Amazing! Integrating Photos From All Over The World
July 18, 2007
I found something in a newsletter that I read regularly that I just had to share. It’s about Microsoft’s Photosynth, which is based on Seadragon technology. Fancy words, but once you see the video you’ll understand the meaning behind them.
Basically, what this new technology will do is make all images on the Web — your’s, mine, everyone’s — connected to make a meaningful collection of data. So what hyperlinks have done for pages, so, too, will do for images.
For example, it can take photos of an object from several vantage points, taken by different people, and put them together to make one cohesive and three-dimensional and/or panoramic view; the more data, the better.
This video demonstrates lightning-fast mobility across numerous thumbnails of images, allowing you to zoom in at incredible levels. What appears to be a pixel can in actuality be a finely typed document. This is pretty cool!
[tags]microsoft photosynth,seadragon,technology,photos,images,community[/tags]
Popularity: 7% [?]
Clean Up With CCleaner
July 16, 2007
We surf the Web, we install software, we remove software…lots of things go on that can clutter up our hard drives. CCleaner can help remove all that while giving you back precious hard disk space.
This is a free utility for Windows users that’s meant to optimize your computer’s performance. It does this by removing the unused files that accumulate. It’s also a privacy tool of sorts because it can erase your online activities. But even if you wouldn’t use it for privacy purposes, it’s still a good idea to clean your cache, history, and cookies to ensure you have a clean start every once in a while.
It’s surprisingly fast, too. Just tell it what to scan for, and it will give you an estimate on the amount of space you’ll save. The times I’ve used it, I usually save somewhere around 100 MB of space at least.
Types of files it removes can be associated with Internet Explorer or Firefox, Windows recycle bin and temp files, stuff left behind by third-party applications. It also has a registry cleaner.
I’ve used it for a while now and have been very pleased with it. 
[tags]ccleaner,computers,technology,software[/tags]
Popularity: 7% [?]
Take Your Bookmarks With You
May 23, 2007
Portable Bookmarks is a portable bookmark manager enabling you to, well, take your bookmarks with you anywhere. The most obvious choice would be a USB drive, but if you’re the stationary type, it will work just fine on your PC. And while you could even take it with you on a CD, I’m not sure why you’d want to.
The software has a small footprint so you can easily install it on any removable device. I can see this being a benefit to business travelers, but even more so for IT personnel. At my office, our IT guys login from a DOS prompt or external drive on the network to access the files they need. It would be so much easier for them if they just kept their links stored on a thumb drive. And if they did it using Portable Bookmarks — even better.
When compared to online bookmark managers, the difference is quite apparent. Don’t get me wrong, I love using online services such as Diigo, but what Portable Bookmarks offers you is something different: security, synchronization, duplication removal, and, of course, portability.
One thing that I found interesting is that instead of integrating with a browser, it instead displays itself as a “drop target” — an icon — that hovers in any location you choose to drop it on your computer screen. With the ability to adjust its transparency, it can remain there unobstrusively, too.
Clicking the drop target is how you access your bookmarks and perform functions such as searching for a link in your collection, or adding a link, even activating the application interface itself. Searching is fast, too. It showed me a match even before I finished typing!
Despite what web browser your computer is set to use by default, you can configure your collection of links to open in a browser of your choice. On my computer I have Firefox and Internet Explorer, so I’m not sure if they were the options because that’s all I had available to me or if that’s all Portable Bookmarks was setup to be used with.
Want more features? How about: password protection, adding descriptions and keywords, hotkey activation, organize multiple collections of links, and importing/exporting your links to/from a browser.
They offer a free trial for downloading, which can only accept up to 100 links. The full version, which costs $24.95, does not have that limitation.
[tags]reviews,product,usb drive,bookmarks,technology[/tags]
Popularity: 7% [?]
WinZip Offers New Service
April 14, 2007
The maker of WinZip, the popular file compression utility, has joined forces with YouSendIt, the easy way to send large files via email, to provide users with WinZip Courier.
Even when you compress your files before sending them to someone, the resulting file size can still be too large for your recipient’s inbox. That’s where WinZip Courier comes in. By uploading your files to YouSendIt, you’re putting them in secure storage and sending a notification instead to the recipient to come download them.
They’re currently offering a free 45-day trial. After that it’ll be $4.99 a month. If you have this sort of need regularly, then this may solution you’re looking for. Otherwise, what I do, is use the free YouSendIt service directly when I come across a large file that’s difficult to send.
[tags]files,compression,winzip,yousendit[/tags]
Popularity: 3% [?]
Decreased Performance with AVG Anti-Spyware
April 7, 2007
I had been using an anti-spyware product called ewido for severas months. It did a pretty good job. They got bought by AVG, the well-known antivirus makers and so came out with an updated version.
I decided to upgrade on my home computer (it was still free, I like that), but started noticing a decrease in performance in my computer. Everywhere I surfed it just kept getting slower and slower. At first I thought it was SpySweeper, another anti-spyware product (this one paid for), so I tried adjusting it’s settings because I had played around with them the week before. I thought perhaps I had set them back wrong.
Nope.
Then I remembered that I installed AVG’s product. Funny thing is that I didn’t have it running. Having two spyware products running at the same time on your computer is a no-no, so I thought I was covered.
After uninstalling AVG, my surfing came back to its original speed. It was really getting frustrating there for a few days.
[tags]spyware,review,AVG[/tags]
Popularity: 4% [?]
