Hachi is a website that allows you connect with new people through your friends. For example if I wanted to become friends with someone (Person1) and my friend(Friend1) is friends with that person it would show you all the possible options to become friends with person1. You must connect via Facebook and it also allows you to connect with LinkedIn for even better results.
Windows, Mac, Linux and even Firefox offer more now than ever before in terms of software pre-installed and ready to make your life easier and the experience on a computer better. While each newer version offers more, sometimes it’s not enough to really make your computer experience as smooth or fulfilling as it could be. Here’s 20 apps you probably never heard of that will help make using your computer more efficient, fun and better.
Sapiens (Mac) – Probably the most intuitive apple launcher I’ve ever used, Sapiens is accessed from either a circular motion from your mouse / touchpad or a keyboard shortcut and actually learns which programs you use the most and anticipates what you’ll need. Sadly, it’s still not working with 10.6.
SuperDuper! (Mac) – The easiest way I’ve ever cloned a hard drive, ever. Want to upgrade to a larger hard drive in your Mac, get SuperDuper, connect the new hard drive via an SATA to USB adapter, run it. Pull the existing hard drive and replace with the new one and turn the power on. Brilliant!
PixelStick (Mac) – If you do web design or web graphics, PixelStick is an amazing little app to measure distance and angles on the screen. I can’t tell you how often I use this for laying out sites, creating banner ads and doing alignments of web graphics.
Paparazzi! (Mac) - A small and unobtrusive app for taking screenshots of web pages.
XXCLONE (Windows) – The Windows version of SuperDuper! and it does an excellent job of cloning hard drives.
CutePDF (Windows) – Create PDF files from any printable document, for free!
EASEUS Partition Master (Windows) – Create partitions, resize, format and merge on nearly all Windows platforms, for free!
SpinRite (Windows) – Hard drives aren’t perfect, when you need to do maintenance on them or recover data, SpinRite can help.
PhotoRec (Windows / Mac / Linux) – If you’ve ever formatted the memory card in your digital camera by accident, PhotoRec will be worth it’s weight in gold. Best photo recovery tool ever, and it’s free!
DVD Flick (Windows) – Convert nearly any video file into a playable DVD.
Mac The Ripper (Mac) – Quickly and easily rip any DVD movie to your hard drive. This application is great if you travel a lot and need to extend the battery life between charges. Using your built in DVD slot consumes far more battery juice compared to playing a movie from your hard drive.
HandBrake (Mac / Windows / Linux) - An open source video transcoder for all platforms, you can now extract video or audio or both from any video source and convert it into nearly any other source.
Vixy (Mac / Windows) – Vixy is an online service to rip YouTube videos to your hard drive, but the site can be somewhat unstable due to high traffic. To resolve this problem they’ve released the desktop app. Still in Beta with a few quirks, the options to save as .avi, .mov or just extract the audio as .mp3 are nice.
Pidgin (Mac / Windows / Linux) – Possibly one of the best chat clients available that loads nearly all formats of chat available, from AIM to Gtalk, Facebook to Yahoo.
FireBug (Firefox) An add-on for Firefox, FireBug is essential for anyone who does web design to quickly and efficiently track down errors with web page development.
SciTE (Windows) – Based on the Scintilla text editor, SciTE has extensions built in. This is hands down one of the best text editors available, and it’s free!
Audacity (Mac) – Going further than GarageBand, Audacity gives you a level of fine tuning and editing that is second to none. This open-source project is also free!
FireFTP (Firefox) – If you need to FTP data, chances are you probably already have a web browser open, so why not do it right in Firefox? FireFTP is a small add-on that is simple to use and provide rock solid stability.
Keyfinder (Windows) – This tiny little app does one thing, sniffs out the product key of nearly any version of Windows. Very helpful when you need to reinstall the operating system but the sticker has been scratched or worn off the case.
Foxit (Windows / Linux / Firefox) – Simply the fastest PDF reader I’ve ever used, period. Uninstall Acrobat reader and install this free PDF reader, period.
TypeFace allows you to make your very own font using your face. Basically, the program uses a camera as an input tool to scan your face. Then, your face is analysed for specific features, lines, curves and angles. This is all then computer and a font is designed specifically for you. Like your very own font fingerprint!
It has been made my Mary Huang and it has some cool features. For example, you can edit and distort your face to change up your font and select what area of your face you want to use if you don’t want to use all of it. You can also make TypeFace books like the one pictured above from all the different fonts of your friends and family.
Today, LG have unveiled their first ever laptop which is also the first ever laptop to get the official Windows 7 touch screen seal-of-approval sticker from Micrsoft. This is different to other touch screen laptops out there which use primitive overlay touch screen technology found on many budget touch screen phones. By using an inbuilt screen technology which leaves the screen firm and doesn’t reduce picture quality and responsiveness, LG are sure to have success with this model.
Undoubtedly, Samsung will be unveiling a competitor to this new product in the coming weeks and months, perhaps a little disgruntled having been bet to the post. Perhaps these touch screen laptops will be the new ‘iPad’ seeing as that doesn’t have enough computing power for most of us.
The LG model will go into mass production in the second half of this year although I’m sure some review units will be floating around. For now, we have this video from LG.
Last year, I reported that the 3D home entertainment trend was on the up. Recession or no recession, it’s coming. The latest development in this tantalising three dimensional tale is the release of HDMI 3D glasses for use at home with a 3D TV.
Whether you’re a fan of wearing weird glasses while watching TV or not, you’re going to be happy with this next piece of new: there isn’t going to be much bickering between the companies about format issues. When almost any new development is made in the tech industry, each company almost always seems to choose its own format. That way, they hop to gain loyalty and crush the others. One wins, a lot loose. And of course eventually we’re left with one format. This time though, they;re doing things differently. They’ll all be going with the active shutter glasses which you can see in the picture.
The ones above are geared up for HDMI 1.4 and will be compatible with future updates to HDMI technology. So 3D is coming, prepare to be either dazzled or extremely annoyed.
Motorola Droid is definitely one of the most understated smart phones. Well, perhaps not understated, just over-shadowed by the likes of the iPhone and more popular Android devices from HTC. However, it would seem as though Motorola are keeping their hopes up for the OS by releasing a new update for all Droid devices. I don’t think anybody expected it to come this soon.
The announced the impending update, which will ‘start to roll out this week’ on their official Facebook page. Besides from announcing the new update, they go on to tease us anxious fan-boys by saying that they “will have more information to share on other device upgrades later”. So maybe some of Moto’s other devices are due for a service check.
Let’s hope that the new update fixes the known Droid bugs and maybe even gives the OS a slight facelift.
One of the emerging trends in the online world is to have a translation service. Google Translate is probably the best well known with ad-ons and blog widgets to help people translate web pages, documents and the likes. However, the problem is that it’s often a little too ‘literal’ meaning some sentences don’t make sense when translated. They get ‘lost in translation’, if you will.
My Gengo allow users to upload a document, have it translated by a professional and then returned to them at a very low rate (normally 70% lower than freelance translators charge on sites like Elance). I think this is a great idea. A few times I have needed letters and documents translated for my business and have had to spend quite a lot of money to ensure they’re translated properly – especially when I’m sending them to a client or a potential one.
The site offers translation services between languages like English, Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, Italian and Russian. They recently received investment from tech entrepreneur Dave McClure so it looks like this start-up might just be a success in the near future.
Since Twitter got really popular thanks to all the celebs who made it famous, the only way to tweet has been either directly on the website or using an app such as Tweetie. Now however, Comufy, a London based tech company brings us TweetSwitch.
Basically, it enables you to set up your account to send certain tweets to your IM. You can then in turn respond to these tweets from the IM service. Selecting what kind of tweets you want to receive is threefold. You can receive all tweets, tweets where you’re mentioned or replied to (such as @Crenk) or the most important ones, direct messages.
At the moment, some main IM clients such as AOL, Windows Live Messenger and Yahoo Messenger are supported and it’s said to be coming to the ever growing Skype. This is a really cool new feature, effectively creating a switchboard for your Twitter account!
Classics,
Nanos, Shuffles, Touches – Apple have made so many different shapes of iPod that you need adaptors for practically every accessory you can buy. Apple likes things to look sleek and neat, so having fiddly bits of plastic to swap over for each of the many iPods they would like you to buy (you couldn’t possibly take your 60GB classic jogging with you!) is not acceptable, and so for all the neat freaks and must-have-it Apple fans, they’re developing a universal dock to accommodate all different shapes and sizes. They’ve filed a patent for, as they phrase it:
A dock for supporting a plurality of differently-shaped electronic devices, the dock comprising: a housing; a connector coupled to the housing; and a compressible support layer positioned at least partially about the connector, wherein at least a portion of the compressible support layer compresses to the shape of at least a portion of an electronic device that is attached to the connector.
Featuring:
A method for supporting a plurality of differently-shaped electronic devices in a dock that includes a compressible support layer positioned at least partially about a connector, the method comprising:attaching an electronic device to the connector of the dock; compressing at least a first portion of the compressible support layer with at least a portion of the bottom of the electronic device when the electronic device is attached to the connector; and supporting at least a portion of a side of the electronic device with at least a second portion of the compressible support layer when the electronic device is attached to the connector.
Which translates to a standard iPod connector in the middle of a squashy or springy surround, which you compress part of by pushing your iPod into, the uncompressed part supporting the sides of the device, perhaps a bit like one of those pin-art pads that were fashionable around when the Lawnmower Man came out.
Google’s minimalistic homepage has been a cornerstone of the internet for the past decade or so. Now, they’re testing out a new homepage which will take the word count from thirty down to one; ‘Google’.
Basically, it will look like the screenshot above with everything but the Google logo and search function being removed. This includes their famous ‘I’m feeling lucky’ button
When you move the mouse however near any area where buttons used to be they will appear. The thinking is that this new method will have the best of both worlds: minimalism and functionality.
However, they are only bucket testing the new homepage to see how it goes down so only a certain percentage of users will actually get access to the new design. For those of you who can’t, see the video below.
