Thursday, February 28, 2008

online image editing

Picnik

One of new favorite blogs

Mahalo Daily

Also has the famous 60 second summary of events

Top free CD/DVD burning apps

Top free CD/DVD burning apps


Just about every computer available these days comes with a CD/DVD burner as part of the package. Whether your primary use for this drive is to make mix CDs for the car, backup data, or burn DVD backups for your movies, you need a good program with the right type of features for the job. Though Windows offers some burning features, you're not going to get the options you'll find in a stand alone app.


There are many paid CD and DVD burning apps to choose from and some of the most popular in this category--like Nero and Alcohol 120%--are probably recognizable by most Download.com users. The only prohibitive trait about these apps (besides cost) is usually they take up too many system resources and offer superfluous features that you may not need for simple burning. I happen to like these apps and some of the extra features are quite useful, but what if you just want something quick and dirty for burning on the cheap?

I did a little research and picked out some top free CD/DVD burning apps that you can download and use for free if you need to get started right away.
CDBurnerXP

The four-paned interface makes moving your media around a snap.


CDBurnerXP is a quick and easy solution for burning audio CDs, creating data disks, and has extra features for ripping your audio CDs and finding track info on the Web. A four-paned interface makes it easy to find and then drag-and-drop files to your chosen media and an included audio player helps you make sure you get the tracks you want. A handy dropbox window lets you browse your files using Windows Explorer and quickly drag-and-drop files to your burn list on the fly. Judging from the user reviews, some users had trouble with CDBurnerXP when burning data DVDs, but I was able to use this function without problems. The developer site offers a list of compatible drives if you have any issues.

JetBee Free

Sometimes an easy way to burn media is all the feature set you need.


JetBee is another free app for burning CDs, DVDs, BlueRay, and HD-DVDs and offers the option to include these burning commands to your right-click contextual menus in Windows. The two-paned interface is simpler than CDBurnerXP, but good enough for most simple burning projects. This is probably the most bare-bones of the bunch as far as extra features, but if you want a quick-burning program to make backups or audio CDs for free, JetBee does the job nicely. As someone who burns primarily audio CDs, I was a little annoyed I had to drill all the way down from the top level for music files, but this might not be a problem for other users.

BurnAware Free Edition

The launch page takes all the guess work out of your burning project.

BurnAware Free Edition is probably the prettiest in the interface department for this collection and offers a step-by-step procedure for your burning projects. A launch window lets you choose the type of project you want and leads you through the process to completion. Navigating your directories is easy with BurnAware's file management system and adding files is as simple as highlighting them and hitting a button. Though you don't have the option of a floating window like CDBurnerXP, BurnAware offers enough features for most burning projects.

Sunday, February 24, 2008

To play any media - DVD, audio


VLC - the cross-platform media player and streaming server

VLC media player is a highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, ogg, ...) as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols







Link

Thursday, February 21, 2008

Thursday, February 14, 2008

Tuesday, February 12, 2008

Stream Your Music Collection to Anywhere with JukeFly

Stream Your Music Collection to Anywhere with JukeFly


If you like the idea of listening to your music collection on whichever computer you choose but aren’t satisfied with the plethora of music lockers out there (including the very nicely designed Anywhere.fm which was acquired by Imeem recently), check out the streaming music service JukeFly as an alternative.

JukeFly looks a lot like Anywhere.fm but there’s a crucial difference: instead of uploading all of your songs to JukeFly, as you would with Anywhere.fm, you download a 1.5mb client (currently only available for Windows) that will turn your computer into a streaming music server. If you leave your computer on and connected to the internet, you can go over to your friends house or a local internet cafe and play all your songs through the JukeFly website for free.

Because JukeFly has opted to leave the heavy lifting to users’ own broadband connections, the company doesn’t have to deal with the costs associated with serving up audio files. But it also doesn’t assist in distributing your files to others, resulting in a limit to how many people you can share your music with at a given time (currently only one friend). To remedy this restriction, the company is working on the ability of users to upload their JukeFly playlists up to a server so they can at least share songs in them with multiple others.

JukeFly supports MP3s, iTunes unencrypted formats (AAC and Apple Lossless/m4a), and Ogg Vorbis. The service should appeal to users with very large music collections since they won’t have to deal with uploading all of their songs. The two entrepreneurs behind JukeFly previously founded Tukaroo, a desktop search product that competed with Google and Yahoo’s desktop search offerings and was acquired by Ask in June 2004 (support for it has since been dropped). Development on JukeFly started in early 2007

Monday, February 11, 2008

Friday, February 8, 2008

Fun to look at old tech logos

Web Link to more like this












Web Link to more like this



Source: IBM Archives

In 1911, the International Time Recording Company (ITR, est. 1888) and the Computing Scale Company (CSC, est. 1891) merged to form the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (CTR, see where IBM gets its penchant for three letter acronym?). In 1924, the company adopted the name International Business Machines Corporation and a new modern-looking logo. It made employee time-keeping systems, weighing scales, meat slicers, and punched-card tabulators.

In the late 1940s, IBM began a difficult transition of punched-card tabulating to computers, led by its CEO Thomas J. Watson. To signify this radical change, in 1947, IBM changed its logo for the first time in over two decades: a simple typeface logo.

In 1956, with the leadership of the company being passed down to Watson’s son, Paul Rand changed IBM’s logo to have "a more solid, grounded and balanced appearance" and at the same time he made the change subtle enough to communicate that there’s continuity in the passing of the baton of leadership from father to son.

IBM logo’s last big change - which wasn’t all that big - was in 1972, when Paul Rand replaced the solid letters with horizontal stripes to suggest "speed and dynamism."

Farecast - for travel forecast

Farecast

Farecast.com™ is the smart travel search site that helps you buy with confidence. Launched in 2006, Farecast.com empowers you to Know When to Buy™ with airfare predictions and Know Where to Stay™ with the hotel Rate Key™.




Different than online travel agencies, such as Orbitz, Travelocity, and Expedia. Farecast provides you with all the flight and hotel search options that help you buy with confidence:

Know When to Buy

Our airfare prediction shows if fares are rising or dropping. Based on the prediction, we provide a recommendation to buy now or buy later.

Know Where to Stay

Our Rate Key indicates whether or not today's rate for a specific hotel is a deal. It compares an individual hotel's current rate found to its observed historical rates.

Triporama

triporama is the free trip planner & travel guide for groups.

Triporama provides a free web site that makes it fun and easy to plan a group trip with friends and family. With Triporama's Group Trip Planner, you can collaborate on a trip plan, including the dining, shopping, golf, skiing, or other experiences that you'll share. Triporama offers tools designed to encourage participation and contributions from everyone in the group — find and share travel research, discuss alternatives, assign tasks, conduct polls, and schedule trip dates. Triporama also offers a Group Travel Guide with trip ideas, deals, and planning advice for girlfriend getaways, family vacations, cruises, and other popular group travel themes.

Thursday, February 7, 2008

Get Yer Free Calls While They Last

Get Yer Free Calls While They Last
Mark Hendrickson


Everyone loves a free lunch, so just about everyone should love ooVoo, at least until the end of the month.

The video conferencing company has just launched its new VoIP to landline/mobile phone service and is kicking things off with a month of free calls to the United States and Canada. That’s right, free calls from your computer to anyone’s phone and with no advertisements to ruin the party.

The best part: the company isn’t collecting credit card numbers so you don’t have to worry about canceling an account by March 1st. The worst part: no support for Macs. And the most worrisome part, its disclaimer:

ooVoo reserves the right to change the offer at any time with no notice.

Let’s hope the service’s popularity won’t force it to cut things short.

While we haven’t covered ooVoo before, the Israeli company offers an impressive range of videoconferencing capabilities including six-person video sessions, video stream recording, and in-call video effects.