Month: August 2009

Web geeks got all excited recently thanks to the discovery of a Google Easter egg – if you search for the term ‘ascii art‘, the Google logo turns into an example of what you’re searching for – cool, eh?

Even if you have heard about this particular Google gift, you might not have been absolutely sure what it referred to. ASCII art is a type of graphic art that involves making pictures and designs from ASCII character coding, in other words, making art using the characters on your keyboard. You’ll probably have seen it around the web before, but what you might not have realized is that it is entirely within your reach!

Whether you are creatively challenged or an artistic maestro, there is a method for you. If you fall into the first group, you can skip the hard bit and download yourself a nice little generator that will do much of the work. Ascgen, for example, is a tool that allows you to upload any image and produce an ASCII version within seconds. You can then edit the image until you are totally happy with it, and voila – you have your first ACSII masterpiece!

Textaizer is not strictly an ASCII program, but it does give you results that are very similar to one and, more importantly, it is very modifiable. This program also allows you to upload your images, but you have the added advantage of being able to specify the text you want to use to make the image. This means, for example, that you could use your name to create an ACSII image of yourself – very cool!

If you are the more creative type, you won’t need a program at all. In its most raw form, ASCII just requires a computer, keyboard and a text editor (such as Windows NotePad or something more advanced such as these) – not exactly what you would call complex. Many experienced ASCII artists suggest that the best way is just to begin experimenting, but it takes a while to master. If you feel that you’d like a little guidance on the road to ASCII fame, there are a wealth of online tutorials to help you on your way. Check them out here, here and here.

Things have come a long way since the days of Wayne’s World and now anyone can broadcast their own TV channel. In fact, I think it’s one of the truly great things about the internet than anyone can now broadcast their own content to the world absolutely free. I decided to set one up using TVUPlayer because a) It’s the best P2P TV streaming app out there in my opinion, b) The player (but not the broadcaster yet unfortunately) works on Mac and c) It has the best English language support of all the P2P TV apps out there with a thriving forum of users.

Here is how you do it. I recommend you do all of this in Internet Explorer because TVUBroadcast doesn’t work as well in Firefox for some reason.

1) Download and install TVUPlayer for Windows or Mac.

2) Sign-up for a TVUPlayer account

3) Click here to create a new channel

4) Download and install TVUBroadcast. Only Windows and Linux are available but a Mac version will be available soon. Note that on Windows, you’ll need Windows Media Encoder 9 or above to use TVUBroadcast in your browser. You should be prompted to install it automatically, but if you’re not, install it first.

5) TVUBroadcast will then open automatically in your default browser and you’ll be promoted to Sign-in to your account.

6) Go the “Source” tab at the top of your screen. You’ve now got three options to broadcast your media:

• You can capture it from a video device attached to your computer (such as a webcam or video camera)
• You can capture it from a live internet video stream
• You can upload a recording you prepared earlier but this must be in WMV format. This uploading process doesn’t work in Firefox either. You’ll just get an annoying “File error: wmv does not exist” message if you try. You should also ensure that the Bitrate of the file is as low as possible for successful broadcasting. For most broadband connections, anything below 500Mbps should work. Anything over that will probably stream very poorly.

I chose the third option by using a sample WMV file. Simply browse to the file you want to broadcast. Continue reading “How To: Broadcast your own video channel on TVUPlayer”

According to this list recently published by McAfee, Jessica Biel is the most dangerous celebrity on the Web. No, that doesn’t mean she’s going to come out of the screen and strangle you to death with the mouse cable; it means that if you look for information, photos, wallpapers, videos or any other material related to her on the Internet, chances are you’ll end up in a potentially harmful website that can put your system in danger.

After three years, the McAfee list of riskiest celebrities online has almost become a tradition but I’m not sure about its usefulness. What’s the point of scaring people away from searching for stuff about their idols? To me, it looks more like a marketing trick to sell more security-related software apps – while the top celebrity surely gets a boost in Google searches. In any case, whatever the final purpose of this list is, the truth is that according to McAfee,

…fans searching for ‘Jessica Biel’ or ‘Jessica Biel downloads’, ‘Jessica Biel wallpaper’, ‘Jessica Biel screen savers’, ‘Jessica Biel photos’ and ‘Jessica Biel videos’ have a one in five chance of landing at a Web site that’s tested positive for online threats.

So you’d better be prepared. Protecting your computer when browsing the Web is easier than it seems. Just follow these simple tips and you won’t have any problems – no matter which celebrity you’re searching for:

• The first and most important rule: use common sense. Don’t trust those banners that promise you a fantastic car because you happen to be visitor #1,000,000.
• Celebrity material is a good bait. Be careful when searching for goodies related to your idols and don’t forget to analyze all files with an antivirus before opening them.
• Use a firewall to protect your system. A free, easy solution like ZoneAlarm, Jetico or PC Tools Firewall will do.
• Use an antivirus with web filtering capabilities against online threats, like AVG Antivirus. It’ll make your Web browsing safer.