Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on June 11, 2007 by CyberNet.

Microsoft Monday

The popularity of digital cameras has meant that people take more pictures because they’re not held back by limited amounts of film.  I love taking pictures with my digital camera, and I also love to share them whether it be through email, social networks, or my Flickr account.  Another way to share photos that I recently experimented with is by using the new Windows DVD Maker. If you have Windows Vista Home Premium, or Ultimate, this feature is available to you. It’s simple to use, and filled with customization options that will allow you to put your own personal touch on the DVD to show to family and friends.

There are two different ways to access Windows DVD Maker. The first option is to go to the Start Menu and select Windows DVD Maker. Another option is to open up a photo from the photo gallery and click burn up at the top, then “Video DVD.” This is the option I chose, and the one I’ll be walking you through today.

Step 1: Select Your Photos

The first thing that you’ll want to do is select the photos that you’d like to be a part of your DVD. All you have to do is highlight (just like you’d highlight multiple files) the photos that you’d like to be included. Remember, you’re creating a DVD so there will be plenty of room for all of your pictures. If you’re taking your photos at 3 megapixels, you should have room for about 3,000 photos!

If you’ve used the tagging system that the Windows Photo Gallery offers, you can select pictures that you’d like to be included by selecting the tag. For example, if you have a tag labeled “pets” you can click on it. Only the pictures that have been tagged “pets” would be selected.

Once all of your pictures are highlighted, you’ll go up to “Burn” then click “Video DVD.”

Another option would be to select just one picture, then go to “Burn,” then “Video DVD” and from there you can add additional items to the video by clicking “Add items.”

Step 2: Menu Options

You’ll have options for deciding how the menu will look on your DVD. There are several customization options including appearance of scenes, button styles, and you can also include foreground and background video along with audio.

Step 3: DVD Settings

Want to add music to your movie? No problem! Add the songs that you’d like.  What to change the slide show length to match the music length? No problem! Want to select your transition between slides or use pan and zoom effects for pictures? No problem! I was especially happy to find that they include the pan and zoom effects because that really makes a difference between a boring and interesting video.

Step 4: Finish and Burn

The last step is to burn your disc! Make sure you have a DVD in your DVD drive, and then click burn. My DVD turned out great, and hopefully yours will too. It’s such a simple, easy process that anyone can do. And it’ll be great to send out to family and friends.

Video of the process:

I’ve included a video of all the different menu options, and I removed all of the loading times associated with previewing the menu animations. Even if you have Windows DVD Maker, it’ll still be easier to watch the video if you want to see the different animations before trying it for yourself.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on February 11, 2009 by CyberNet.

Windows only
Most of the time I use my computer’s desktop as a temporary holding place for things that I need to organize later on. It’s normally filled with attachments that have been downloaded from emails, apps I’ve downloaded to try out, and more. My goal is to always have a clear desktop because that means I’ve filed everything away, but that rarely happens.

Stardock has released a free program called Fences that focuses on de-cluttering your desktop. Basically what it does is make it possible to group the icons on your desktop into self-contained areas. You can then hide all of the groupings simply by double-clicking on your desktop. If you’ve got certain icons you always want visible (like the Recycle Bin) you can specify them within the settings, and those will never be hidden when double-clicking on the desktop.

To top it off the application will also let you take snapshots of how all your icons are organized at any given moment. These will serve as backups in case you ever want to revert back to a previous state of organization.

Stardock Fences is completely free, but they do have a professional version in the works that will add more features if you’re willing to pay for them. The free version, however, will always remain available.

This has become a must-have app for me, and I highly recommend it for anyone that has troubles managing their desktop.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on April 10, 2009 by CyberNet.

Windows only
We’ve shown you some tools in the past that lets you automatically rotate your desktop backgrounds (like this one), but the sheer simplicity of Wallpaper Juggler is what makes it so great. Basically what it does is download wallpapers from InterfaceLIFT and WallpaperStock, and you can choose to have it grab only the most popular wallpapers. Then you can setup an interval so that it automatically rotates through the downloaded wallpapers. Once setup the whole process happens transparently in the background without any interaction needed from you.

Here are the features the free Wallpaper Juggler app has to offer:

• Controllable from the System Tray (enabled/disable, juggle now, switch back to last wallpaper, etc…)
• Can be configured to…
  • start with Windows
  • look for wallpapers in multiple folders including/excluding subfolders. Best results when used with matching resolution wallpapers
  • change wallpaper once every preferred duration between 1 min and 500 hrs. It will understand “000 Hrs/Mins 000 Min” format. It can interpret M/Min/Mins/Minutes and H/Hr/Hrs/Hour as Minutes and Hours respectively
  • confirm before changing wallpaper
  • adjust image positioning for odd size wallpapers
• Change wallpaper manually by clicking ‘Juggle Now’ menu or double clicking the icon
• Displays the last updated wallpaper and the time stamp when the next change will occur

If you hate having the same wallpaper on your computer this might be just the thing you need. Give it a whirl and let us know what you think.

Wallpaper Juggler Homepage (for Windows only)
Thanks Raj for the tip!

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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

Microsoft was finally able to take a step back and look at how many licenses of Vista are actually in use right now. According to their numbers, there were more than 20 million licenses sold from January 30 to February 28. That is nothing short of impressive!

That number does include upgraded versions of Vista from people who bought new computers before Vista was actually released, but CNet says that when they questioned Microsoft on how many of the 20 million licenses were from upgrades the response was:

It’s boosting the overall number, but it’s certainly not the core component of the 20 million.

To put the number in perspective Microsoft said that 17 million Windows XP licenses were sold after two-months, which means Vista more than doubled its Windows predecesor! The thing that made this number the most astonishing was that there are a reported 20 million Mac users (source) in total, and in the first year of Apple’s next OS release they are expected to sell 10 million licenses. By the end of this year Vista is expected to hit more than 100 million licenses.

Mac’s numbers are by no means shabby, but it just goes to show how widespread Windows really is. CNet also noted that Vista Ultimate sales are doing better than expected, although Microsoft has not released specific information regarding how many licenses of each version of Vista were sold:

Mannion said that Microsoft is even seeing better-than-expected sales of the pricey Ultimate edition. “We have relatively modest expectations for Ultimate, but it’s exceeding that on both new PCs and the packaged product.”

…

He likens it to car buyers who buy more horsepower than they need. “How many people buy the V8 instead of the V6?” Walker said. Or how many go with the optional towing package, “even though they have nothing to tow?”

I am a little surprised that people are picking the Ultimate Edition, but when purchasing a new PC, the upgrade to Ultimate from Home Premium is typically just $100. That is much more reasonable than spending the $400 on a retail copy of Ultimate, and the retail version can be switched to a new PC if that need should arise.

Having used the final version of Vista for nearly two months I would have to say that I am impressed with its capabilities. In the next few months I will be purchasing a new laptop that supports the Aero graphics, and I can’t wait because there are a lot of cool applications emerging that utilize Vista’s advanced graphical capabilities!

Microsoft Press Release

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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Mozilla has been looking at different ways to optimize the user’s experience when they open a new tab in Firefox. By default Firefox is set to display a blank page whenever a new tab is opened, and from there the user normally performs a search or navigates to one of their favorite sites. From the sounds of it they’re looking to add something much like what Opera already does with Speed Dial.

Using that idea one developer decided to create an extension called Auto Dial. It grabs information from your browser’s history to determine what your most visited sites are, and it will display them in a format similar to what you see in the screenshot above. The more popular sites are larger and listed towards the top, while the less visited sites are at the bottom and occupy less space. The number of items shown on the screen at a time will change depending on the size of your browser window.

As it stands right now Auto Dial is far from being anything fancy. The only way you can access the Auto Dial page is to visit chrome://autodial/content in Firefox, which you can then set as your homepage. If you want the page to appear whenever you create a new tab you’ll need to use an extension like Tab Mix Plus or New Tab Homepage.

I like some of the ideas Mozilla has for optimizing the new tab page, and it will be interesting to see if any of the improvements will be coming in the early part of 2009 when Firefox 3.1 is due out. Would you like to see a revamped new tab page, or are you content with the blank screen?

Get Auto Dial for Firefox
Thanks Cody!

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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