Thursday, August 31, 2006

Google Joins Gutenburg

If you are in search of free Ebooks, now Google has joined the likes of Project Gutenberg, so you have no excuse to go without your out of print classics. Or if you prefer, you could always get them as audiobooks.


Edit: Spelling Error Fixed, Thanks Ferenc
(Time to change the batteries in the keyboard again)

Sunday, August 27, 2006

"Terrorism" in the WoW Forums

This is a bit pathetic, but funny. (Ipod == bomb, who knew?).

Anyway, Enjoy, and Hopefully I will have something a little more directly computer related in a bit.

WoW Fourms
The Ottawa Citizen
Slashdot

Wednesday, August 23, 2006

Bryce 5

I have posted about several free 3D Modeling/animation Packages (specifically Blender and Sketchup) before. Well, If you don't like one of those, I saw on techbargains that you can get a copy of Bryce 5 for free from Download.com for a couple weeks. Check it out Here.

Monday, August 21, 2006

Google Checkout -> Discounts!

If you have been waiting for an excuse to try out Google Checkout, they have some coupon codes for $10 off 30 on back to school purchases from several stores, as officially posted by Google here. Get the codes here.

Happy shopping (if shopping can be happy)

Saturday, August 19, 2006

Portable Apps

If you have a flash drive or some other type of rewritable, removable storage that you don't know what to do with, you might want to check out PortableApps.com. PortableApps started out with Portable Firefox, a distribution of Mozilla Firefox that could be run off a flash drive and left almost no residue on the host computer, allowing you to bring your browser and browser settings with you. That project has since been expanded to include some of the other popular open source projects like The Gimp and OpenOffice. Very handy if you want to use one of these packages without installing, or keep the same settings across multiple (Windows) computers.

Click Here for more info...

Tuesday, August 15, 2006

AllPeers

I can't remember if I have posted about this before or not, but its been awhile since I have posted (been busy) so I'll do it anyway.


At any rate, AllPeers is an interesting new Firefox extension that allows you to easily share files with friends through your browser. I just got an activation code, though I last looked at it months ago. If it sounds like something you're interested in, you can try to get an invite here. I'll try to remember to post some more info when I have some friends invited to really try it out.

Thursday, August 10, 2006

Curve Fitting

For those of you mathematical people, I found an interesting site at work the other day. ZunZun.com allows you to enter data as a space delimited matrix and can fit it to a 2 or 3 dimensional curve. The sever even crunches the numbers (very handy if you have a slower computer). Depending on your data and settings, it may take a few minutes to do the math, but it seems to do a good job. Next time you want to fit a curve to some data give it a try.

Tuesday, August 08, 2006

Windows Live

As I'm sure any regular readers have noticed, I am fond of Google Earth, but Microsoft's answer has some unique features making it worth a mention. Windows Live Local is completely web based, so you don't have to download anything, but the interface isn't as quick/nice. The big feature that sets it apart from Google's offering is the "Bird's Eye View" which gives you amazingly good, high resolution images, like you might take from a low flying plane.

If you haven't already, give both services a try!

Sunday, August 06, 2006

Speech "Recognition"

Getting a computer to communicate and understand vocally has long been a goal of programmers. Microsoft has had software built into  Windows and Office to achieve this for quite awhile, but you had to be pretty lucky to get it to work. I guess they must have thought they had it worked out for their upcoming OS, Vista but that's not what their demo showed.

Watch and learn the meaning of "beta"...

Saturday, August 05, 2006

Google Spreadsheets/Writely Invites

I don't know how this works, but this site is claiming to be giving out free invites to these two online office services. Give it a try or try some invite free alternatives here.

Thursday, August 03, 2006

PuTTY

Next time you are in need or a Telnet or SSH client, give PuTTY a try. If you want to access a computer remotely with the command line, then SSH is the way to go, and PuTTY is a great client. It even handles some of the more advanced (and useful) SSH features like tunneling. Of course, for the majority of people who don't have a SSH server they want to connect to, PuTTY is still handy for connecting to clear text Telnet servers (like MUDs or Multi-User Dungeons for you non-gamers). 
 
You can get a copy of PuTTY here, as well as some other useful SSH/Telnet/Rlogin utilities. 
 
Just one more free utility everyone should know about ;-)

Tuesday, August 01, 2006

10 Kodak Photo Tips

If you are better with computers than with cameras, but you still want some good pictures, Kodak has a bunch of basic tips to get you started, complete with flash based "cameras" so you can try them out on some canned pictures. Check it out here.

If you are above Kodak's site, give the Digital Photography School a try.

The better the source picture, the more you can do with image manipulation software when you get back to your computer...