I don’t know about you but I’m always struggling to think up new passwords for websites and the myriad of other things I need to gain access to these days. As we all know using simple words, such as names and places for passwords is just asking for trouble as they can be easily guessed by someone who knows you, or about you, or cracked using ‘brute force’ dictionary methods, so here’s something else to try. It’s called Password Bird and all you have to do is enter a special name, special word and a special date and from that it creates a good quality random-looking alphanumeric password, but made up from bits of your special words and numbers, which should make it a little easier to remember
Undoubtedly, we are heading towards a future that resembles what you might have seen in countless Sci-Fi movies. It’s clear that this is happening because technology tends to advance at a very high paced rate. Speaking of which, Intel, the leading manufacturer of computer processors, is working on a video search technology that it hopes will improve the quality of our video search. The company also intends to bring it to its future multimedia platforms.
The technology is being developed at Intel labs in the US and China and is said to cut down videos frame-by-frame, and then use image and face recognition applications in order to recognize faces, objects, voices, locations and movements. According to Intel, the frames are aftwerwards patched together in order to allow video search. Read the rest of this entry »
Here’s a quick heads-up on the next craze, probably… It’s called Flip Video, from Pure Digital and on the other side of the pond they’ve sold a million of them in the past few weeks. It’s a tiny pocket camcorder, around the size of a cellphone, so far so ordinary, but it has a couple of tricks up its sleeve. First it’s cheap, prices in the US start at around $99 or roughly £50. It has a built-in USB connector, so there’s no faffing around with cables, when you want to watch and download your videos to your Windows or Mac PC. Flip Video stores around an hour’s worth of video at quite reasonable quality, and you can upload directly to You Tube or edit the movie. Power comes from a couple of AA batteries and it has a built-in 1.5-inch display screen. Read the rest of this entry »
If it moves and it appears on your PC screen then you can capture it with this freeware application, called Debut. Now don’t get too excited, it can record streamed video (and audio), like You Tube and iPlayer, but the unless you have a blisteringly fast PC the frame rate will probably be quite slow if you don’t want to sacrifice too much picture quality, but it’s definitely worth experimenting and its certainly good enough for a quick and dirty archive. It’s just the job for making tutorial videos, showing someone how to do something on a PC, by recording everything that happens on the screen. It also has a built in timer and it can be set to email or upload your movie by FTP. You can even get it to burn directly to DVD with an optional add-on and there’s a facility to record from external sources like web-cams and USB capture devices.
I don’t know about you but I’m always struggling to think up new passwords for websites and the myriad of other things I need to gain access to these days. As we all know using simple words, such as names and places for passwords is just asking for trouble as they can be easily guessed by someone who knows you, or about you, or cracked using ‘brute force’ dictionary methods, so here’s something else to try. It’s called Password Bird and all you have to do is enter a special name, special word and a special date and from that it creates a good quality random-looking alphanumeric password, but made up from bits of your special words and numbers, which should make it a little easier to remember
