Hang on to your paint brushes because there's a new form of art that outpaints Picasso, Monet, or Van Gogh.

Yeah that's right. It's ASCII Art! Otherwise known as text art or drawing pictures with notepad!

ASCII art, unmatched in its beauty, simplicity, and it's uniqueness to use the common keyboard characters to graphically draw a picture, amazes most computer users!

Take a look at what I did in a few minutes!!

How did I do it?

Fine alright. I admit that I didn't completely make this piece of art by myself, but I did get the help of a very useful piece of software. ASCII Artist!

Drawing a picture is not nearly hard as typing one up. However, what if there was a way to 'type' a picture in less than a few seconds? Wouldn't that be cool? You can draw a flower by using 0s and 1s. You can paint a car and show it off to your friends. You can even compose an image of yourself with excruciating detail, making it look exactly like the original picture!

Luckily, for you, there is a way and here's what you need to do!

• Download ASCII Artist.
• Select a picture.
• Click 'Make ASCII Picture' and you're done!
  

It's so easy. Like 1,2 and 3 and your ASCII masterpiece is done!

Download ASCII Artist today!

Ever had a long link such as: http://www.somesite.com/somefolder/somesubfolder/somepage.html?

Have trouble remembering it? Have trouble sharing it with your absent minded friends? Just can’t be bothered to re-visit again without bookmarking it?

Hmm, seems like there is a lot of lazy people these day, but fortuneately for you guys, today, we take a quick look at Url Shorteners.

What is a Url Shortener?

An URL shortener shortens your URL or link. So for our above example, would it be nice if we shortened:

http://www.somesite.com/somefolder/somesubfolder/somesubsubfolder/somepage.html

To:

www.tinyurl.com/somesite?

That way, you just need to remember the URL Shortener tinyurl and the bit after it, somesite, so that when you visit www.tinyurl.com/somesite, it takes you to the long and bothersome website: http://www.somesite.com/somefolder/somesubfolder/somesubsubfolder/somepage.html. Neat huh?

More, How do URL Shorteners work?

For this example, we will use TinyUrl, because it is the most popular URL Shortener. URL Shorteners work simply by these steps:

1. Go to TinyUrl

2. Enter your long url

3. (Optional). You can set a set a custom name, known as a alias, for your tinyurl

3. Click ‘Create TinyUrl’

4. Success. Now you can copy and share your URL

Now What?

Now that you are done with making your short link, you can share it with your friends on facebook, myspace, and so forth. For example, i can now email my friend saying:

“Hey man, check out my blog! http://tinyurl.com/my12345blog“

The advantages of shortened urls are that they are easy to remember and extremely short compared to your original url.

More Services of TinyUrl

TinyUrl isn’t the only url shortener out there, there is also:

1. Adf.ly

Adfly gives users the ability to shorten their long url and also earn about 1 cent each time someone visits your URL. If you have a lot of friends or a popular internet blog that receive a lot of visitors, adding an URL shortened with adf.ly can earn you heaps. Sign up here.

2. Tiny.cc

Tiny.cc is similar to TinyUrl, both shorten links and allow custom names. The only difference is that tiny.cc is shorter. You can check out tiny.cc here.

3. Goo.gl

Goo.gl is another popular URL Shortener service. Being provided by Google, goo.gl is similar to tiny.cc and tinyurl.com, with the exception that it does not allow custom names.

4. Bit.ly

Bit.ly was a popular url shortener until TinyUrl and Tiny.cc gained popularity. Bit.ly allows users to sign up, something TinyUrl and Tiny.cc does not offer, and track the visitors to their link. Bit.ly does not offer custom url names.

5. Ow.ly

Even though it is not as popular as the above 4 services, ow.ly is another great URL shortening service that does the same function as the rest; shortening an url. Ow.ly does not offer custom names, and requires an annoying captcha code, but overall is worth checking out.

It's normal to be tired of staring at your Windows shutdown screen for minutes everyday. After finishing using our computer, most of us know that it takes at least a minute to shutdown, but what if there was a faster way?

What if there is a way to shutdown your computer in less than a second? The time looking at the endless 'Shutting Down...' can be used to do better things. Wouldn't you agree?

Fortunately for you, today, at XetoWare, we have released a free software than you can download and install within seconds, just like other XetoWare programs. It's called 'Fast Shutdown'. Fast Shutdown allows you to choose from it's menu:

• Fast Shutdown. This shuts down your computer in less than three seconds.
• Fast Restart. This restarts your computer in less than three seconds.
• Instant Shutdown. This shuts down your computer almost instantly, however can cause data loss to unsaved work.

Just make sure that you save all your work before shutting down or restarting, or else a project that you've worked two hour on can all be lost!

What to do now?
Download Fast Shutdown and stop spending your waiting for your machine to shutdown. Download HERE.