Thursday, April 29, 2010

Will Self-Adjust Monitor to Soften at Night, Brighten Day!

www.stereopsis.com
11/22/2009
Point Your Browser HERE: http://stereopsis.com/flux/

_You must be familiar with modern LCD screens, right? If you look carefully, most of them have a button to automatically change the attributes of the screen to adjust for the types of media which is being viewed: one specially tweaked for movies, another for photos, a separate one for text and there’s one we’re particularly interested about — night.

_You see, working in front of a computer screen at night raises a particular concern. The fact that you’re staring at a bright screen late at night when your body is supposed to be turning in, disrupts your circadian rhythm.

_A bit of medical jargon coming your way — during nighttime, darkness permits the production of melatonin by the pineal gland. Melatonin causes drowsiness and in tandem with the central nervous system, controls the circadian rhythm. In layman’s term, all this means is the bright light from the LCD screen screws up your sleep-wake cycle.

_That’s why there’s a customized “Night” setting on your LCD. Furthermore, there are several apps that will reduce the brightness of your screen while working at night; Shades is one example of a Mac app that will do just that. I don’t know if you’ve noticed the LCD’s reflection off a person’s face at night — it’s mostly bluish white. Technically, the specific colour temperature is 6500K; also known as daylight. That’s right. If you find it hard to fall asleep after using your computer, this is why.

_F.lux addresses this issue but it does it slightly differently. Instead of reducing brightness per se, it actually warms the colours you see on your screen and imitates the lighting in the room during nighttime. It’s quite hard to wrap your head around until you actually use it but I’ll do my best to try and explain it:

THE LOW-DOWN: After downloading and launching the app, it will ask you for your location and the type of lighting that’s in the room — tungsten, halogen, fluorescent or daylight. Based on the information, it calculates exactly when the sun sets in your area and adjusts the colour temperature of your screen to mimic the lighting in the room. Note that the Mac version’s interface isn’t as refined as its Windows counterpart — but it doesn’t matter very much because all of the time, the app is absolutely unobtrusive. There are no pop-ups and you won’t notice it running.

I have found the "night mode" so much more relaxing on my eyes, and I "think" a calming effect on my body.

Try IT!

(Thanks to MakeUseOf.com for description)

Deals, Shopping, 13 Bargain Inexpensive Websites

Please Browse to: "http://tinyurl.com/2l5r2o".

Looking for a place to find some good deals or bargain discounts while shopping online for electronics, clothing, accessories, etc? Well, there are a good number of sites out there other than Fatwallet, which (possibly?) everyone in the world knows about. I’m going to list a number of "good deal-finding" shopping sites. Check them out and see what you think!

dealighted.com A very cool site that’s a mashup of deals from other sites like Slickdeals.com, Fatwallet.com, Gottadeal.com and lots more. Mostly tech-related stuff, but there are other things as well.

passwird.com is a web site created by a University of California student that lists bunch of excellent deals on everything from tech to shoes daily. This site is very simple and is addictive.

bensbargains.net. The nice thing about this site (and others) is that you can subscribe to the RSS feed to quickly find deals. Also, pictures of the items are included in the feed. This site also gives you info on rebates and coupons in addition to just deals.

dealdump.com. DealDump is an aggregate of multiple deal sites, covering everything from Woot.com to DealOverFlow. There are a lot of sites on here I had never even heard of before, so you might find something great.

dealnews.com. Find the hottest deals on gadgets, computers, electronics, cameras, and lots more. The cool thing about this site is that you can subscribe to an RSS feed for the specific item you’re looking for.

dealsplus.com. Takes the same concept of Digg.com and does it for deals. Users vote for the best deals and the ones with the most votes get on to the front page. Also once you join you can enter to win free stuff, etc.

techdeals.net. As you can probably tell from the name of the site, Techdeals.net is all about tech stuff likes games, MP3 players, digital cameras, computers and more. It’s updated daily and has a good number of items.

cybuys.com. An online service that helps shoppers find coupons and hot deals for tons of online stores. It has a very clean interface and is one of the best sites for just finding coupons! Definitely check it out.

jellyfish.com. Not your normal deal-finding site! This site is basically a social shopping deals site, complete with a game show host and a good number of great products. You’ll have to check it out yourself to find out.

dealitem.com. DealItem is another deal site for mostly tech stuff. It works best when you’re searching for something by model # or by make and features. If you know what you’re looking for, check out DealItem.

dealigg.com. A social bargain hunting site that changes frequently during the day, so you’re looking at new stuff all the time. Again, its based on a peer voting system that brings the best deals to the front page.

slickdeals.net. SlickDeals is one of the better known deal sites and includes everything from tech gadgets to men’s shirts. They also have over 800 coupons that you can use at your favorite stores. Very clean interface and easy to use web site.

gottadeal.com. Finally, GottaDeal.com is very popular site for finding deals and coupons online. Has a bunch of categories and brings in deals from many of the major retailers such as Apple, AT&T, and CompUSA.

So that’s about 13 deal sites that I've run across that seem to be gaining in popularity. I hope shopping any of these sites brings some measure of savings and a good deal to boot.

Thanks to Aseem Kishore

Great Audio Video Free Editior.

www.mediacope.com
11/29/2009
It is an all in one media player solution and lets you play audio & video files, cut them according to your needs or transcode them to other formats. In addition you get a photo cutter, resizer and much more. In short, it’s as complete a media package as you’re likely to get. It is called Media Cope.

I've reviewed plenty of audio/video tools in the past, from mp3 joiner to video trans-coding tools. If you are an avid user of such tools, you will have a nice, albeit a little lengthy, collection in your start menu. Well here is one tool that can make that list a little shorter.

The tag line doesn’t overstate Media Cope’s capabilities, when it says: “It is all you need“. Media Cope combines the best open source software in the business to give you a killer application. It has mplayer for playing media files and uses ffmpeg for all the transcoding heavy lifting.

Let us take a deeper look on what Media Cope offers.
Media Cope supports all the major media file formats. It lets you play file formats mp3, avi, divx, mov, mkv, flac, rmvb, flv, vob, wma and mp4 to mention a few. In addition it also offers other mplayer functionality like speed change, ratio change, audio delay , framestep and screenshots etc.

_An Audio/Video Cutter

Hop over to the next tab and you can now trim audio & video files to your liking. All the formats listed above and many more are supported. Open the file, you can use the slider to go the exact location you want to start the video clip from, click “Select Start” and the starting point will be set to the current slider position. You can choose the end point in similar fashion. Now choose the output file format and you are ready to save the trimmed file as an audio/video clip.

_An Audio/Video Converter

The next two tabs let you trans-code your media files into a format of your choice. Queuing, output quality and trans-coding to and from all major formats are supported. I missed default presets or the ability to create and save your presets. Such an option is extremely useful if you trans-code files for playback on an iPod or any other device.

_Photo Cutter/Resizer/Converter

Media Cope lets you do common photo tasks like resizing and converting to different dimensions and formats. The photo tools do a fairly good job and are great for batch processing. That said, I would stick with image editors for such needs mainly because of the interface and greater control and visual feedback they offer.

_Slide Show

Media Cope also lets view your photos as a slide show. You can specify a background music and basic slide show configuration options. There is no option to export your slide show as a video file which makes it seem as misfit as a mere photo-browser amongst other tools.

_Internet Tools

You can also use Media Cope when browsing the Internet. Media Cope offers text to speech functionality in Internet Explorer and Firefox web browsers. You have to explicitly enable Internet tools from Media Cope’s settings.

Media Cope offers a number of tools to meet all your media needs. There are some glitches and the user interface could use some touch up. Even then the media player, cutter and trans-coders are straightforward and easy to use. MPlayer and FFMPEG form a deadly combo and it would be interesting to see Media Cope develop further and iron out some of the shortcomings.

Enjoy it, I do!
Thanks to MUO.com

Fbi, Fraud, Internet Crime Complaint Center.

www.ic3.gov
This seems to be an excellent place to report fraudulent Internet business. It's a web site that pulls the FBI, the bureau of White Collar Crime, and the Bureau Of Justice Assistance together for the soul purpose of handling malicious business activity on the Internet (called IC3).

Interestingly, it has no single focus (i.e. banking, commercial, individual, etc.) rather, is a in place for any consumer(s) that feel they've been victimized by Internet ("cyber") fraud. The web site introduces itself with this 'intent:

_"IC3's mission is to serve as a vehicle to receive, develop, and refer criminal complaints regarding the rapidly expanding arena of cyber crime. The IC3 gives the victims of cyber crime a convenient and easy-to-use reporting mechanism that alerts authorities of suspected criminal or civil violations. For law enforcement and regulatory agencies at the federal, state, local and international level, IC3 provides a central referral mechanism for complaints involving Internet related crimes".

The IC3 site explains in simple terms how a claim is created, asks for basic personal information, and then provides a large, Red link reading, "FILE A COMPLAINT". Easy to navigate.

IC3 is not bogged-down with legalese, and the complaint process is thankfully quick.

I'd include this web site high on my list of "reporting" mechanisms. RIPOFFREPORT.com has it's place, but this is rather like calling the Internet's version of the Federal Trade Commission!

Best Of Luck!

Search 4 People Information.

www.webmii.com
1/13/2010
Find all online public information about you (and other people)
and get your "PeopleRank": or Your "visibility" score on the web.

You'll love this search tool. Look yourself up, might be surprised.

Idea For Creating Easy & Safe Excellent Password.

www.pcmag.com
1/21/2010
The web site I've provided is simply a link to PC Magazine article on how terribly passwords are selected. The most common password revealed, from a hacked web site, was "123456", literally. The exact URL for the article is:
"http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2358273,00.asp" (without the quotations).

I have a suggestion for creating a very secure 'universal password', easily remembered, and assuredly a safer password that what most use - perhaps yourself.

The best passwords have no pattern, are alpha-numeric, and the longer (12-15 characters) the better. However the prospect of deciding on such a phrase, easily recalled - but so difficult to crack, can be daunting.

Try this: Take a piece of information (perhaps an old address that you won't forget) I'll make one up as example: "1584westanywherestreetsandiegocalifornia". Read that carefully and you'll see it's an address. First, that's a nice "long" series of characters. Secondarily it's alpha-numeric, the safest type of password. Here's a trick to make that address harder to crack.

By selecting (or un-selecting - the OPPOSITE of your default keyboard setup - play with this to be sure!) the "Num-Lock" key (one tap), the above address becomes: "1584westanywherestreetsand5eg6ca35f6rn5a". Note the changes in the latter part of that address.That information has been sufficiently "garbled" to be a much more secure password, certainly than what most people use.

Take some time with a text doc., or a Word document, and play with different unforgettable strings of information. Once you've decided on a long string, but a memorable string, play with the Num Lock key and see how it changes the data.

After a bit of fine tuning, you should have an near worry-free password, very hard to crack, created simply by hitting "num-Lock" before typing it.

If you're curious what the Num Lock key does, how it works on different keyboards and computers, you can Google that and get answers. Right now, it's sufficient to jump into a safer universal password you can stop worrying about.

Really Clean Up Your Writing! Great Tool!

www.afterthedeadline.com
1/25/2010
I'm very sensitive to 'words'. People often get a "gut-hunch" of who we are based on what we say, and how. Business correspondence is an obvious application, but I feel it spills over to how we affect friends, colleagues, and even lovers.

With that in mind, I found "After The Deadline", a great, free, site that can help you correct your grammatical errors, but syntactical issues, and more.

Here's what the site says in "about":
"We use artificial intelligence and natural language processing technology to find your writing errors and offer smart suggestions". Even when I think I've created the flawless document, a cut&paste into "After The Deadline", reveals more 'over-talk' than I realised.

A highly recommended tool for finishing/sharpening important writing!