Taking GIMP and Running with it
Here are my first few of photos post processed with GIMP
(Click on the image to view the original capture)
All I did was Crop, adjusted Levels, Sharpened and bumped up the color saturation. So far I’m very impressed by the functionality of this FREE app. I guess I can hold off on buying Photoshop CS3 for a while
Next stop, Portraits.
If you want to see more GIMP images, there is a GIMP Users group on Flickr. And while you’re there check out the discussions, an excellent resource for GIMP Tips.
PicLens; Awesome Photo Viewer Add-On for Firefox
This has to be one of the coolest add-ons for Firefox. With this installed, visit a Flickr site. You’ll see a little “play” button appear when you hover over an image. Hit “play” and interact to your heart’s content! 
If you don’t have a Flickr page to go to, you can always use mine.
Nice find, DT!
Import Outlook Folders into Thunderbird
If you’re looking for a way to wrest yourself away from the clutches of Microsoft Outlook, PST Import is a must-have Thunderbird extension.
Spicebird: Email, Calendar, IM, RSS and Blogging Integration
Synovel is looking to impress you with its all-in-one office solution, Spicebird. Though it’s still in alpha, it looks promising. Check out their video demo.
Firefox 3 Beta 1
Anybody willing to give the Firefox 3 beta a shot and report back on how it performs?
Use the power of your Playstation 3 for good
While browsing through my Playstation 3 XMB (yeah, why didn’t Sony call it CMB, I guess Sony focus groups found the letter “X” cooler), I noticed under the “Network” sub-menu there’s a Folding@Home icon.
Folding@Home is a project cooked up by these really smart guys over at Stanford University.
“Folding@Home (also known as FAH or F@H) is a distributed computing project designed to perform computationally intensive simulations of protein folding and other molecular dynamics. It was launched on October 1, 2000, and is currently managed by the Pande Group, within Stanford University’s chemistry department, under the supervision of Professor Vijay Pande. Folding@home is one of the world’s largest distributed computing projects. The goal of the project is “to understand protein folding, misfolding, and related diseases.”
Well I downloaded the program into my PS3, installed and ran it. Don’t know exactly what its doing but it looks cool. =D
Here’s a screen shot of the simulation
See that little yellow dot on the map of California? That’s me!!! Actually that’s my PS3 running an assigned task. An assigned task takes an average of 8hrs to complete.
Apparently, you can run this program in Windows, Mac or Linux. It’s good to know that all Fanboys can set their differences aside and work for the greater good of Mankind.
Top 10 Free Video Rippers, Encoders, and Converters
Lifehacker has a great Top 10 List of Free Video Rippers, Encoders, and Converters. Of course you guys would only use this backup movies you already own, right? Right?
PriceDrop Firefox Extension; The Compulsive Shopper’s Friend
Here’s a handy little Firefox Extension that enables you to keep track of prices on Amazon.com. I’m looking at you, Amazon Prime guy!
Netvibes Widgets Everywhere
I used to use Netvibes as my internet gateway because of its snazzy presentation (drag & drop), but as the number of RSS feeds I consume grew, I switched to Google Reader.
That being said, one of the big appeals to Netvibes is its “widget” system. You create a homepage and drop in a widget, which is usually dedicated to a particular website’s RSS feed. There were specialized widgets for Gmail, to-do lists, etc., but there were only a handful. Netvibes provided an open API so the general masses were able to create their own specialized widgets. Now there are over 90,000 widgets to choose from.
Netvibes took the next step and now provides an interface that allows these widgets to be used in Windows Vista, iGoogle, Apple Dashboard, etc. Currently, there are about 1,000 cross-platform widgets available (denoted by the white “infinity symbol” in the orange box), but that number is growing.
The SplashTop Platform
I’m sure that most of us experienced a situation where we just wanted to turn on the computer really quickly to just check email or send a short IM to someone. Sure, you can just put your system to Sleep, but that still consumes power (albeit, a very low amount). You really want an instant-on system, though.
SplashTop looks to fulfill this niche market by providing an embedded Linux environment that boots off of flash memory that itself is embedded into a motherboard. Built into this Linux environment are Firefox and Skype. You won’t be able to modify these installations beyond saved cookies and bookmarks. That shouldn’t be a problem since this environment is for those “quick” interactions. This isn’t where you’d do heavy research or involved operations.
Another nice perk is that this environment is pretty isolated from whatever OS you would normally boot up in from the hard drive.
Neat idea.
-
Recent Comments
