Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Freeware

If you've ever upgraded Outlook, tried to keep your contacts and calendar when migrating to a new computer, or plugged a PDA into your PC, odds are you've got a few duplicate items in Outlook. Outlook Duplicate Items Remover can help you find and remove those duplicates.

ODIR is a free Windows utility that integrates itself with Outlook. Once installed, you should notice a new ODIR menu in Outlook. When you click Remove Duplicate items, you can choose any Outlook folder to scan. ODIR can handle contacts, calendar items, tasks, notes, or emails.

The utility scans contacts to find identical first and last names, email addresses and company names. If you've got two items that are similar, but not identical, ODIR may still try to move one to a new folder. Becuase the program isolates your duplicates instead of deleting them, you can always go into the new folder and move them back.

[via SolSie]

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Filed under: Internet, Utilities, Web services

Someone tells you that they live 3.2 miles away, and instantly your brain starts turning, trying to figure out things like how long it would take to walk there, to ride a bike, or to drive a car. But what if you can't quite comprehend 3.2 miles? Wouldn't it be easier if someone said it was the equivalent of 47 football fields?

No? Yeah, we didn't think so. But that's exactly the sort of information you can get from SensibleUnits. Just type in any length or weight, using pounds, kilograms, centimeters, inches, feet, miles or kilometers, and SensibleUnits will spit out useful information letting you know how many cats, textbooks or cans of baked beans it would take to match your weight.

The information is almost completely pointless. And after a while you start to notice that you're getting the same measurements each time you type in similar weights. But that didn't stop us from wasting about a half hour entering measurements and marveling at the results.

[via StumbleUpon]

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Filed under: Internet, Video, Web services

Some online video sites like Hulu have gotten a lot of flack for being unavailable outside of the US. But you know what? It's expensive to stream video over the internet. And it's even more expensive to secure the right to stream copyrighted works internationally. It's also much easier to sign advertising deals in some countries than others, which helps justify the streaming costs.

So how do other online video sites like Veoh pay for worldwide video streaming? It turns out they don't. This weekend a number of Veoh users around the world started reporting on Wikipedia that access was blocked in their countries. And today NewTeeVee confirmed that Veoh has turns off service for all but 33 countries.

Veoh says it's maintaining service in the countries where it has the most viewers, and that only 10 percent of its audience comes from the countries that are experiencing service cuts. The company reportedly is not running out of money, but is trying to focus ont he countries where it has the best chances of actually making money. Again, this all makes perfect sence. But it still stinks if you live in Venezuela, Argentina, the Dominican Republic, the United Arab Emirates, Lebanon, Romania, Thailand, South Africa, or any of the other countries where Veoh is reportedly no longer available.

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Filed under: Internet, Web services, Social Software, web 2.0

Want to know if a movie's worth checking out? You could read reviews written by people you've never met. Or you could ask a friend or two who has already seen the movie. or you could ask a few thousand Twitter users. FlixPulse takes the latter approach.

FlixPulse is sort of like Rotten Tomatoes. But instead of compiling average ratings from dozens of professional movie reviews, FlixPulse scans Twitter for mentions of current movies. Then real live human beings look at each tweet and decide whether the comment was good, bad, or indifferent. The result shows up as a percentage on the main page, and if you click on a movie title you can read the actual messages left by Twitter users.

The concept is kind of cool. But since most people probably don't realize that their remarks are being aggregated, it's not clear that random Twitter users are providing accurate reviews. Every movie on the front page of FlixPulse has a score well above 50%, which means that either every movie in theaters right now is awesome, or people are more likely to comment on films they liked.

[via Data Mining and The Net Savvy Executive]

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Filed under: Finance, Internet, Google, Yahoo!

A number of web sites have been offering free stock quotes for years. But they've always been delayed by about 15 minutes or so. While 15 minutes doesn't sound like a lot, if you've dumped a lot of money into one stock and it's tanking, you want to know as soon as possible. The solution has been to sign up for subscription-based services like E*Trade.

Now it looks like you can save your money. A whole slew of companies including Google, Yahoo!, CNBC, and the Wall Street Journal have announced the availability of real-time stock quotes. For free.

Yahoo! has partnered with BATS, while a slew of other companies have partnered with NASDAQ to provide the up to the minute stock quotes.

[via paidContent]

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Filed under: Internet, Microsoft, Search

If you can't convince people to use your applications or web services over your competitor's, what's the best way to gain market share? Bundle your products and services with the operating system so that people won't have to go out of their way to use them.

Microsoft has obviously known this for a long time, and got into a spot of trouble in the EU a few years back for bundling Internet Explorer with Windows XP (among other things). So it should come as no surprise that Microsoft and HP announced a deal today that will make Microsoft's Live Search the default search engine on all computers the company ships starting in January.

HP will also install the Live Search Toolbar for Internet Explorer which also provides links to HP services including Snapfish. There's no word on how much Microsoft paid for the deal. Odds are folks who really truly prefer alternate search engines like Google or Yahoo! will change their default search engine at their earliest convenience. But we're willing to bet that an awful lot of people still just use whatever comes with their computer.

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Filed under: Utilities, Productivity, Web services, Mozilla, web 2.0

The question that a lot of people bring up when they're talking about open source extensions and plug-ins is that "What happens when a new version of X comes out, will my favorite plug-in for it work?"

In some cases, especially with Wordpress, unfortunately the answer is often No.

But Firefox has a dedicated community that does a really good job of porting over the most popular extensions to new versions of the browser. This makes not only the community strong, but the browser and the Firefox initiative itself stronger.

Sage is an extension that basically replicates a desktop RSS/Atom reader, but it's really lightweight and integrates with Firefox well. That's what Firefox does well. Seamless experience with software and the web.

The new version that works with Firefox 3 is called "Sage-Too". Kind of like Teen Wolf Too, but better. And with no wolves. And without Jason Bateman. He was great in Juno and Arrested Development, but Teen Wolf was not his shining moment.

We digress.

Here's a Sage-Two feature rundown:

• Reads RSS (2.0, 1.0, 0.9x) and Atom feeds
• Newspaper feed rendering customizable via style sheets
• Feed Discovery
• Integrates with Firefox's bookmark storage and Live Bookmarks
• Imports and exports OPML feed lists
• Technorati and RSS search engine integration
• Support for a number of locales: Argentine Spanish, Catalan, Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Serbian, Slovenian, Spanish, and Swedish
• Simple, one step install / uninstall

Give Sage a shot, and don't forget to sign up for the Lets-Break-The-Download-Record-Day with Firefox!

[via dailygyan]

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Filed under: Fun, Games, Macintosh

We at Download Squad strive to find apps and services that make it easier for you to get things done. If that's what you're looking for, you should stop reading this post now, because once you start playing Neon Tango, you won't be getting anything done for a while. Neon Tango is 50 levels of colorful geometric space-shooter, set to an adrenaline-pumping soundtrack by Digital Droo.

The fun of Neon Tango is in its simplicity. While the visuals are pretty cool, the emphasis is clearly on gameplay. Your ship handles like a dream, and the variety of enemies in the three demo levels was sufficient to hold our interest through a few replays. Because the controls are so responsive, we wholeheartedly recommending playing a little Neon Tango as a break from work. The difficulty level of the game is adjustable, so blowing up rogue shapes can be challenging, but it doesn't have to be frustrating.

Neon Tango carries a $24.95 pricetag, which seems pretty fair for the hours of playing time and replay value you'll get out of it. This is, of course, not taking into account any money you might lose by gaming instead of working. The game will run on a G4 or better, and you can turn off some of the fancy visual effects if it's not fast enough for you.

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Filed under: Fun, Blogging, Web services, web 2.0

Plurk is a new micro-blogging service that looks a lot like a Twitter clone. At face value Plurk allows you to post updates letting people know what you're up to. You know, telling everyone you're brushing your cat, or feeding your hair, or trying to break the world beer drinking record whilst standing on your head.

The normal stuff.

There might be more that meets the eye to this little service though.

Right off the bat, here are some features that make Plurk stand out:

• No character restrictions
• More elegant display of your "timeline", with Ajax drag and drop capability
• Pre-set emoticons and prefixes such as "was, is, will"

Pretty basic stuff, right?

Well here are the two potential game changers:

• Karma Points
• Cliques

What are Karma points? Basically it's a measure of how active you and your Plurk friends are on the site. The more Plurk services you use (such as instant messaging or uploading a profile picture) the more points you'll rack up.

And what are cliques? Well you know the answer to that. It's the ability to group your friends together into categories that you choose. Pownce lets you do this already, and so does Facebook...but the possibilities are endless with this one. Think of being able to send updates to very unique groups of people. Family, friends, possible investors or colleagues. You could spend an infinite amount of time shuffling your cliques based on what's happening around you. Has someone fallen off the map or lost favor with you? Then they're out of the clique. It's sticky AND useful.

Twitter's downtime and focus on marketing over substance has maddened a lot of people. Who will be there to clean up the mess? Don't shirk, it might be Plurk. On the other hand, Plurk may have to deal with the same scaling and reliability issues as Twitter. The service was down for a brief period this morning. What do you think? Are you ready to leave Twitter for a service that offers more features? Or would you rather stick to a network that already has a loyal userbase?

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Filed under: Utilities, Web services, Adobe, web 2.0

Adobe has built a suite of online office applications to compliment Buzzword, the company's online word processor. We've covered Buzzword in the past. It's pretty, fast, and not really all that much more useful than similar products from Google or Zoho. Here's a rundown of the other applications you'll find at Acrobat.com:

• ConnectNow: A web conferenceing tool that lets you share your desktop with others, chat, talk over a VoIP connection, or share files and mark up whiteboards.
• Share: Selectively share files with other users. Adobe Share lets you send files to a list of contacts, and lets the recipients view PDF image, and video files online.
• Create PDF: Seriously, do we need to tell you what this does?
• My Files: Store and organize up to 5GB of files online.

You'll notice that Acrobat.com doesn't have a complete office suite. There are no spreadsheet or presentation applications. But that 5GB of free storage space is pretty attractive.

Adobe has also released Acrobat 9, an updated version of its desktop PDF reader. The biggest change in Acrobat 9 is support for embedded Flash, which means you might start finding PDF documents with embedded YouTube videos or other Flash content.

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