Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on May 30, 2011 by CyberNet.

Welcome to the WrapUp by CyberNet. This is a collection of news stories, downloads, and tips that we have collected over the last few days, but never got around to writing about. Don’t forget to send in your own tips, or just leave a comment on this page if you think you’ve got something we should include.

–News–

Google Wallet Coming to Your Phone
Google will be turning your NFC-equipped phone into a digital wallet that is packed with coupons, membership cards, and credit cards.

Amazon Launches Mac Download Store
Amazon is now selling Mac software downloads with some titles that even Apple’s own Mac App Store doesn’t have, such as Microsoft Office.

Gmail Will Display Related Contact Information
A new feature that Google is rolling out in Gmail will show information (off to the right of an email) about the contact(s) in the message you’re reading.

YouTube Streams 3 Billion Videos Each Day
As YouTube rolls by their 6-year anniversary they announced that over 3 billion videos are watched every day, and 48-hours of footage is uploaded every minute.

Yahoo! Mail Redesign Leaves Beta
Yahoo! Mail has over 277 million users, and they will all get to experience the new interface that marks the first major update in over 5-years.

WolframAlpha Adds Medical Information
I am constantly amazed at the amount of information pouring out of WolframAlpha, and last week they announced that medical data has also been added. Now you’ll be able to find out interesting medical stats, such as how many patients suffer from a particular illness each year.

Microsoft Shows Off Features in Windows Phone Mango Update
According to Microsoft there will be “hundreds of new features” coming in the new Windows Phone Mango update due out later this Fall. Some of the features include IE9, multitasking, threaded conversations, and speech-to-text support.

Dropbox Crosses 100 Billion File Mark
Dropbox hit a huge milestone with over 100 billion files having been saved by their service, and another 300 million being added every day.

Square Launches iPad App
Square’s new iPad app gives users the ability to accept credit card payments using a powerful register-like application.

–Tips, Tutorials, and Reviews–

iOS Style Scrollbar in Google Chrome
This awesome extension will shrink the size of the scrollbar in Chrome, and does it for both the main reading area as well as any scrollable areas inside the page.

Submit Forms to New Tabs in Firefox
With the TabSubmit Firefox extension you can submit forms in a way that a new page is opened up. When is this useful? I’d use it when doing searches on a site or in a forum so that the search results page opens up in a new tab.

Evernote Extension for Chrome Updated
The new Evernote Chrome extension has added the ability to auto-detect the body of an article making it easier to clip only the content.

AirPlay for Windows Media Center
With the help of this free addon users can actually stream video directly from their iOS device to any Windows Media Center PC.

Bulk Convert Audio Files on a Mac
xACT is a free utility that will let you bulk convert over a dozen different types of audio files to the MP3 or AAC format on your Mac.

Compare the Cost of Driving vs. Flying
The Fly or Drive Calculator is a great way to determine whether it is more cost effective for you to drive or fly to your destination.

–Downloads–

• CDBurnerXP 4.3.8.2568 [Homepage] [Mirror]
• Dexpot 1.5.10 [Homepage] [Mirror]
• Dropbox 1.1.35 [Homepage] [Mirror]
• Fedora Linux 15 [Homepage] [Mirror]
• FileZilla 3.5.0 [Homepage] [Mirror]
• Firefox 5.0 ^{Beta 2} [Homepage] [Mirror]
• Foobar2000 1.1.7 ^{Beta 5} [Homepage] [Mirror]
• Foxit Reader 5.0.1.0523 [Homepage] [Mirror]
• Google Chrome 13.0.772.0 ^Beta [Homepage] [Mirror]
• Miro 4.0 [Homepage] [Mirror]
• Opera 11.50.1016 ^Beta [Homepage] [Mirror]
• Skype 5.3.0.113 [Homepage] [Mirror]
• Sumatra PDF 1.6.3834 ^Beta [Homepage] [Mirror]
• uTorrent 3.0 ^RC2 [Homepage] [Mirror]

Copyright © 2014 CyberNetNews.com

This article was written on February 03, 2008 by CyberNet.

There’s nothing worse than snapping a once-in-a-lifetime photo just to get home and realize that you weren’t holding the camera still enough. Have no fear because there are several different tools that you can use to try and remove the blurry effect. The bad news is that most of them aren’t free, but we did manage to find one that is.

Unshake is a free Java application that doesn’t require installation. Just download, run the “Launch” shortcut, open the blurry image, and hit the DeBlur button. Unshake will go to work trying to clear up any nasty blurring that may have occurred when the photo was taken. Here’s how it works:

Unshake analyses correspondences between nearby points in a picture, and if it finds more similarity between points than it expects, it deduces what went wrong with the image and “deconvolves” it, that is, it works out what the original scene looked like.

The results that I got from the test varied, but in all of the cases the end result was better than the original. As seen in the example on this page you can tweak the various settings to increase the quality of the outputted image. In particular giving Unshake more time to process the image (by increasing the “x1″) will yield way better results, but it will also take a few minutes depending on the size of the image.

Download Unshake

Copyright © 2014 CyberNetNews.com

This article was written on February 26, 2007 by CyberNet.

This morning when I woke up I noticed that I had more than 20 tabs open in Firefox that I still needed to sort through and read. Most of them were articles that I found the previous day, but never got around to reading. Despite having a 24” monitor I still find that having 20 tabs open takes up a lot of room, and what I really needed was a folder-like structure for my tabs.

Some of you might be thinking that I should just bookmark the items into a temporary folder to read later on. That’s not a bad idea, but I’ve tried that before and I typically forget about reading them. So I did what every Firefox user does…went and searched Mozilla’s Firefox Extension page for something that would fulfill my needs.

I was pretty disappointed that I didn’t find anything. I then turned to Google trying to see if I could find something that would do what I was looking for. After about 30–minutes I came across an extension called Tab Groups that was just released three weeks ago. My initial thought was “why didn’t I see this on the Firefox Extension page?” which I later found out was because the developer has not yet submitted this to Mozilla.

It sounded like exactly what I needed so I went ahead and installed it. As you can see in the screenshot above it creates a new toolbar that essentially adds tabs to your tabs. Here are features it currently offers:

• Tab Groups: Grouping of tabs into groups with a tab bar to manage groups, only the browser tabs in the currently selected group are shown.
• New tabs are opened in current group
• Drag And Drop of tabs between groups
• Renaming of groups
• Support for Session Store (Firefox 2 built in session storage) and undo-close tab (again only the one built into FF2). In other words tab groups will be restored along with tabs with restored tabs being placed in the correct group.

This extension is only for Firefox 2 users which makes sense since it uses the built-in session restore to remember tab groupings. There are some known bugs that you should also consider before getting cozy with the extension, such as a lack of “group overflow” management. That means if you have too many groupings they will extend beyond the edge of your Firefox window and simply run off of the screen without allowing you to scroll and see them.

I also began thinking about some features that would be pretty cool to see in this extension, such as bookmarking a whole group of tabs. Then I noticed the Planned Features section for the extension which says that particular feature should be in version 0.05 which is currently three releases away (it’s currently at 0.02). Looking at the Planned Features page will make you realize that the developer has a lot of things he/she would like to do with the extension, and I can’t wait.

I’m currently using this on a Firefox 3 nightly and it is running great, except for a small gap between the grouping tabs and the Tabbar (pictured above), but that is something I can live with. I’m actually not sure if that problem is with Firefox 3 or if it is the visual properties of Vista that’s causing the problem…either way it doesn’t detract from the value that the extension adds.

Tab Groups Homepage
Here is a mirror of Tab Groups 0.2 (I recommend downloading from the homepage since it will probably be frequently updated).

Copyright © 2014 CyberNetNews.com

This article was written on May 08, 2007 by CyberNet.

Time Saving Tuesday

Our daily lives continue to become more and more overwhelmed with information. The problem that most of us face now is finding an efficient way to keep all of that information organized in a fashion that makes it easy to find what we’re looking for.

Evernote has got to be one of the best solutions for taking notes for just about everything imaginable. Whether it be creating to-do lists, shopping lists, or clipping stuff from the Web…Evernote does it all. Check out some of the amazing features that it includes, and it’s all free:

• Note Formats: Create notes in multiple formats, including text, Web, email, handwriting, image clips and custom templates.
• Multiple Categories: I’m not sure if categories is really the right name for these because they behave more like tags. Basically you can add as many categories to a note as you want.
• Powerful SmartSearch: Multiple methods for finding notes: visually, by time, categories, automatic labeling and keywords, complete with matching note count.
• Web & Email Clipper: Instantly add web pages and emails into EverNote from Internet Explorer, Outlook, Mozilla Firefox or Thunderbird using an ‘Add to EverNote’ button along with context menus.
• Drag & Drop files: Drag & drop or paste text with images from any applications into EverNote.
• To Dos and Note Templates: Create and monitor To-Do lists, expenses, contacts and other common note templates. Here are some examples of the different templates (click to enlarge a screenshot):
     
• Embedded To?Dos: Click Ctrl-Shift-C or right-click and select “Insert To-Do checkbox” anywhere in your notes to place a checkbox at the cursor position in any note. This means the note will automatically appear in the To-Do category until all of the boxes are checked off.
• Send notes via IM: Drag-and-drop your notes into Yahoo! Messenger, MSN Messenger, Skype and other IMs to instantly transfer interesting bits of info to your buddies.
• Keep Your Sensitive Info Secure: Encrypt notes you want to keep private or protect from accidental changes or deletion. You can also password protect an entire EverNote database.
• Backup: Automatic and manual backup are available via the Tools>Options>Backup tab.
• Spellchecker
• Note History: All changes to edited notes in “History Notes”.

One of the cool things with Evernote is that you never have to think twice about saving your notes because it is done automatically while you work.

The Web Clipper is a very integral part of Evernote for myself. In Firefox it just adds a small icon next to the address bar, and clicking on that button will automatically create a new note from any of the content highlighted on the page. This is a very quick process and doesn’t require any other interaction. Once the note is saved you’ll see a little popup in the corner of your screen that you can always click on to edit the newly created note:

There is also an experimental feature that they currently have available called the Universal Clipper (pictured to the right). This is a separate download and once installed you will be able to quickly note just about anything by using double-clicking on the Universal Clipper icon in your System Tray. As seen in the screenshot, you can even specify an area on your screen to store in a note.

There is also an EverNote Plus version available for those who need synchronization capabilities or handwriting recognition features. I think most people will be content with the free version of Evernote since there is no time or note limitation, but Tablet PC users may find those more advanced features useful.

Visit the Evernote Homepage

Thanks for the tip JavaSharp!

Copyright © 2014 CyberNetNews.com

This article was written on February 06, 2007 by CyberNet.

Windows might be the most common operating system but there is no doubt that Linux is gaining ground rather quickly. The biggest complaint that I always hear about Linux is that the hardware on a computer never quite functions right with Linux. Ubuntu is trying to conquer that problem, but wouldn’t life be a little easier if the computer you bought was built for Linux? Then you know that everything would work how it is supposed to.

No problem! System76 has several different laptops that vary in price to accommodate nearly everyone’s needs. You can even go as far as to customize them so that they are exactly what you want…you can even get a built-in camera. Honestly though, for the operating system being free I am quite surprised that their cheapest laptop is $700…and by the time you add some of those finishing touches I’m sure you can take it over $1000. Right now, without any coupons, I can go over to dell and pick-up a Windows Vista laptop for $689. I guess if you are looking into the future then the Ubuntu laptops might be appetizing since the operating system upgrades will always be free, but it would have been nice to see these in the $500 range.

Source: Engadget (Thanks for the tip Mohan!)

Since we are on the topic of Ubuntu I thought I should mention Ubuntu’s newest pre-release of version 7.04, which is still two-months away. This pre-release is dubbed Feisty Fawn Herd 3 and sports a few new features over the previous versions. The most prominent feature is the new Control Center (pictured above) which pulls in the feature I love the most from Windows Vista…instant search! Now you can just start to type the setting or option that you are looking for and it will instantly show you the results. Figuring out how to change that one hidden setting is now going to be a thing of the past.

A lot of the other things that are new in this pre-release are updates to existing programs, so they are primarily building on what already exists. I definitely like that idea because people aren’t necessarily looking for a lot of new features, but instead they want to see the existing features and applications made even better. With the popularity of Ubuntu it surprises me that they have not integrated XGL/Beryl to spice it up with the 3D effects, but I would guess that they might be holding back until the stability of those features gets a little better.

Thanks for the tip Chris!

Copyright © 2014 CyberNetNews.com