Archive for February, 2008
Photography
It’s been a while since I’ve written here. Last time I was talking about my senior project, which was a success. The autonomous driving algorithm was a bit tricky to work out, but I don’t mind a challenge. It drew quite a bit of attention when I was testing it in Police [...]
Make your own PDFs
PDF Creator is an open source tool you can use to create PDF files. Using it is simple enough, it installs itself as a printer driver, so all you need to do to is change your printer in the print dialog box of any windows program.
I often use it as a print preview [...]
Free Photoshop
GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) is an open source image editor that is comparable to Photoshop. By no means is it a drop in replacement. But a lot of the core functionality is there, including layers, filters, plugins, paths and channels. There is a bit of a learning curve, especially because the [...]
Video Transcoding
Media Coder is an open source video transcoding utility. It supports a large number of formats, and plenty of advanced options for tweaking all of the encoder settings. Fortunately, an extension that is included in the typical install makes it all very easy to use with various presets for small and large [...]
Image Management
Google’s Picasa is a simple yet powerful way to store your photos. Once installed, it will scan your drive for images and present the chronologically by folders. You can then add your own tags to any image, and create albums of images, photos can even exist in more than one album.
Once you’ve got [...]
On-Line Backup
Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) service coupled with Jungle Disk is an excellent, inexpensive solution for on-line backup.
The Amazon service is $0.15 per gigabyte per month, and $0.10 per gigabyte transfered. It’s pay as you go, so you’re never paying for more storage or bandwidth than you need.
Jungle Disk is a very user friendly [...]
Pandora
Pandora is your own personalized internet radio station. Once you sign up, you start by telling Pandora about one artist that you like. It then uses data collected as part of the Music Genome Project to find other music you might like. It then begins playing music. As each song comes up you have the [...]
