There are many screen capture programs out there, but the Open Source ZScreen gives them all a run for their money.
ZScreen has a plethora of options when it comes to capturing the screen and what to do with the captured image. It has the standard 3 ways of capturing the screen (selected region, active window, or the entire screen), and a number of options to choose from afterwards. You can either directly copy it to the clipboard, open the captured screenshot in an image manipulation program of your choice, upload the captured image to an FTP server, or simple save the image automatically in a predefined folder in an image format of your choice, and you can tweak almost all the settings for any of these actions. This software is a must have for anyone who frequently takes screenshots.
Grab the software from here (You'll need the .NET framework to run this).
If you are doing higher studies in IT or Business (Or any other), when you get to work on projects, you usually have to submit a documentation. And when preparing this documentation, the last thing you usually do before submitting is creating the Gantt chart (Although its supposed to be done first!). Most of us usually use Microsoft Project to create this. Now you can use an Open Source alternative called GanttProject.
GanttProject is very much similar to MS Project, with the tasklist on the left hand pane and the graphical timeline on the right hand pane. There are two tabs on the main window, one for the Gantt Chart and the other for the resources allocated for whatever the Gantt chart is made for. There is also an option to get the corresponding pert chart for the Gantt chart.
The software is not bloated like MS Project and has all the necessary tools to quickly create a chart. Plus, you can export the charts you create into several formats including JPEG and PDF. I never considered Gantt charts seriously and couldn't make head or tail of it. If you have the unique combination of being into Project Management and Linux, GanttProject is the way to go. You can download it from here.
First of all, Pidgin is an excellent IM client. So is Digsby, but it goes a few steps further than simple instant messaging.
Manage you emails from Digsby
Digsby is an IM client, an email manager, and a social network 'client', all rolled into one application. Its IM behaviour is similar to pidgin with combined buddy list for all AIM, MSN, Yahoo, ICQ and Jabber protocols. But one added bonus is the ability to chat with facebook buddies right from the digsby window, without logging into the site separately. Once you set up your email accounts, you are notified of new messages, and can take all the usual actions on them like, 'Mark as Read' or 'Report Spam'. There are numerous other features you can check out here. Grab the windows version from here (Linux and Mac versions are also available).
Keep track of social networks and get alerts on new events
We all have defragged our hard drives at some point. Usually we do this using the defragger that comes with Windows itself. But if you want to squeeze that last nanosecond of speed out of your hard drive, you can use UltimateDefrag.
UltimateDefrag is an advanced defragger that, unlike other software of its kind, gives the user complete control over (almost all) the inner workings of the defrag process. You can defrag individual files, folders, or even applications and you can place them around the hotspots (places which are easily accessed) on the hard drive.
The software defines two types of files. High performance and Archive. High performance files are those files you access frequently and will be placed so as to minimize access time. Archive files are the ones you rarely use and will be defragged so as to not get in the way of the high performance files. You can either let the software automatically select the high performance and Archive files or you can select which files to be in these categories manually. You can also include files based on their extension which is good if you want to access a particular file type quickly, like .EXE files. There are many other options for defragging, but the best part of this software is its visual representation of the fragmentation, which gives a very good picture on how files are physically laid out in the hard drive. You can click on any part of the disc and see what files are stored in that particular sector.
UltimateDefrag. Notice the name of a file stored at a particular sector on the hard drive displayed at the bottom left corner
Needless to say, the software is a bit complicated with a lot of options to choose from. Fortunately, there is a PDF file which explains all the bells and whistles of the software, and also gives a good idea on how hard disks work, and fragmentation occurs, etc... You can grab UltimateDefrag from here.
BackTrack is a Linux distribution based on Slackware, created for penetration testing purposes. It merges two existing distributions, Whax (formerlyWhoppix) and Auditor Linux, into a single powerful Live CD system.
BackTrack incorporates all the necessary tools used in security testing, like nmap, finger, traceroute, Metasploit and other software. The Live CD worked perfectly in my VirtualBox VM, but actual installation on a USB drive or a hard disk is a bit technical (Although anyone who seriously uses BackTrack can do this). BackTrack also has all the other usual software for web browsing, image manipulation, document editing, etc... BackTrack automatically comes with HTTP, SMTP, and other server software so there's no need for manually installing them. The major drawback to BackTrack is the lack of an updating mechanism.
BackTrack Penetration testing Tools
I don't recommend this distribution to the average user. Only those who are extremely curious or expert computer users should find any use for this. You can download the distribution from here.
As internet speeds get faster and faster, more and more desktop applications are being ported into web platforms. This post is about a free service that gives the user a web based desktop, which can be accessed from anywhere in the world.
Okay, so what is Jooce? As I've mentioned in earlier posts, I'm not good at stringing words together, so here's a sample from their about page.
"Jooce is your very own, private online desktop - with public file sharing capabilities. A highly-secure, online space to keep, view, listen to - and instantly share with friends - all your files, photos, music and video."
There, that is what Jooce is all about. I tested it out, and was surprised by the speed of the OS, considering the whole site is made using Adobe Flash (You'll need version 9). So now I have an account, what can I do? According to the Jooce FAQ,
"you can start uploading files, music, photos, videos from a local disk drive or the web, store and organize them as if you have your own computer, play them using the jooce media player, transfer any of your jooce files or folders to any of your friends in your contact's list instantly with drag-n-drop ease, chat with any friend even if they have MSN, Yahoo, AIM, or ICQ instant messenger accounts, create a public joocetop from where your friends can see and retrieve any files or folders you post there, visit other people's public joocetops, transfer files and folders from your friends public joocetops onto your own jooce account or share them with other friends on your contacts list, customize your private desktop as well as your public joocetop."
As with any usual OS, you can create, rename or delete folders and files. There is a control panel with limited settings you can tweak, such as the desktop background, your jooce account info and your instant messaging settings. The Public Joocetop mentioned above is simply a desktop which is presented to the outside world (It's like your profile page in Facebook). Your friends (Those whom you have included in your contacts list) can not only view your Joocetop, but can also copy files to and from it. There are a few videos available that explains the main functionalities of Jooce in the Videos folder of your jooce desktop. One major feature still lacking is email support. And one more thing to note, currently there's no limit to the amount of data you can upload!
Jooce Desktop
I was pretty impressed with the number of features available for this beta version of jooce (But there is still much room for improvement and better features). If you are a serious file sharer, I very much recommend getting a Jooce account.
VirtualBox, Sun Microsystems' Open Source Virtualizer software reached version no. 2.0 yesterday.
Most important new feature of VirtualBox is the support for 64bit guest OSs. However, there are a few conditions that must be met for this.
The CPU of the machine should be 64bit with hardware virtualization support enabled(At the moment, VirtualBox doesn't support software virtualization for 64bit guest OSs).
The Host OS should be 64bit.
VirtualBox itself should be the 64bit version.
Even with all these restrictions, the addition of 64bit guests is a good move by Sun, since 64bit versions of software are the future. This new version also fixes a few problems with AMD CPUs.
VirtualBox is available in both x86 and x64 versions for almost all major linux distributions (and any linux distro with kernel version 2.6) and also for Windows XP/Vista.
You can download VirtualBox 2.0 from here (Make sure you select the correct version for your architecture).
I've posted before of another instant messaging system with 3D avatars. This new app is a bit similar, but not nearly as bandwidth hogging or truly 3D.
Weblin is a simple chat application that works like any other out there. But unlike other applications, weblin allows you to chat with people, inside your web browser, who are visiting the same site (The website you are at acts like the chat room). For example, say I'm visiting the kottu.org website. While I'm there, I can see the avatars of other people who are there at that time. (Below picture shows there are no others visiting kottu with weblin installed).
Once you download the weblin setup,It will in turn download and install the actual program. Once installed, you can create your weblin account to start using weblin. Firefox users have to install an additional plugin to get started (I'm not sure whether there's a need for an extension for IE).
You can start chatting with other avatars on the website by double clicking on your avatar. This will show the speech bubble, into which you can type and your message will be visible to all in the current page. You can also have a private chat with anyone in the page by right clicking on the other persons avatar and selecting Private chat from the menu that pops up. You can also animate your avatar by selecting any of the actions available like dance, clap, wave, etc... Right clicking on your avatar provides much of these (and many more) options to you, as well as the 'Butler' icon available on the bottom left corner of the screen.
Download Weblin from here. Firefox extension can be found here.
With the much hyped release of the new Google Chrome browser, the launch of the new and improved Picasa 3 beta went relatively unnoticed. The newest release from Google contains many improvements.
The best new feature of picasa is the 'name tag' along with the face recognition. You can tag a person in a picture, and picasa, using face recognition techniques, will try to automatically tag all the other pictures of that person in your collection. Needless to say, sometimes picasa makes errors in taggin and sometimes doesn't recognize people at all. But most of the time I tried, picasa was able to get about 65% of the faces correct (You might not get the same results).
With this beta, Google has tried to tie the picasa software to the picasa web albums platform even more tightly. For example, there is a 'sync to web' option which transfers any changes you make to pictures inside the software, to your corresponding web albums pictures. There is another option which allows you to easily post pictures from picasa to your blogger posts (One drawback to this option is the use of an IE window to post the pictures).
Another option is the Geo-tag, which allows you to put pictures on your Google Earth software (Need Google Earth obviously). With this beta, you can now combine your pictures, existing videos and music to create new movies, with relative ease. I would say the new movie maker is as much powerful as the Windows movie maker itself. Picasa has all the photo editing features available in other photo management software like removing red eye, cropping, setting contrast, etc... There is also a nifty photo viewer which can be used to view your pictures from inside the explorer window, instead of the standard Microsoft Image Viewer.
There are many other new features and a lot of improvements to the software. I definitely recommend Picasa to be your standard photo management software (But remember, as with most Google products, this is still in beta).
This reminds me of Second Life. It really is more like a limited version of Second Life. But since its coming from Google, there might be good things in store for Lively in the future.
Lively is a chat application that creates 3D worlds in place of the traditional chat rooms and lets users create 3D characters, or Avatars, to represent themselves in the 3D world. You can customize the look of your avatar, ranging from the color of the skin to the clothes to wear. The characters can interact with each other using various actions (hi5, hold hands, hug, kick, etc...). You can also create your own chat rooms and customize them by placing various furniture you want. And the best thing is, you can embed these rooms into your own web pages, and anyone with a Lively account can enter it.
Currently, only Windows XP/Vista and IE/Firefox combination is supported. You have to install a plugin to use Lively, and a Google account to create a Lively account. Be warned though, that this is still in beta.
You can download the plugin at Google Lively. Check out the room I've embedded below.
Just got this news. Google is releasing its own web browser, called Chrome (See screenshot below). They put up this post on their blog after a comic book introducing the new browser started circulating earlier than anticipated. The new browser boasts a lot of new features, one of which is a new and improved JavaScript engine called V8. This news comes just as Mozilla announced that they have created a new Just-In-Time (JIT) JavaScript compiler called Tracemonkey, to replace the current Firefox JavaScript compiler SpiderMonkey, for the next version of firefox. There are other features to the new browser, such as the new privacy mode called 'Incognito' (which is like the InPrivate mode of the new IE8 browser) where your browsing history won't be recorded, and 'Sandboxing' of tabs, which will prevent one tab from crashing all the others (By isolating, or sandboxing tabs).
The browser war just got heated, as this new Chrome browser is sure to get widespread usage (coming from google). You can view the comic introducing the new browser here.
Its the first of September, and what I like to call the 'TV Series Season' will kick off today, with one of my favs, Prison Break. And its time to backup the old seasons onto DVD and make up space for the new seasons, and time to make some serious use of our SLT bandwidth! Below is a list of premiering dates for some of my(and your, maybe) favourite TV shows.
Lincoln Burrows and Michael Scofield are both out of prison (But Michael is still a fugitive. He escaped from fox river remember). Michael is on a lone mission to destroy the company and to take revenge against their agent Gretchen Morgan. Show starts today with a 2 hour season premier. Cant wait...
This show lasted only 9 episodes in its first season (due to the writers guild strike). The second season should see Sarah Conner and Co. trying to track down and destroy 'The Turk', the computer which stems the growth of Skynet, all the while being hunted down by Cromartie, the skynet cyborg. Show starts on the 8th. Cant wait...
The angry, brutally honest, nihilistic (maybe?), Sherlock Holmes like medical genius comes back for a fifth season of medical mysteries and sarcasm. Last season saw House hiring new people for his diagnostic team, and failing to save the girlfriend of his best friend. Cant wait to see whats going to happen between House and Wilson (and maybe Cuddy?). Show starts on the 16th.
One of the best TV shows out there for certain. Heroes season 2 closed with Sylar getting his powers back, and the new season is said to be full of villains (The season premier is called Villains). Apart from Sylar, there's a new villain who will be the arch-nemesis of Hiro, a girl who can run fast, which is in direct collision with Hiro's time stopping abilities. You can check out all the hints, the comics which fill in the gaps of the storyline, and some new webisodes at the official Heroes Site. Check out the video below (Claire shooting Peter?). The show starts on the 22nd.
The new show takes off from where the 2 hour backdoor pilot stopped a few months back. The old KITT is dismantled (The pilot shows the number plate and the steering wheel from the pontiac) and the new Knight Rider is a Ford Mustang on steroids, with a new home called KITT-Cave (as in Batcave), which serves as the HQ for the Knight Rider team. The show has borrowed some ideas from the Viper TV series, with KITT having the ability to transform itself into a truck (or something. not sure on this. check video below). There seems to be a lot of changes to the car since the backdoor pilot, and I cant wait to watch this. Show starts on the 24th. Darn.
The Winchester brothers are back, sans one. Go to Hell Dean! and he did. Sam couldn't save his brother from the deal he made with a demon, and the season 3 finale showed dean caught in a web like structure, which is, apparently, Hell! While they could've come up with a better place for Hell, the new season is a must watch (for me anyway). Season 4 starts on the 18th.
Sex, Drugs, Betrayal are back again with the second season of Gossip Girl. Last season's finale showed the teenagers readying for their summer vacation and Blair, who finally became the Queen Bee at the Upper East Side private school, getting on to the helicopter without Chuck. What will happen to Blair and the gang during the summer vacation? We'll find out on the 18th, when the second season premiers.
Clarke Kent aka Superman went down in the last season finale, but rest assured he'll be back. Bad news is that Lex Luthor won't be in the new season. Instead, three more villains (Doomsday and Maxima from the DC Universe, and a new character called Tess Mercer in place of Lex Luthor) will be introduced. This series has gone a bit stale, and I hope this is the last season of Smallville. Show starts on the 18th.
