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Currently, most tripod legs are hollowed and allow the extensions to fit inside. Tamrac has taken a different approach and designed what is possibly the most innovative tripod we've seen this year.

The ZipShot is a compact, three-legged support whose design is inspired by collapsible tent poles. With a rugged bungee cord inside the legs, users just have to pull apart the joints and fold the tripod. The rounded edges at individual sections help to guide the aluminum legs to join together.

Tamrac rates the ZipShot as able to support up to 2.8 pounds, which means the tripod … Read more

Hermetic Systems' Data Destroyer is a disk-wiping utility that can render data unrecoverable by overwriting it multiple times. It will scrub your hard disks, floppies, and ZIP disks clean. It will delete individual files, whole directories, or entire disks full of data. You can select the type and number of purges, or overwrites. Data Destroyer will even estimate how long it will take to perform the selected number of purges. It meets stringent U.S. Department of Defense standards for data disk sanitization, too. If it's good enough for the Pentagon, it'll probably meet your needs, too.

Data … Read more

UnRarX is a simple freeware utility for expanding .rar archive files and restoring corrupted archives with .par and .par2 files. The Mac OS no longer includes software for unpacking .rar files, so if you want to expand these kinds of files (usually from PC users), you'll need to download some sort of unarchiving app to do so.

UnRarX has a fairly crude interface--a single log window with options to test, browse, extract, or enter a password for protected archives--but its drag-and-drop simplicity and high success rate have made it a popular choice for users who want a reliable, bare-bones … Read more

With version 14 of this venerable archiving tool, WinZip aims specifically at Windows 7 compliance and enhancements, and adds a few other new features, too. WinZip in Windows 7 gets extensive support for libraries, tools, and recent archives in the jumplist, previews in Windows Explorer for certain file types, and basic touch-screen support. Multitouch support is limited to rotating pictures previewed from WinZip archives.

WinZip 14 also includes minor security enhancements. New automatic wiping keeps confidential data secret by "shredding" the temporary file that WinZip creates by default whenever it opens an archive. The shredding uses U.S. … Read more

One of the best-known Windows utilities, archive creator and manager WinZip updates to version 14 with the future in mind--the future of Windows. The new features in WinZip 14 are aimed squarely at Windows 7 users, with extensive support for Windows 7 libraries, recent archives in the jumplist, and tool tweaks to bring them more in line with the new operating system. Certain file types can be previewed from within an archive in Windows Explorer, and basic touch screen support.

With archive previews, you can click on an archive and the files it contains will appear in list form in … Read more

YemuZip is a simple, free utility with a single purpose: to help you easily create Mac- and PC-friendly ZIP files with just a quick drag and drop. The Mac OS already includes ZIP-compression functionality (which you can access through contextual menus), but YemuZip add some extras--most importantly, the option to choose between Mac-specific and PC-compatible formats, removing the Mac metadata in the resource fork that can otherwise make ZIP files made on a Mac unreadable on PCs.

You just drag files into YemuZip's main window, or onto the YemuZip Dock icon, and the app creates a zipped archive in … Read more

SecureZIP is a program that allows users to create ZIP files that are secured by a password or security certificate. Although the program functions well, its interface could be more intuitive.

The interface is sleek and clean, with a reasonable number of buttons, which are labeled. But the way the program works just isn't immediately clear. If we want to create a new ZIP file, do we click New, as in new ZIP file? Or perhaps Open, to select the documents we want to include in the ZIP file? No, it turns out, we want to Add. We selected … Read more

A new interface kicks off TurboZip 8, a reliable compression alternative to WinZip. The easy-to-use archiving tool now supports an even wider range of formats, including 7Z, MS Office 2007 archives, ISO, and BZIP. Two new features make it worth considering: the robust preview feature that makes peering into archived files much simpler, and the Auto Compress Script, which allows you to build new archives based on predetermined criteria.

The preview window can show the contents of not just JPEG and DOC files, but MSI, EXE, and others. It's also blazingly fast, and previewed large files without delay. A … Read more