Edit Your Images Without Spending A Dime

Just because you don't have photo editing software like Adobe Photoshop or Corel Paint Shop Pro doesn't mean you can't have fun with your photos. I use Paint Shop Pro for everything just because that's the program I've been using for years, and I'm used to using it. I've paid to take classes that taught me how to do a lot of the things you can do online these days for free.

Pixlr is just about one of my favorite online image editors these days for the novice. You can use Pixlr to edit your images in a variety of ways from simple cropping, resizing, and rotating to even adjusting colors and adding effects. It's great for the basic user who needs to edit a few photos, and you don't need an account to use it. Just upload your photo and edit it.

Picnik is another online image editor I really like if you're looking for more than basic editing. You have your basic features like all the other editors, but you also have auto adjust tools to help you out. You can create all kinds of fun and interesting photos with effects, text, touch ups, etc.

Here's just a simple photo I created in about 30 seconds using Picnik. As you can see I was able to adjust the colors in the photo, resize it, add a Polaroid frame, and add text.



There are many more online editors out there, and this just proves you don't have to pay expensive prices for great photo editing software anymore. Just take a look around the web, and you're sure to find a free version that will give you just what you need.

Here are a few more for you to check out.

1. Adobe Photoshop Express
2. Flauntr
3. AlilG
4. Photobucket (built in editors to edit photos, add effects, create scrapbooks)
   
5. DrPic.com
   
6. Pixer.us
7. FotoFlexer.com
8. OnlineImageEditor.info
   
9. Splashup
10. Webresizer.com (simple editing tools to make a photo web ready)
    

Get Firefox 3 Today: Set A Guinness World Record

Today is Firefox's Download Day 2008. What's so special about that? Firefox is trying to set a Guinness World Record for the most software downloads in 24 hours.

If you want to take part in setting this record all you have to do is download Firefox 3 today! There have already been over 1,700,000 pledges to download Firefox today, and your download could be the one that pushes it for the record!

Digital Makeover

What's the best acne treatment out there? Right now I can tell you it's Paint Shop Pro! Haha! This just shows you how bored I get when I can't sleep.

I finally got Paint Shop Pro X2, so I'm going through a bunch of my old photos "cleaning" them up. I'm removing pimples that stand out in the photos, changing my eye color (my natural blue still looks the best), and giving myself makeovers.

It's amazing how good I look when I'm completely digitally altered! If only I could look this good everyday! I do love the makeover feature in PSP X2 though. I know some of these features were in X, but I'm upgrading from PSP 9. I don't know what took me so long to upgrade....oh yeah, the cost!

Photo Morphing

I've been playing around with a fun little program tonight. It's called Morpheus Photo-Morpher, and it's actually a fun little program to use. Basically this is a little software program you can use to Morph your photos into anything you like. I've seen people do this many times on TV shows, humor websites, and more, and I've always been interested in learning how to do it. We even used something like this in our high school graduation ceremony. We each submitted a baby picture of ourselves, and the school had all of those pictures morphed with our graduation pictures for a nice video presentation. It was cool to see how much we all still looked like our baby photos, but at the time I didn't know how to even attempt to do a photo Morph. Morpheus showed me that not only is it fun to do, but it's actually pretty easy as well. I didn't get to spend a lot of time messing with it tonight, but I'll be sure to Morph more photos soon. Here's the quick one I made as an example. I saved this one as an avi file, but you have many different photo and video options to choose from.

Although it took me a few minutes to figure the program out, it was pretty easy to use once I got into what I was doing. There's a wizard to help you set up your photos, and the wizard also gives you instructions on adding dots to your photos. The photos will morph depending on where you place your dots. You have to play around with the dots to get the photos to morph like you want them, but it's fun to see how different settings can change the photos. If you get lost, you can also check out one of the example morphs for examples of where to place your dots depending on the type of morph you're creating.

I'll definitely have to create another morph later with photos of hubby and our old dog Brutus. Not only did hubby love him to death, but everyone used to say they were the epitome of owners and dogs looking alike. Haha! I think I might also use this program to create a photo cd for my grandparents anniversary. I think the entire family would like to see photos of them throughout the years morphed together. It would be interesting to watch them change.

If you think this program is something you might like to try you can find it over that the Zoombi website. You can also find more information there on how the program works as well.


This is a paid post sponsored by Zoombi.

Finances A Mess

I've spent a lot of time going over our finances this week. Hubby works a full time job, but he also does a lot of his own contracted work on the side. That means I have to keep up with his finances for that portion of his work throughout the year, otherwise we'll have a huge mess come tax time. Now that I'm self employed, I've got double the finances to sort each week, and unfortunately I've been a little slack on hubby's stuff. I spent 4 hours yesterday just straightening hubby's mess of receipts and printouts. I'm thinking it might be about time to invest in some sort of financial reporting software to help keep things more organized for us.

Active File Recovery Software

Have you ever lost a file you wish you could recover? Maybe you accidentally deleted a photo that meant a lot to you, or you had an MP3 you loved that was damaged by a virus. Well now you can recover almost any file or folder you have lost with a simple to use program called Active File Recovery. Normally I don't like paying for a program when I can find a freeware one that will do the job for me, but I have tried many freeware file recovery programs and not one of them did the job. Active File Recovery starts at $29.95 for the Standard version, and is $44.95 for the Professional version.

What can each version do? Both versions can recover files that were deleted then emptied from recycling bin, lost due to a format, damaged by a virus or other malicious program, or lost during a power failure. You can also recover hard drive partitions that were lost during formatting or deleted.

The professional version includes Active Partition Recovery that can recover a partition that has been damaged. It works for partitions on FAT, FAT32, and NTFS systems. That's not all. You can also recover files on flash drives, memory cards, etc. Never worry about losing a photo again when the card for your digital camera dies! Just recover it! Both versions support all types of external hard drives, too. I really like the boot CD or DVD feature. You can recover any system that won't boot up by using the included ISO to burn a boot disk that contains a lighter version of Windows Vista.

If you're interested in giving Active File Recovery a try, feel free to download the trial version. Don't forget to check out the Active File Recovery website for tons of useful information including screenshots, and a list of file types that can be recovered.

Freeware Software

If you like trying freeware programs, check out the Pricelessware site. I stumbled upon it tonight as I was searching for a good freeware organizer to use, and I've already found quite a few programs I want to try. The list hasn't been updated since 2004, but I've already found a few names of programs that I've used for years, as well as those few I want to give a try. You can browse programs by category or by year. Everything on the site is 100% completely free to use thanks to wonderful creators who decided to share their creations selflessly.

Snapshot Adventures

I love downloading games from Reflexive Arcade. I install the game and play it for a few minutes. If the game catches my attention in anyway, I'll play until the time limit is up, then I'll uninstall it and add the game to my "games to buy" list. If I don't find the game interesting within the first couple of minutes, it gets uninstalled and I return to Reflexive Arcade's site to mark that I didn't like it. That way I won't run the risk of accidentally downloading it again in the future.

Last night a friend of mine brought over his laptop so I could do a cleanup job on it. He knows I like the little reflexive games so he told me he had just picked up a new one from them. He had Snapshot Adventures: Secret of Bird Island, one of the new games! I told him I would check it out after I finished cleaning up his system, and I'd let him know what I thought about it, so he left. I spent 30 minutes working on his pc, and the rest of the night playing the game. I was finally drug myself away from the game at 6am to lay down in bed with hubby for a few minutes before he had to get up for work!

Basically, you run around snapping pictures of various birds. Each mission gets a little tougher, and when you complete it you can earn some cool gadgets for your camera like bigger zoom lens, flash, camera silencers, night vision, etc. The graphics are beautiful, and the birds are rendered smoothly. I found myself getting lost in the game. You get a field journal where you can choose your best shots of each bird stationary and in flight to keep. I found myself wanting to screenshot some of the photos I couldn't keep just because they turned out so well. I was quite impressed with this game. The graphics could be a little better, but overall they are pretty good.

There's also a section where you can design your own bird or download birds others have made. Then you can go to your special locations to snap shots of those birds. This is definitely a game for all ages. I already enjoy birdwatching, and I loved seeing the different types of birds. This game is not only great for kids because it is educational, but you can also teach children about photography. I highly recommend it to anyone!

Getting On The AGLOCO™ Bandwagon

Okay, I finally did it. I finally decided to head over to AGLOCO™ to sign up. I've heard a lot of good things, and a lot of bad things about it, but I figured the best way to truly see what's going on would be to check it out for myself. So I headed over there, started to fill out the signup form, and guess what? I apparently signed up awhile back and must have totally forgot. This probably means I signed up when AGLOCO™ just began to surface. At least that was one step I got to skip.

What's next? Since the viewbar hasn't been released yet (it should be out between now and April 16th) it's time to start working on my referrals. So, if you would like to try AGLOCO™, please consider signing up under my referral link.

Now, you might be asking yourself, what is AGLOCO™? Did I just sign up for something that's going to suck the life from my computer? Simply AGLOCO™ is the healthy alternative to spyware. What? Did you just say spyware? Yes, but didn't you see that I also said the healthy alternative? Okay, so basically you will download the viewbar and use it while surfing. I could try to explain it all, but it would probably make this post extremely long, and you probably wouldn't understand a word of it, so let me refer you to the AGLOCO™ FAQ.

This is going to be a learning experience for me. In some ways it reminds me of the "Paid To Surf" phase a few years back. Of course I was sucked into that phase, but I didn't earn enough to even transfer it out of my account, so I can't wait to see how similar this is. Hopefully we'll all end up making a little extra money.

Where Were You When I Needed You?

Last month my not so computer literate hubby hit the delete key, sending almost all of his mp3s to the recycling bin. Then somehow, he had managed to empty the bin instead of clicking restore files. *Sigh* He did what he does best, yelled for me to fix it before he threw the computer out the window. Seeing how I networked our comps together awhile back, all the music on his would be the stuff that I don't listen to. Awhile back I backed up all his cd's on his computer because he's horrible at scratching them, and I didn't want to go buy new copies every time he messed them up, so I would just burn him a copy. I even made a backup burned copy that I stuck in a cd case I thought he didn't know about just for times like these, but to my dismay, he had already found my backups and scratched them up as well, so my last resort was to try to recover his files.

I spent all day searching for a recovery program that would work, but I couldn't find a single shareware or freeware one that did the job right. Recovering mp3s is tough. I got the same results every time...a bunch of half chopped up files that weren't playable, so I finally gave up. A couple weeks later a friend told me about a program she used all the time called Multistage Recovery. She said it recovered mp3 files perfectly without screwing them up as well as almost any other file type, but I was too cheap at the time to drop $50 on something to do the job.

Then today, I was stumbling through my daily visited bookmarks, and guess what! Giveawayoftheday.com is giving away Multistage Recovery for free as their software giveaway today! I'm definitely grabbing it! Even if I don't recover my hubby's music, it would still be nice to use on an old hard drive I have from years ago. There's no telling what I could recover from my teeny bopper years!

Video Conferencing Thoughts

Once a month my old college roommates and I get together for a "catch-up" meeting. We lived in a campus apartment that housed 8, so there are a lot of us to keep up with. We have always tried to put together lunch meetings, but recently that has become a hard thing to do with 3 of them moving away from the area. We all have families and busy lives now, so it's getting harder to get together on a regular basis. We knew we were going to either have to find another way to get together, or stop meeting once a month all together. We decided last month to try video conference meetings. Most of us have personal webcams, and one of the girls works in an industry that requires video conferencing, so it fits into all of our lifestyles without having to try to plan a trip back home.

Our first video conference went pretty well, but we had issues with the free video host we tried to use. After the meeting was over, I promised to try to find a better service to use. We of course all thought about using Teamspeak. My hubby and I both use it for gaming, but that would require for everyone to download software, then one of us would have to host the client (probably me) on their computer. None of us have the bandwidth to support that right now, and there is no video.

After doing some research, I think I have decided to try MegaMeeting. First of all there is no software to install. Everything is web-base. The personal package would be great for us. The package would cost us $49 a month to host up to 10 people, and since we only need 8, that's perfect! We all agreed $6 a month to get together is much better than the gas spent on driving somewhere to meet up, the cost of lunch, and the cost of flying in for some of the other girls. Using MegaMeeting also solves another problem we have. One of the girls using a Mac, but most of us have a PC. Most of the other Video Conferencing things we've tried don't support to the use of a Mac, but MegaMeeting supports, PC, Mac, and Linux. After participating in the live demo, I think I'm sold. My hubby is also thinking about switching from Teamspeak to MegaMeeting for meeting with his Battlefield 2 clan. The costs of a professional conferencing package for 25 people at $225 a month is 50% cheaper than what they're paying now to host Teamspeak for 15-20 people without the video capabilities.

I would love to hear from others who use web conferencing software, and can give me some pros and cons of MegaMeeting if you have dealt with them. To me it looks like a great service that I will be very happy using!

Creating Videos From Photos

If you love photos and music as much as I do, you should definitely check out fliptrack. This is a great tool for creating slideshows, scrapbooks, greeting cards, and whatever else your mind can fathom. Best of all it's free!

How do you do all this? All you do is download (spyware & adware free) the fliptrack software and start creating. Add your photos, add the music you want to feature, and you're done. If you want to be creative you can even match up certain photos with certain parts of each song! You can browse other members creations to grab some ideas, or just to see what others have to offer. You can also view of demo of how things work before you download the software.

This is a super easy free program you can use to share photos with friends & family, showcase photos on your website, or just add something to fliptrack's site to share. I just created a short little sample video to show you guys what this thing can do! Enjoy!

Great Products Worth Checking Out

PSP Blender is a site every Playstation Portable owner should check out. Whether you prefer games, music, or movies, PSP Blender has it all. For a one time fee, you can access downloads of thousands of games, movies, music files, backgrounds and much more for your PSP! All downloads are 100% legal, and the one time fee gives you a lifetime membership! I give this site a 4 out of 5 and recommend it as a great christmas present for anyone you know with a PSP and an internet connection!

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SpamWeed combines various state-of-the-art spam filtering technologies to achieve best spam detection rate, accuracy and ease of use. Whatever you requirements for a spam filter, you can get a solution with SpamWeed.

Works with Outlook, Outlook Express, Thunderbird, Eudora, Incredimail and all POP3 Email Clients. It also supports Hotmail/Yahoo accounts.

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