, all email messages that have attachments larger than 10MB, you’d simply search for size:10m. And you can pair that with the “older_than” modifier for searches like size:10m older_than:6m (to get all email larger than 10MB and older than six months).

2. Work offline

Working on an airplane without Wi-Fi? Live in an area where Internet access is slow or spotty? Either way, install Gmail Offline. With it you can read, respond to, compose, search, and archive messages, all of which will be automatically sent or synced the next time you’re online. Just one catch: It requires Google Chrome. If you use another browser, you’re out of luck.

3. Tame messy replies

The longer an email conversation (or “thread”) gets, the harder it becomes to wade through that messy, cluttered explosion of text. That’s because normally, when you click Reply, Gmail quotes the entire original email and all subsequent replies. Thankfully, you have an easy workaround: In the sender's message, select the exact text you're replying to—the meat of the message, as it were—and then click Reply. Now, when Gmail creates the reply, it will include only the highlighted text. Translation: a lot less mess.

4. Turn off conversation view

If you like a more traditional inbox appearance, turn off conversation view.

Speaking of messy, some people would argue that Gmail’s conversation view (also known as message threading) makes things extremely so, as it groups together messages with the same subject. If you’d rather have your messages spread out, and therefore easier to navigate at a glance, head to Gmail’s Settings (under the General tab) and select Conversation view off.

5. Master keyboard shortcuts

KeyRocket suggests keyboard shortcuts for actions you've recently taken.

Hands off the mouse. You can dramatically accelerate your Gmail operations by learning various keyboard shortcuts: R for reply, Ctrl-K to insert a link, Ctrl-Enter to send, and so on. For a full, pop-up list of available shortcuts, press Shift-? while viewing your Gmail inbox. Google also has a webpage that lists all Gmail shortcuts. And if you’re a Chrome user, you can learn shortcuts much faster by installing the KeyRocket for Gmail add-on, which teaches you while you work.

6. Make important messages bubble to the top

Email from work, friends, relatives—important. Email from stores, Facebook, and people you don’t know—less important. Gmail’s Priority Inbox feature can prioritize your mail so that the important stuff appears at the top, where it’s less likely to get lost in the shuffle. To enable the feature, head to Settings, click the Inbox tab, and choose Priority Inbox from the Inbox Type selector. This feature can be a little tricky to wrap your head around, so read Google’s Priority Inbox overview if you need help.

7. Restore the old-school buttons

Buttons without text labels can be confusing. Fortunately, Gmail lets you restore them.

A while back, Gmail replaced most of its buttons—Archive, Delete, Spam, and so on—with icons that some users find cryptic, or at least harder to recognize at a glance. If you’d rather have buttons with text instead of icons, you can restore them: Just go to Settings > General, scroll down to Button Labels, and change the setting to Text.

8. Add a snooze button to your inbox

Not ready to reply? Schedule a reminder.

Can’t attend to a particular message just now? Even if you mark it as unread, newer email will eventually push it down and out of sight. What you need is a way to “snooze” that message, to make it return to the top of your inbox at a designated time. Two great options are Boomerang and Snooze Your Email. Both integrate with Gmail, adding buttons that make it simple to set the delay for a specific number of minutes or days. Boomerang works with Chrome and Firefox and costs $5 per month; Snooze Your Email is free, but works only with Chrome.

9. Turn email into to-dos

Gmail has a built-in task list, but it’s a little anemic—especially if you want to access that list elsewhere. If you’re looking for something more robust, check out Astrid, a free Web-based to-do manager that consistently ranks among users' favorites. The new Remind Me add-on for Google Chrome brings the Astrid service to Gmail: You can view your current tasks and, even better, click a button to turn an email message into a new task.

10. Automatically save Gmail attachments to your favorite cloud

Save your Gmail attachments to four popular cloud-storage services.

Ever wish you could save attachments directly to, say, your Dropbox account? Attachments.me is a free service that can upload Gmail attachments to Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, or SkyDrive. Just install its browser plug-in (available for Chrome and Firefox), and then link it with one or more of the aforementioned cloud services. With that done, it indexes all your attachments and then catalogs them for easy viewing and searching. With just a few clicks, you can view, download, share, or archive an attachment.

11. Give Gmail a social makeover

You know the drill: You get an email message from LinkedIn, Twitter, or the like, and then you have to click a link inside that message to view the connection, link, update, or whatever. PowerInbox embeds all that stuff within Gmail proper, allowing you to view the contents of various social-network messages right inside the messages. This Chrome add-on also lets you perform certain actions, such as commenting on Facebook updates and accepting contact requests.

12. Make your inbox “smartr”

Smartr Inbox brings a Xobni-like sidebar to Gmail.

Outlook expatriates may have fond memories of Xobni, a kind of address book on steroids. Smartr Inbox for Gmail brings that same goodness to your webmail, packing contact info, social-network updates, message histories, and related contacts into an attractive sidebar that you can view or hide as needed. It’s available for Chrome, Firefox, and Safari, and it’s one of those tools you’ll quickly find you can’t live without.

13. Keep branded messages out of your inbox

Keep nonessential email out of your inbox with PhilterIt.

Admit it: Half the clutter in your inbox comes from stores, social networks, and other "branded" sources. PhilterIt for Chrome "philters" all that stuff out of your inbox, relegating it to an icon-laden Gmail sidebar where you can review it later, at your convenience. It’s a quick and easy way to excise inbox clutter, while still keeping the stuff you might want to see.

14. Add attachments from services other than Google Drive

If you’re a Gmail user, you know how easy it is to attach files from your Google Drive. But what if you want to attach something from Box, Dropbox, Evernote, Facebook, or Flickr? Cloudy for Chrome lets you attach files from those services and other cloud hangouts. Just click the Attach button while composing a new message, and then choose a cloud service or social network. You can even attach multiple items from multiple services.

15. Reply to mail faster with canned responses

Canned responses let you quickly insert boilerplate text into email.

Do you routinely find yourself typing out the same replies over and over? Labs feature Canned Responses can save you time, as long as you keep the messages short. After enabling it, just compose or reply to a message, click the More Options arrow, mouse over Canned responses, and choose the one you want. You can also create new ones as needed. It’s not the most elegant addition to Gmail, but it’s definitely a handy one.

16. View messages without clicking through

Ever wish Gmail had a preview pane? You can give it one.

Gmail annoyingly lacks a preview-pane option, which means you have to click any email you want to read and then go back to the inbox and click another—a slow, time-wasting process. Thankfully, Labs feature Message Sneak Peek simplifies things a bit: Just right-click any message to immediately see its contents in a preview window. Even better, enable Preview Pane, which gives you a bona fide preview window alongside your inbox.

17. Mark messages as read with one fewer click

Sometimes the best timesavers are the simplest. If you’ve used, say, Message Sneak Peek to look at an email message and now want to mark it as read without clicking into the More menu, enable Labs feature Mark as Read Button. After selecting one or more messages, you’ll see that button on your toolbar. One click, and presto.

18. Set up smart triggers

Bend Gmail to your will with help from IFTTT.com.

Wouldn’t it be cool if Gmail could notify you via smartphone whenever an email marked "urgent" comes in? Or if it could automatically save starred messages to your Evernote account? Those are just some of the "recipes" available on If This Then That’s Gmail Channel, which also lets you create your own triggers to make Gmail do all kinds of cool things.

19. Add specific Gmail bookmarks to your browser

Add a Compose shortcut to your browser.

When you want to compose a new email message, you know the drill: Open Gmail and then click the Compose button. But you can save a step by adding a bookmark to your browser’s Favorites bar—and not just for Compose, but also for things like Starred, Sent Mail, and even specific labels. Simply click the desired option in your browser, and then create a new bookmark for it by dragging the URL in the browser's address bar over to the browser's Favorites bar. Now you have one-click access to your favorite Gmail functions.

20. Switch to Mailbox for iOS

Want to use the new Mailbox app? Patience.

Though still in beta, Mailbox for iOS is rapidly emerging as the preferred app for using Gmail on your iPhone. Among other features, it lets you "snooze" messages for later (much like tip #8, above). And it definitely promotes the "inbox zero" philosophy of simplifying your email. Best of all, it’s free—though you'll probably have to wait in line to get it.

21. Add PGP encryption to your Gmail email

Concerned about email security? You should be: Webmail in particular tends to be fairly insecure, as evidenced by any number of recent high-profile hacks. Mailvelope (in beta for Chrome and Firefox) lets you exchange encrypted email by way of OpenPGP encryption. You can generate your own public and private keys, and then just click a little lock icon to make sure your mail goes through with heavy-duty protection.

For more than 20 years, Rick Broida has written about all manner of technology, from Amigas to business servers to PalmPilots. His credits include dozens of books, blogs, and magazines. He sleeps with an iPad under his pillow.
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