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Best Screencasting Tool That You’re Not Using At All

Are you looking for a screencasting tool for Windows that doesn’t cost a dime but can still help you create high-quality screencast videos? Read on.

Microsoft Expression Encoder is essentially seen as a tool for developers to encode video files for the web with Silverlight. What you may not know, however, is that Expression Encoder comes with an impressive video screen capture application that is quite easy-to-use and offers more features than most other free screencasting solutions.

The program, known as Expression Encoder Screen Capture, is easy to learn and master and it won’t bore you with any of the technical jargon that is associated with video encoding.

To get started, simply select the area of the desktop screen that wish to capture as a video. The application has built-in presets for standard capture sizes, like 1280×720 for 720p or 1920×1080 for 1080p, or you may drag the red boundary to manually select an area. You can also perform full screen captures with Expression Encoder.

The default frame-rate for video screen captures is 15 fps but you can increase it to 30 or even 60 fps if you are recording, say, a video game walkthrough or even Google Earth.

You can toggle the microphone icon on the recording toolbar to add audio narration to the screen recording. Expression Encoder also supports “Picture in Picture” style video recording with your web camera, a feature that you are less likely to find in most other free screencasting tools.

Once you’re done with the recording, it’s time to edit and publish the video.

Expression Encoder offers a basic set of editing tools to help you fine-tune the recording. For instance, you may trim the boring parts or you can import external video clips and images (like an intro) to merge them with the main screencast.

If you would like to brand your screencast video with your own logo, just choose the “overlay” option and pick a location over the video where you want to place the logo. There’s support for sub-titles as well in case you would like to produce accessible screencasts.

The free version of Expression Encoder will let you publish screencast videos in Windows Media format and the maximum length of individual video screen captures is 10 minutes. The software supports Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7.

To give you an example, the above screencast video was recorded and produced with Expression Encoder. See more on screencasting software and online screencasting apps.

Via Labnol

Google Street View Maps On Antarctica

Google has announced that you can can explore the world via Google Street Map on all seven continents, with the addition of Brazil, Ireland and Antarctica, today.

Google Street view was launched back in May 2007 and in just three year Google has managed to provide a picture of the world in 360 degree panoramic views, to explore from the comfort of your arm chair and all for free.

Google’s Antarctica images include of an area called Half Moon Island, pictured above. When using Google Street View in Antarctica any blue dots you see throughout the continent  are user-contributed photos.

More information about Google quest to photograph the world can be found on the Google Lat Long Blog

Via Ubergizmo Via Google

View the original article here

The Easiest Way to Setup Email Reminders

Do you ever want to email something to yourself so that you can remember it later?

It happens to me all the time especially when I am on a mobile phone. For instance, if I come across a cool site that I would want to check out later from the desktop, I just send the URL to my own email account. If I have an idea for a blog or need to remember something, I jot it down in a message and email it to myself.

Now there are quite a few apps that can help you schedule email based reminders, including Google Calendar, but if you prefer to have something really simple that you can use from your email program itself and one that requires no setup, check out FollowUpThen.

With FollowUpThen, you can quickly setup custom email reminders using email itself. Just send a message to time-interval@followupthen.com and the service will send you a copy of the same email message after the specified time interval.

Here are some sample date formats that you may use while setting up email reminders:

6pm@followupthen.com (get a reminder at 6 PM exact) 6pm Tomorrow@followupthen.com (get a reminder at 6 PM tomorrow) 10minutes@followupthen.com (get a reminder after 10 minutes) 3days@followupthen.com (remind me after 3 days) tuesday@followupthen.com (remind me the next Tuesday) nov29@followupthen.com (setup email reminders for a specific date)

The service recognizes time zones from the email headers so if you setup a reminder for 11 AM, you’ll be reminded as per your time zone. You may also setup recurring email reminders with FollowUpThen though an online calendar would be a more suitable option for such tasks.

Disable Windows 7 ?This Program Might Not Have Installed Correctly?

Do you often see this dialog that says “This Program Might Not Have Installed Correctly“, after you finish installing a new software on your computer?

You may think that this window pops up with a reason, so you shouldn’t disable it, right? Well, if you are not so familiar with Windows, and don’t know much about computers at all, then you should probably leave it enabled.

But if you know that the software you installed, actually IS working, and Windows 7 still gives you this message, then I’m sure it gets pretty annoying. That’s why you should definitely disable it.

Here’s another reason to consider. Windows 7 displays this message even if program is installed correctly and it works 100%. This is why the sentence “This Program Might Not Have Installed Correctly” has a word “might” in it.

Find out how it work at the website

From: http://gadget-junction.net/disable-windows-7-error-code

PDF Reader can Write PDF Files

If all you want to do is read PDF files on your desktop, your existing copy of Adobe Reader is just perfect for the job. The software lets you view and print PDFs but you’ll have to upgrade to Adobe Acrobat in case you would like to have the ability to create PDF files offline.

There are some excellent alternatives, like Bullzip and doPDF, that don’t cost anything and can create PDF files but they only do half the job – you’ll still need a separate program, like Adobe Reader, for viewing those PDF files locally.

Nitro Reader gives you the best of both worlds. It’s a PDF Reader for Windows that you may also use for creating PDFs from Office documents, web pages and virtually any other Windows application that has the print button.

If you would to convert a batch of files into PDFs, simply drag them all to the Nitro Reader icon on your desktop and they’ll be converted into PDFs almost instantly. It can’t get any easier than this.

Other than PDF generation, Nitro Reader offers some other useful features as well. For instance, you can import an image of your signature into Nitro and turn it into a stamp. The next time you want to sign a PDF file, simply add that stamp using Nitro Reader itself.

The software has a useful “Extract Images” feature that you may use to extract and export all images from a PDF into individual files. This is handy if you want to re-use any of the images from that PDF but don’t have access to the document from which that PDF file was originally created.

Nitro PDF Reader is available for Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7 (x86 and x64 editions).

Via Labnol

Test The Windows 7 Features Via Online Demo Site

If you are still using Windows XP or Vista and you are not sure whether to upgrade to Windows 7 soon… This could help you to make a decision.

Microsoft launched a new website demo for Windows 7, where you can test drive many features of the new version of Windows, without need to install it.

Everything is going to work inside a web browser, with a couple of clicks. That’s the only purpose of the website.

If, for some reason, you don’t want to test it online, you can also download or watch videos that demonstrate the new features of Windows 7.

But before you go to the site, you first need to meet the minimum requirements to be able to see it properly.

Microsoft Windows:
Only Microsoft Windows XP, Windows 2000, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista and Windows 7 are supported.

Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 or later:
Only Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 or later are supported. I would never recommend you to use Internet Explorer but for this occasion, there is no other way.

If you do not have IE 6 or later, you can download it here

From: http://ping.fm/oXbJI

The Smartphone Camera Battle

Smartphone cameras are becoming increasingly powerful-many, in fact, are fully capable of taking very sharp and professional looking photos. But are these phones capable of holding their own against more sophisticated equipment? And which phone does it best?To make a fair comparison, we compared smartphone shots taken in a bevy of different lighting scenarios, including controlled and low lighting, and also tested flash capabilities. We didn’t have all of these phones at exactly the same time, but we did make a concerted effort to control the lighting as much as possible.

You’ll also notice that the size of some of the images appears different. We wanted to show you the native dimensions of the images these cameras take, and their respective dimensions as well.

From a features standpoint, the Incredible’s camera takes the cake, offering an incredible amount of customizable options including meters that let you adjust brightness, contrast, saturation and sharpness, all in real time. The Incredible also offers a ton of effects, including Sepia, Solarize, Posterize, and more.

Most impressive, however, is the actual manual control you are allowed if you happen to be photo geeks like us. If you want it, full control is yours. This includes control of ISO, white balance, resolution output, and a heap of other awesome features usually only reserved for the latest, full blown point and shoot cameras. On paper, it’s one of only two phones that sports an 8 MP camera-three up from the rest in case you’re planning on printing larger-than-normal images.

The Epic 4G is an impressive phone with an impressive camera. The flash in particular performed admirably, even in low light scenarios. A common problem for many phone cameras (and point and shoots) when shooting in low light is the censor often has difficulty speaking to the flash, often resulting in washed out images that are far too lit.

The Epic also offers a pretty broad range of camera features and customizable options-you can manually set the ISO, use light metering (a feature often reserved for digital SLR cameras), and adjust white balance and resolution settings, to name a few options. It also comes pre-loaded with four effects, which is appreciated, but not nearly as many as the HTC Incredible.

Finally, without a doubt, the Epic has the best looking in-camera screen of all of the phones in the test, hands down, bar none.

I’m probably just preaching to the choir at this point, but I’ll say it anyway: It’s really simple to use. In fact, it’s the simplest of all the phones to load up the camera, and also features the snappiest auto focus sensor we tested.

We did, however, run into a few problems with the built in flash that we’ll talk about during the comparison, and, like the BlackBerry, there’s only a limited amount of customizable options. The lack of options is partially saved, though, by an HDR mode that actually works pretty well under the proper lighting conditions.

The BlackBerry’s camera capabilities, much like the phone itself, can be pretty impressive but kind of frustrating to use. On the plus side, the Torch comes with a huge range of scene modes, including face detection, Potrait, Landscape, and even more obscure environmental settings like Snow and Beach modes. Speaking of environments, the Torch did a phenomenal job recognizing shifts in the environment when the scene mode was set to Auto-it alerted us when we were in an environment with low light, for example.

Unfortunately, the customization sort of ends there. There’s hardly any manual control offered at all. This didn’t used to matter, but with the recent upswing in mobile camera technology, manual customization becomes a desirable option.

Far and away the largest phone in the roundup, the Droid X is the only other phone in this roundup that also includes an actual shutter button, which, when coupled with the massive 4.3 inch display, makes for a very solid feeling camera, and also is easy on the eyes thanks to the massive screen. The Droid X camera also has a pretty decent amount of features, offering seven effects, eight ‘scenes’ (portrait, landscape, sports, etc) and a controllable flash.

Unfortunately, it lacks much of the manual control and abilities of its Droid based competition, the Incredible, but it’s still the only other phone in this roundup that matches it at 8 megapixels.

The Droid 2′s camera settings are identical, feature for feature, to the Droid X. We’re figuring that’s because they were released around the same time and made by the same company, but there is one puzzling difference: The Droid X features an 8 MP camera, while the Droid 2 features a 5 MP camera.

These cameras have more than enough megapixels to capture some pretty exacting detail, so, if we set up a soft box and wanted to take a dramatically lit portrait, could the phones pull it off? We wanted to find out how these devices would react to a controlled lighting environment.

Such an experiment will test a couple of important factors. Can the censor in these cameras color balance for dramatic light, without blowing the image out? Also, the pictures were taken in relatively low light, so are the shutters in these tiny little lenses fast enough to avoid motion blur?

We’re going to use a digital SLR shot as a reference point. The portrait of features editor Amber Bouman below was taken with a Nikon D300, and is as close to the actual lighting configuration we set up in our lab as humanly possible.

This was taken with a 12 MP Nikon D300. Dramatic light could potentially confuse a point and shoot censor, so we were curious as to which phone could re create this dramatic look.

As we’ll be doing with the majority of our tests, we’re going to take the best two and compare their image quality. The top two images from this test are pretty clear. Let’s scrutinize the two best pictures to find out which one comes out on top. (Hint: it’s not the BlackBerry).

Droid Incredible:

The Droid Incredible did a magnicifant job balancing the light in this image, and didn’t blow out or misjudge color corrections like the other phones. Though the Epic did a pretty good job handling color corrections, it blew out a part of the background, where the softbox was shining. In fact, look at the far right side of Amber’s head. See how natural her hair is lit? Now look at the iPhones image, which totally blew out the highlights in her hair. (Sorry Amber, that didn’t come out right.) All in all, the Incredible really did a terrific job balancing all of the proper necesseties needed to make this image look the way it does, producing a surprisingly detailed and professional looking image that we think looks even better than the DSLR snapshot.

iPhone 4:

The iPhone’s image is worthy of mentioning just because of the crazy amount of detail it picked up on. See that catch light in her eye? Notice you can actually see the color of her eye? However, the image suffered from a recurring problem we’ve found with the iPhone 4: a slight purplish-bluish hue. This seemed to happen almost every time direct light was involved (including use of the iPhone’s flash), and though the images are surprisingly detailed (it’s hard to believe the iPhone’s camera is only 5 MP), it can’t compete with the color clarity and smoothness of the Droid Incredible.

The Winner: The HTC Droid Incredible – Outstanding Color and Light Balancing.

We knew this was going to be hard to gauge, because a nice, bright day looks the same on almost any camera. But it’s an important factor—we reckon the majority of everyday phone users would use their camera in naturally lit environments more so than anywhere else.As stated above, choosing was pretty difficult, as most of our smart phones delivered some great results (though what’s with the undersaturated image Droid 2?). In the end, the showdown comes down to the two phones that captured exacting detail and saturation levels.Let’s have a look at the top two from the bunch.

iPhone 4:

Shocked again, we had to give the iPhone some praise here, for reproducing the most eye-catching image of the bunch with some pretty vibrant colors. The image itself is a messy one, but Apple’s image censor picked up on the subjects quickly and precisely—the iPhone 4′s shutter fired faster then any of the other phones when taking this particular picture. As you can see, it was an extremely bright (and hot) day, and the iPhone did oversaturate the image just a smidge, but not enough for any major concern.

Samsung Epic:

As you can no doubt tell from this picture, the Samsung Epic has a super wide lens, and we really really like it for that reason, but were also very impressed with the amount of detail picked up in this photo, especially the spot on color match on the actual little Droids. Unlike the iPhone 4, which produced rich colors but oversaturated the image, the Epic captured the correct look of light (around 5:15 PM or so) quickly and easily. And, since this is a natural light test after all, the Samsung takes it.

The Winner: Samsung Epic- Most Accurate Reproduction of Natural Light.

In the world of cameras, the accurate reproduction and saturation of colors is an important factor to consider. And, as much as we would’ve liked to take pictures of beautiful, natural things (like bright flowers, Autumn leaves, etc) we were limited to what we have in our surrounding environment: PC parts.So we found the brightest, most colorful PC setup we had in the lab, and photographed it with all of the contending phones. This was an important test for two reasons: First, this would give us a good idea at the camera’s color rendering capabilities; and second, the lighting in the lab isn’t so great, and we were curious to see if the shutters were fast enough to avoid motion blur when pressing the shutter button.

Samsung Epic:

The Epic accurately reproduced the wide range of colors and hues found in this image, and also maintained a snappy shutter (though you’ll notice a tiny bit of motion blur in the boxes behind the GPU). It did, however, slightly oversaturate the light parts of the motherboard, making some of the slots in the mobo look like they’re glowing almost. A very smooth, consistant image over all though.

Droid X:

Having such a large screen gives you plenty of liberties when shooting—by far the widest shot and also one of the best color matches in our tests, the Droid X really captured the rich colors of the image without blowing anything out. What’s more, the sharpness of the image was unparalled, due (we ponder) to the conveniently large shutter located on the top right of the phone for better shutter stabilization in lower light. The shutter works great with the X in your hands—it’s bulky and feels sturdy, much like an actual point and shoot camera.

Winner: Droid X- Rich Colors And a Solid Shutter.

We knew this test would be a rough one; it’s hard to get flash right in low light. Images taken in low light require the camera to crank the ISO to insanely high levels, resulting in grainy images that, when coupled with a misfired, over blown strobe, can look truly terrible.But we wanted to see which phone, with its flash camera settings on Automatic, would produce the best image in low light. Here are the results.

Samsung Epic:

Once again, the Samsung Epic just got it right, firing just enough of a flash to illuminate the subject enough to look natural. Also, graininess was at a low in comparison to the other phones (but still visible). Furthermore, this image is the only one of the six to not feature a crazy amount of red-eye from the flash. There was barely any available light in this image, but the auto focus censor still picked up what it needed to. Very impressive.

BlackBerry Torch:

Just when we thought BlackBerry was down and out of this competition, it delivered! As with the Epic, the BlackBerry fired just enough flash to keep things looking natural, and the autofocus censor picked up on the subject in a totally dark room. There’s a ton of grain to the image, however, noticeable mostly in the black areas of the photo. A good flash and a great auto focus censor go a long way, but the image smoothness of the Epic is just too compelling for us to ignore.

Winner: Samsung Epic- Just Enough Flash For a Natural Looking Image.

We’re not going to spend too much time here, because the results of every one of the phone’s images looked identicalliy bad. Digital zooming is a tricky thing to get right, and not even the highest end digital cameras can produce a sharp image when the zoom is maxed out. So, for this particular test, we’ll call it a draw.

The Samsung Epic, by a nose! In our testing, the Samsung Epic was the most capable camera, handling itself accordingly in the wide range of lighting tests we ran. It may not always have taken the best image, but it’s range of performance impressed us.

The iPhone 4 and the HTC Incredible are definetely worth mentioning for doing a stellar job as well, and though the Incredible didn’t formally win, it still comes loaded with a staggering amount of camera features, which we thought was cool. The BlackBerry, well, didn’t do so hot, but that wasn’t really a huge surprise—they’re made for business people, not art majors.
Via Gizmodo

Mother’s Day Flowers Online

The celebrates Mother’s Day on the second Sunday in May. So, this year should be May,11. Mother’s Day was loosely inspired by the British day and was imported by social activist Julia Ward Howe after the American Civil War. However, it was intended as a call to unite women against war. In 1870, she wrote the Mother’s Day Proclamation as a call for peace and disarmament.

Therefore, you should send the flower to your mother to let she know your love and care. You just choose in 800florals.com. There are many choices that I assure that your mother will like and appreciate. Let’s Send Mother’s Day Flowers Online Now!

Jaguar C-X75 Electric Supercar

Jaguar are the latest car manufacturer to show off an electric car, although this one is slightly different than any we have seen before as it features a top speed of 205 miles per hour.

The Jaguar C-X75 can accelerate for 0-60 miles per hour in just 3.4 seconds, which is about the standard speed for a normal petrol powered supercar.

The Jaguar C-X75 is powered by two turbine engine and four electric motors. It is still in the concept stages at the moment, and there are no details on whether Jaguar will put it into production.

via Dvice

Image Credit: Auto Express

View the original article here

What’s a RockMelt Browser?

RockMelt, it’s a browser built on top of Chromium—the open source project that powers Google Chrome. Which means RockMelt is really, really fast, even with all of the sharing stuff on top of it. In fact, it’s kind of like Chrome, but with super-duper extensions for Facebook and Twitter.

The big name behind RockMelt is Marc Andreessen—you might remember him as the founder of Netscape, the loser of the Great Browser War, when it was obliterated by the Dark Lord IE.

RockMelt’s centered around sharing links with your friends. In practice, it’s like having Facebook built into your browser. In fact, every time you start up RockMelt, it logs into your Facebook account. (Twitter is optional.)

On the left side, there’s a Facebook buddy list, populated with your favorite Facebook friends for dragging links to share, chatting or checking their latest updates. The address bar is the biggest departure from Chrome: There’s a giant share button for posting to Facebook or Twitter, and the separate search box drops down the results in a list—flicking through each with the down arrow, you can quickly preview the site for each search result. On the right, there’s a collection of feeds, like Twitter, your Facebook newsfeed and your favorite sites.

It’s the Facebook browser, in effect, since most of the convenience is for quickly posting stuff on, communicating through or scanning Facebook.

Like it or not, in RockMelt, you can see the beginnings of a true social browser, one that’ll more deeply integrate lots of different social services, from StumbleUpon to Flickr, and hopefully blend them together in a way that works. Given that more and more of the stuff we read and watch online comes from social networks, it seems obvious that the next step is to build that into the browser.

It’s not hard to imagine one day seeing what all of your friends are browsing in real time without having to manually “share” anything, or watching crazy YouTube videos together. For now though, RockMelt’s just a handy browser for serious Facebook and Twitter addicts who don’t mind a little extra clutter in their browser window and the constant threat of procrastination.

Via Gizmodo