knisely.org

I am attempting to fanagle my way into the beta of an exciting new product called Xobni! It looks like a sweet addition to Outlook, a program that can use some help.

The attachment discovery feature is of special interest to me, as I am constantly searching for attachments. Threaded conversation also looks promising. Reading mail by thread makes more sense, but not many people I know actually do it. I’m looking forward to trying it out at work, I’m always on the look out for helpful additions to Microsoft products.

If I get in, I’ll write a review…hint..hint..

Popularity: 18% [?]

I do a lot used to a lot of retouching my photographs that i take. These days I simply don’t have the time, so when I do I want to it ‘quick and dirty’ as they say. I snap a lot of pictures, so manually retouching each one would take too long. I have a few tools that I can use, of course there is the Gimp, but that is too tedious and only for making real edits. When I just want to remove some red-eye, or crop and ‘auto color’ it is helpful to have other tools at the ready.

I recently found Picnick, and it looks promising. Pretty simple to upload a photo, or grab one from my Flickr account. It is very simple to use, of course the results are not as good as you would get by taking your time with each photo, but for sheer simplicity this gets 2 thumbs up!

Popularity: 21% [?]

Lifehacker has a nice list of Windows applications that are free, and are great replacements for default Windows applications. I use almost every single one, with the exception of iTunes. I’m one of the few that doesn’t like iTunes, but hey, that is just me.

I run Ubuntu on my main pc at home, at work I’m forced to live with Windows XP. Linux, and especially Ubuntu have come a long, long way in the past year or two. I NEVER miss Windows at home, it does everything Windows can do, only better, more secure and it is FREE! Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 24% [?]

I’ve only made one call, and the results were ok, not great. I asked Google Local Voice Search for the location of Giant Eagle, and I was presented with 3 locations, 2 of which are not really close to me, but did fall within the search paramaters. This service along with my mobile Google Maps will help me when out and about!

The best thing is, the services are free. Your carrier may charge you for the call or data but no charge from Google! Google rules!

Popularity: 17% [?]

Want to save that great “White and Nerdy” video from youtube.com? Me too, but until now, I did not know how. However, this morning I found KeepVid.com, that let you give the link to the video and it will convert it to and let you save the movie as a .flv file. It would be better to have it converted to a .mpg or .avi file, but at least you can now hoard all those great videos to show your future self.

Popularity: 28% [?]

I am constantly on the look out for web apps that can make me more productive, or somehow make my life easier. I found a great one the other day. I signed up for a Jott account and have tried it out a few times. The basic concept is this; jott.com gives you a voice mail box, you call the voice mail box and leave yourself, or anyone you have set up as a contact. It then uses voice recognition to convert your speech to text and sends you an e-mail of your message.

First real use was yesterday; I walk in to drop my son off at day care and see the notice posted that class photos are coming up on May 7th. I am always terrible about that kind of stuff, I always forget until the last moment. Too time consuming to get out the PDA right then and make a note. Instead I hit the speed dial for jott and left myelf a note. By the time I got to my office there was the e-mail, all correct with the exception of the spelling of my son’s name. I then grabbed it and stuck it on my Google calendar, and presto, no forgetting to dress the little man for picture day!

I can see a lot of great uses for the service and plan to take advantage of it.

Popularity: 25% [?]