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TV commercials
spoil any free-to-air capture, but the Internet has spawned freeware
tools that remove commercials automatically. You can even do it
manually with most freeware video editors.
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Can't watch
those West Wing DVD's because they're region 1 and your DVD player is
region 4? Get onto the Web and find the hack tha makes your DVD player
region free. It could be as simple as a few key presses on your DVD
remote. www.videohelp.com/dvdhacks
is a great place to start looking.
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HDTV
broadcasts all have network logo watermarks that spoil the view but
codehackers have developed freeware tools, such as the Logoaway
VirtualDub filter, that can remove those watermarks. It's free, but
also illegal.
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Music DRM can typically be bypassed by burning
it to a music CD and then re-ripping it to a non-DRM format (like MP3).
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Users who don't have a region-free DVD player
can readily convert their
DVD's region by ripping the DVD to a PC's hard disk, stripping the
region coding on the DVD, and re-burning the movie to a blank
recordable DVD.
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Make your DVD burner/DVD-ROM drive region
free. New PC-based DVD drives
give you five chances to change the region lock and then it's locked
for good. But you can bypass that permanent lock with freeware software
that resets your five changes whenever you want. Check out www.videohelp.com/tools?tool=485
for more.
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Upgrade your digital SLR camera for free. The
similarities between
Canon's cheaper EOS 300D digital SLR and the more expensive EOS 10D
have made the 300D a prime candidate for hacking. Some Russians have
hacked together a firmware crack update, with details published on the www.digit-life.com
Web site. Just remember, updating your camera's firmware with this
means you void your warranty.
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Don't get fooled: many popular tweaks for
enhancing XP's performance
are actually XP secrets you don't want to know about. Prefetch tweaks,
disabling the paging file and /or System Restore, Registry cleaners and
RAM optimisers are among the myths debunked at http://tinyurl.com/6akz3,
and there's a link to each credible source for each.
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Check out http://tinyurl.com/7hkkj
to discover secrets for Paint and Defrag, hidden uninstall options for
XP components and inbuilt cheats for Pinball, Minesweeper, FreeCell and
Solitaire.
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You can create cool desktop shortcuts to send
an email, open a Web page, lock your PC and more. Find out how at http://tinyurl.com/e9lh7.
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You can bypass the Welcome screen or Classic
Logon Prompt, even if your
PC has more than one user. The last part of the Microsoft Knowledge
Base article at http://tinyurl.com./n9n2 gives a
procedure that doesn't require editing the Registry.
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Creating a printable list of fonts that you
can use in your Word
documents isn't exactly simple, but there's a cool Word macro you can
create and use (see http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=209205)
which will do the lion's share of the work for you.
