Springnote is web 2.0 service which makes real-time collaboration on office documents and notes easy, here other users can comment, and add content as needed.

Springnote has all the features and capabilities of a word processor including all elements. You can add images, movies, audio, other presentation, and many other plugins. It also provides you with RSS to track changes in the documents and all activities made on it. But the main attraction of Springnote is its ability to allow real-time document sharing with other users you invite. Springnote also support publishing of the documents with 2GB of space, which I think is enough to host thousands of work documents.

Google Docs also sport a collaboration feature but I found the real-time on Springnote much more effective. Try it out and share if you have any more alternatives.

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In case you're wondering what I'm going on about, JamLegend is the result of a passionate night between FooBrew and Guitar Hero.

Imagine GuitarHero, except online and using a keyboard. That's what JamLegend is. I've been having quite a ball trying to Jam to the various songs.

The way JamLegend works is simple. You pick a song, you select your difficulty and decide if you want a rock show-down against another player, the computer or if you want to just rock all by yourself and then off you go. You have an on-screen numbered fretboard and as the notes fall across the fretboard you've got to press a button corresponding to the string that it's on.. It's not really complicated but take a little bit of practice to get used to the faster and more complicated songs.

What I liked most about JamLegend is the fact that if you're not too keen on signing  up (who in the world wants another user-name and password to remember!) you can always just use your Facebook account to sign in. Just login via Facebook and you're set. You can even show off your scores on Facebook. (This might lead to complications of it's own, but for most of the part seems very harmless.)

The design is clean and neat and definitely user-friendly. I wouldn't consider myself a complete 'newb' but I had no trouble at all navigating the site. And I haven't even gotten to the best part yet.

Most of these games are generally limited to the songs that they have in their database and if there's a song that you want to play that isn't in there, you're just plain out of luck.

Not anymore! You can now upload any song that you might want to jam to and continue to rock the socks of people! In fact you can even buy tracks via the site.

Of course it doesn't have the best 'graphics' in the world, but that also means I'm a 100% sure that I won't suffer a seizure while trying to become the next Jimmy Page and also I'm sure it's not completely hassle-free but in terms of pure entertainment, it's a blast.

Sign up and add me – 'BingelJell'. Let us know what you think.

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So have you recently decided that you wanted to get yourself a new gaming console or wanted to upgrade an existing console and are wondering what to buy?

Well, we're here to help you! (Not really..)

Just the other day I was sitting down and thinking to myself, "it's about time I bought myself a Ps3 or an Xbox.." and so I logged onto the net and did some poking about. And I'm sad to report, a week later, that I'm still confused as ever with regards to what console I should buy.

Here are my thoughts on each of the consoles and their Pro's and Cons, as such..

I think the PS3 makes for a great console and I'm not saying that just cause I'm a big PlayStation fan-boy. They've had some of the best games and at least in the past Sony was famous for selling the best electronic equipment. (I fear, not so much recently..) It doubles up as a great Blue Ray player as well and with the added bonus of being able to store all the media you want it's a great idea. Now they're working on a new Motion Sensing Controller to be released by next year. To top things off you've got games like Killzone 2, Street Fighter IV, Resident Evil 5, etc.. And as far as HD goes, PS3 is the way to go, nothing beats it. Some PS3 only titles..

But then you move onto the subject of the Xbox 360. It's not like the Xbox is lacking in titles either:UFC 2009, Halo Wars, Call of Duty: World At War (and this is just the first half of 2009..). Then there's the ability to hack your Xbox 360 so you can copy the games and play them off a copy. And from what I've heard, if you have a decent internet connection, Xbox live is 'da bomb!'. Also, the Xbox is a tad bit cheaper than the PlayStation as well, so you're not selling a kidney on the black market to have some MGS4 fun! (Some Xbox only titles..)

And finally we come to the Wii. There's a saying, something along the lines of; 'There's lies, damned lies and then there's statistics'. But if we're to believe statistics, the Wii has been quite the sensation all over the world ever since it's release. With some cleaver marketing and some absolutely ingenious games, the Wii is one heck of a console. It's completely different from any thing in the market, not to mention that I don't think I've ever had more fun playing multi-player sports games. Once you get past the graphics, the games themselves are a blast. And who doesn't want to buy a console that can actually cause some sort of physical injury. (Yes there are more cases of people hitting themselves in the nether regions with the Wii controllers while trying to play golf than you would believe.) Also if you buy into the whole "The Nintendo Wii will make you fit and healthy" sales pitch, you're a winner on all counts! (It also means you're a gullible moron and should get out more often. But hey, I'm not judging.)

So there you have it, I'm still clueless as to what console to buy…

Actually, I do have a suggestion. Since you're reading this article, we'll assume that you have a computer. Putting together a decent rig isn't a big deal anymore. You can pretty much get yourself an 'up to date' PC that will not cost you very much and that will entertain you as much as, if not more than all the 3 consoles we've talked about. I'm running a E600 2.4GHZ C2D on a P5B Deluxe motherboard with 2GB dual channel (duh!) ram and a 256MB – Nvidia 7600GT (not too shabby, especially compared to the Riva TnT2 I had before this…) I figure, with just 2 upgrades (3 if I count Windows 7, whenever that happens) I should be able to run some of the best games out there and still have a ball.

With titles like StarCraft 2, Diablo 3, Warhammer 40k: DOW 2, etc I'm pretty well taken care of. And the upgrade is a damn sight cheaper than actually buying a whole new console. Because buying a new console means buying a new HD TV to get the best picture quality and a home theater system to get the best sound quality and.. you see where this is going.

There you have it. Don't buy a console, just upgrade your existing system and pick up some of the epic PC only game titles and enjoy!

So how many of you have any of these consoles and what are your opinions about buying one at the moment? Also which is your current favorite game and on which console?

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You tweeted some snaps with Twitpic using your mobile app and now you also want them to be uploaded to your Flickr photo album. What to do now without manually posting those images to Flickr?

TwitPickr is a new web 2.0 Twitter tool which helps you do this easily. TwitPickr posts your Twitpic images automatically to your Flickr Album. Just approve the authority to Flickr and Twitter. You're done then!

TwitPickr is damn easy to use, enter your Twitter username, select your Twitpic photos and woof!! they are uploaded to your Flickr album in a swift!

However a drawback or rather say a missing feature in TwitPickr is that there is no option to auto-post images whenever it is uploaded to TwitPic via Twitter feeds. Hope they get it soon.

Try it out, TwitPickr.

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FontShop.com recently launched its new web 2.0 service called FontStruct. FontStruct is a free font-building tool.
FontStruct allows you to quickly construct fonts by using geometrical identities arranged in a grid base.

FontStruct's custom font making feature is powered by its inline graphic tool which helps adding geometrical figures, shapes etc. to lower and upper case of the font you are making. While drawing font figures, in FontStruct referred as 'FontStructions', the tool lets the user see adjacent figures and relating shapes to make the font creation easy.

FontStruct also allows the user to refer to some pre-made fonts for shape or mods suggestion. The drawback here is that the pre-made fonts are not listed in categories, making it hard for the user to check the correct pre-made font.
When its done, your 'fontstruction' created by the so called 'fontstructor' tool is saved and a high quality True-Type font is generated ready to be used.

FontStruct

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There are quite a few video games that will be releasing in 2009 and I'm going to list the top 5 games that I am looking forward to. These are games that I've been waiting for since the day they were announced. In fact, I've already started saving up to actually go and buy some of them.

So, without further adieu, here's the list:

1. Starcraft II: This has to be one of the most highly anticipated games of 2009, if not of this decade. The sequal to Starcraft, which by the way is still one of the most popular games in the world, is looking like it's going to quite literally be as awesome as it's being hyped up to be.
   This is going to be a little different from Starcraft and I'm not talking just about the looks either. Blizzard has said they will release 2 expansions for this game, each focusing on a particular race. The game is still an RTS, but the mechanics have changed just a little bit. According to Blizzard, they've been "re-imagined".
2. God of War III: Good God! Kratos is back.. If you've played GOW (God of War) I and II, then you don't really need me to tell you why this game should be on your list of games to definitely get in 2009. But just for those who have not been fortunate enough to get their hands on the previous version let me spell it out for you. The GoW series is one of the most bad-ass that you will ever come across. If you are into any kinda of RPG games, this one takes the cake. Not only are the graphics mind blowing, but so is the game play. And for all those out there who love a good story, this game's got that too.
3. Bioshock 2 : I played Bioshock and I really really liked the game. I can only expect this game to be better. A lot more will be released about this game in the coming months, but from what I've seen (trailer) I'm pretty sure that I'm going to love this game as well.
4. Call of Duty – Modern Warfare 2 : I'm quite a fan of the COD series. I had minor issues with 2 and 3, but all in all the series has not disappointed. The Single player campaign is quite entertaining and pretty good for a one time complete, but the COD Multi-player is the most fun. Activision Blizzard has confirmed the release of COD 6 or Modern Warfare 2, as it's known, for later on this year. If you don't already have it on your must buy list, you should seriously consider it.

5. Splinter Cell: Conviction : There has been much debate as to when this game is going to be released, but one hopes that it will finally be released this year. After having played Pandora Tomorrow and Double Agent, it's only fair that I give Conviction a try. I really enjoyed Double Agent, and I played it on a computer that barely managed to run it. Now that I've upgraded I'm all set to help Sam Fisher do whatever he needs to, at at least 60FPS! I'm quite looking forward to the game.

So there you have it. My top 5 games to look forward to this year.

Oh, I'm not done yet. There are a couple of other games that are either already out or will be out shortly that need to be mentioned as well.

• Tekken 6 : Don't tell me you don't want to play Tekken!
• Fear 2 – Project Origins : I haven't gotten my hands on the full version yet, but boy oh boy was the trial a nice treat. Hoping to get my hands on this one soon.
• Resident Evil 5 : Who doesn't like shooting Zombies. The PC version of this game should be out later this year, but until then, I'm sure you can make friends with someone who has a PS3.
• Halo 3 – ODST : Another Halo game. Definitely worth giving a go. I havn't played it yet, and probably wont bother with it until I've tried Fear 2 and until I finish Prince of Persia on my new comp (Yes, old game, but I'm a BIG fan.) But since it's a Halo game it deserves a mention.
• Duke Nukem Forever : All I know is that this game is going to be badass. I've been waiting for this game for a while now and I can't wait for them to finally release it. This game was probably the reason why people started blaming games for why kids are so violent. Too bad they never played it themselves.

Right! So if there are any games that you're particularly looking forward do let us know. Also, if you do manage to get your hands on any new games this year, let us know what you think.

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To be more specific FeedDemon 3, which is currently in it's beta state and is available for download here.

For those who have never used FeedDemon, it is a really neat and clean RSS reader that makes keeping track of and reading your feeds extremely easy. You can download your feeds and browse them even when you're offline and it even includes a panic button incase you've overshot your unread feeds limit (which can be set), which will just tag your feeds as read.

And for the current FeedDemon users, there are quite a few new features in the new beta that might be of interest to you.

There are tonnes of new features for twitter users (subscribing to Twitter feeds with avatar images, Twitter timelines,  popups for short urls that display the redirected page, replying to Twitter posts directly, etc..). Additionally FeedDemon is planning integration or synchronization with Google RSS reader. (This may not be included in the early Beta versions but is expected to be added in.) You can still download your feeds from your favourite online reader and sort them in FeedDemon. The new setup allows you to add lots of new subscriptions just by clicking on check boxes.

For those new to FeedDemon and still needing some persuasion, here's a list of features that should definitely get you thinking about at least giving FeedDemon a try.

1. Newspaper Format: When you select a channel, FeedDemon's tabbed browser displays the channel's news items in a newspaper for easy reading. You can display a newspaper of news items for an entire folder or view one feed at a time.
2. News Bins: Store news items in a central location and provide a handy way to collect items from different channels. If you find an interesting item that you might want to read again, just store it in a news bin for future reference. News Bins are synchronized through the NewsGator Online platform, so you can read these items from FeedDemon on other computers as well as other NewsGator readers.
3. Synchronization: Read a post in FeedDemon and it is marked as read in other NewsGator readers.
4. Shared Experience: See what news is popular with other NewsGator users and find out who is linking to the news you’re reading.
5. Video: Watch embedded video right within the newspaper view.
6. Panic Button: Ever gone on vacation and gotten a little behind on your reading? The Panic Button solves this and many other problems by quickly marking all older items read.

(Of course, these are just features of the current 'live' version.. just to entice you a little.)

So if any of you have given FeedDemon a go, let us know what you think and how your experience has been

As a gentle reminder; You can now download FeedDemon's latest beta version here.

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Right, I'm not normally a Laptop person, mainly because I like my keyboards big and comfortable. But one can't go on with life without saying something about Dell's new Adamo. Claimed to be the World's slimmest laptop, this really is the cool new laptop-kid on the block.

I'm not saying it's as important as shooting a monkey into space, but it's pretty cool.

At least as far as I'm concerned, this is one sweet looking laptop with all the basic gadgetry you'll need to go about being your double O self.

At .65 inches when closed it truly is quite neat. It even manages to accommodate a 13.4inch 16:9 HD screen. Considering it's not an Apple product and still seems so cool, I'm going to give it a 4.5/5 on the 'cool-o-meter'.

The laptop comes in 2 models; the Admire and the Desire.

The Desire is a little more expensive than the Admire but comes with a little more kit, so to speak. Both of them come with all your basic features, which you can read up on here.. What's really impressive is that despite being so thin, it offers a battery life of 5 hours, or so I've heard, which isn't too bad at all. It's a small price to pay for something as cool as this.

To give you a small taste of what all it offers;

1. Super-thin 13.4-inch 16:9 (High Definition; 720p) WLED display
2. Full-size keyboard with back-lighting and scalloped, metallic key cap design
3. Integrated 1.3 megapixel camera and integrated digital microphone
4. IO: Display Port, USBx3 (1 eSATA combination), Audio Out and integrated RJ-45 port
5. Communications: Gigabit LOM, Bluetooth 2.1, 802.11n (3×3)
6. 5+ hr battery life using Li-Polymer cells; 40 Whr

Here's the cool bit:

• Dimensions: (w x d x h) 13.03 x 9.5 x 0.65 in (331 x 242 x 16.39 mm)
• Weight: 1.81 kg (4.0 lb)

And of course you can either get the C2D 1.2GHZ Admire with 2GB ram or the C2D 1.4GHZ Desire with 4GB ram.

For those interested, Dell started shipping this baby out a couple of days ago. So if you happen to get your hands on one of these, let us know what you think about it.

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There are developments that matter to the end-user in this release – both cosmetic as well as core features that improve the average person's browsing experience.

Performance

A marked improvement in browsing and rendering speed as compared to the 3.0.x versions, although truth be told, Google's Chrome still feels slightly faster. This due, in part to an improved Gecko rendering engine and of course, TraceMonkey which has been enabled by default since Beta2. Expect AJAX based sites (read most Web2.0 sites) to be faster.

Native support for JSON has been included and that will ease the task of loading data to web applications.

I personally also saw a marked improvment in RAM usage especially with a number of non-static pages/sites loaded. This, I'm sure will be substantiated thru more professional tests and hopefully will improve with future releases.

Interface

The new tab button is now placed next to the last tab instead of the far right of the tab bar, making it more discoverable. The whole emphasis has been shifted to present Firefox as a tabbed browser. Tabbed browsing or single window mode is now enabled by default. One can also tear tabs off the tab bar to create new windows, and drag and drop them from one Firefox window to another.

The much talked about Private Browsing Mode works very well indeed and can be toggled either via an entry in the TOOLS menu. Privacy mode is then engaged until you manually turn it off thru the menu or until the browser is closed.

Awesome Bar keyword filters

A new feature is also the ability to filter what is displayed in the Firefox location bar (aka Awesome Bar) by including special characters:

One can restrict the search to one's history by typing “^”, or bookmarks with “*”, or tagged pages with “+”. To make what you’ve typed match only in the URL type “@”, and for title/tags only use “#”.

More details & screengrabs at Edward Lee's post.

Native Ogg A/V playback

This latest BETA can also now natively play OGG audio and video citing support for HTML5's <video> element – so no need for external plugins or media players for this OpenSource format.

Sample video here.

VERDICT: If you're a geek and/or a FirefoxFan, go get it. It's not ready for mainstream release yet – the lack of compatible extensions et al is one more reason to stick to 3.0.x, but if you're looking for faster performance and less memeory usage, I say go for it.

You can get Firefox 3.1 Beta 3, available for Linux, Windows and Mac, in 64 languages, from the Firefox beta download page.

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World of Warcraft (referred to as WOW from now on…) has to be one of the most popular games ever to be seen by mankind. It's so popular that even in times of Economic Recession, Blizzard (makers of WOW) managed to sell 2.8 million copies of Wrath of the Lich king. Just to strengthen my case before I carry on; Blizzard also has over 10 million active subscribers playing WOW every month. And for those still not convinced and thinking of Blizzard as one hit wonders, they sold over 2.4 million copies of The Burning Crusade within the first 24 hours of that coming out.

Now that I've praised the best game makers of the world enough, let me get onto the good news and tell you about some of the most awesome changes one can expect in the upcoming patch 3.1.

That's some WOW FanArt for you!

Lets start off with the awesome Uladuar raid. Which means all raiders can now start gunning for their tier 8 or T8 equipment. Additionally the new Arena Season beings so there's new PVP equipment to look forward to. Season 5 Arena gear to be more specific.

Then there's also the new dual talent tree specs, meaning each player can select two separate trees and switch between them without having to go back to a Class trainer to un-learn and re-learn all their talents.

My favourite new update so far though, is the addition of the Argent Tournament. It's basically world PvP (player versus player), with some mounted action, new achievements and rewards. This will definitely be quite a bit of fun.

And one of the most intriguing changes so far is probably the fact that a player no longer dismounts in the water and the introduction of water mounts. Of course this could also be Blizzard's step towards another big patch or a new expansion. Blizzard did say that there were going to be at least a few more expansions after The Burning Crusade, and so far we've gotten one. Hopefully they still have at least one more in them.

There are also quite few class changes and some other general changes that have been announced for the new patch. The only disappointing change so far is that you can't ghetto hearth anymore! (Again, if you haven't played the game, the chances of you understanding what I said even if I explained it to you are very very slim.) Most of the classes are getting some talent changes which means everyone obsessed with the game is going to pull out their Einstein caps and a calculators and sit down to calculate the best possible Spec to go to get the maximum out of the class.

You can get all the information you need from WoW Insider, or you can Google it!

If there's any of you who play World of Warcraft and want to share something, please do feel free to let us know. Especially if there's any insider information that you would like to share with your favourite site in the world.. Us!

And for those of you who want to start and are looking for a place to get started, pick up the game and setup a WOW – US account, log into the 'Deathwing' realm and hit me up. My character name is BingelJell and I should be able to help you out with anything you might need!

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Ever had too many Tweets to keep up with? Ever been bored of logging onto your Twitter page every time to check updates? Never fear, for Techtites is here! (I know it's getting old and lame, I promise I won't be lame after this.. so please bear with me!)

TweetDeck is the perfect piece of software to help you manage your Twitter account.

TweetDeck simplifies your Tweets into feeds that are easily manageable. You can organise your Tweets anyhow you want.

Additional Features

• - Catch up with overnight global twitterings as TweetDeck stores all updates whilst running
• - Continual status updates of TweetDeck and Twitter
• - Resize TweetDeck as either an unobtrusive column, full screen or anything in between
• - Especially useful running full screen on a separate monitor
• - Filter tweets using the tweet text, username, source or timeframe
• - Auto updates from the Twitter API

TweetDeck is built using Adobe Air, which means it's awesome. It also means that you can persnoalise the look of TweetDeck. It's currently in it's beta stage, so there might be a few issues here and there. So far though, I haven't encountered any. I had a slow update day once, but that could have also been my connection bugging out.  (And I've been using this for a little less than a month now.)

There are tonnes of people I know who use TweetDeck and are very happy with it, and for the moment at least, this gets my seal of approval!

You'll have to head over to the TweetDeck page to download it.

There are a few other Twitter managers out there, so if there's anything you'd like to share with us, please drop us a line.

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I first got my hands on this plugin about a year ago when I was in France, competing in the finals of the WIF. It seemed very
fascinating but I soon forgot about it.

Recently again one of the many design & development blogs I follow had an article on Ubiquity and this caught my eye. I've been using it for about a couple of weeks now, and I'm absolutely loving it.

Ubiquity is basically a plugin that allows you to execute complex actions using simple English commands. None of that <$, var, if, when non-sense. Just plain old English.

The idea is to reduce the gap between the normal everyday computer user and the ultra geek who probably see's the world through the Matrix code. It's pretty much the future.

With the speed at which technology is growing, it's not too farfetched to imagine that we'll all have home computers like the one's Johnny Quest had. Entirely voice activated houses with a very sexy computer voice that talks back to you and cares for you. While such technology exists, it's not within the average Joe's grasp. But with software like Ubiquity, it's only a matter of time before everyone gets used to the idea of leading 'futuristic' lives, before the software & code barrier is broken and everyone can accomplish their tasks using simple English.

Before you get turned off with my excessive rambling, let me give you a few examples.
Say you want to send a mail to Ajay but are too lazy to actually open up Gmail or Outlook or whatever, we now have a solution for you.

Simply activate Ubiquity (the default shortcut is ctrl+space) and type mail Ajay and Ubiquity will open up your default e-mail for you with all the fields filled out. In fact, you can even put in the content of your mail after the name and even that will be filled out for you.

Similarly, if you're on Twitter you can just use Ubiquity to tweet for you. Just type 'Twitter' followed by your message and voila! You’re done!

These are just a couple of examples, there's quite a bit more you can do. You can even plot out maps using Google maps by just simply typing Map and your location. Or you can check the weather.

Ubiquity also allows you to write your own custom commands if you know a little bit of programming. It's not particularly complicated but might require you to use your head. There are some default commands that come built-in when you install Ubiquity, but you can also subscribe to community generated commands that allow you to do a lot more.

I'm completely sold on Ubiquity and I hope they do even cooler stuff with it. For more information or to download the plugin, you can go to the Ubiquity home page.

If you've used Ubiquity before or try it now, let us know what you think.

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Focus:  GIMP!
Right, to avoid confusion;

“GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed piece of software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It works on many operating systems, in many languages. (more…)”

– From the Gimp website.

After using the software for a while you realize that it’s capable of a lot. The UI isn’t particularly great, but it’s very simple and no tool is more than a couple of clicks away making it fairly easy to use. It didn’t take me very long to figure out the basics. You can do almost all the basic things that you’d want to in an image manipulation software. Red Eye Removal for those Facebook junkies, image cropping and re-sizing for any of you obsessed with sharing all your photographs, colour correction and image enhancement are just a few of the things you can do with GIMP. You can also delve into deeper and more complicated things like Digital Image Manipulation, Animation, etc.

You can find out more by checking out the feature list.

Since this is a community developed piece of software, there are quite a few tutorials out there to help you get acquainted with the software and then there are even more tutorials to help you become a pro with GIMP. (That sounds so wrong!)

In itself and as an image manipulation tool the software is great. However if you compare it to other professional software like Adobe Photoshop or Corel Draw, it leaves a lot to be desired. But I think that’s the great thing about GIMP. It’s not meant to compete(or maybe it is?) with those programs, but as an Open Source solution for people who don’t wish to spend the money on expensive software but still want to give their creative side an outlet.

All in all, I’d say it’s a nice piece of software and I’d definitely suggest giving it a go before you make your decision. For me, though, I’m going to stick to the more conventional Photoshop. (I am quite an Adobe fan-boy, so don’t take my word for it.)

You can download GIMP here, and here’s the documentation. Incase you’re a developer and would like to contribute to the development of GIMP, you could either do plugins or dive straight into the core development of GIMP.

Here are some of the things I came up with after some tinkering around in GIMP.
This is a film-grain look that I've given to a random picture that I pulled from Sxc.hu.

And here I converted a photograph of Uma Thurman into a sketch.

(GIMP, Pulp Fiction, Uma Thurman…. You guessed it! I'm a huge QT fan. In fact, I have 'Son of a Preacher Man' playing in the background right now…)

If you try GIMP, let us know what you think about it. Additionally, if there are any other Image Manipulation softwares you'd like us to test out for you, let us know and we'll have our very own 'Gimp' test it for you.

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If you're browsing the web from an office or school, you're most likely on a highly restricted network. Many public networks block video sites like Youtube and Metacafe due to the high bandwidth that these consume. Additionally, several other social networking sites like Facebook, Orkut etc. also end up being blocked. Honestly, I never understand the purpose of the latter, but then network admins do not want you spending all your time "networking" when you should be working.

One good method to bypass this is to setup tor. However, you'll find browsing to be terribly slow. Additionally, it is also possible to block tor proxy IPs since it is an openly available list.

Then again comes in the issue of privacy when browsing sites. If you don't want the websites you visit to detect your details, you'll want to use a proxy.

Here's where Proxybonanza's proxy service comes in. Proxybonanza provides proxy IPs that support anonymous SOCKS5 and HTTP protocol. Thus, you can even use it programs that require socks5 proxy support.

Features:

• Proxybonanza offers 2 kinds of proxy service: shared proxy and exclusive proxy (dedicated)
• very reliable service with 99% uptime and very good connection speed
• USA based proxies
• IP authentication with exclusive packages
• money back guarantee
• up to 128 IPs
• socks5 proxy and http proxies

Getting started is very simple. Either pick the shared proxy or exclusive proxy. There are three plans each based on the bandwidth. In case of exclusive proxy, you receive a dedicated IP address. These also offer you more bandwidth per month. The smallest shared plan gives you 3GB bandwidth which should be sufficient for most users. If you keep running out of bandwidth, you can always upgrade to higher plans or buy more bandwidth.

Once you signup and pay via PayPal, your account is setup and you can login to your user panel and view the IPs allotted to you.

You will then need to configure your browser to accept proxies. Read how you can do it with:

You can also configure your other programs, like Yahoo! Messenger or Bittorrent to use these proxies. Now, try to open that blocked site. I tried YouTube.com.

You'll be prompted to enter your username and password here.

On entering the details you're in. Now, you can browse to any of the sites. You will need to login again if you close your browser.

I tested viewing a few videos at YouTube and they streamed at a decent speed. Again, this depends on your internet connection. Overall a worthy investment if you want speed and privacy and are willing to pay for it.

Are you already using Proxybonanza? What has been your experience so far?

Our Friend: WebberZone Hosting - Plans starting from 15000MB storage and 300GB bandwidth at $5/mo only

MoFuse is a service that helps you convert your blog into a mobile compatible view besides offering a host of other services.

Some of the main features that MoFuse offers you:

• Custom Domain: This in my opinion is one of the best features that MoFuse has on offer. You can map your own domain or subdomain to your MoFuse URL. You will need to edit the DNS settings of your domain in order to take advantage of this feature. e.g. You can browse this blog at http://m.techtites.com/ from your mobile.
• Monetize your blog: You can display ads on your mobile website. MoFuse allows you to place ads from Google Adsense and AdMob.
• Custom Logo: Add your own custom logo that will display at the top of your mobile site.
• SMS Widget: Visitors from the USA can enter their mobile phone number and be sent a message with your mobile site URL.
• Mobi Badge: Alternatively, you can display a badge linking to your mobile site.
• Automatic Redirect: This is my favorite feature after the custom domain. MoFuse provides you with PHP code than will automatically redirect visitors browsing your site on their mobiles to your mobile site.

Besides this you can also edit colors, add content like pages, header text, links and even a comment widget.

This is definitely a go for anyone seriously interested in making their blog accessible to mobile users as well.

You can visit us at http://m.techtites.com/ from your mobile. Are you using MoFuse? Post your URL to your mobile site. What are the features that you are using at MoFuse? Have any tips for the readers of Techtites? Comment below.

Our Friend: WebberZone Hosting - Plans starting from 15000MB storage and 300GB bandwidth at $5/mo only

Last week Yahoo! announced the update on the delicious blog.

The biggest change is the url, viz. Delicious.com.

Besides the new URL, Delicious.com boasts of faster pages, faster search results and a brand new look. The look definitely is a lot better the old drab look that the site had.

The navigation has been totally revamped that makes it really easy to go through most parts of the site. What would have been a welcome addition would be the use of AJAX, especially when adding friends.

Overall the update has been very useful. Now, I just need to remember to add the links I like to Delicious!

Our Friend: WebberZone Hosting - Plans starting from 15000MB storage and 300GB bandwidth at $5/mo only

Our Friend: WebberZone Hosting - Plans starting from 15000MB storage and 300GB bandwidth at $5/mo only

After having declared that all Advertisers get a 50% off on reviews, ReviewMe has announced that as of this Monday, Publishers will now be able to edit the price at which they want to sell the reviews.

I haven't yet added this blog to ReviewMe, but intend to do so once it completes six months. As of now you can buy reviews at AjayDSouza.com. Reviews are priced at $100, but this month you get it for only $50, which is great for a link from a PR6 site!

ReviewMe will also be introducing an affiliate program which will go live on March 1.

Our previous coverage of ReviewMe

Except for the fact that upgrading this blog gave me problems, I have had absolutely no problems running WordPress 2.1, codenamed Ella.I promised a review of WordPress 2.1 a while back, but have been busy testing out the various features it has to offer.

The WordPress Blog Release Post listed a few of the new features, which I shall take a look at here.

Autosave

In my opinion this is indeed the best addition in WordPress 2.1. I can't remember the number of times I've lost blog posts and had to retype them all over again simply because my browser or operating system crashed or my internet connection gave problems.

This was also one of the features that got me to upgrade to 2.1 so easily and I don't regret it.

What I would love to see is a discard post feature similar to that on Gmail, so in case I change my mind about the post, it will do a clean remove.

The Editor

I hated the WYSIWYG editor in 2.0. It took hours to load and was definitely not user-friendly. You had no easy way to switch between the code view and the WYSIWYG view. Also, editing the HTML was cumbersome and hard to read.

2.1 comes with a complete revamp of the editor. And, I'm so pleased with it, that I am actually typing out this post in it. The best feature here is the ability to quickly switch between the WYSIWYG and the quicktags. Since it is using the traditional quicktags, buttons added by plugins are visible. This makes my favorite image management plugin IImage Browser accessible easily. This image below was uploaded using the same.

The editor also includes spell-checking capabilities with the ability to find the correction easily.

CMS Capabilities

Usage of WordPress as a CMS has been made easier. Earlier, you can to modify your theme or use a plugin to display a page on the main page. Now, this feature comes inbuilt in the WordPress core. As for me, I prefer to use the latest posts as my front page.

Links are now Blogroll

Now, this is one feature of WordPress 2.1 that I do not like. The Links section has been renamed to Blogroll, which isn't an issue. However, the blogroll categories have been fused with the Post categories, which means a lot of extra unnecessary categories! I, as many others, would have preferred to have these seperate.

Speeeeed!

If the frontend has received an overhaul so has the backend. WordPress 2.1 comes with tons of optimizations.

Database code has been cleanedup and improved and so is much lighter on your server.

Ajax has been used all over the admin panel, hence reducing the number of page loads and definitely speedin up stuff.

The Dashboard loads quicker because the RSS feeds are now fetched in the background.

Mark reportsthat he has seen resource utilization half since he upgraded the blog to WordPress 2.1.

Other Improvements

Ella comes with other additions like the Akismet 2.0 plugin, a better upload manager. I don't use both of these, hence will skip the review of these. I am sure you will find reviews of the same elsewhere. The login screen has been made more attractive, though if you're the only user on your blog, it isn't going to make much of a difference. Comment feeds can include all the comments and the number can be customized accordingly, which is great if you are publishing comment feeds as I do on AjayDSouza.com and soon intend to do here as well.

Developer Features

For us developers, 2.1 also heralds in some good features. For one, you have an inbuilt cron facility. I'm going to study this soon for a plugin I have in mind.

Theme authors can take advantage of the custom header, color picker, and image cropping framework. I'm yet to see many themes incorporate these.

Plugin authors have several more hooks and API at the disposal.

Overall Feel

To summarize, I like the new WordPress 2.1. I loved 1.5 and preferred not to use 2.0 (but had no option), but I simply love 2.0 2.1.

Though there are somethings I could have done without, most of the new features have made it a must have upgrade.

2.2 is also coming in two months, with plans to implement a lot of user suggested ideas. I hope it marks the start of a true open source user contributed blogging platform.

In a bid to increase the number of advertisers, ReviewMe has announced that they will be offering half rate reviews all of this month.

Publishers will not lose anything as ReviewMe will absorb all the expenses, i.e. it will forfeit its share of the review.

Advertisers need to use the coupon trial during checkout to avail of the 50% off.

This means that all of this month you can buy a review at AjayDSouza.com for just $50.

Our previous coverage of ReviewMe.