Lifehacker's Best DVD Ripping Utilities Summary

I know that my readers will appreciate this one! The top five dvd burning utilities as submitted by Lifehacker readers. Nothing revelatory here but it's nice to see some free utilities still at the top of the charts after all of these years (DVD Decrypter and DVD Shrink).

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Open Source Software

Find open source (i.e. FREE!) software alternatives for such expensive packages as Microsoft's OFFICE or Adobe's PHOTOSHOP? You say it can't be done? Click on the link below for all of the details. I routinely use Open Office (the Office alternative) and Gimp (the Photoshop alternative). And my main home computer system is running Ubuntu.

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Bypass the 'Wait Screens' For Popular Download Sites

Skipscreen is a Firefox plugin that will allow you to bypass the 'wait screens' for most of the popular file hosting sites (Rapidshare, MegaUpload, etc.). It doesn't bypass the 'captcha' codes or the download limits but it will autmatically start downloading your files once you get to the right screen.

Get it now because these services will probably quickly bypass this hack (and hopefully this software will continue to be updated).

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jdownloader - Automatic Rapidshare downloader

Download Squad highlighted this piece of software yesterday and I have to say that it is pretty cool if you are a blog-reader like me who downloads lots of Rapidshare files. Copy the URL's of all of the Rapidshare files that you wish to download and this program will automatically download them all for you. It still does them one at a time but it is completely automatic, including entering the 'captcha' codes and waiting for the timer to time out. I set it up to download a bunch of files while I was sleeping and it worked like a charm.

It is a java program so it is also cross platform. It works pretty well on my Linux box (but don't download the updates when you start the program as that seems to crash it every time). The program is also written in German so you need to know a little German to switch it to English (or follow the instructions at the provided link).

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