Sometimes it’s nice to be able to save a web page to your local computer for offline browsing (or you want to view a restricted website at college/work).

You can just save the page to your local machine but this brings in the need to download all the image files, css and anything else associated with the page you are viewing. A much easier way is to just take a screen shot of the page and save it to a file. Thats essentially what HTML – PDF Convertor does.

You feed it a web page address and HTML – PDF Convertor looks at the site, converts it to a pdf and then gives you a file to download. Nice and simple really, but also quite useful at times.

With that in mind I thought I would cover a few of the tools and methods I have come across when setting up PC’s for people with children who will be using the computer.

The first tool on the list is Open DNS. This is always the first thing I suggest to worried parents. It’s particularly useful where there is more than one computer in the house that they want to monitor. Open DNS provides a content and domain filtering service for free. Basically the Domain Name Servers (DNS) your computer’s used are changed to be the Open DNS ones. This means every page requested is requested through their servers. On the Open DNS website you can set up which themes/categories are disallowed on your network. This sounds a little technical because it does require messing with your Network Settings (or the settings on your router) but the sign up process will guide you through this, it even has specific instructions for different routers to set them to use the Open DNS servers.

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Nothing beats being able to see just what they are up to. Most children develop the skill of hiding exactly when they are up to when their parents are in the room so obviously standing over their shoulder and watching what they are doing might not let you see what they are up to. This is where Real VNC comes into play. With VNC installed on the computer your child is using you can sit at another computer and run the Real VNC viewer application to connect and monitor screen. Allowing you to get on with your own work while periodically checking their activity.

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I’d also suggest Protect Our Kids. Currently one of the top rated parental control software’s available on the Download.com Protect Our Kids has the features of most parental control softwares. It allows for Web Page usage logging, key logging and adult content filtering. But it has one other feature which is quite unique.

When running P.O.K. watches for key phrases such as “Let’s meet”, “My phone number is” or “Where do you want to meet”. If it detects any of them then it instantly locks the Internet connection on the computer, making it impossible for your child to continue using the Internet in any form until an parent/administrator password is entered. Even restarting the computer will not allow the Internet connection to begin working again. Very useful!

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The last one for the moment is Gulbble, this one is only really useful for people using Firefox. Glubble is an extension for Firefox that is particularly useful with younger children. When installed it allows Firefox to be put in to a mode where only content from a list of allowed websites is allowed to be loaded rather than loading the content so long as it doesn’t appear in a list. This gives you the chance to specify exactly which sites your children are able to visit. When Firefox loads with Glubble installed a welcome log in screen is displayed where a parent or a child can log in, children can only browse certain sites while parents can log in and browse the Internet unrestricted. If a child visits a site not on the allowed list the site can still be allowed when a parents password is entered. An added bonus with Glubble is that it applies a skin to Firefox which will be more appealing to children (as well as easier to user).

At the end of the day the best way to protect your children online is to educate them on the dangers of their activities. Tell them what can happen and the reasons why you don’t want them to do certain things. And if you still don’t trust them to be safe online then your only option is to move the PC to somewhere where you can monitor it with easy (i.e. the living room)

First of all their is Avarton Software’ Air Sharing app for the iPhone. I’ve had an iPhone for about a month now and its pretty much the best puchase I have made in the last few years. The ease with which it sync’s it’s self with my emails, diary and contact list on my Mac is amazing. It’s useful to have access to my diary especially as I am on the road a lot. But Air Sharing brings something even better to the iPhone, with Air Share installed any computer running Windows, Mac or Linux can mount your iPhone as a wifi device and then transfer files to it just like you would any other file storage on your next work via the explorer/finder or alternatively you can access it for downloading only via your web browser.

It’s password protected and when you close the app you can no longer connect. A really useful app for transfering files to and from your iPhone when not using your own computer, and best of all right no its free and will be so for the first two weeks of it’s release. After that its back up to $6.99. Get it here

Those of you with out an iPhone to carry your files around on may find this one of more use to you. File Savr are offering a lifetime account for free to any one who signs up before the 15th September. It’s an account that will allow you to upload files up to 10 GB in size and have a maximum of 250GB stored there. Once the files are uploaded you have a download link that you can pass around to your friends allowing them to download just that file. Quite a useful little thing to have if you move a lot of files between computers. Get it free here