Best Personal VPN

There are a lot of reasons to securely connect a group of computers together over the Internet. File sharing, remote desktop, and gaming are just a few popular applications. But when it comes to VPN, even IT professionals will find it a tedious and complicated topic. Obscure jargons like PPTP, IPSec, SSH, SSL tunneling start to appear and you get everything but fun.

Not until the arrival of Hamachi.

It requires virtually zero configuration. Even a layman can build his/her personal VPN in minutes. Once set up, each of your computer will be assigned a permanent address in the 5. network and can communicate with each other directly using this special address. Needless to say, all traffic is encrypted with the industry proven AES-256 algorithm. Available for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.

Best PDF Creator

If you google for "freeware PDF creator", believe it or not, you get almost 3 million results! Many of the PDF tools are free (as in beer), such as CutePDF, PDF995, Go2PDF, PDF4Free, etc. Yea, it's not difficult at all to locate a free PDF tool, the real challenge is which one is the best?

My vote goes to PDFCreator, a free tool for creating PDF from any Windows applications. It is installed as a virtual Windows printer. It supports PDF encryption for both 40- and 128-bits! It can merge multiple files into a single PDF. As well, it's under GPL so it's 100% free for both home and commercial use!

The tip from me is that in order to create the highest quality PDF files with lossless pictures, you can change the image compression algorithm from "JPEG" to "ZIP", and down sample the resolution to "120". This resolution is generally good enough for distribution.