Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on August 05, 2008 by CyberNet.

Time Saving Tuesday

Windows only
One trend that I’ve noticed as bandwidth and hard drive storage space continues to grow is that sending CD/DVD’s over the Internet is becoming a preferred way for distributing media. These files are typically in an ISO or BIN/CUE format, which most people will then burn to a CD/DVD before using them. The good news is that you can easily save the time and money involved in doing this by using a free virtual drive application.

How do you mount an ISO image? It’s actually really simple if you have the right tools. What they do is take an ISO image, BIN/CUE file, or any other supported format and displays it as a virtual drive on your computer. The drive will look just like any other CD drive in Windows Explorer. One of the huge benefits of doing this is that reading/copying files from the “CD” in this way is much faster than using a physical CD-ROM drive.

There are several free applications floating around the Internet that can do this, but you should be aware that some of them (Daemon Tools, etc..) might install spyware/malware on your machine. Luckily there are three great freeware solutions that you can trust, and that’s what we’re going to cover today.

–Virtual CloneDrive (Homepage)–

If you want a no-frills solution for mounting images Virtual CloneDrive is what you’ll likely want to use. It supports all of the common image formats including ISO, BIN, and CDD, and is capable of mounting the last used image file upon startup. You can have up to 8 virtual drives at any one given time, but the nicest feature would be the fact that you can mount an image simply by double-clicking on the file.

–MagicISO (Homepage)–

MagicISO (commonly referred to as MagicDisc) can do everything that Virtual CloneDrive is capable of plus some. It supports up to 15 simultaneous virtual drives, can automatically mount the last used image file, compress ISO images (which really just converts it from an ISO image to UIF), and more. Plus you can create ISO images from a CD/DVD!

Here are some of the filetypes it supports when creating or mounting images:

• Creating: ISO, BIN/CUE, NRG, or UIF images from a CD/DVD
• Mounting: Not only does MagicISO support the ISO image format, but it also supports over two dozen other popular formats: UIF, BIN/CUE (CDRWin), IMA/IMG, CIF (Easy CD Creator), NRG (Nero Burning ROM), IMG/CCD (CloneCD), MDF/MDS (Fantom CD), VCD (Farstone Virtual Drive), FCD, LCD, NCD, GCD, VaporCD (Noum Vapor CDROM), P01/MD1/XA (Gear), VC4/000 (Virtual CD), VDI (Virtuo CD Manager), C2D (WinOnCD), BWI/BWT (BlinkWrite), CDI (DiscJuggler), TAO/DAO (Duplicator), and PDI (Instant Copy)

The only thing this seems to be missing is the easy double-click to mount an image file that Virtual CloneDrive supports. To mount a drive in MagicISO you’ll want to click on the System Tray icon, go to Virtual CD/DVD-ROM, hover over one of the virtual adrives, and then choose the “Mount” option.

–StarBurn (Homepage)–

You might recall us writing about StarBurn as a free CD/DVD/Blu-ray burning application, but it’s also capable of mounting an ISO image! Once you have the StarBurn software running you’ll notice that there is a StarPort option located on the toolbar (also in the Action menu), and clicking on that will initiate the StarPort wizard. From there you can mount or unmount an image file on a virtual drive.

If you’ve been wanting a nice freeware application for burning CD’s and DVD’s I highly recommend picking this up. The fact that it doubles as a virtual drive manager makes it extremely worthwhile.

Note: This software tries to change your browser’s homepage during the setup process, but getting around it is as simple as unchecking a box.

–Overview–

It’s good to know that you’ve got options available to you should you decide that you need a virtual drive management application. Each one of the free solutions I’ve mentioned above caters to a different type of need: Virtual CloneDrive is simple and intuitive, MagicISO is powerful and lets you create images from CD’s, and StarBurn doubles as a CD burning application. Pick the one that benefits you the most, but it’s not like you can’t easily download one of the other free alternatives if you don’t like how one of them handles.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on February 05, 2007 by CyberNet.

FastStone Image Viewer 3.0 is moving along quite nicely and just the other day they released Beta 2. I have already raved about their screen capture utility (that is free as well) which we use quite heavily on our site, but the Image Viewer is sure to amaze you just as much.

Basically, with Image Viewer you can manage all of your images located on your PC in one convenient location. It is something that kind of reminds me of Google’s Picasa photo management software, but there is something about Image Viewer that makes it seem powerful yet slim. Maybe it is the fact that you can download a portable version that doesn’t require any sort of installation…I’m not quite sure what it is, but it is quite sleek.

The custom interface really looks nice and gives the application a professional look and feel. It has the tree navigation on the left-side of the Image Viewer so that finding images is as simple as browsing your hard drive. There is no more having to add albums or fuss over why images aren’t showing up, because this just pulls stuff straight from your hard drive.

As you can see in the screenshot I took above, the Edit menu offers an array of effects and customizations that you can choose from which is what makes this so useful for me. There are a lot of really simple operations that I like to do such as resizing images or cropping them, and this lets me do it in just a few operations. Not to mention that you can fix the red eye in photos in a few clicks!

Those of us that struggle trying to manage and view images on a small monitor will also find their full-screen mode to be quite useful. As seen in the screenshot above you can view an image in full-screen mode and still have access to all of the tools that the Image Viewer offers. The best part is that the menus automatically hide themselves and they pop-out when you hover your mouse towards one side of the screen. In the example above I am hovering over the left-side of the screen so the photo editing menu and each side of the screen will reveal a different tool.

The newest Beta has some nice improvements including saving photos as a PDF or cropping multiple images in a single batch operation. Maybe we’ll see some new features in the next pre-release as well, but since you don’t even have to install anything there should be nothing holding you back from giving this version a shot.

Download FastStone Image Viewer 3.0

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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In the midst of fiddling with tablets and laptops at Computex, we haven’t been thinking much of eye-tracking technologies until we saw Utechzone’s booth. What we have here is the Spring, a TW$240,000 (US$8,380) eye-tracking rig that was launched in March 2010 and is aimed at users with limited mobility. The package consists of an LCD monitor, a computer, and an external sensor that utilizes infrared to track our pupils. Also included is an eye-friendly software suite that lets users play games, browse the web and media files, send emails, communicate with caretakers, and read PDF or TXT files.

We had a go on the Spring and quickly learned how to control it with our eyes: much like the Xbox Kinect, in order to make a click we had to hover the cursor over (or fix our eyes on) a desired button until the former completes a spin. The tracking was surprisingly accurate, except we had to take off our glasses for it to work; that said, the other glasses didn’t exhibit the same issue, so the culprit could be just some coating on our lenses. Another problem we found was that it only took a quick jiggle with our eyes to cancel the spinning countdown, so full concentration is required to use the Spring. This shouldn’t be a problem outside a noisy event like Computex, anyway, and if you need more convincing, we were told that a disabled Taiwanese professor managed to hit 100,000 Chinese characters within three months using phonetic input on the the same rig — he’s planning on releasing a new book soon. Have a look at our eyes-on video after the break for a better idea on how the Spring works.

Continue reading Utechzone Spring eye-tracking system hands-on (video)

Utechzone Spring eye-tracking system hands-on (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 06 Jun 2011 08:52:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Continue reading PhotoFast i-FlashDrive does USB on one end, 30-pin dock connector on the other

PhotoFast i-FlashDrive does USB on one end, 30-pin dock connector on the other originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 04 Jun 2011 09:07:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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While combing through the show floor at Computex, our fortunate selves stumbled upon a new phone-tablet duo at Leadtek’s booth. Oh, don’t worry, this isn’t yet another phone-in-pad design; but actually a VoIP / home phone docked next to an Android tablet. Dubbed AMOR Multimedia Phone 8218, the idea here is that the docking station acts as both a DECT base and a WiFi router, but also packs ZigBee radio to relay data from compatible devices (for healthcare, home surveillance, home automation, etc.) to the web.

Alas, there’s no direct interaction between the phone and the tablet, but we were still intrigued by the latter’s specs: Android 2.3 (although this demo unit had 2.2), Tegra 2, 7-inch 1,280 x 720 LCD, HDMI-out, and a front-facing camera for video calls. For a home device, this is actually a pretty powerful package and certainly a significant upgrade from the AMOR 8210 announced earlier this year. No word on US availability, but Taiwanese buyers will be able to grab hold of an 8218 starting in September.

Leadtek AMOR 8218 DECT phone with Tegra 2 Android tablet hands-on originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 04 Jun 2011 05:04:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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