7 Essential multimedia tools and their free alternatives :: 10,000 Words Why spend money on expensive multimedia tools when you can use comparable alternatives for free? They may not be an exact replacement, but how can you argue with the price? PHOTO EDITING: PhotoshopFree: Splashup Photoshop may be the industry leader when it comes to photo editing and graphic design, but Splashup, a free online tool, has many of the same capabilities at a much cheaper price. Splashup has lots of the tools you’d expect to find in Photoshop and has a similar layout, which is a bonus for those looking to get started right away. Splashup isn’t the only free online photo editing program, check out this list of 20 more. WEB DESIGN: DreamweaverFree: KompoZer Looking to create your next web site without paying big money for programs like Dreamweaver? VIDEO: Final Cut, Adobe PremiereFree: iMovie, JayCut Many video editors, both novice and professional, use iMovie to create professional-looking videos and an amateur price. AUDIO: ProTools, Adobe AuditionFree: Audacity, GarageBand
How Two Scammers Built an Empire Hawking Sketchy Software | Magazine Illustration: Alvaro Tapia Hidalgo Before they built an international underworld empire — before they weaseled their way onto millions of computers, before their online enterprise was bringing in hundreds of millions of dollars a year, before they were fugitives wanted by Interpol — Sam Jain, now 41, and Daniel Sundin, 33, were just a couple of garden-variety Internet hustlers. The two, who met around 2001, started out with a series of relatively modest scams and come-ons. Then, in August 2003, Jain and Sundin had a breakthrough thanks to the arrival of the so-called Blaster worm. Coincidentally, Sundin had already written some firewall software called Computershield. Source: Panda Security The plan worked. Over the next few years, imitators sprang up. IMI employees didn’t know each other’s real names — everyone just went by an online nickname.
The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss “Everyone’s looking for rules to follow, and the sooner you realize there aren’t any, the better art can be.”– Jerrod Carmichael Jerrod Carmichael is pushing the boundaries of comedy with his groundbreaking work in stand-up, television, and film. Now just 29 years old, what this driven North Carolina native has accomplished is mind-boggling, and 2017 is going to be his biggest year yet. Jerrod stars in the hit NBC series The Carmichael Show, which he also writes and executive produces. The third season of the show premieres in 2017. In March of 2017, Jerrod will star in his second stand-up comedy special on HBO, directed by Bo Burnham. Love at the Store is the funniest standup special I’ve seen in many years, and it’s the reason I reached out to Jerrod. In the summer of 2016, Jerrod reprised his role as ‘Garf’ in the Universal comedy sequel Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising opposite Seth Rogen and Zac Efron. Please enjoy my wide-ranging conversation with Jerrod Carmichael!
Cool Notepad Trick - Hirlpoo West This neat trick came across on an internal alias. I hadn't seen this before, but I'm guessing it isn't new. Pretty handy for notetaking (if you're a plain text sort of guy/gal). Open a blank Notepad file Write .LOG (in uppercase) in the first line of the file, followed by Enter. [Update: Evidentally this is explained in KB260563 which makes it look like this feature has been around since Windows 98. I was in a presentation today with Jeff Sanquist and as he was scrolling through his blog on screen saw he picked up on this too.] Hacked! - Magazine As email, documents, and almost every aspect of our professional and personal lives moves onto the “cloud”—remote servers we rely on to store, guard, and make available all of our data whenever and from wherever we want them, all the time and into eternity—a brush with disaster reminds the author and his wife just how vulnerable those data can be. A trip to the inner fortress of Gmail, where Google developers recovered six years’ worth of hacked and deleted e‑mail, provides specific advice on protecting and backing up data now—and gives a picture both consoling and unsettling of the vulnerabilities we can all expect to face in the future. On April 13 of this year, a Wednesday, my wife got up later than usual and didn’t check her e‑mail until around 8:30 a.m. The previous night, she had put her computer to “sleep,” rather than shutting it down. When she came back to her desk, half an hour later, she couldn’t log into Gmail at all. We thought that “other than this” was a nice touch.
10 Search Engines to Explore the Invisible Web Not everything on the web will show up in a list of search results on Google or Bing; there are lots of places that their web crawlers cannot access. To explore the invisible web, you need to use specialist search engines. Here are our top 12 services to perform a deep internet search. What Is the Invisible Web? Before we begin, let's establish what does the term "invisible web" refer to? Simply, it's a catch-all term for online content that will not appear in search results or web directories. There are no official data available, but most experts agree that the invisible web is several times larger than the visible web. The content on the invisible web can be roughly divided into the deep web and the dark web. The Deep Web The deep web made up of content that typically needs some form of accreditation to access. If you have the correct details, you can access the content through a regular web browser. The Dark Web The dark web is a sub-section of the deep web. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.
What it Means Today to be 'Connected' - Lucy P. Marcus by Lucy P. Marcus | 12:10 PM October 13, 2011 Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. I was recently selected as one of Britain’s “best connected” women by Director, a business magazine. Connecting with people and innovative ideas is more important than ever. The integration of social media tools, like Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Plus, and Facebook, and the use of technologies like video Skype means that when used to best effect, the online and offline exchange of ideas can be seamless and without the restrictions of distance and time. One of the most exciting developments that technological advances have facilitated is the breaking down of the hierarchy of ideas, allowing great ideas to bubble to the surface from virtually anywhere. I have found myself asking a question via Twitter, sending the query out into the ether, only to have some of the most creative and interesting solutions coming back in very short order. Why?
Free TiVo: Build a Better DVR out of an Old PC by Ken Sharp April 25, 2005 Digital Video Recorders (DVRs) have become a necessary luxury over the last several years. Millions of people rely on these devices to pause and rewind live television, and to keep track of broadcast schedules and record programs for them. Many consider them just as essential to their daily lives as their cell phones. Several months ago, I finally became sufficiently jealous of the millions of DVR owners to motivate me to put a DVR in my own living room. I earn a living as a computer engineer, so I understand how long it can take to write custom software. Here's how I did it. You'll need: with at least 256MB of RAM (512MB is better), plenty of hard drive space, and a good video card. presumably from your existing home theater system). I used a Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-250 card, $149 at hauppauge.com . I used BeyondTV, which was bundled with the Hauppauge card, but is available from SnapStream separately for $70 at snapstream.com . Automation software, $20 at promixis.com
Life in the Age of Extremes - Bill Davidow - Technology The Internet causes connections to multiply and strengthen, creating a frenzy of positive feedback, which can drive people apart--not together Optimists have long dominated the cyber-landscape, firm and vocal in their belief that the Internet creates a more transparent world, and that the quick and easy access to information it provides is bringing the global population together into one enlightened chorus of harmony. My perspective is different, and my goal in this, the first in a series of posts for The Atlantic, is to lay out the implications of an Internet-driven world. I have been deeply concerned that the Internet has created a centrifugal force that has the potential to tear us apart. Hobsbawm wrote: "The world of the third millennium will therefore almost certainly continue to be one of violent politics and violent political changes." Central to my own viewpoint is the concept of positive feedback. The Internet is positive feedback's best friend. Image: David Blackwel/Flickr.
How To Permanently Delete Your Account on Popular Websites - Smashing Magazine Advertisement We all have an increasing number of sites and online services we’re members of, and sometimes it all gets a little overwhelming. At times, we just need to delete our memberships to some sites, either in an effort to simplify our lives or just because we’ve grown tired of a particular site or service. What we often don’t realize when signing up for all these accounts, though, is how difficult it can be to permanently delete our accounts when we’ve had enough. Some require complicated, multi-step processes that can stretch over the course of days (or weeks). Others take less time, but still require multiple steps by the user. Below we’ll take a look at the account deletion processes of popular websites and services, and how easy or difficult they make it. Facebook Difficulty (on a scale of 1-5, 5 being hardest): 5 Deleting a Facebook account is a bit more complicated than many other services. Then you can use the form found here to request deletion. Twitter Difficulty: 2 MySpace
The NS Profile: Tim Berners-Lee Twenty years ago, Tim Berners-Lee launched the World Wide Web among a small circle of fellow computer enthusiasts. Today, the 56-year-old Briton remains one of the internet's most vigorous advocates. Its vast success, however, has had a downside: it has exposed him to a bombardment of requests from visionaries, obsessives and rubberneckers, as well as hordes of children demanding help with school projects. Berners-Lee has never been an enthusiastic self-publicist. “I have built a moat around myself, along with ways over that moat so that people can ask questions. That the creator of the web - a father of two children, separated from his wife and based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he pursues his research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology - has to live like an electronic Howard Hughes is just one of the many paradoxes that his invention has thrown up over the past two decades. It feels odd to picture him struggling to convince people of the web's potential.
6 Things I Bet You Didn’t Know You Could Do with Google Some of the tips below are effortless to implement and save you a lot of time and energy when dealing with these issues. Let’s start with the first proof of the awesomeness of Google… 1. If you add dots (.) between the letters of your Gmail username, sending an message to the new username will get forwarded to your original email (which is without or with only 1 dot.) It doesn’t matter how many dots you’ll add between your username, all of the emails sent will go to your original email. Gmail doesn’t recognize dots as characters within usernames, you can add or remove the dots from a Gmail address without changing the actual destination address; they’ll all go to your inbox, and only yours. homerjsimpson@gmail.com = hom.er.j.sim.ps.on@gmail.comhomerjsimpson@gmail.com = HOMERJSIMPSON@gmail.comhomerjsimpson@gmail.com = Homer.J.Simpson@gmail.com All these addresses belong to the same person. Why is this helpful? 2. Nowadays it’s VERY easy to find ANY type of wallpaper using Google images.