gHacks technology news » break http://www.ghacks.net A technology blog covering software, mobile phones, gadgets, security, the Internet and other relevant areas. Tue, 24 Nov 2009 16:29:26 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.6 en hourly 1 Organize your PC Breaks with Off 4 Fit http://www.ghacks.net/2008/06/03/organize-your-pc-breaks-with-off-4-fit/ http://www.ghacks.net/2008/06/03/organize-your-pc-breaks-with-off-4-fit/#comments Tue, 03 Jun 2008 16:22:46 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/?p=4758 I reviewed Workrave a while ago which reminded PC users that it was time to take a break to assist in the recovery and prevention of Repetitive Strain Injury. Off 4 Fit is another application that reminds the PC user that he needs to take a break. The difference between both applications is that Off 4 Fit is actually using animations to show a number of exercises during the breaks.

Exercises are divided into the three categories Eyes, Hands and Body each containing several exercises that do not take up lots of space, if any, which is ideal for work environments. Each exercise is explained visually by an avatar that is performing it over and over again as well as text that is displayed below the performance.

The first exercise for the hands for example asks the user to stretch his finger joints while the first body exercise is all about stretching the body for a few times.

pc break fitness

Each exercise is repeated several times. Basic controls allow to pause, rewind or forward exercises at any time. The exercises are easy to learn which means that the animations are no longer needed eventually which should definitely be the first goal of a new user. It does not make much sense to exercise the eyes when you have to keep them glued to the computer monitor to understand the exercises correctly.

The other criticism that I have is the advertisement popup that appeared once talking about another tool of the developer that would scan my Registry. I have no idea on the frequency of those popups, it happened once during my tests.

The time before the program reminds the user that he should take a break can be set between 10 and 180 minutes.

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]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2008/06/03/organize-your-pc-breaks-with-off-4-fit/feed/ 2 Download Avis from Youtube and other video sites http://www.ghacks.net/2007/04/01/download-avis-from-youtube-and-other-video-sites/ http://www.ghacks.net/2007/04/01/download-avis-from-youtube-and-other-video-sites/#comments Sun, 01 Apr 2007 17:44:32 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/2007/04/01/download-avis-from-youtube-and-other-video-sites/ All of my friends hate the flv format that Youtube and other social video sites such as dailymotion and break use to show video content on their websites. Most download managers, like the Firefox extension Video Downloader, offer the flv files as downloads which most multimedia players do not support at all. You could add a flv plugin to add flash video support to your media player but there is an easier solution to this.

The website viddownloader converts the videos to avi before it displays a download link. This is probably not the most elegant solution if you want to download hundreds of videos but it works fine if you only want to download a few videos. You supply the url of the video that you want to download and viddownloader does the rest automatically and displays a download link afterwards. It supports the following sites at the moment: Youtube, Break, Dailymotion, Myspace and Pornotube.

The conversion took just a few minutes and depends on the length of the video mainly. Not sure if video conversions are queued or how viddownloader handles several requests at the same time. Download speeds were fine as well. I was able to download with about 100K which is ok for videos of that size. The flv video was about 7 megabytes in size while the converted avi was almost triple that size with 19 megabytes.

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