knisely.org

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: 23% [?]

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: 31% [?]

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: 27% [?]