If English is not your native language you might have encountered some words that you did not know how to pronounce correctly. How would you pronounce zealously or eligibility for instance if you never heard the words before ? Even in the English language family words are pronounced differently depending on the region of the speaker. A Scott pronounces word different than someone from San Francisco.

Now that is what I call a niche search engine. Youtube is big, sometimes to big to find what you are looking for. Peter created a simple interface to search over 150000 music videos that are currently hosted on Youtube. The videos are embedded in the page as well which makes it probably the fastest method to search for music videos on Youtube. I’m not exactly sure how he managed to get all those videos in this database or if he used a script to do it, lots of work nevertheless.

For the average user Microsoft Paint is just a basic image editor with limited functionality. It never occured to me that artists could great pro images even with such a basic image editor. I probably would never get in contact with works of those artists if video sites such as Youtube would not exist. Thankfully they do exist and I was able to select some handpicked images that have been created with the Microsoft Paint image editor.

A reader of my blog recommended a great music download site with the name ElectroBel, a free underground electronic music community site. The mp3 music that can be found on Electrobel can be listened to online or downloaded as mp3 files to your own computer. Every single song has been created by a member of the music community and released under Creative Commons.

My participation in both the Joost and Bablegum beta phase has taught me several things about those social TV over Internet clients: They do add interactivity to the TV experience. Users can chat about a TV show they are viewing at that moment or rate shows for instance. Both TV clients have one big disadvantage though that weighs much more than the new interactivity. Joost and Bablegum stream pre-recorded tv shows only, at least in this stage. There is absolutely no live content and the content that is currently offered is considered by many as B-Movie content.

Widescreen monitors become more and more common these days which run on native resolutions like 1400 x 1050, 1680 x 1050 or 1920 x 1200. Many applications, especially games do not support the native resolutions of widescreen monitors and it is also extremely difficulty to find wallpapers that do not need to be stretched. I did find a resource that has a compilation of wallpapers for widescreen monitors offering the resolutions mentioned above

Karaoke and Karaoke software is becoming more and more popular since Sony decided to release the first Singstar Playstation 2 Karaoke game. Even friends who never heard of the Playstation 2 before were fascinated by those Karaoke games and some even bought a Playstation 2 only for those games. In case you did not know, Karaoke means that someone sings the song while only the instruments play in the background. This is tremendous fun especially in conjunction with cold beer.

I thought my dual computer monitor lineup would be something spectacular, how wrong I was. Everton from Connected Internet posted an article today that has an image of an incredible looking computer monitor lineup. The linup consists of one 30” center flat screen monitor and five 20.1” perimeter flat screens that surround the center lcd monitor. This computer monitor setup needs special multi-monitor software of course that makes it possible to choose what you display on all the single flat screen monitors. Take a look at the image first to get a better impression.

Since I’m running the wallpaper changer application non-stop on my computer I’m always on the lookout for more wallpapers that would fit nicely in my rotation. One site that I discovered reading the Donation Coders Blog is called Desktopography and describes itself as an exhibition of natural designer wallpapers. There have been exhibitions in the last three years with a total of 75 beautiful wallpapers. All wallpapers can be downloaded from the site free of charge and most are offered in different sizes.

A new version of the Internet TV application Joost has been released yesterday. The first thing that struck me was that I had to uninstall Joost 0.85 before I could install the new Joost version. If that was not bad enough I had to create a new account because Joost changed to a new user system. Signup was hassle free though. There have not been many changes to the system as far as I can tell, one new feature seems to be the so called channel catalog which displays all the channels that can be added to view in Joost.

If you ever wanted to access your mp3 collection remotely the Winamp Remote Plugin which is currently in beta status might be exactly what you are looking for. Once setup you can access your music collection from any web browser using a normal Internet connection. The computer with the music collection that streams the content has to be connected to the Internet as well. Just download and install the Winamp Remote Plugin and create a new account. This is important that only you, and everyone who is having the username and password, is able to connect and listen to your music collection.

The free social music networking site Jamendo announced today that they have distributed more than one million downloads of albums that are freely available using bittorrent technology. Only albums that have been fully distributed have been counted or as they put it: “this figure is the minimum indicative number of the total of complete albums we have distributed so far”. This is a huge success for sites that believe that drm free music sites can and will succeed in the long run. Jamendo has an incredible download rate of more than 200000 albums every month and the figure is increasing with each passing month.

Jabbits is a interesting new interactive website that is supposed to be the worlds first interactive video website. It could be described as some type of video answers website where one user posts a question and all others reply to it. The major difference to normal written conversations is that everything is recorded on video and can be accessed through Jabbits. There are actually three types of questions on Jabbits: Public, Research and Private questions. Public questions come from normal visitors who would like an answer to a question whereas research questions are added by companies who pay the users that answer the question that they ask. Private questions can only be answered by users who have been invited by the creator of the question to answer it.

You might know that Youtube held a video awards voting on their site for the last five days were everyone was able to vote for their favorite videos that Youtube preselected. Ten entries were shown and you could assign spots from 1 to 10 to them. Now, after all votes have been cast Youtube presents the Winners of the 2006 Video Awards in the categories Most Creative, Best Comedy, Best Commentary, Best Series, Best Music Video, Most Inspirational and Most Adorable. The videos below are in the same order in case you are wondering.

I do like futuristic looking demonstrations of technologies that will play a big role in the coming years. One demonstration that I found absolutely fascinating is a Photoshop multitouch image editing one. Working with small screens and a mouse plus keyboard combination is the current state of the art when it comes to image editing. It becomes problematic in a number of way including working in a team. It is also not natural to use a mouse to draw and edit images. Multitouch image editing uses a natural flow and offers a bigger detailed view of the image at hand.

Many users tend to use wallpapers to customize the look and feel of their operating system. Wallpapers come in all sizes and shapes but have one thing in common, they are normally image files that have a size of 100K and more. This is probably not a problem for most new computers but when you have a old machine you might want to fight for every byte that you can save somewhere. The alternative to those wallpapers are tiny wallpapers that have the exact same effect. Sure, they do not show objects or people but they are still nice to look at.

Gutenberg was a German inventor most famous for inventing movable type printing around 1450 in Germany revolutionizing European print-making. Project Gutenberg offers more than 20000 free Ebooks for download and has a audiobook section as well. The audiobook section of Project Gutenberg offers a great list of free audiobooks in various languages with the emphasize on English audiobooks. Please note that all audiobooks are read by humans, some audiobook sites offer books read by computers instead. Human read audiobooks are of a higher quality.

Moby, James Blunt, Metallica, Jack Johnson and Madonna. That is only a sample of the artists that you can find on Sideload. Sideload basically searches the internet for free mp3 files that are for example used for promotions or available on the artists websites. Those mp3 files get indexed by Sideload and can then be found using the Sideload search. The homepage of Sideload already lists about 100 mp3 files that can be instantly listened to. Just click on the little green > icon to play the song that you want to listen to.

Rectable looks so damn futuristic that I had a hard time believing it was a concept of our time. The reactable hardware is based on a translucent round table. A video camera situated beneath, continuously analyzes the table surface, tracking the nature, position and orientation of the objects that are distributed on its surface, representing the components of a classic modular synthesizer. These objects are passive without any sensors or actuators, users interact by moving them, changing their position, their orientation or their faces (in the case of volumetric objects).

It was only a matter of time until someone put youtube clones on the web that did not concentrate on movies but on other files such as documents. Scribd is one of the first sites that gives its users the opportunity to upload – or even bulk upload – many types of documents including pdf, txt and doc. Every single document can be downloaded in the same three formats even without being logged in, much similar to youtube.

There are several ways to watch tv online. You can download episodes from video portals, use p2p networks to download shows, use p2p clients that stream tv in real time and use websites that do the same. The demand for and resources to do so are ever growing and it becomes quite a task to keep an overview over the best possibilities.

I never thought it would be possible to create Line Rider movies with such great detail. The artwork is without doubt one of the best that I ever saw in a Line Rider movie. Next to that is the excellent choice of music and the playful choreography which makes it a pleasure to watch. If you never heard about Line Reader before make sure you check out this movie and try to create a movie by yourself, it is pure fun.

Babelgum and Joost are two services that try to deliver tv content to your computer using peer to peer technology. Both services seem to have the same aim to make the transition from watching shows on your television to watching shows on the internet as fluent as possible. There is no configuration involved, all that is needed is the Bablegum or Joost client and a broadband connection to the internet.

I’m a participant of the Joost beta best and have currently one free beta invite that I can freely give away to one of my readers. I will be getting more invites as the Joost beta progresses and will give them away as well. I probably should start to describe the service that Joost offers before I announce how you can win the beta invitation to Joost.

I’m really fond of wallpapers and always looking for great sites that offer many of them. I do rotate them every 15 minutes on my Windows desktop which looks and feels great. Whenever I come upon a new wallpaper site that offers quality wallpapers without – to much – spam and ads I post it here at ghacks because I know that many of my readers also love wallpapers. The following site offers more than 8000 high quality wallpapers, the only bad thing about it is that it only displays eight of them per page.

Many wallpaper websites can be classified as spammy. They have to many ads, some use popups and other means of making a quick buck. Good wallpaper sites are therefor rare and deserve to be mentioned in an article. The over 1000 abstract wallpaper on a single page website offers what its page title suggests, a good way of viewing and downloading some or even all of the wallpapers offered on that page.

There are so many hot or not picture voting sites out there that cover almost any subject imaginable but a video voting site that uses the same system is new to me. DizKiz pulls videos from youtube and lets the user vote for or against the videos. The majority of videos that they pull are funny ones – especially commercials, blunders, fakes and homemade fun movies.

I’m seldom impressed by commercials, most are boring, bad looking and not worth my time. I will come upon an exception from time to time that is worth watching. Some of these get even posted here at ghacks and the following one deserves its own article. It is a new BMW commercial from Glassworks which features stunning visuals with a nice orchestral soundtrack inspired by Beethoven’s 9th symphony in the background.

Codehunters is a impressive work of computer art which was produced by Stateless Films for MTV Asia. It is a seven minutes long intro to the ongoing MTV Asia project Codehunters. The prolog introduces several characters of the Codehunters universe to the audience. The animation looks beautiful and I would suggest that you download the high resolution version if which could take some time to download.

The Hype Machine is a free music blog search engine that makes it easy to search and listen to music that is posted on music blogs. Whenever a music blog that is connected to the Hype Machine adds a new mp3 file it is added to the index of the Hype Machine as well and everyone visiting the website is able to listen to it using his favorite player.

The following announcement is a shameless plug, I’m going to promote the new blog that I have created called DRM Alternatives. You will like the blog if you are fed up with the music industry and think that the relationship between artists and fans should be based on trust instead of mistrust which describes the current relationship.

Orb is a free software that changes your pc into a streaming server. If the Orb software is running on the pc every other device that has internet such as the Nintendo Wii, a notebook or pda can connect to a website and view any media file that is shared on the streaming server. The setup is really simple. Download the Orb software and install it on the computer that you want to use as the server.

Did you know that there are more emoticons accessible in Skype than the 56 that are displayed during chats ? I’m not sure why those additional ones have not been included in the menu where you can choose the emoticons. The only way to add them to your text would be to enter them manually.

I had some time at hand and decided to write a short article about great football goals and tricks that I found surfing youtube. Most football videos are from 2006 and feature stars such as Essien, Maxi Rodriguez, Xabi Alonso, Scholes and Thierry Henry. Please don’t be disappointed that your football team or player is not among the top ten, post a link to youtube in the comments to pay tribute to him.

Spam free wallpaper websites are rare these days and it does not happen every day that I find a new one which has enough quality wallpapers to get a recommendation on my site. The dont love me website is one of those which really deserves it. They offer more than 2000 quality wallpapers in about 20 categories ranging from 3D over Girls to XP wallpapers.

Etsy is a website where people can buy and sell (only) homemade goods. Everything is neatly categorized and accessible through various innovative methods such as colors where you choose a color and the site displays everything that is offered in that color. Anyways there is also the traditional way of clicking through categories like Furniture, Children and Weddings.

Jamendo is a music service that tries a different distribution model for music albums. Instead of paying money to download and listen to music you download the music for free and pay or donate money later directly to the artist who created the music. You may either donate money using paypal or visit the artists website to purchase music directly to support them even further and receive CDs that are send to your location.

I can’t think of one movie that I was so much excited about than the movie 300 which is a faithful adaption of Frank Millers graphical novel also called 300. I was starring at the movie trailer when it first appeared and I was never ever so blown away before. The visuals are so stunning and the battle of Thermoplyae was probably one of the most important ones for the future of Europe.

If you ever wanted to paint again the way you did when you were in Kindergarten then Art Rage is the right program for you. The free version is limited but sufficient for everyone who just wants to play around. I think it would especially be a very nice application for kids because they surely will enjoy the ease of use and ways of painting that art rage offers to them.

Sexy Girl, Dancing to music that you like ? What can be better ? The Visualize Her plugin for winamp adds the visualization of a pretty exotic barely clothed dancer to the list of your winamp visualizations. Once installed and activated you see her dancing to the music that is currently playing. The moves are of course limited because, hej, this is not the real thing, hehe.

I bought a Nintendo Wii when it came out. As you might know you do not use gamepads to play the games but the so called Wiimote which looks very much like a tv remote control and uses bluetooth to communicate with the core system. Carl Kenner developed the software Glove Pie which can be used to control games and applications with gestures, speech and other input devices.

Men has been looking to the stars from the beginning of the world and this tradition is still visible in our modern world, although for slightly changed reasons. After the download of Stellarium finishes (Windows, Mac and Linux version available) you may startup the application to take a first look at the stars. I took a look from Paris, not sure if this is the default for everyone though. The name of the stars that I was able to spot were shown in the 360° landscape.

If you do now Pandora you feel right at home when entering the FineTune website. Guests may use only part of the streaming radio services offered at the website but it is good enough for a rough overview of what FineTune has to offer. Just enter an artists name in the search field and FineTune will search for the artist that you have entered and related artists and start with the playback of songs that the search found.

Christmas is only seven days away and it becomes harder to find presents for your loved ones that do arrive in time and are personal at the same time. Sure, you could hop into the next store on Saturday and make a quick purchase just to have something but that’s not how it should be. Money is also playing a role here – a limited budget does not make it easier to find something special.

There are not many people I know that do not have a mp3 player. Many use the player exclusively for music and probably never heard of the term podcasts before. The best way to explain podcasts is to compare them to radio shows. Some hosts talk about certain topics, you listen to jingles, to music sometimes that is played during breaks.

Line Rider is not really a game but a piece of art. I wrote an article about it just a month ago ( linerider ) and would like to take the opportunity to write about the changes since then. Line Rider gives you some basic drawing tools and a unlimited workspace at hand. The first phase is the drawing phase. You draw lines on the screen, lines that are somehow connected. The second phase is the playback phase. A Linerider, better a guy on a slade, falls out of nothing from the sky at the exact position you drew the first line.

There were lately some rumors about tvu player, the program that I normally use to watch tv over internet. The website was not reachable and everything seemed to go down the hill. I decided to take some precautions and test other tv streaming programs to see if any could reach the quality of the tvu player.

If you wonder what a interactive radio would look like you should visit the Musicovery website. The main part of the website shows songs which are connected by lines to each other. Clicking on a song centers and plays the song and all the adjacent songs are displayed as well. The left menu displays either a mood graph with that shows energetic on the top and calm on the bottom, positive on the right and dark on the left. You can click either on the graph to navigate or click on certain songs to reach a certain position in the graph.

Every wanted to create a huge poster from a relative small image that you had on your computer ? Or are you looking for a great gift idea for Christmas for someone you like ? Rasterbator creates huge rasterized images from pictures that you either upload from your computer or select from a website. You may create those images online or download the software and use it that way. Take a look at two examples that I have selected from the Rasterbator gallery.

Paris – city of love. If you have never been to Paris you don’t know what you have missed. Sure it is full of French people but sometimes it seems that even more tourists roam around the streets of the capital. Paris by Night is one awesome panoramic view of Paris by night. I think it looks just way to great to dismiss the picture and don’t post it here at ghacks.