Online Observations

A great place online for all your tools and utilities needs

If you are a person who has to provide IT support to your friends and family, then I have found just the thing for you, but before that, answer this question – how many times have you asked a family member to go download AVG and have them come back to you asking where to download it from? Yes, I though so. Well the person who has put together this site (hang on, I will reveal the name in a second) has had an even worse experience. His family member accidentally downloaded spyware when he asked her to AVG from FileHippo.

So, he decided that he had had enough, and he put together a site where he will start storing all utilities that you would ever need, so that he can provide safe links to his family and friends for downloading software. And he made it public so that others can benefit from this store as well. Allow me to introduce MSunderground – an add free repository of useful tools and utilities (and here’s the link to the incident with his family member).

This is the “promise” of the site: We want to provide the easiest means possible for people to get the software they need. Without ads, flashy banners, and built in adware.

And he intends to be free forever for this service. But if it becomes popular, all these files have to be stored somewhere, and all the bandwidth has to be paid for, and so he has a link where if you like, you can donate to the cause. I hope many people donate to him so that he can meet the cost of hosting and bandwidth for this great site.

And I wish that this site becomes larger than all those stupid money-grubbing download sites.

Convert Html to PDF

I am a great fan of free tools on the Internet. Tools that do only one thing, and do it well. I don’t care if they are ad supported. That’s what keeps them free after all. And one such tool is hosted on a website called http://html-pdf-converter.com/. As it is obvious by the name, it converts any html page to PDF.

It works simply enough, when you navigate to its home page (http://html-pdf-converter.com/), it asks you to specify the URL of the html page that you want to convert (yes, that is the only caveat, that it has to be hosted on the Internet); then you click a button, and after some gears turn in the background, you get a prompt to download the PDF file which represents the HTML page you just converted.

As I said, it does ONE THING, and DOES IT WELL. Perfect for downloading articles into PDF format from blogs, and then being able to read them offline (or if you have a Kindle, then you are all set).