Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on February 22, 2008 by CyberNet.

Back in September, the Firefox download counter rolled over the 400 million mark giving Mozilla yet another reason to celebrate over their open-source web browser. At the time, Ryan looked at their current trend in growth and estimated that around April 15th, 2008 Firefox would hit their 1/2 billion milestone. Well, it’s only February 22, 2008 and they’ve just hit their 500 million mark. Congratulations Firefox!

On the Mozilla Blog, they made the announcement and helped show the significance of it by explaining that in terms of dollars, $500 million would be enough for you and 15 of your friends to fly to the International Space Station. In weight they say that it would be like 8,500 Boeing 747 airplanes.  For Mozilla, part of celebrating this milestone includes giving back.  They’re inviting people to help celebrate by playing a “game” over at www.freerice.com.  We’ve written about it before, when you go to the site, a word will be displayed and you’ll be given four difference choices of what the word means.  For each word you get right, they’ll donate 10 grains of rice to a hungry person through an international aid agency.  On their blog, they said that they are trying to break another milestone by donating 500 million grains of rice in on day.

Looking ahead, given the current trends, it looks like the next big milestone will be around Wednesday, July 30th 2008 when they’ll hit the 600 million download mark. Once again, congratulations to Mozilla and the Firefox team!

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on August 29, 2008 by CyberNet.

Yesterday word started getting around that come October 1st Comcast would be enforcing a 250GB bandwidth cap for all their users. This is obviously their way to get back at the whole BitTorrent rigmarole that started last year, and this way people are more apt to know what they consider to be “acceptable use.”

The new policy won’t go into affect until October 1st, and if you’re a heavy user you’ll likely be contacted by Comcast:

If a customer uses more than 250 GB and is one of the top users of our service, he or she may be contacted by Comcast to notify them of excessive use. At that time, we’ll tell them exactly how much data per month they had used. We know from experience the vast majority of customers we ask to curb usage do so voluntarily.

Hitting the 250GB limit would take a lot of Internet usage, but it’s definitely possible if you’re streaming videos all day long or are active on the BitTorrent network. They’ve also not said what will happen once you hit that limit (pay extra, get cutoff, etc…)

Scott, the individual who sent us the tip on the Comcast news, was wondering if there was a good free program to use for monitoring your bandwidth usage. After looking around a little bit I found that the AnalogX NetStat Live (for Windows) was a highly recommended program. With it you can track both the current month and last month’s bandwidth usage, set it to start with Windows, and it can be minimized to the System Tray.

If you’ve got a tool you use to monitor bandwidth usage let us know in the comments. We’re particularly looking for apps that keep track of monthly usage, and not just real-time data.

Get NetStat Live for Windows
Thanks Scott!

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on August 10, 2006 by CyberNet.

Editing and playing with digital photographs is something a lot of us do for fun. There are all kinds of programs out there such as Photoshop that have become useful tools. Another useful tool is a program called FantaMorph which I’ve just spent some time tinkering around with.

FantaMorph lets you create image morphs with two or more pictures and add animation to them. You can also create time warp movies. It uses a ‘key-dots’ method to create the perfect morph. Key dots are placed around important features. For example, if you are morphing a picture of yourself, you’d want to use the dots to outline features like the nose, mouth, and eyes. FantaMorph has also added a Face Extractor, Face Locator, and a Face Mixer into their Deluxe Edition. These tools take away some of the manual process and make it easier and a lot faster. These tools really work. It perfectly extracted the facial features from the picture I was using.

Take a look at some of their samples to get a better idea of how this works. Some of the coolest morphs have included pictures of your everyday Joe morphed into a famous person. I saw two different examples, one using Bill Gates (pictured above) and the other using Britney Spears. After you’ve created a project, you can easily turn it into a quick movie to send to your friends and family.

FantaMorph offers a fully functional trial which I tested out myself. The only restriction is that when you save a file, it places a ‘trial’ watermark over the picture. There are several tools available such as a cropping tool, along with special effects such as transitioning and light and sound that add a lot of customization to your project.

If you have some vacation photos that you’re wanting to get creative with, try out FantaMorph. I toyed around with it for just a few minutes, but probably could have spent a lot longer with determination to get mine to turn out like the samples You can purchase the basic edition for $29.95, FantaMorph Pro for $49.95 or FantaMorph Deluxe for $99.95.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on October 03, 2007 by CyberNet.

For the longest time I was always a huge fan of OpenSUSE. Up until about a year ago that was all I used on the Linux side of things, but Ubuntu’s quickly rising popularity caused me to start using that more. Tomorrow, however, will mark the release of OpenSUSE 10.3, and I flipped through a lot of documentation today to see what it was going to include.

I started over at the TuxMachines.org review of the first release candidate, and then moseyed on over to the OpenSUSE news page to see what they’ve had to say the last few weeks. From what I’ve seen I think it will be time to rekindle the old flame when OpenSUSE 10.3 is released tomorrow.

–One Click Install (More Info)–

SUSE engineers recognized the hassle that installing some applications presented. They understand the burden of needing to locate packages, add repositories, and then perform the install process. The solution? One-Click Install! There is a package explorer website setup that will aid users in finding packages, and once they have found what they are looking for they just press the One-Click Install button to initiate the installation. A wizard will automatically begin, and the necessary repositories will be added:

The installation process will then continue, and in no time at all you should have your new program running. I like how this works, and it’s nice to see that more steps are being taken to make software installation easier.

–Compiz & Compiz Fusion (More Info)–

I’m a sucker when it comes to eye candy, and OpenSUSE 10.3 is putting a lot of it at your fingertips. Compiz features will be available out-of-the-box, and Compiz Fusion can be installed using the One-Click Install that I mentioned above. Before diving into enabling these features let’s drool over a collage showcasing the Linux goodness:

To get Compiz up and running just enable Desktop Effects in GNOME, or type gnome-xgl-switch –enable-xgl (in GNOME or KDE) into the terminal.

To get Compiz Fusion installed you’ll have to take advantage of the new One-Click Install. Click here for more information on doing that.

–KDE 4 and GNOME 2.20–

OpenSUSE 10.3 will have the latest version of both the KDE and GNOME desktop environments. KDE 4 and all of its glorious features will be included. For the players out there you’ll be pleased to know that there are several games bundled with it: KMahjongg, KMines, KPatience, KReversi and KSudoku. Many of these had been included in previous versions of KDE, but now in KDE 4 they have been revamped to include better graphics! Suddenly I have an urge to play Reversi.

And we can’t forget about the inclusion of GNOME 2.20! Normally I’m more of a KDE fan myself, but the SUSE engineers have found ways to make me yearn for a sampling of what GNOME has to offer. It started with the unique Start Menu, called SLAB, that they created (pictured below), and now they have a sweet World Clock Applet that can be retrieved from the tray. Among other elements of the GNOME Desktop, SLAB has received some minor updates to the appearance.

–And More–

You thought that was it? I don’t think so! OpenSUSE 10.3 has hundreds of improvements, bug fixes, and enhancements that will please users in ways they didn’t even know was possible. Take a look at some of the other significant enhancements:

• There have been a lot of changes to the bootup process, and the result is phenomenal to say the least. You should find that your computer reaches the login screen in about half the time that it did in OpenSUSE 10.2.
• You only need to download 1 CD for installation! There will now be a CD for KDE, and another for GNOME that will be used for installing OpenSUSE. Prior to this there were 5 CD’s available, three of which were required for installation. Now you just have to pick the desktop environment you want, and then download only that CD.
• Better multimedia support, which prompts you to install codecs that currently aren’t on your system.
• Includes the latest OpenOffice.org 2.3.
• Includes a program called Giver that can be used to transfer files with other Giver users. Any Giver users on the network are automatically recognized, and the transferring works without any extra configuration.
• And there’s still more!

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on May 29, 2008 by CyberNet.

Tutorial Thursday

Windows only
One of the things that I thought was pretty cool with my Mac was that it lets you rotate your desktop backgrounds at set intervals using images on your computer. That got me wondering what kind of solutions are available for Windows users that do something similar, and what I happened to stumble upon is a real gem.

John’s Background Switcher is a free application that does exactly what you would expect it to, but likely goes a step further than anything you’ve seen before. It’s not only capable of grabbing images directly from your computer, but it can also interact with multiple online services including Flickr, Phanfare, SmugMug, Picasa, and Yahoo. What’s really nice is that it even supports retrieval of your private images for nearly all of the online services either through authorization or by providing your username/password. Heck, you can even mix and match the sources you want to pull images from. Neato!

Need a calendar on your desktop? No problem! Background Switcher has an option to display a monthly calendar directly on your wallpaper, and it will highlight the current day. Now how convenient is that?

Oh, right, but you use multiple monitors. Yeah, it supports that, too. You can have it show the same picture on each monitor, one picture for the entire desktop, different pictures on each monitor, or only show one picture on the main monitor. I think you get the point… this is a very full-featured background rotation utility.

(Click to Enlarge)

One thing that I do want to point out is that you can obviously specify the interval that the backgrounds will rotate, but it can also be done manually. To do that just double-click on the System Tray icon, and it will immediately begin processing a new background to use.

–Very Impressive Layouts–

Not only can this flip through your images, but it can also take multiple photos and lay them out in a way that is sure to make your friends go “wow.” Take the “Snapshot Scrapbook” mode for example, which takes a handful of your photos and lays them out in a polaroid fashion. It also takes one image and converts it to black and white to be used as the background. The number of images shown on the screen at any given time are dependent on your monitor’s resolution, and here’s what it looks like using images tagged as “flowers” from Flickr:

Note: The application does place some text in the upper-right corner of the background with the program’s name. I didn’t see any option to eliminate this.

If you want to see more images at a time just switch over to the mosaic mode where it will grab a lot of thumbnails, and then tile them on your desktop. Here’s what that looks like once again using images tagged as “flowers” from Flickr:

–Performance–

One of the questions that I frequently get asked when writing about apps like this is what kind of performance hit a PC will take for running this. As you can see above there are a handful of multi-image layouts that you can choose from, and Background Switcher has to generate the background each time the wallpaper is switched out.

On my Vista machine the memory usage for the app sat around 13MB when idle, and 21MB when hard at work. The processor usage obviously spiked while putting together the background, but the highest I saw it go was 65% (it only did that for a split second, too). That’s not all bad for what the program accomplishes.

The nice thing is that Background Switcher is actually a performance-conscious app, and offers several different settings to make sure it doesn’t interrupt your work. Here are some of the things you customize:

• On start up don’t switch the wallpaper for a specified number of seconds. This gives the rest of your apps a chance to finish loading before it starts working on the background.
• Stop switching the background when the screensaver is running.
• Stop switching when running over terminal services (ex. remote desktop).
• Only switch when the system has been idle for at least 15 seconds.
• Stop switching if any programs you specify are running. Great for games or applications that require extensive use of your computers resources.

–Overview–

To be honest I haven’t gotten this excited about an application in a long time. The interface is very intuitive and simple, but at the same time there are tons of things you can customize. And the fact that it supports so many online photos services is astounding. Plus it’s free! The developer is even very active in the support forum in case you need help using it, or just have a feature request. It’s not often that you see an application and developer of this caliber that doesn’t charge a dime.

Get John’s Background Switcher

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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