Magic ASCII Picture Convert 1.30

Magic ASCII Picture Convert is an easy to use application that will take an image and process it to create an html file of the original image. an HTML file of color-coded text characters, that when combined, resemble an image. It is an ASCII Art Photo. And the html files are very worthy of being published to the Web or in the document. Make ASCII Art Word(s)
# Visual ASCII Art making process
# Convert image to HTML files
# A lot of output modes for the ASCII Art Photos/Animations
# Full install/uninstall support

Ultracool iGoogle Widgets

Homepages are not the same anymore. Gagan did a story a while ago on cool AJAX-powered startup pages – or mashups, if that's what you prefer to call them. I like iGoogle the best, and would recommend signing up pronto. Once you're signed in, you can attach widgets and customize the home page to suit your tastes. The best way is to create tabs for each aspect of your life, such as a general tab with widgets for time, email, weather, reminders, etc... and then create customized ones for work and play.

Now I'm not going to recommend rubbish widgets such as daily horoscopes or Microsoft Outlook. It’s ‘play’ I’m interested in, so let's look at some audio-video widgets. I tend to waste a lot of my time fooling around on my home page, so let me pass on the addiction by showing you some of the coolest iGoogle widgets ever. (Note that these are not for Google Desktop – those are slightly different.) Once you sign up (a one-minute process), you can add widgets or themes by simply clicking the ‘personalize’ link on the top right.

Last.fm Radio Station
The most important thing for anyone who can't do without music while working. This widget is a stripped-down version of the uber-cool online radio site, and basically represent the flash player they have. It works exactly by the site’s principles: you type the artist’s name in the box and the radio starts playing music from that space, including music from the artist you mentioned. Here’s a secret: If the website is blocked at your workplace, use the widget – it works perfectly.

Soma.fm
This is another awesome radio station widget that represents the original site. Soma is THE place to discover underground artists, and is often better than Last.fm. The only thing is that the playlist is generated by them; you can’t choose an artist or change the track. But you get some killer radio stations such as Secret Agent (spy movie music), Cliqhop (IDM, glitch), Sonic Universe (avant garde jazz), Tag’s Trip (trance) etc.

The caveat with these two widgets, or any online radio station for that matter, is a compromise on sound quality. Soma has an option to opt for AAC streaming, though that's on the site, not the widget.

UltraMenu 1.1

		Ultra Menu is a DHTML / JavaScript web menu builder. With its help, you can easily complete the creation of navigation menus for a web site even without any development experience related to DHTML or JavaScript. It can generate cross browser pop-up or dropdown menus compatible with all popular browsers including Internet Explorer, FireFox, Netscape Navigator, Opera, Mozilla, Konqueror, Safari and Camino, etc. Ultra Menu supports hierarchical menus, and you can customize such attributes as layout, text, font style, link, background, border, animation effects, etc. for menus, menu groups and menu items separately based on your requirements. After you have completed the design of a menu, you can add it into your web pages by Ultra Menu's Publish Wizard in a breeze.

Color Handsets Under Rs 5000

Intex IN3333 – Rs 5000

The design of the IN3333 may seem a bit familiar but it’s a neat-looking job. It's clearly an entry-level multimedia mobile, as its features would indicate. The handset is equipped with a 2-inch TFT display with a resolution of 176 x 220 pixels and 256K colors. There's a media player and FM radio, and the 1.3MP camera can also be used as a USB PC webcam. MicroSD card support provides external memory, and you get three preloaded games. Internet connectivity is at your disposal too, as the phone supports GPRS and WAP.

Nokia 3110 Classic – Rs 4650

The 3110 Classic is a simple-looking candy bar handset. It's not a looker, but then it wasn’t designed with style in mind. The screen is a 1.7-inch TFT that can display up to 256K colors at a resolution of 128 x 160 pixels. The keypad is designed for comfort and is quite responsive, as is the S40 interface it runs on. The handset supports MicroSD cards for external memory, which is useful since it's equipped with plenty of media-oriented features: a 1.3MP camera, media player for video and music, and an integrated stereo FM radio. The 3110 is also well-equipped for connectivity – it supports EDGE, GPRS and WAP for net connectivity, as well as USB v2.0 and Stereo Bluetooth.

Sony Ericsson W200i – Rs 4300

The SE W200i is a Walkman series handset. Again, the form factor is not altogether a stunner, but the simple and ergonomic design isn’t bad at all. The 1.8 inch TFT display has a resolution of 128 x 160 pixels and 65K colors. It supports GPRS and WAP for the Net, and USB for PC data transfer. While the handset doesn’t offer Bluetooth, it does support external memory via M2 cards. Other features include a VGA camera, Sony’s Walkman player, and an integrated FM radio. The W200i is available in a range of funky colors.

AD Stream Recorder v2.6.2

D Stream Recorder is a sound record program for Windows. It can digitize, visualize and record any signal connected to your sound card as well as live streaming audio including the Internet radio played by the most popular media players into MP3 and WAV format. Real-time sound visualization while monitoring and recording enables you to adjust the audio source level and make high quality recordings. AD Stream Recorder features include sound clipping detection, record control with hotkeys, build-in player.

Pantone Colorvision Profilerplus 2.3 For Adobe Photoshop Multilanguage

ProfilerPLUS software is a simple-to-use plug-in for Adobe Photoshop that creates quick scanner-based CMYK and RGB profiles for color printers, Adobe PostScript printers and RIPs. The profiles created using ProfilerPLUS will be as accurate as your scanner's ability to produce good color scans.

ProfilerPLUS works in just four easy steps: Load the calibration chart; print it; scan it; and build the profile. That's all! Everything else is done for you automatically.

Verbatim Introduces 500 GB 2.5" HDD

Verbatim has announced a new line of 2.5" portable hard drives, including the world's first half-terabyte 2.5" drive featuring an industry standard 9.5mm Z-height drive.

These new external drives allow consumers and businesses to add from 120 to 500GB removable capacity to their computer.

Weighing 170 grams and measuring only 86mm x 137mm x 16mm, Verbatim's 500GB 2.5" SmartDisk HDD is easy to carry when traveling with a laptop and requires minimal desk space when connected to a desktop system.

Inside its rugged case there are three 166 GB platters that utilize advanced Perpendicular Magnetic Recording (PMR) technology to deliver breakthrough storage capacity in a small form factor. To optimize performance, the drive features a 5400rpm spindle speed and includes 8MB of cache memory.

Being able to add half a Terabyte of storage to your PC or Mac with such a small, easy to carry device is a new milestone in the portable storage industry," said Ramesh Tuli the Country Manager for Verbatim India. "Imagine the convenience of being able to store, transport and backup all of your digital content without having to span disks or carry multiple storage solutions."

The 500GB drive will be available later in 2008. Pricing is not known yet.

Google Launches Free Music Search Service in China

Google has launched a music search service in China that allows users to access music legally online in a forum backed by some record labels and supported by advertising revenue.

Paid music downloads in China are virtually nonexistent, and Apple Inc.'s iTunes digital music store is not offered there. Downloadable pirated versions of songs are widely available for free online.

Google's service, called Music Onebox, directs users to Top100.cn, a site that names as an investor basketball star Yao Ming, to download or stream music for free. Users outside China are blocked from accessing the music.

Top100.cn is a Beijing-based Web site that already has licensing agreements with about 100 labels. Talks are ongoing with Sony BMG and Warner Music Group Corp. to become partners.

''This legal music service will help users avoid dead links, slow downloads, inaccurate search results, and poor quality or incomplete songs,'' Google said in a statement.

Google said it is not participating in any of the advertising revenue from the site.

The International Federation of Phonographic Industries says more than 99 percent of all music files distributed in China are pirated. It says that despite China's large potential market, the country's legitimate sales of $76 million a year account for less than 1 percent of global sales.

Top 3 Free Download Managers

In an era where high-speed broadband's becoming common, a download manager is no longer a luxury or a power user’s domain – it's something everyone needs. Fortunately the gap has been mostly filled by Firefox’s inbuilt manager. While this suffices for most sites, it does not offer even a fraction of the features a dedicated application can offer: multiple download links for the same file, segmented downloading, one-click downloads for multiple files etc.

It may seem that such a boatload of features is likely to be available only in paid apps. Fortunately, this is not the case. Thanks to the ever-expanding freeware and open source market, there are plenty of download applications out there that offer features rivaling commercial products – and, in some cases, even exceed them. Here's our pick of three such applications.

Free Download Manager

Publisher: FreeDownloadManager.org
File size: 5754 Kb
Download link: 1

Despite its "Captain Obvious" name, Manager is one of the best freeware programs available. Not only does it integrate with a wide variety of browsers, it also has a very well-designed interface, and separate clients for FTP and HTTP. It's also a 'site ripper' – that is, it can download entire websites without much ado.

http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/Free+Download

Hitachi Introduces Blu-ray Disc Hybrid Camcorder MRP

Hitachi has introduced the DZ-BD10HA - a Blu-ray Disc Hybrid Camcorder with the ability to record onto the Blu-ray.

The DZ-BD10HA contains several new features and improvements including a newly developed 7 mega pixel CMOS image sensor, which captures videos and stills in FullHD (1920 x 1080). It can also record up to 4 hours 20 minutes of 1920x1080 video or 8 hours 40 minutes of 1440x1080 video onto the built-in 30 GB HDD. Additionally, the built-in SDHC card slot provides added flexibility by allowing for Full HD video and still recordings.

It also offers a dubbing function that allows Full HD video to be transferred with a single push of a button from either the HDD or SDHC card to the BD drive, all within the camcorder, without having to connect to a PC. Editing functions such as split, splice, delete, merge, and transitions can also be performed within the camcorder before dubbing for additional functionality. The Transcoding feature allows for the camcorder to transfer full HD videos off the HDD or SDHC card to standard definition DVD discs for the sharing of videos with friends and family who may not own a Blu-ray player yet.

The Hitachi model DZ-BD10HA model Blu-ray Hybrid with built-in 30GB hard disk drive (HDD) is priced at a Manufacturers Advertised Price (MAP) of $999. The camcorder is available in Japan and will be available in North America in September 2008.

Games of 2008 august

Even though August is a relatively mellow month for gaming, we’ve scoured the net and hassled a couple of local distributors to give you the lowdown on some of the more interesting games hitting retail this month. So here we go...

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky

As most of you know, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl (SoC) was one of the most atmospheric games to grace the PC in recent times. Players had to don their radioactive suits and experience the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust in Chernobyl while tracking down a S.T.A.L.K.E.R. known only as Strelok, a certain someone who could shed some light on their fuzzy past. Clear Sky serves as a prequel to SoC and will put players in the boots of yet another S.T.A.L.K.E.R. called Scar as he sets out to unravel the events that lead to this cataclysmic event in the first place. We’re not sure if the game’s going to hit retail, but it’s definitely going to be available on Steam by the end of the month.

Ratchet and Clank Future: Quest for Booty

Instead of making gamers wait for a full-fledged sequel to last year's Tools of Destruction, developer Insomniac has decided to go the episodic way with R&C Future: Quest for Booty. What this means is that unlike a full-length game, Quest for Booty will span 3-4 hours (or more depending on your skill level), and will pick up from where Tools of Destruction left off. The game is being released on the PlayStation Network this month, but will be sold through hard copies – a.k.a. box packs – next month for around Rs 1000 (the price has not been confirmed by Milestone yet).

Lenovo Offers Olympic Branded USB Range

Lenovo, in its capacity as an official sponsor of the Olympic Games has released a couple of limited edition USB drives. These drives have been released under the Mascot series and are priced at $29 for 4 GB. In all, six drives have been released with their front side printed with a Fuwa image. Apart from this, the company is offering a 1 GB titanium limited edition drive that comes with a swiveling USB plug in a special mahogany box.

Considering the amount, the company has probably already had to spend, it may be brave enough to venture a guess that we just might see an Olympic branded laptop sooner or later.

iPhone 3G Pricing Out

Well, that's about to change now as we've received official pricing for the most-awaited phone.

The 8 GB version of the iPhone 3G will cost Rs. 31,000, while the 16 GB version will cost between Rs. 36,000 and Rs. 37,000.

These prices are not inclusive of the plan these phones will come bundled with.

Customers buying the iPhone will have a choice of plans to choose from, so stay online with us to get those details soon.