Month: March 2009

Today’s downloads for Windows, Mac and Mobile

Download ArtisteerWindows: Design custom templates for a webpage or blog with Artisteer, even if you have no idea about HTML coding or CSS style sheets. This WYSIWYG editor lets you create professional templates in a snap: choose elements, customize them to your liking and preview the result in your browser. Easy as pie!

Follow the F1 season on your Pocket PCPocket PC: It’s that time of the year again when the World goes F1 crazy in the tun-up to the first race of the season at the end of the month. f you’re a fan of the motorsport and want to follow the season’s thrills and spills on your Windows Mobile device then you really shouldn’t be without F1 Season 2009. The program contains a wealth of information about the calendar, courses, tracks, drivers and teams.

xplane logoMac: Fancy your chances at trying to land a place in the Hudson? X Plane is the world’s most comprehensive and powerful flight simulator with a level of realism that’s hard to beat. You can choose from turbo props, jets, single and multi-engine airplanes, as well as gliders, helicopters and even VTOLs such as the V-22 Osprey and AV8-B Harrier.

Share personal recommendations on Likaholix

Share personal recommendations on LikaholixJust when I started thinking we already had enough social networks and online communities, I suddenly came across Likaholix, the latest project developed by Bindu Reddy and Arvind Sundararajan – former Google Product Manager and Google Senior Staff Engineer, respectively.

Likaholix is an online service that lets you share personal recommendations. It can be connected with your Gmail contacts and Facebook friends, and is also linked to Amazon, Wikipedia and other reference sites to provide information about each item you mark as liked and also each item you’re recommended by the system.

Share personal recommendations on Likaholix

So how does Likaholix work? First of all, you have to request an account code because the site is still at a private beta stage, but that shouldn’t take long – I got mine only a couple of hours after requesting it. As soon as you fill in the personal details in your user account, you can start adding items you like. Continue reading “Share personal recommendations on Likaholix”

Time waster: Program your own robot

When I was a kid I used to dream of creating my own robot, a kind of personal assistant that I could use to do some small errands for me or play with me for a while. Today I found an fun online game that can contribute to make that dream com true: Light Bot.

Light bot: Program your own robot

Light Bot is a cute animated robot that can be programmed to do whatever you want. Well, in fact you must program it to accomplish a mission: lighting up all the blue cells on each level. Programming Light Bot is very easy: you have a bunch of available commands, including movements and actions, with which have to create a sequence so that the little cute robot moves to the blue cells and lights them up. Voilà, level completed!

Sounds easy, huh? The difficult part comes when the level layout involves so many movements and actions that they don’t fit in one single sequence. Then it’s time to start using secondary function sequences, and try to find the shortest, most optimized way to solve it.

5 tips for burning large iMovie and iDVD projects

idvd-logoI recently transfered all of my family’s home movies onto one DVD using iMovie and iDVD. The problem was this involved years of film which added up to 60GB of DV footage in iMovie. Even when edited, the final edited footage came to almost 8GB – way too much to fit on a normal DVD.

Blank Single Layer (SL) DVDs can only hold 4.7GB of data so I had a big problem. To split the film in iMovie and re-export it to iDVD would have taken absolutely ages. My only option was to buy a blank Double Layer (DL) DVD which annoyingly, are only sold in packs around where I live. So I ended up paying almost $20 just to use one disc. The problems didn’t stop there either. In fact, they only just began so here’s a few tips that I hope might be able to help you if you’ve found yourself in the same situation.

DVD DL logoCheck DVD Player compatibility – For some strange reason, many DVD players can’t even play DVD Double Layer disks and this includes new players too. If you’re burning your project as a gift like I was, make sure you find out whether the recipients DVD player can play DL discs.

Hard DriveClear some hard drive space – To export a project such as mine to iDVD required around 15GB of free hard drive space to work. In addition, iDVD required another 15GB to burn the movie. When you do finally come to the point where you burn your movie, iDVD will warn you how much disk space it needs to burn.

burn-logoBurn at a slow speed – After about 7 hours of rendering the project for burning, iDVD informed me that there had been a “Multiplexer Error” during formatting and the project was unable to burn. A Google search revealed that many other users had experienced the same problem but explanations varied from lack of hard disk space to dodgy DVDs.

I finally discovered that the problem is solved simply by burning at a slower speed. in iDVDs advanced preferences, de-select the option “Burn at maximum speed” and select one of the lower ones (4x speed worked for me).

iDVD Burn Preferences

encoding.pngLower the encoding quality in iDVD – There are three rather confusing encoding settings in iDVD’s “Project Info” settings – Best Performance, High Quality and Professional Quality. It seems that Best Performance takes up the most disk space, while High Quality and Professional Quality take up a few gigabytes less. By changing to High Quality or Professional, you may be able to fit a large movie onto a Single Layer disk.

The colored bar indicates the final output quality – the more green the better basically. If the bar is coloured red towards the end, it may mean that the quality of your movie is degraded.

idvd-encoding in iDVD

cup-of-teaGo make a big cup of tea – Or make that several cups because your project is going to take a lot of time to render and burn. Mine took around 9 hours and that was just under 8GB. This consumes a huge amount of processing power too so it’s best not use your Mac during this time if you can help it.

Three easy ways to convert web pages to PDF

how to convert webpages to PDFLast night, while booking a trip online, I was asked to print one of the web vouchers to show at the hotel. Unfortunately, I don’t have a printer at home, so I had to find a quick alternative that enabled me to keep a copy of that voucher for later printing. The solution: convert it to PDF.

Converting a web page to PDF not only lets you save an exact snapshot of the page you’re currently visiting – from top to bottom – but also makes sure the copy you open and print afterward keeps its original format, no matter which platform or software tool you use. After a bit of research, I found three easy ways to convert a web page to a PDF document. Here they are:

  • Use an online application – This is probably the simplest option. Head to HTML PDF Converter and enter the URL of the website you want to convert to PDF. You can then open the PDF right away or save it to your hard drive.
  • Use a Firefox add-on – If you use Firefox, PDF Download may be your best choice: an extension that not only enhances online PDF management, but also enables you to save any webpage as a PDF document.
  • Use a virtual printer – The third option is to install a program (e.g. doPDF, PrimoPDF) that emulates a printer and saves all the documents to send to print as PDF files. It works with web pages and with any other printing-capable app as well.

What happens when the lights go down at CeBit?

go-go dancers on the Tobit stageIn these harsh economic times, it’s encouraging to see that the suits from the tech world haven’t lost their appetite for a party.  We’ve been checking out some of the hedonistic social events that take place after the working day at CeBit 2009 has finished (purely for research purposes, obviously).

One of the highlights of the after-show program starts every day at 6pm, when the booth of Tobit Software in Hall 6 mutates from a lounge into a disco. Behind the turntables stand the Glamrock Brothers, whose outlandish hats seem to get bigger by the day. On stage, go-go dancers fidget to dreamy uplifting house music.

For several years, one of the guaranteed crowd-pullers at CeBit has been the ‘Russendisko’ staged by Kaspersky Labs. Hall 11 shakes to the sound of Balalaika rock, as the organizers dish out free drinks. As the delegates at the conference start to relax, so too it seems, do the smoking regulations. At least, that is, until one of the muscle-bound security guards comes over to bring in a semblance of order. On the opposite side of the Kaspersky booth, a guitar band strikes up, belting out some classic rock and pop numbers, and the gathered mass of executives swings back and forth between the two venues.

The ‘beer police’After observing the party crowd for a while, OnSoftware got a bit hungry and decided to stop by the notorious Münchner Halle. We arrive to find that virtually all 3,200 seats in CeBit’s biggest restaurant have been taken. Bavarian girls in traditional ‘Drindl’ dresses serve typical specialities such as Hendl, Haxen, Knödel (chicken, joints, dumplings) and, naturally, beer from Munich in steins. Several live bands play oompah music or a mix of modern pop and rock. Visitors to the show needn’t worry about drinking too much, because you can measure your alcohol intake, using official equipment used by the ‘Deutsche Polizei’. Because this is CeBit this is, of course, administered by a pretty young lady. Don’t ever let anyone tell you the tech crowd is boring.

More photos after the jump…

Continue reading “What happens when the lights go down at CeBit?”

Create 3D galleries of your photos with Sysygy Gallery Creator

Checking out photos with a slide show is getting a bit dull now, so why not liven up your pictures by putting them in a 3D environment?

Sysygy Gallery Creator is a neat piece of freeware that lets you do just that. Download and unzip the “no setup” version of the program, then run GalleryCreator.exe. Unfortunately, the three galleries on offer have fixed numbers of picture places, and for a good effect you’ll want to fill them. The two smaller galleries fit 29 pictures, and the larger one 51 – so find that many pictures! In the gallery creator, just click the add photos and don’t change the importing options. You can import photos in groups, which is much quicker than one by one. Save the file in the Galleries folder in the Sysygy folder, and close the application. Continue reading “Create 3D galleries of your photos with Sysygy Gallery Creator”

Aviary: Full featured online graphic suite for free

Aviary: a full featured online graphic suite for freeWhen looking for a decent suite for photo editing and designing, one usually considers the most popular choices such as Photoshop or GIMP. But in the Web 2.0 era, desktop software is not the only alternative. In fact, you can find excellent online graphic tools with which to edit, optimize and share your images – like Aviary.

Aviary is a complete online graphic suite that includes four applications: an image editor (Phoenix), a vector editor (Raven), a tool to work with color swatches and palettes (Toucan) and what they call “a visual laboratory” (Peacock), which lets you experiment with pixel-based images in a completely new way. And all you need to start using these four online tools right away is create a free user account.

Aviary: a full featured online graphic suite for free

Each Aviary tool opens in a new browser window and provides you with a working environment that’s very similar to the standard interface found in any regular desktop graphic app. In the case of the photo editor and the vector tool, for instance, you have floating menus – like the ones you’d have in Photoshop and Illustrator respectively – and a selection of tools, filters and effects. Also, most of the standard shortcuts you use when working with images are also valid here. Continue reading “Aviary: Full featured online graphic suite for free”

USB 3.0 will transfer data at more than 4Gbits/s

USB logoOur man in Hannover has been drooling all over the new super-speed USB 3.0 technology at CeBit 2009. The demonstration of the new standard in the USB Implementers Forum at the tech show revealed speeds that were a massive leap forward from the current USB 2.0 format. While USB 1.0 only was able to transmit at 12 Mbps, USB 2.0, at 480 Mbps was a significant improvement when it came out. However, USB 3.0 Superspeed will signify a quantum leap: The new standard should be able to transmit data from one device to another at a lightning fast 4.8 Gbps.

The new FGPAsThe system we saw at CeBit is based around a simulation of FGPAs, and reaches a top data transfer speed of 155Mbytes/s. According to the USB Implementers Forum, the first chips supporting super-speed USB 3.0 will be available from autumn of this year. The cables and switches will be backwards-compatible, so you’ll be able to plug a USB 2.0 cable into a version 3.0 socket.