Saturday, June 14, 2008

Make Your Own Stabilised Video Collage

11:00PM Gina Trapani | One of the most creative uses of Flickr video support is the “stabilised video collage,” a beautiful way to capture a scene in a multi-frame moving portrait, as shown. Out of respect for the producer’s copyright, we didn’t embed the actual video example in this post, just a reduced thumbnail—so go here to see it in action. Then check out a how-to video on making your own collage, which involves combining two videos into one frame using Motion for Mac. Neat! Stabilized Video Collages, How-To [Flickr via Waxy] More »

This Week’s Best Posts

10:00AM Lifehacker US Edition | This week’s most popular posts include: Teach your Eee’s OpenOffice to spell in Australian“OpenOffice offers a fine word processor for users of the ever-popular Eee PC, but sadly the default shipping OS doesn’t offer any spell checker at all, let alone an Australian one. Fix that problem by following these steps.” What price an Aussie iPhone?“I guess we shouldn’t complain — Australians will get the new 3G iPhone on July 11, the earliest date that anyone will, and we get a choice of networks (Vodafone and Optus) which is more than the original iPhone ever boasted. But while US customers are promised a US$199 phone, both Optus and Vodafone are only saying that pricing details will be announced at a later date.” How to Recover Deleted Files with Free Software“Ack! The computer ate my term paper! We’ve all been there at some point. You delete an important file, somehow it skips your Recycle Bin altogether, and for all practical purposes, it’s disappeared into the ether.” Three Awesome Experimental Firefox Extensions“While scouring the far corners of the internet, we often run across tools that look great but come up just short of making the cut for a post…” FireNes Brings 2000 NES Games to Your Browser“Firefox only (Windows/Mac/Linux): The FireNes Firefox extension integrates over 2000 old-school NES games with your favourite browser.” Top 10 Useful Bookmarklets“Having a good set of bookmarklets on your browser’s toolbar is like having a web-savvy Leatherman handy—you can take them anywhere, use them in many situations, and they just simply work.” Best Online Language Tools for Word Nerds“When you need a word’s definition, translation, pronunciation, synonym, or antonym, you don’t have to haul an enormous tome from the bookshelf, dust it off, and ruffle through its delicate pages like your grandparents used to do—you can just hop on the internet.” Five Best Photo Sharing Web Sites“The first consumer-priced, one-megapixel digital cameras hit the streets just over 10 years ago, and today digital cameras are everywhere—hell, one megapixel is tiny for even our phone cameras.” Build Your Own Wire Photo Wall“For under 20 bucks, using some wire, black card stock, and mini binder clips, it’s easy to create your own wire photo hanger.” Run Xbox Media Centre from a USB Drive“LiveXBMC, a blend of the XBMC and Ubuntu Linux, lets you do all the same big-screen media playing, file sharing, DVD ripping, and other media centre goodness without installing a thing, but with saved settings.” More »

Trayconizer Makes Any Program a Permanent System Tray App

8:00AM Adam Pash | Windows only: Freeware application Trayconizer turns any application into a system tray application in just a few steps. Unlike other previously mentioned minimize-to-system-tray apps like TrayIt or 4t Tray Minimizer, Trayconizer starts applications in the system tray from the moment you run them. To use it, you need to tweak the shortcut you’re using to launch the application (right-click shortcut and select Properties) by adding the path to Trayconizer in front of the app like so: C:\Path\To\Trayconizer.exe C:\Windows\Notepad.exe. Trayconizer is freeware, Windows only, requires no install, and consumes a paltry 2MB of RAM. Trayconizer [via FreewareGenius] More »

Opera Portable Hits Your Thumb Drive

7:40AM Adam Pash | If you liked what you saw in the screenshot tour of Opera and were impressed by its performance in our speed tests, you can now grab Opera 9.5 USB to run from your thumb drive. [via] More »

Firefox 3.1 New Features Already in the Works

7:30AM Adam Pash | The official release of Firefox 3 may be slated to drop on Tuesday, but the folks at Mozilla have already started drafting features for Firefox 3.1, like a Windows Alt-Tab-style for the Ctrl-Tab switcher. Want it now? Check out the Firefox 3-compatible Ctrl-Tab extension. More »

Afloat Manages Your Windows from the Keyboard

6:00AM Adam Pash | Mac OS X only: Open-source donationware application Afloat adds several useful tools and effects to your windows. We’ve mentioned Afloat once before, but it’s since updated with a more polished look and tons of new features. Apart from standards windows effects like transparency and always-on-top floating, Afloat can reveal the file a window is displaying through a shortcut (Cmd-Ctrl-Up) or keep a window on top as you switch Spaces on a per-window basis. The new and improved Afloat is part eye candy, part productivity, but unfortunately it only works with Cocoa-based apps like Safari and TextEdit, which means popular apps like Firefox and even iTunes are left out in the cold. Afloat is donationware, Mac OS X only. Afloat More »

Get a Song Out of Your Head

4:30AM Adam Pash | Can’t get that song out of your head? Wired says listening to the whole song or doing some math will beat it out of your brain. More »

Google Browser Sync Discontinued, No Firefox 3 Support

4:21AM Gina Trapani | Reader hominid.todd says that a Google rep emailed him about the long-awaited status of the Browser Sync extension for Firefox 3. Turns out they’re discontinuing development on it. Here’s Google’s response to hominid.todd’s inquiry: Thanks for trying out Google Browser Sync and for all of your feedback. It was a tough call, but we decided to phase out support for Browser Sync. Since the team has moved on to other projects that are keeping them busy, we don’t have time to update the extension to work with Firefox 3 or to continue to maintain it. More »

RUBotted Checks Your Computer for Zombie Bots

4:00AM Adam Pash | Windows only: Freeware application RUBotted monitors your computer for the presence of malware zombie bots and alerts you of any suspicious activity. A common and popular form of malware, bots turn an infected computer into a zombie of sorts that will perform tasks in the background when directed by the maker of the virus. Often a network of bots will be used to send spam or participate in denial-of-service attacks. RUBotted monitors your computer for suspicious, bot-like activity and alerts you if it thinks you may be infected. More »

Speed Testing the Latest Web Browsers

2:00AM Kevin Purdy | Read the hype on every new web browser released or due out this year, and you’ll see claims that every one of them is “faster” than all the others. You could compare super-specific tests and decipher all the code-brain terminology, and you’d still be left wondering which browser starts quicker, uses less memory, and slides through dynamic interfaces like Gmail the fastest. Since our squadron of independent analysts had the week off, we ran the latest editions of Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera 9.5, and Safari for Windows through some unscientific but highly geeky tests ourselves on a plain old Windows computer. Take a look at the full (and somewhat unexpected) results after the jump. More »