Category: Software

  • Surprise! You can find color in B&W photos

    Surprise! You can find color in B&W photos

    This is easy to reduce a color photo to a B&W image (any photo software or any B&W photocopier can do it). But the reverse operation seems difficult at best, impossible in most cases. However, a team of French scientists from the French INRIA (Guillaume Charpiat, Matthias Hofmann et Bernhard Schölkopf) presented recently an algorithm…

  • CDBurnerXP goes Portable

    CDBurnerXP goes Portable

    I always recommended the excellent CDBurnerXP for burning your CD and DVD discs. It’s free and does all the commercial programs do. Now, the editor publishes CDBurnerXP Portable (download it for free). It goes on a USB stick and can follow you everywhere.

  • Write down everything to ease maintenance

    Some have been surprised by one little habit of mine around my PC (I should say ‘my PCs”): I keep a detailled log of everything I do on my PC in a plain old school paper book. It may be a software installation, a parameter change on another software package, the update of a driver.…

  • Stepper motors, step-by-step

    Stepper motors are nearly everywhere. this is marvellous for happy hobbyists. Even better, you can find them (and extract them from) a large number of devices that are easy to hack like old floppy disk drives, hard discs. For those of you who would ike to know more and keep an eye on the technology,…

  • OpenOffice.org 3.0: Your free replacement for MS-Office 2007

    OpenOffice.org 3.0 arrives and this is important. As a matter of fact, the free desktop suite (as interesting as the MS-Office suite) shift in high gear. The new features are quite noticeable: Support of MS-Office 2007 format for documents OOo 3.0 is now compatible with Mac OS X New multi-page mode in Writer Several users…

  • Be a beta-tester

    If you have the heart of an adventurer, you may be interested to know that Ijust put in beta-test some new websites that I am working on. YLovePhoto.com (site specializing in digital photography) YLoveBigCats.com (about felines and other big cats) YLoveIllusions.com (optical illusions) YWantVisits.com (SEO, traffic optimisation and web site revenue maximization) Your opinion will…

  • Photoshop CS4 vs. The Gimp v2.6

    Newsrooms are full of weird coincidences. For example, we just learned that  two products often presented as direct competition were launched this Fall. To my right, here is Adobe with its boxing champion, Photoshop, loaded up to version CS4. To my left, Linux and its community of free developpers pushing the challenger on the ring,…

  • Pre-Photokina calendar (photo news)

    What can be forecasted of the most important (in my eyes 🙂 ) announces expected before the Photokina fair in Koln. 18 September Nikon lenses: AF-S 50mm/1.4 G – AF-S 85mm/1.4 G – AF-S 70-200mm/2,8 VRII.Nikon new SLR : D800 or D900 (24.6MP Full Frame dSLR camera, with Sony-designed sensor), or Nikon new pro SLR:…

  • Drag off-screen window back into view

    Windows tip I recently had the problem of an application (DreamWeaver) which had hidden a Windows dialog box. When opening it, it was out of view. But how to drag it back? It appears that this is rather easy (if you know how). First, you use your keyboard: Ctl-Space to open the system menu of…