Software

Edison: freeware app to automate your computer’s energy use

1 Comment / Computers, Gizmo of the Day, Home Automation, Software / By /

Edison is a freeware application for your Windows XP or Vista machine that regulates its energy use, mainly by doing things like turning off your monitor, spinning down your hard drive and/or putting your computer into standby or hibernation.

Assuming you haven’t been a good boy/girl and already turned on some of those power-saving features, then you expect to save a good $20 to $35 per year per computer. Edison will also calculate your savings. Ok, so it doesn’t sound like a lot, but if you’re a poweruser who has a monster machine with more than 1 or 2 hard drives, a souped up graphics card and more, then you may well save a lot more. And of course, let’s not forget the significant benefit to the planet.

via Wired.com

iSpring Free converts PowerPoint presentations into Flash

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For the geek that has to do presentations, iSpring Free is a neat little tool that converts your PowerPoint presentations into Adobe Flash slideshows. So no more sticking this slides up on the Web, and needing your visitors to download then open up on their computer (and they need to have Powerpoint Viewer at a minimum too).

iSpring runs on Windows supports PowerPoint 2000/XP/2003/2007.

Review: PricePirates price comparison software

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PricePirates is a piece of Windows freeware that lets you compare prices in eBay auctions ( you can select what country), Amazon.com and Shopping.com. Each of those product sources show up in different tabs in the software and automatically populated once you switch to a tab. There is also a tab with a Web search (although I don’t know why you would bother with this when there are much better search engines out there).

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Movienizer helps you organize your movies

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This is primarily for the movie lover who has tons of movies and needs a way to catalog and organize them, something akin what iTunes/MediaMonkey/Music Jukebox does for your music collection. Movienizer can pull down up to date movie information from the Net including cover/poster art, actor, director and assorted production info.

One nice feature that I’d like to see in the music jukebox apps as well is the ability to mark a movie as being loaned out and to whom.

Getting value from technology

Networking & Internet, Phones, Software / By /

There are two things I am pretty pleased about this week – my new phone and a really useful plugin for Outlook, both of which are allowing me to get much more value out of the technology I use every day.

I have recently changed my mobile phone to a Nokia N95 8GB (from a SE K800i) and so far I am really pleased with its performance. The interface is responsive and the functionality including the wireless connectivity, 5 megapixel camera and N-gage are well worth the upgrade – you can read more about it Welcome to my Nokia N95 8GB.

Xobni (read Inbox backwards) is enabling me to get way more use out of Outlook (Why I need Xobni to manage my e-mail) than I have had before. Two of the key features for me are the contact relationships and the exchanged files indicators. The Contact Relationships part allows me to find a particular email recipient who have been involved a communication chain whilst the exchange file indicators keeps a log of files transmitted between us.

I have also posted the next part in the Web 2.0 series: 42 things about Web 2.0 in 2008, part 2 of 3.

Windows XP SP3 Set to be Released

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Microsoft says the third and final service pack for the aging Windows XP will be available for download on April 29th while manufacturers and larger customers currently have SP3 in house. SP3 will include all updates released since 2004 when SP2 was released. Here are some added features in SP3:

A feature called Network Access Protection
that’s borrowed from the newer Windows Vista operating system. NAP
automatically validates a computer’s health, ensuring that it’s free of
bugs and viruses before allowing it access to a network.

Windows XP SP3 also includes improved “black hole” router
detection — a feature that automatically detects routers that are
silently discarding packets. In XP SP3, the feature is turned on by
default, according to Microsoft.

Windows XP SP3 also steals a page from Vista’s product
activation model, meaning that product keys for each copy of the
operating system don’t need to be entered during setup. The feature
should prove popular with corporate IT managers, who often need to
oversee hundreds, or even thousands, of operating system installations.

When a Microsoft spokesperson was asked for the number of fixes in XP SP3, they responded “one billion fixes” while resting the pinky finger aside the mouth.

Source: Information Week

Microsoft Extends XP Again

Computers, Software / By /

As the Geeks mentioned last week in Windows XP nears the end, Microsoft plans to phase out XP. Well, Microsoft has decided to extend the sales of Windows XP Home to OEMs to June 30, 2010 which is two years after their extended extension.

Perhaps your entry in one of the “Save Windows XP petitions” paid off! Actually, that’s not the case at all. Microsoft just doesn’t want to lose anymore footing to Linux in the “ultra-low-cost” laptop market according to this article.

Google Docs Offline being rolled out

Networking & Internet, Software / By /

Google Docs proved (at least for me and others I know) that for a significant portion of what we use office productivity software is relatively simple and does not usually require full-blown, feature rich suites like MS Office, or OpenOffice. While I found that using GD was not an issue as I regularly have high-speed Internet access (@ work and @ home), it did lack what the other suites provided which was offline use (like say when I’m on a plane or at an airport refusing to pay $12 for 24 hours of Internet access).

Now get ready for Offline Google Docs. All you will need to do is download and install a browser plugin called Google Gears, which already has me wondering what other applications Google has in mind for your browser. For now, Offline GD only works with the word processing app and only in English, but stay tuned. The others will be coming soon. Here’s a video of it in action.

Adobe launches free Web version of Photoshop

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In a move similar to Google, Microsoft and a slew of other Web 2.0 companies, Adobe now offers a Web-based version of Photoshop, called Photoshop Express, for free. It is a basic version, and obviously does not have all of the features of the full version or even the cheaper Photoshop Elements, but will probably satisfy a decent chunk of the Photoshop target market.

So for all of you warez fans out there, quit downloading illegal copies of Photoshop and using faked keys!

Check out Photoshop Express.

Sony has a momentary lapse in sanity; quickly recovers

Computers, Software / By /

After their last snafu with secretly installing rootkits as a DRM measure, Sony is getting smart(er). The smart part is in listening to consumers, but they did start off again by doing something dumb. In this case, it was a $50 fee to eliminate excess non-essential applications (aka crapware) from their default Vaio laptop installations. The blogosphere went berserk, but Sony listened and promptly dropped the fee. Good for them (and us).

And in more dumb company moves, Apple has been shipping Safari for Windows along with iTunes updates. Now while you can deselect Safari from being downloaded and installed, let’s face it – users tend to click OK before reading anything! Downloading a new 22MB installer when you’re really just expecting to update your existing apps is a bit sneaky and probably unwanted. A better idea may have been a more in-your-face dialog box asking your permission. As someone who didn’t care much for iTunes and then lost his iPod Nano and replaced it with a Sandisk Sansa, I haven’t noticed this, but I can understand the backlash.

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