Techmazine: Tech Made Easy
One of the frustratons of working with web based programs including email apps like Gmail, Hotmail, etc. stems from the fact that you cannot paste pictures from say your Word document or PowerPoint presentation into a Gmail message that you are composing.
With web based applications becoming more common-place, this sort of clipboard access option becomes more of a necessity. That's why I was glad to see this new company called PicturePaste that has developed a product of the same name.
Once I downloaded and installed the program, I was able to launch PicturePaste. This showed up as a small window. I then opened a PowerPoint presentation, and copied a picture from one of the slides -- this automatically showed up in my PicturePaste window as you can see below.
You now click the Convert button within the PicturePaste window -- after a while, you see a box that can be dragged to your Gmail compose window as shown in the figure below.
That's all you need to do!
There are two versions of PicturePaste -- the free version works with 50 pictures, and the Pro version works with more than 50.
Labels: pictures email web_applications utilities
In the past few weeks that I have been playing with Windows 7, I have found many small and simple improvements that no one talks about! I'm guessing they are all talking about the big improvements.
The first of these small things is that Windows Media Player now plays QuickTime MOV files, even if you have no QuickTime Player installed! Wow -- who saw that coming?
Now -- too be not too patronising, Windows Media Player did throw fits while trying to play one of the movie files I asked it to play -- but it did play many of them -- look at the screenshot below!
This should keep people who work with both Windows and Mac machines happy!
Labels: quicktime, windows_7, windows_media_player
Animoto, an online video editor that I have mentioned in an earlier blog post is coming up with holiday cards that are actually video clips you customize within the Animoto interface.
The folks at Animoto do say that the personalized holiday cards won't be ready until December 1st -- but they wanted to provide a sneak preview of the holiday greeting cards that they will make available later next month.
They also have a cool movie on their site that tells more.
Labels: animoto, fun, movies, video
Apple has done the impossible again! If you thought that the Apple iPod Nano music player was incredibly small, then think again because Apple has now managed to fit in video recording and a FM radio tuner within the new generation of the product without increasing its dimensions.
It also has a larger screen than before, and the video recording part has built in video effects. The FM radio tuner has two killer features called Live Pause and iTunes Tagging -- and to make the product even better, Apple threw in a Pedometer feature so that your new iPod Nano can count every step you take as part of your fitness program.
The new Nano is now priced at $149 and $179 for 8GB and 16GB models respectively, and that is actually $20 less than the last 16GB Nano model.
Techmazine has been conceptualized for a long time to fulfill the need for a tech blog site that doesn't assume that a reader knows everything -- so each post in this blog site will contain references and links to explanations of terms you might not understand. Think of this as a blog that everyone can read and understand!
Labels: about
Microsoft may be opening their first retail stores, a la Apple Stores as early as this fall in Scottsdale, Arizona and Mission Viejo, California. No word is available yet about any store launches outside the US but according to eWeek, the Mission Viejo store will open at a mall that includes a successful Apple Store. The Shops at Mission Viejo is an upscale mall that I have visited often during my US trips in Orange County, south of Los Angeles.
Do you find that some sites don't open for you, or return errors? Move to another system in another location and the same site works flawlessly? Well, that may be happening because you are using the DNS of your ISP (Internet Service Provider) -- and these are set by default to values hidden in your Internet settings or in your router, so you probably did not even know that you could change them!
So what exactly is a DNS? DNS stands for Domain Name Server, a service that translates Internet URLs such as www.microsoft.com, www.google.com, etc. into a set of numbers called IP addresses that read like 72.14.207.99, or 208.77.188.166, or similar sets of numbers. Your web browser understands IP addresses rather than URLs -- so it needs to translate the URL you want to visit to a specific IP address -- for this task, it needs to approach a DNS. Without access to a DNS, your web browser would not be able to get you anywhere online!
This is how it works:
- You type in a URL in your web browser ->
- Your web browser looks for a DNS service listed in your Internet settings ->
- It approaches that DNS service ->
- The DNS service translates the given URL to an IP address ->
- Your browser uses that IP address to fetch a page from the site you requested via the URL!
The instructions on OpenDNS work like a wizard and help you step-by-step if you are using a router or just a single computer -- try it out!
Here's a cool video on YouTube that shows how you can get started with OpenDNS:
Labels: dns, internet, ip, opendns, url
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