Don’t limit your PC to running bread and butter tasks as it’s not too dissimilar from buying a Ferrari and driving it to the corner shop.
1. Make cash with live PC support
You may be used to helping people solve their PC problems, so why not use your knowledge to earn a little extra cash? You’ll need a website with FTP access and MySQL support. Install LiveZilla to add live chat, where site visitors can click a button to open a chat window on your PC. Then sign up at PayPal, go to the Merchant Services tab and create a ‘Buy Now’ button with your charges. Integrate this with the LiveZilla button and people will only be able to chat if they pay first.
2. Create your own wireless hotspot
Sharing your broadband is easy thanks to a little-known Windows 7 feature called Virtual Wi-Fi. It turns your internet connection into a software-based wireless router. Once set up, any nearby friend with a laptop, iPod Touch or other Wi-Fi-enabled device will be able to see your system, connect to it and access the internet.
It’s an impressive feature, but there’s a problem – you need compatible drivers for your wireless device, and right now they’re hard to find. Check with your manufacturer to see what’s available. Or, if you know your chipset, take a look at the small print for Intel’s latest 32-bit and 64-bit drivers to see what might work for you.
If you’re in luck and you find a driver that supports virtual Wi-Fi, you should be able to start your hotspot manually. Click Start, type cmd, right-click ‘cmd.exe’ and select ‘Run As Administrator’. Then enter the command netsh wlan set hostednetworkmode=allow ssid=private key=passphrase, replacing ‘private’ and ‘passphrase’ with your own choices, and making sure that the passphrase is easy to remember yet impossible for anybody else to guess.
Activating the hotspot
Next, enter the command netsh wlan start hostednetwork to fire up your hotspot. Finally, click ‘Control Panel | Network and Internet | Network and Sharing Centre | Change Adaptor Settings’, right-click your internet connection and select ‘Properties’. Click the Sharing tab, check the ‘Allow other network users to connect…’ box and choose your virtual Wi-Fi adaptor. Anyone nearby should now be able to see the virtual router you’ve just detected and connect to it once they’ve entered your passphrase.
Virtual Wi-Fi encrypts your new hotspot with WPA2 for the best possible security.
Too much like hard work? You could create a batch file to run the netsh commands, but there’s an even simpler alternative: install Virtual Router and the entire set-up process will be automated for you.
3. Read the classics
When you’re stuck for some reading material and don’t want to pay to download ebooks to your reader, why not settle down with one of those classics you’ve always meant to read? You can do so for free at the Project Gutenberg.
If you already know the surname of the author of the book you’re interested in, simply enter it into the ‘Author’ input box at the top left of the main page and hit [Enter] to see the list of works included in the archive. You can also click the ‘Browse Catalogue’ link to select an author or title by its initial letter.
If you don’t know what to read, click the ‘Bookshelf’ link to sort the archive by subject. Click ona bookshelf to access several sub-bookshelves and fi nally the books themselves. Now click on a book to download it.
4. Control your apps with mouse gestures
Mouse gestures are productivity-
boosting shortcuts. Instead of clicking a button or using the keyboard, just hold down a mouse button and move the cursor in a certain way to get the job done. Your apps don’t support them? Not a problem: install StrokeIt and it’ll give you time-saving gestures for the desktop (minimise or restore all windows), Media Player (zoom, play, stop), Explorer (back, forward) and more.
Other gestures work just about everywhere – for instance, drawing a U-shape with the mouse sends an Undo command to the foreground application, whatever it is. And if you can’t find a gesture for the action you’re after anywhere, simply click ‘File | New Action’ and create it for yourself.
5. Remote control your PC via Twitter
Twitter can be useful. No, really. Install TweetMyPC and you’ll be able to lock, shut down or reboot your PC, download a file, send a file on your PC to a Gmail address and more just by tweeting.
First, create a Twitter account. Turn off public access to this so that people can’t see what you’re doing (click ‘Settings | Account’ and then check the ‘Protect my tweets’ box). Don’t follow anyone on this account.
Next, download TweetMyPC, enter your log-in details and click ‘Save And Close’. To see if it works, type a tweet like Screenshot. All being well, TweetMyPC will take a screenshot of your PC, post it online and send a link to your Gmail address.
6. Share a mouse and keyboard
Synergy is far better than using a KVM switch. It enables you to control multiple PCs with one keyboard and mouse – even if they’re running different operating systems. First, decide which machine to use as the controller and download Synergy to it. The others will be clients. In the app, click ‘Share this computer’s keyboard and mouse’ and then select ‘Configure’. Now add each PC and that’s pretty much it, bar setting up rules for screen size scaling. When you’re done with the dominant PC, install Synergy on the others, select ‘Use another computer’s shared keyboard and mouse’ and enter the hostname of your main PC.
7. Make a Wi-Fi CCTV system
With the right software, your PC could become a powerful home security system, monitoring several areas simultaneously and alerting you at the first sign of any intruders. All you need is a collection of webcams and some know-how.
Vuse Active Webcam to create a CCTV system for your home.
Firstly, install the trial version of Active WebCam. It displays a ‘Trial version’ logo but won’t time out, so it’s good enough for us. Launch the program, set up a camera and select ‘Settings | Motion Detection’. Make sure motion detection is turned on, with the sensitivity you need it to be (turn it down if there’s a pet wandering around to reduce the chance of accidental alerts) and tell the program to alert you via email should it detect something.
Now click ‘File | New Camera’ to add each new camera, using the Motion tab to define how it’s treated. That’s just about it. Test Active WebCam by sending someone into each area and confirming that you’re notified, then just leave the program to watch over your home.
8. Change the world
Distributed computing is a way of combining the spare computing power of numerous PCs to help analyse complex scientific data, allowing scientists to speed up their research. This method is famously used by SETI, who exploit it to analyse the skies for signs of extra-terrestrial life, but there are many other projects that could use your computer’s help.
Your spare runtime can be funnelled off to help people who are really trying to make a difference – and all you need to do is download a small program onto your PC. Forget searching for little green men: distributed computing projects cover everything from modelling drugs in the fight against AIDS to monitoring climate change, researching different ways to end our reliance on fossil fuels and probing the limits of our knowledge about the universe.
Lending a hand
World Community Grid has a list of projects that you can join. Among their number are those trying to model drugs to fight muscular dystrophy and various forms of cancer. There are also groups discovering new drugs by studying how proteins fold, and even people trying to find ways to make eco-friendly fuels and more productive rice strains to feed the world more efficiently.
Change the world the easy way by adding your PC to distributed computing projects like this one trying to find new treatments for AIDS.
BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) also has a list of groups who want your help to push back the boundaries of research. It includes projects trying to model climate change, attempting to stop the spread of malaria and trying to create artificial intelligence by reverse engineering the brain. If you fancy looking out into the cosmos you can even get involved with tracking asteroids that could harm the Earth or trying to detect gravitational waves.
9. Access your to-do list anywhere
Although there are many online tools out there offering to-do lists and reminder services, Remember The Milk stands out because of the number of sites and services that you can add it to – making checking your to-do list easy no matter what you’re doing. You can receive Remember The Milk reminders via email, SMS and various instant messenger services, and you can add them to (and even edit them from) your Google calendar. You can even add a Remember The Milk to-do list to the right-hand side of your Gmail homepage, giving you a visual reminder of what you need to do next each time that you sign in to check your email.
10. Get classic movies free
Many films from the golden age of cinema have fallen out of copyright. This means that it’s now legal to download and watch many films and short features in your home. To make sure that you stay on the right side of the law, however, it’s best to download them from a legal cinema archive.
One such archive is Public Domain Torrents, which provides content as torrents. You’ll have to install a torrent client such as Vuze to download the files, but once done you’ll have access to a large number of classics including Laurel and Hardy, Charlie Chaplin and some surprisingly good forgotten gems.
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