When creating a presentation, a web design, a leaflet or a brochure, it is important to find suitable images to use. Whilst one option is to pay for stock photos to use under a restrictive licence, another option is to find free (gratis and libre) photos.

Wikimedia Commons is the repository which Wikipedias and other Wikimedia projects use for the majority of their media. Wikimedia Commons has 3.5 million files: over 1 million more than the total amount of articles on the English Wikipedia.

Any media, whether that be music, a video or an image, on Wikimedia Commons can be commercially re-used and generally speaking the only major licensing limitation is that credit may have to be provided to the creator and copyright holder, if any.

continue reading "Get Free Images, Video and Sound from Wikimedia Commons"

Pixolu is an academic reasearch project on semantic image search. It does increase the quality of the search results by asking the user to refine the first batch of results and using the selected pictures to discover images that are closely related to them. The process is made up of three steps. The user enters a search term in the first step which loads a batch of 150 images from the three sources Google, Yahoo and Flickr. It is possible to deselect a search engine before starting the search.

The 150 images will be displayed in a zoomable and movable area. The mouse wheel can be used to zoom in and out of the area to inspect images closely. Pressing the left mouse button in the area makes it possible to move around which is handy if some images are not displayed because of the zoom level.

It is also possible to use the zoom slider on the right sidebar to zoom in and out of the main area. The second step is the refining phase. The user drags and drops images that fit best to the right sidebar. A double-click is the alternative method of selecting those images. To give an example. A user searching for the game Diablo might enter Diablo in the search form. The resulting pictures will show images of Diablo 1, Diablo 2 and Diablo 3. It is then possible to only select Diablo 3 images from the first batch to tell the search that these are the images to find and display from then on.

continue reading "Pixolu Semantic Image Search"

What is good customer service? Customers would usually state that good customer service means fast and effective solutions for difficulties with a product of a company. What about a company that actively monitors forums and initiates the contact with the customer?

That is apparently what has happened to Nicole Gorski (via Softpedia, thanks Dante) who stated on the official Apple support forum that she got a customer service call from Apple after posting about a problem she encountered with her MacBook Pro.

She confirmed in the thread that she did not contact Apple on this behalf and that they could only got the information about the problem from the forum thread. Another user weighted in that he found this behavior scary and (privacy) invasive.

continue reading "Apple Might Be Watching You"

Using an online desktop recorder like ScreenToaster eliminates the problem of having to install software on a computer system first before being able to record the computer screen. ScreenToaster is a free online service build with Java that can record the full desktop or just part of it by drawing a rectangular shape around the area.

The use of Java ensures that the screen recording service works on most operating systems that Java can be installed on including Microsoft Windows, Apple Macintosh and Linux. The recording works surprisingly well and is completely keyboard driven. Pressing [ALT S] will start the desktop recorder which will capture the entire screen. Pressing the hotkey combination again will stop the recording and display a preview of the video on the ScreenToaster website.

The alternate hotkey to record only part of the computer screen is [ALT Shift S] which lets the user draw a rectangular shape which contents will be recorded. It is possible to quit at this point which would delete the video or assign a title and description to it to store it on the ScreenToaster servers.

continue reading "Online Desktop Recorder ScreenToaster"

The democratic west, with all its ideals of free speech, free religion and believes, is on the forefront of demolishing those ideals for the greater good as politicians like to call it. The greater good can be terrorism, child pornography, pornography, different believes, different political views, violent video games or anything else that politicians might feel inappropriate to be viewed by the general public.

Plans came to light recently that described a nationwide Internet censorship initiative in Australia to protect the children from the Internet. One could say that parents should take care of that but the Australian government does not seem to have much faith in Australian parents and decided that a far better way to protect the children would be to ban selected websites completely in Australia meaning if you are of legal age to view a website you might not be able to by normal means because of the censorship to protect the children.

One common denominator is always the vagueness of those plans. Questions like who will select the websites that should be banned, how will they be banned, who will decided what is appropriate, who will maintain the blacklist, what can be done about false positives or who will have access to it are not addressed at all.

continue reading "Nationwide Internet Censorship Planned In Australia"