Are you itching to buy a high definition disc player but don’t know which format to go with? Given how long HDDVD and BluRay have been on the market you’d think we’d have a definitive format. 3 Years towards their intial introduction; picking a high definition player is still one of the most confusing purchasing decisions a consumer is faced with.

Up until now.

LG has just announced it will be launching the first dual format high definition disc player at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas next week; although there has been no word on pricing; we don’t expect high def to come with less than a 4 digit price tag. Details should be available on Sunday.

While a dual format player will lessen the cosumer’s worry about investing in the wrong format. It won’t make it any easier for content producers. If dual format players become the norm, studios will be faced with a quandary; continue to support both formats? Or release new and catalog content in just one of the disc formats; thereby foregoing support of those early adopters who bought into whichever disc format falls by the way side.

I guess time would tell…

Hot post? I might disagree, but you now get to know the feel of the post and the reason it’s featured prior to clicking on it.

If you ever stop and wonder what on earth tooticators were thinking when they featured a certain post on toot, wonder no more, they thought it’s hot/exciting/interesting/funny/etc. At the present time it appears only in the what’s tooting section, but I guess it will make its way to the reads.

Nice, but very Web 1.0. What i’d like to see is “power to the people”, the essence of web 2.0; where nothing ever depends on one given person’s opinion or mood. An example of this would be newsvines or diggs seeding and sinking, where enough votes should change a mood or sink the post altogether. But that might require user registration, which I hear is in the works.

I can’t speak much of aesthetics, but i believe the mood icons should be of the same size and at the same location, possibly the very bottom of the feed.

On the other hand a nice feature that toot has implemented is click count (example:http://itoot.net/GoRead.php?id=418), this should give tooticators the idea on which posts visitors like without voting, those 3 and 5 toots still confuse me.

Another thing I almost missed is the barely noticeable archive and RSS feed at the bottom of toot reads. Reads can now be syndicated, what’s tooting is not included, which makes me question the entire purpose of that segment.

The feed lacks moods and categories, something the toot team should work on. For instance I would like to get the hot + technology feeds categories in the feed should be able to solve this. There’s no RSS feed for tootstream at least non that I know of, but you can always import the toot OPML into your aggregator.

Nice additions, but still a very long and tough way ahead. But I bet those guys have many tricks up their sleeve. I look forward to the next version of toot.

Note: What’s with the non-standard feed icon?

Are you a clumsy person like myself, constantly messing up your camera settings and end up with black and white/sepia photos? (you don’t accidentally drop iPods from a 3rd floor balcony too, do you?). Do you look at your granparents old black & white photos and wonder how they’d look like in color? Or perhaps you’re about to redecorate your flat and wonder how those new colors you chose for the walls match your furniture. If you answered yes to any of those questions and don’t have/want to use photoshop then this tutorial is for you.

Art geeks and photoshop gurus would shrug their shoulders or cry foul at such a thought, but many of us don’t have access to photoshop or lack the training or patience to use it. (note: If you’re an art geek you might be interested in Roba’s Photoshop version).

For this tutorial/software review, we’re going to use a software called “Recolored”. Recolored is brush stroke based recolorization software that mixes sophisticated algorithms and users brush strokes to colorize objects. It works on both colored and greyscale images, is quite inexpensive and very simple to use. Before you continue you will need to download the 21 days trail version.

For this tutorial we’re going to be using a friend’s flat photograph, it looks quite boring with loads of grey and white everywhere.

Step 1: Convert the image to grayscale by selecting image > greyscale in recolored
Although recolored works with colored photos, I found the best results can be acheived with greyscale photos

Step 2: Colorize Walls / Furniture Using Brush & Pen Tool

I selected a shade of orange for the wall on the left and white for the one ahead.

Clicking on the Recolorize button shows you how it would look like

Looks good, let’s colorize the furniture (I know some of you might disagree with my choice of colors, but I did this in a hurry and didn’t think it through)

Recolorize for to get the final.

Much more interesting, don’t you think?

It only took three steps and less than 3 minutes to recolorize the entire room. There are downsides to using Recolored though

• You can’t colorize part of the image only, somehow the color manages to spread to the rest of the image
• There’s no visible history like photoshop, you will have to go through undos and redos, and i can’t seem to find a way to select a brush stroke and delete it. I had to over color segments of the photo (as you can see in the carpet segment), there’s an erase tool, but if found recoloring faster.
• It just doesn’t work with detailed photos. You won’t get good results if you’re trying to recolor a garden for instance. It takes loads of time to get it right and it won’t look perfect. Recolored is good for simple photos like a face shot, or a flat, etc.
• Last but not least, you will have to guess the colors for those old grandpa photos.

On the upside, it’s very easy to use, The built in color pallett makes it easy to pick colors for skin, lips, sky, etc. It’s inexpensive and has a 21 days version.
[Download It]

If you found this article useful digg it

Earlier on Microsoft released a public beta of Internet Explorer 7.0 with web developers as the main target. At a first glance you can see the long wait was worth it. IE7 is better in terms of aesthetics, functionality and performance. It loads much faster than IE 6 and Firefox 1.5. Some might argue that IE loads much faster than Firefox since it’s a part of windows; which is a myth disproved by Opera’s performance. (to date opera is the fastest graphical browser)

Aesthetics
First thing that drew my attention (prior to even loading IE 7) is the logo change (new one on the left). I personally find think the new one is better, but I’m not graphics expert.

Upon opening the browser you will notice a change to the interface.

The simplicity is mind blowing, some might argue this looks like FF, I personally think it looks more like Opera. The menu bar is hidden by default (still accessible via shortcuts / tools > toolbar > classic menu), the location of the bar is peculiar. When enabled the menu will be shown under the address bar, which needs a little bit of getting used to. I won’t place much importance on this as I think the average user doesn’t actually need the menu bar.

Another thing that caught my attention was the use of Mozilla’s RSS icon, apparently the guys at Microsoft visited Mozilla offices and agreed that a unified RSS icon is in the user’s best interest, as opposed to the originally proposed icons found here.

The button placement is well thought of, placing the ones you need most to the left side and the ones you would use less on the right.

Tabbed Browsing At Last!
We finally have what we’ve been wanting for years. Although Tabbed Browsing has been available for IE 6 for a while now (through MSN Search Bar or 3rd Party Plugings). Worth noting that Netcaptor were the first to introduce Tabbed Browsing back in 1997, while Opera developed it back in 1995 and introduced it in Opera 4 in 2000, Avant Browser and Maxthon also had this feature long before FireFox arrived in 2004.

Quicktabs
This is probably my favorite feature. Quicktabs (accessible via ctrl+q, or the third icon from the left) is a preview feature that allows you to see what’s on your tabs, very handy, this is similar to Firefox’s foXpose extension.

Web Standards Compliance & CSS Fixes

Gone are the days IE would render stuff like this.

According to the IE blog Microsoft intends to fully comply with web standards, CSS 2 in particular (CSS 2.1 once it’s recommended) . DHTML rendering noticabely improved. The only site I visited today which didn’t render properly was http://uk.msn.com/

I presume it would work out fine with most hacked and non-hacked CSS code. I didn’t thoroughly test this, so this is just a presumption; you can read more on this on the IE Blog

I would appreciate your feedback on this.

RSS (Really Simple Syndication)
For those of you who don’t know what RSS is, I suggest you check the wikipedia entry
RSS functionality in IE 7 is superb. It allows for OPML import and export meaning that Microsoft won’t lock you in and force you to use their platform. It allows for enclosures which can potentially make it a great Podcasts aggregator. And according to this video it seems to be cross application. It allows communications with other applications using the RSS API, basically this means if you add an RSS feed to your IE7 and you have another application that utilizes IE7’s RSS API it will be added their too.

IE7 automatically formats RSS feeds in a nice readable formats, it even highlights changes since last check, very useful! I did have a problem with Jordan Planet’s RSS feed, their ATOM feed worked fine though.

You can check Dave Winer’s opinion on IE7’s RSS

ClearType & Zooming
IE7 utilizes ClearType which makes webpages more readable especially on LCD Screens. The zooming feature is very useful but quite jittery when used on machines with no graphics acceleration.

ClearType Screenshot

Magnifying Screenshot

Multi Engine Search Bar
The title says it all. Search providers can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/searchguide/default_new.mspx notably missing are Google’s Logo next to their link Technorati & Wikipedia (I’m sure it will have Encarta at some point)! I hope these will be added soon.

Security
Now before we go on with this one I want to emphasise that security is an ongoing job, anyone who claims their product is 100% secure is just being arrogant. Microsoft had it’s downs, but so did all other rivals, including Firefox which had 26 security vulnerabilities 6 of which were marked as Highly Critical!

Microsoft is doing a great job at securing IE 7 here are a few pointers

• ActiveX controls are disabled by default in Internet Explorer Version 7. The ActiveX Input TYPE=FILE control no longer submits a fully-qualified path; it now submits only a filename. The ActiveX control for XEnroll certificate enrollment was removed from Windows Vista and replaced with a new control.
• Antiphishing Filter Built In Cyota Inc, Internet Identity and MarkMonitor will regularly supply information to Microsoft on thousands of confirmed phishiping websites to help ensure the URL reputation service is running with the latest information on known attackers (more at: http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/11/17/494040.aspx )
• Safer Protocol Defaults: Weaker SSLv2 protocol are disabled, TLSv1 protocol are enabled. Hence IE users will negotiate HTTPS connections using SSLv3 or TLSv1; you will not notice any difference in the user experience, it’s a silent improvement in security.

You can find more at http://msdn.microsoft.com/ie/releasenotes/default.aspx

Better AJAX Support
IE7 support a scriptable native version of XMLHTTP. This can be instantiated using the same syntax across different browsers. The addition of XMLHttpRequest is very nice, but for really advanced AJAX applications to run without ActiveX alerts XMLDocument and XSLDocument are needed as well.

International Domain Names with no Add ons
So you can finally use those non-latin domains you’ve registered (example arabic domains) http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/12/19/505564.aspx

Oh and I forgot…. PRINTING
What’s Missing/What’s Wrong!

Missing:

• The absence of a download manager and ability to pause downloads. (Note: IE6 & 7 do resume downloads if the server supports it, provided that you do not try downloading until the connection is resumed)
• XMLHttpRequest is only half of the AJAX toolkit!
• We still have that awkward find popup screen with no highlighting capability
• Viewing source code displays the source in an unformatted colorless notepad!
• Ability to rearrange the tabs in toolbar is missing
• IE7 Still Lacks the Shift + Enter for sites that end with .net (if anyone knows of a key for that or .org please let me know)
• Like I said before it doesn’t have wikipedia or technorati in search options which is a bit of a disappointment.
• Themes! I cannot stress this enough, loads of people end up downloading spyware/adware just because they want to customize their IE experience.

Bugs So Far:

• Inability to open drupal RSS 2.0 feeds
• One site rendering funny (http://uk.msn.com/)
• Blogger editor doesn’t display what you’re typing!
• Incompatible with MSN Messenger Produced Chat Logs (Same with MSN Messenger Live)
• I didn’t experience this myself but I heard some people had trouble uninstalling

Downside of all this:

• You need to have a genuine version of windows in order to test drive IE 7.0
• You still have to reboot after installing IE, but I guess that’s because it’s part of windows.
• Available for I32 bit platform on Windows XP only. WinXP 64 and 2003 Server editions coming soon

So awaiting in my inbox today was an invitation to test Windows Live Messenger (WLM from now on). Just when MSN started to become a verb in certain regions of the world, at least mine anyway. Microsoft decides to change the name into Windows Live Messenger. The program still installs on “C:\Program Files\MSN Messenger”. The name also suggests it won’t be available for other platforms. Naming aside I’m not that impressed.

Click to expand

Design:
By default the top bar is hideous shade of bright orange, which can be changed with a few mouse clicks; I’ve changed mine into blue as you can see from the screenshots. What annoyed me most is that Groups & Contacts kept on expanding when I hovered them, thankfully the later can be disabled from the options menu, and the first can avoided by moving your mouse outside of the MSN box. There’s no way to hide your tabs unless you declare your computer as a shared computer which in turn won’t save your messages / contact list / login information.

Features:
Here’s a list of the few notable features of WLM.

• Better Contact Management [screenshot here]
  You can now add your contact into a group immediately, those who sort their contacts by group will benefit from this feature, you will no longer have to add a user then drag them into the appropriate group afterwards. You can also attach contact information to any user on your list, there will be immediately synchronized with your hotmail or Live Mail contacts. Surprisingly adding a birth date to a contact doesn’t immediately reflect on your calendar, but then again this is just a beta.
• File Sharing [screenshot here]
  This is rather amusing, WLM was unable to recognize my antivirus software (”Windows OneCare”) and offered me a free Antivirus Software which turned out to be Windows OneCare again! Now with file sharing you create folders for each contact and files into them, files will be automatically synchronized with them, very useful if say you’re working on the same files / projects. As always .exe, .pif, etc are blocked to prevent sharing virus infected files.
• Offline Messaging
  Name says it all, you can now send instant messages to your offline contacts and they’ll receive them once they get online. This feature is nothing new it was built into ICQ back in 1998!
• Search Contacts Box
  This is quite useful for those who manage huge lists, or if you want to send a message to an offline contact. You can type in part of the name/email address of any contact you have on your list and your list will be narrowed down to them.

How to Get It

• Legal Way: is to either wait for the final version, or request to beta test it on www.live.com
• Not So Legal Way: Download MSN Messenger 8 off Microsoft, then use MSN Proxy patch
  

Sony Vaio: All Things Microsoft
Originally uploaded by Yazan Malakha.

I must admit I’m quite impressed, although I rarely am. I got my hands on this nice next generation toy earlier this morning; actually I had it for four days but I never bothered to check it out until today.

Now I should point out that this device is designed to be a media center on the go, and although it has built in Wifi, browsing can be quite difficult given the fact the device has no built in keyboard (it has a touch-sensitive screen, with an on screen keyboard, but I found it to be cumbersome), the resolution is way too high for a 5” screen, which can bother you while reading emails/long articles.

Navigation using the built in pointing stick was quite easy, although it takes a little bit of getting used to. DivX movies played perfectly in different lighting situations. The device runs hot, so you might want to wear oven mittens while holding in.

Few things I appreciated having built in were the SD/CD card readers and the single USB port. So you’re traveling somewhere sitting at a café with Wifi, you can pop out your CF card, pop into the Vaio and upload them straight to Flickr.

What impressed me most was the form factor/size. Imagine an Intel Celeron M 900 Mhz computer with 20Gb of diskspace, 512 MB of RAM, 20 GB HD, Wifi, SD/CF Readers, 5” screen all crammed into 6”x4” frame. Impressed?

Yazan Malakha takes Linspire FIVE-O for a spin

If you’ve missed it, the people at Linspire (Previously Lindows) are giving away free digital download version of their latest operating system, a $49 USD value, for a limited time. After countless attempts to register on their website; I finally managed to download and install the much-hyped-about Linspire 5.0 (For some reason or another their Linux based servers has difficulties coping with 250 concurrent users, what a bummer).

Downloading frustration aside, I was actually impressed by how lucid and unbelievably simple their installation is. The CD offers 2 options, a live feature which allows you to run the operating system directly off your CD Drive. And an installer option similar to the one you’d find on Windows XP CD, it took approximately 10 minutes to install the software on VMWare, and less than 2 minutes to configure it, although booting was unusually slow for a Linux system. Hardware support was trouble-free: all my peripherals (except for the webcam and satellite card) were detected and worked without a hitch, in both VMWare and Native mode.

Now before I go on, I should point out that I’m all about Gnome; I’ve used KDE in its early stages, but never long enough to form an opinion. What struck me upon booting the system was the resemblance this system bears to Windows XP! Aside from using Windows XP naming conventions like (“My Computer”, “My Documents”, “My Music” and so on); everything has been copied or mimicked. The login screen almost looks identical, the green start menu button, bookmarks in the file explorer, some of the icons are a complete knock-off. It also starts off with an audio tutorial demonstrating all of the OS features.

On the other hand the system does have a close resemblance to Mac OS. The curvy look of windows, the circular shaped minimize/maximize buttons, the inclusion of multimedia programs such as Lphoto and Lmusic (iPhoto and iTunes anyone?), not to mention the Load Screen, which reminded me of OS 8/9 days. I should mention that it comes with instant messaging software and open office, making the system ready for an average user.

One of the most impressive features was CNR, which stands for Click-N-Run; it takes exactly one click to install an application, again quite similar to Mac (a click and a drag). They offer a CNR library that spans hundreds of Linux programs that provide alternatives to just about any Windows application you’ll ever need.

So what impact can Linspire cause in a world full of Linux Distros? Can Linspire live up to it’s goal of delivering a system that won’t make Linux users wish they had paid their Windows tax? I think so, although I think there’s still room for improvement. The clean interface, simple installation, and resemblance to windows, makes switching to linux a breeze, even for the novice user.

No more will Linux be reserved for the technically-advantaged. At a fraction of the cost of Windows XP; you get an operating system that includes all the tools you need to perform any type of computer work. In a simple and user-friendly interface. Perfect for a newbie or a bargain-hunter.

Some Screen Shots

Tags: [Linux] [Linspire] [Freespire] [Windows] [MacOS] [OSx86] [Lindows]