Afghanistan, January 2011

 

 

Sent to you by Somy via Google Reader:

 

 

Afghanistan, January 2011

via The Big Picture on 2/3/11

President Obama recently spoke about the War in Afghanistan in his State of the Union address: "Thanks to our heroic troops and civilians, fewer Afghans are under the control of the insurgency. There will be tough fighting ahead, and the Afghan government will need to deliver better governance. But we are strengthening the capacity of the Afghan people and building an enduring partnership with them. This year, we will work with nearly 50 countries to begin a transition to an Afghan lead. And this July, we will begin to bring our troops home." With this post, we continue the monthly look at the men and women who live and fight in the country and at the Afghan people themselves as they struggle for peace in their land. At the end of the regular post I've included 14 additional images by Associated Press photographer Kevin Frayer. The images are black and white aerials - a unique view - of Helmand Province, southern Afghanistan. -- Paula Nelson (48 photos total)

Sergeant Quincey Northern, a medic with the US Army's Task Force Shadow "Dust Off,'' Charlie Company 1-214 Aviation Regiment, gathers his equipment after finishing a medevac mission and arriving back at Camp Dwyer, in southern Helmand Province, Afghanistan, on Thursday, Jan. 27. Medevac units may make several runs a day - at times under fire - to evacuate both injured troops and Afghan civilians. (Kevin Frayer/Associated Press)

 

 

Things you can do from here:

• Subscribe to The Big Picture using Google Reader
• Get started using Google Reader to easily keep up with all your favorite sites

 

 

5+ Free Poster Making Tools For Windows OS

 

 

Sent to you by Somy via Google Reader:

 

 

5+ Free Poster Making Tools For Windows OS

via Timeless Tales by Deepak on 3/29/10

For a newbie, making a poster isn't an easy task to accomplish. While a professional can do a whole lot of image editing with Adobe Photoshop or an alternative to make a nice flashy wallpaper or Poster and then print it to his/her desired size. A poster making requires a big size scale of about 3600x4800 cm size. By default even the most image editors doesn't come with such scalable big size. And theres no end to such long list of shareware poster making tools. While the most shareware poster making tools comes with lot of features to play with. But still, just only for making a poster you have to cough out a hefty price of $30 to $60.00 for these commercial poster making tools. I have listed 7 free Poster making tools here, which includes all the necessary applications, right from designing a poster to printing it. These pack includes free poster making tools, poster printing tools and a poster trimmer or razor to scale the poster to a small size for printing which can be later put together to make mega poster size like that of movies. With such freebies in hand, making a motivational posters, wallpapers, collage photo albums at home, office and work place has become so easy. The best thing about these pack is that they come with simple straight forward interface and very easy to do approach. If I were you, last thing I'll do is put together all those money you were thinking of spending on those costly softwares to upgrade my computer hardwares like a laser printer and scanner combo. Look at the list.


Poster Forge Standard

Poster Forge is a software program for quick making of professional looking posters practically without any efforts and totally for free! It contains predesigned templates for creation of inspirational, motivational, movie or old west "Wanted" posters. Special built-in free version of poster printing utility ProPoster - allows you to print your own huge size posters and hang them on the wall. Why not to put your creative ideas in your posters and amaze your friends and colleagues? Or why not to use your new posters in the internet profiles or in the blogs?

Picture Collage Maker Free

Picture Collage Maker Free is a simple-to-use Windows freeware that turns ordinary photos and pictures into stunning keepsakes to share with family and friends. With just a few clicks, you can create digital collages, scrapbooks, posters, invitations, calendars, and greeting cards.

Posteriza

Posteriza is a software application for designing all kind of posters, banners and murals. It's very easy to use, it have been designed with inexperience users in mind, so everyone can create a customized poster in seconds. It allows printing posters of any size, as big as you want (imagine your favorite photo resize to 10m2, covering all the wall) even you could add text to make it more spectacular. Don't need to install, just download

Easy Poster Printer

Easy Poster Printer enables you to print posters of any size (max 20x20 meters) with a regular printer. Just drag n drop your picture into the application and click print. Easy Poster Printer comes with a Windows Shell Extension that allows you to see thumbnails of your posters in Windows. This ensures that it is very easy to locate your posters in Windows for later use or sharing. Easy Poster Printer uses the latest technologies from Microsoft .NET, which ensures you a wide compatibility.

The Rasterbator

The Rasterbator is an application which creates rasterized versions of images. The rasterized images can be printed and assembled into enormous (or smaller, if you prefer) posters. Enter the online Rasterbation Gallery to see what the images look like. The Rasterbator originated as a web application at homokaasu.org, but it has gained so much popularity that the web server occassionally cannot handle the load and a standalone version was in place. The standalone version is the same as the web version, except that downloading images from the web and image cropping are not supported, and you have to set the output size numerically (number of pages wide/high) rather than using a fancy drag handle. The results are exactly the same.

PosteRazor

The PosteRazor will cut a raster image into pieces which afterwards can be printed out and assembled to a poster. As input, the PosteRazor takes a raster image. The resulting poster is saved as a multipage PDF document. An easy to use, wizard like user interface guides through 5 steps.

 

 

Things you can do from here:

• Subscribe to Timeless Tales using Google Reader
• Get started using Google Reader to easily keep up with all your favorite sites

 

 

10+ Best Firefox Security and Privacy Addons

 

 

Sent to you by Somy via Google Reader:

 

 

10+ Best Firefox Security and Privacy Addons

via Timeless Tales by Deepak on 4/5/10

Security and privacy are some of the major concerns these days while choosing a web browser to use. So much so that all the major players in the "browser wars" are providing or developing a private browsing mode.

Firefox with the myraid of addons that it has to offer is never far from action. Here are some of the top Firefox security and privacy addons that you should install for safer browsing.

Stealther

Stealther – Stealther provides you with what can be called a private browsing mode. It allows you to browse the web without leaving any trace. The addon disables browsing history, cookies, cache, recent tabs and sending of referrer header for as long as you want. It's lot like the incognito mode in Google chrome. Distrust is another similar addon that allows you to acheive the similar results.

Close 'n' Forget

Close 'n' Forget – While Stealther and Distrust require you to turn on private browsing explicitly, what if you happen to stumble upon a site that you wished you would have known to turn on the private browsing mode for? Close 'n' Forget comes to your rescue. Just hit the special close button once you are finished and that site will be deleted from history and cookies cleared as if you had never visited the site.

WOT

WOT – We all know about the threats which surfers suffer like viruses, spywares, adware, malicious spam, phishing etc., but here Web of Trust comes to rescue. WOT warns you about risky websites that try to scam surfers before they enter in them using a safety rating of 21 million websites, WOT combines evidence collected from multiple sources. Not only does it help surfers but also sets a protection level for children by blocking inappropriate content.

NoScript

NoScript – An absolute must have security addon for your browser. NoScript gives you the power to specify the sites you trust and only those sites will be allowed to run active content like Javascript, Java code and other executable code. The addon thus protects you from cross-site scripting attacks and clickjacking attacks.

Panic

Panic – Panic allows you to instantly close all the open tabs and replace it with another tab of your choice. So next time while you are on facebook and your boss drops to check in just hit Alt + ` and you would be taken to predefined page in no time.

hideBad

hideBad – Hides bad things! Saves all the tabs, closes them and opens your home page. Allows you to clear history, cookies, cache and passwords at your will and then restore them later.

TabRenamizer / Page Title Eraser

TabRenamizer and Page Title Eraser – Do your tabs give you away? Why not change their names with TabRenamizer or remove the names all together with Page Title Eraser? Both these addons let you play with the tab titles so that you can change them according to your will.

Gish It / tEMPORARYiNBOX / spamavert

Gish It!, TemporaryInbox, spamavert – These addons allow you to protect your inboxes from Spam by getting throwaway email addresses to be used with web forms while registering for sites you are not sure about.

BetterPrivacy

BetterPrivacy – Now you don't need to worry from anything like 'you are being tracked..!!' BetterPrivacy is a Super-Cookie Safeguard which protects from usually undeletable Flash-Cookies. It blocks long term tracking on Google, YouTube, Ebay to name a few.

Ghostery

Ghostery – It keeps an eye on the websites that are keeping an eye on you i.e. it finds out that which web sites which are tracking you and would alert you about the same.

Torbutton

Torbutton – It provides a button to securely and easily enable or disable the browser's use of Tor. Tor can be used for anonymous browsing and has been covered on makeuseof in detail.

FoxyProx

FoxyProxy – FoxyProxy automatically switches an internet connection across one or more proxy servers based on URL patterns and switching rules defined by you.

JSview

JSview – Allows you to view the source code of external files like javascript and CSS files. Although it would require a bit of knowledge and looking through the code to determine if it really is harmful, it can be quite useful to see if there is some malicious code sending off your passwords to somewhere else.

You have more such addons .. please share in comments.

Source : MakeUseOf

 

 

Things you can do from here:

• Subscribe to Timeless Tales using Google Reader
• Get started using Google Reader to easily keep up with all your favorite sites

 

 

List of Top 50 free applications for Windows

 

 

Sent to you by Somy via Google Reader:

 

 

List of Top 50 free applications for Windows

via The Best Article Every day by bspcn on 12/15/09

Written by Nidhi

Are you tired of buying utilities or renewing license to your utilities on your already expensive Windows system? Here is a list of 50 such applications that are free to use. Furthermore, these applications do not require any fees and are available absolutely free.

1    Advanced SystemCare Free

Helps to protect, repair, clean and optimize your PC.

Owner : IObit

2    Wise Registry Cleaner Free

Helps you speeds up your PC by cleaning up your registry. Basically it provides windows registry clean up features with pretty easy to use interface.

Owner: WiseCleaner

3    Ccleaner

Helps you optimize your system by cleaning up the system. Cleanup includes Browser history, Trash Files, Temporary files and Log files. Further, it features un-installation of unused application and the registry cleanup.

Owner : Piriform Ltd.

4    Adobe Reader 9.1

Adobe Reader lets you

•    Open up and interact with all PDF documents.

•    View, search, digitally sign, verify, print and collaborate on Adobe PDF files.

Owner : Adobe Systems Incorporated

5    PDF-XChange

PDF – Xchange standard features includes

•    Add Comments and Annotations

•    Add & apply Custom Stamps

•    Mark-up pages with text and objects

•    Type directly on any PDF page

•    Extract text from a PDF page and few more.

Owner : Tracker Software Products (Canada) Ltd

6    AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition

Protection against viruses and spyware

•    Compatible with Windows Xp or higher

•    Light weight and less overhead on OS.

Owner : AVG Technologies

7    avast! Home Edition

Simplest of application in terms of usability.

•    Daily automatic updates

•    Continuous data protection against all types of malware and spyware

•    Available in 30 different languages.

Owner : ALWIL Software

8    Avira AntiVir Personal – FREE Antivirus

Provides Basic protection

for your computer against dangerous viruses, worms, Trojans.

•    Available in 5 different languages

Owner : Avira.com

9    Avant Browser

Its salient feature include online profile storage to let user save users' bookmarks, RSS Feeds, configurations or web passwords etc, in Avant Online Storage.

Owner : Avant Force

10    Open Office 3.0

Open office is an open source office suite for Windows. This is available for free download and serves as good alternative to well know Microsoft's Word & Excel. It has full-featured set of office applications for word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation programs.

Owner : CollabNet, Inc., Sun, Sun Microsystems

11    DropBox

This application lets your share files with an account and you could use up to 2 GB (greater space requires paid accounts). This is quite handy tool for sharing your file over internet.

Owner : DropBOX.com

12    SKYPE

This popular freeware is VOIP based application which helps you voice call and is available for free download. You may make computer to computer calls for free. Moreover, Skype is one of the cheap VOIP service available to make computer to Phone calls.

Owner : Skype Limited

13    Smart Defrag

Smart Defrag helps defragment your hard drives more efficiently.

•    Ease of use along with Data Safety and Reliability Guaranteed

Owner : IObit.com

14    Download Accelerator Plus

• Provides Mirroring Speed Boost to download from the fastest sources.
• Available in 38 languages
• Built-in Twitter integration to Tweet directly from DAP

Owner : SpeedBit Ltd

15    Flash Player

Plays multimedia design made with Flash.

Owner : Adobe Systems Incorporated

16    VLC Media Player

•    It supports various audio and video formats which include MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, ogg, etc.

•    Further, it is handy for use with DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols.

Owner : Videolan.org

17    YouTube Downloader

•    YouTube Downloader is software that allows you to download videos from YouTube, Google Video, Yahoo Video, and many others

•    This lets you convert them to other video formats for Ipod, Iphone, PSP, Cell Phone, Windows Media, XVid and MP3.

Owner : Biennesoft

18    Irfan View

•    Fast directory view (moving through directory)

•    Batch conversion (with image processing)

•    Multipage TIF editing

•    File search

•    Email option

•    Multimedia player

•    Print option and many more.

Owner : Irfan skiljan

19    Notepad++

•    It is a very good source code editor with support for several programming languages.

•    Very good search and replace option.

•    It has good Bookmarking and Multi-document support feature.

Owner : sourceforge.net

20    Textpad

•    Huge files can be edited, up to the limits of 32-bit virtual memory.

•    Good search and replace files in huge files.

•    Warm Start feature lets you restart exactly where you left off.

•    And many more.

Owner : Helios Software Solutions

21    Word Web

•    Provides Definitions, Synonyms and Usage for 150000 root words.

•    Includes audio pronunciations

•    Light-weight to the system

Owner : WordWeb Software

22    Applian FLV Player 2.0

•    Play FLV Files on any PC

•    Zoom to 2x or full screen.

•    Includes free audio/video recorder & converter option.

Owner : Applian Technologies Inc.

23    Easeus Partition Manager 3.5

•    Resize/Move partitions without data loss

•    Extend system partition easily and safely

•    Create, Merge, Split, Delete and Format partitions

•    Support up to 2TB partition or hard drive

Owner : CHENGDU YIWO Tech Development Co., Ltd.

24    Free YouTube to MP3 Converter

•    Lets you convert the YouTube video and download it as MP3 or Wav format.

•    Automatically fills the title tag and the artwork in the downloaded mp3 files.

Owner : DVDVideoSoft Limited

25    Undelete Plus

•    Restore accidentally deleted files

•    Image recovery from Compact Flash, SmartMedia, MultiMedia and Secure Digital cards.

Owner : Phoenix Technologies Ltd

26    Video mp3 Extractor 1.8

•    Convert Video Files (AVI, ASF, WMV files)  to mp3

•    Fast audio extraction algorithm

•    Easy to use interface.

Owner : GeoVid.

27    Diagram Designer 1.22

•    Creating flowcharts, UML class diagrams, illustrations and slide shows.

•    Import/export WMF, EMF, BMP, JPEG, PNG, MNG, ICO, GIF and PCX images.

•    Consists of slide show viewer and Simple graph plotter to plot mathematical expressions.

Owner : meesoft.logicnet.dk

28    Real Temp

•    Reads temperature information for all inter Core processors.

•    Keep track of the minimum and the maximum temperature of the processor.

•    Provides calibration features for each core of your processor.

Owner : www.techPowerUp.com

29    Pidgin

•    Free chat client with support for Msn, Yahoo, AIM Google Talk and other chat networks all at once.

•    Supports more than 60 different languages.

Owner : pidgin.im

30    VNC Viewer Free Edition 4.1 

•    Easy connect and use remote computer screen.

•    Easy to install and use.

•    Supports loading and saving of .vnc a file which contains a set of connection options.

Owner : RealVNC Limited

31    Free Video to iPod and PSP Converter

•    Helps convert full video or the part of video to Apple iPod, Sony PSP, BlackBerry and mobile phones MP4 video format

Owner : DVDVideoSoft Limited

32    LimeWire

•    Helps user connect to P2P network and share the file they want to share.

•    Faster starup and less waiting time.

•    Better memory usage

•    Free download and usage for basic usage.

Owner : Lime Wire LLC

33    FrostWire

•    Completely free and open source.

•    Provides Faster Torrent Speeds, I-Tunes compatibility, Friendly online chat rooms, easy navigation and many more.

Owner : frostwire.com

34    JetAudio

Even though plus Vx cost but basic version is absolutely free. Features it consists are as

•    Audio CD ripping

•    Voice recording

•    File conversion between various formats and

•    Audio CD buring.

Owner : JetAudio Inc.

35    Sql Tools

•    This tool is for Oracle 8/9i/10g PL/SQL development.

•    Provides good basic editor services

•    Easy to install and connect to ORACLE server

Owner : Aleksey Kochetov

36    Tortoise SVN

Tortoise SVN is Subversion client having features such as

•    Atomic Commits

•    Directory and File versioning,

•    Versioned Metadata

•    Consistent Data Handling

•    Reliable and quick tagging and branching and many more.

Owner : subversion.tigris.org

37    7 Zip

•    High Compression ratio

•    Compression ratio in the new 7z format is 30-50% better than ratio in ZIP format

•    Supports multiple formats such as 7z, ZIP, CAB, RAR, ARJ, LZH, CHM, GZIP, BZIP2, Z, TAR, CPIO, RPM and DEB formats

Owner : Igor Pavlov

38    The Gimp

The GIMP is a more of the complex image editor like Photoshop available for windows platform. This application is free for download. It is quite good alternative Adobe's Photoshop with similar features available for use.

Owner : The GIMP Team

39    iTunes

ITunes is a freeware that helps you play your digital music and video. It helps you synchronize your iPod, iPhone, and Apple TV.

Owner : Apple Inc.

40    JCreator

Jcreator is a light weight IDE for Java Programmers. Project management, project templates, code-completion, debugger interface, editor with syntax highlighting, wizards and a fully customizable user interface are some of the functionality that it provides.

Owner : Xinox Software

41    Eclipse

Eclipse is Software Development environment with support for multiple programming languages such as Java, C++, perl, PHP and others.

Owner : The Eclipse Foundation

42    MySql

MySql is a free open-source relational database management system (RDBMS).  This is the most popular open source RDBMS and offers free download and usage. Further this has adequate features needed by small to medium scale database.

Owner : Sun Microsystems, Inc

43    Cygwin

Cygwin is a Linux-like environment for Windows.

This provides a DLL which acts as a Linux API emulation layer providing substantial Linux API functionality.

Owner : Cygwin

44    Apache

•    This is free/open source http web server.

•    This provided Server-side programming language support to authentication schemes.

Owner : Apache Software  Foundation

45    Xampp

•    Xampp is a comprehensive set of web development resources under a bundle.

•    This is integrated package that consist PHP, PHP myAdmin, Mysql RDBMS, Apache Web server, Filezilla Ftp Client and few more.

Owner : Apache Friends

46    HTTrack

•    This is freeware that you download the full website into your local folder.

•    Arranges the file in the same directory structure.

•    Further, lets you browse the pages with offline browser utility.

Owner : Xavier Roche & other contributors

47    AVS TV Box Free

•    AVS TV Box Beta is a FREE universal software TV viewer and comes along with Personal Video Recorder functionality (PVR) .

•    PVR allows you to schedule TV recordings.

•    It works with any windows video capture device like satellite, TV and DVB cards, miniDV cameras, video capture cards and others.

Owner : Online Media Technologies Ltd., UK

48    Mozilla ThunderBird

•    This is good alternative to Microsoft's Outlook. This is an email client email and Usenet client.

•    Provides features such as easy mail setup, attachment re-minder, One click Address Book and many more.

Owner : Mozilla

49    Free Guitar Tuner

Free guitar tuner provides features for tuning acoustic and electric guitars. It provides few set of tones to tune it.

Owner : GCH Guitar Academy

50    mTorrent

mTorrent is free to download and use torrent client. This is one of the finest, speedy, efficient, and free torrent clients. Ease of installation and use along with user friendly GUI makes it quite popular.

Owner : BitTorrent, Inc.

Image Credit : Tech2.in.com, yesnet.yk.ca, lifeizpoetry.com, redcetus.com, stgeorgecollege.co.uk, funbigtime.com, sprucesoft.com, powerbasic.com, thewaytobuildhealth,i25.tinypic.com, milkyourmoney.com

 

 

Things you can do from here:

• Subscribe to The Best Article Every day using Google Reader
• Get started using Google Reader to easily keep up with all your favorite sites

 

 

JD Salinger’s Uncollected Stories

 

 

Sent to you by Somy via Google Reader:

 

 

JD Salinger’s Uncollected Stories

via Open Culture by Dan Colman on 11/22/09

JD Salinger captured the public imagination with The Catcher in the Rye in 1951. Later, he published Nine Stories in 1953, Franny and Zooey in 1961, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour in 1963, and a short story for the New Yorker in 1965, among other things. And then nothing. He stopped publishing and went off the grid. For those who always craved a little more Salinger, this site is a worth a look. It pulls together 22 Salinger stories that appeared in various magazines during his career, but were never published in book format. This collection includes The Young Folks, Salinger's very first published story; Hapworth, his very last piece; and Slight Rebellion Off Madison, an early version of a scene that later appeared in The Catcher in the Rye. You can peruse the full collection of stories here.

via @BrainPicker

 

 

Things you can do from here:

• Subscribe to Open Culture using Google Reader
• Get started using Google Reader to easily keep up with all your favorite sites