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Raw Bytes Computer News KPBX FM 91.1 Radio National Public Radio Network Frank Delaney Producer Broadcast on Wednesday Morning 7:35 AM During Morning Edition Support Public Radio ! The Theater Of the Mind |
In computer news this week 12/30/2009 The Raw Bytes annual best free
products of the year This
transcript is on my Raw Bytes
website with links to all the programs I’m talking about today. Product of the year – The Ask and record toolbar,
from Applian technologies. This is a toolbar that you can download and
install into your browser, that lets you capture video or audio, save it and
convert it to different formats. Once you’ve viewed a video anywhere on
the web, you can click on the A&R toolbar in your browser window, save
it, and then convert it to a variety of video formats. As the
WWW has exploded, you now find that there is often as much video and music on
sites as there is text. A lot of the videos I see around the web and on You
Tube I’d actually like to save on my computer, rather than create a
bookmark for them in my browser, and then a few months later find that the
video is no longer there. Applian Technologies is a company that I
have worked with and reviewed their products for years now, and they provide
a complete suite of products designed to let you capture virtually anything you
come across on the internet. I’ve
loved computer graphics for decades now, and have used most of the graphics
programs in the programming I do and in the websites I create, but the best
one I’ve come across is called
paint.net which has similar high end
capabilities to Photoshop but is free and extremely powerful. I’ve
only been using paint.net for a few months now, but it has allowed me to do
things I’ve never been able to do before – like rotate images in
any direction or angle – instead of the simple flip horizontal or
vertical that mspaint and other programs let you do, and it has some
incredible tools for cutting a picture out of its original background and pasting
it into a new picture – so that no one would guess its not the original
picture. Why It looks like it’s been Photoshopped ... J I have
used and reviewed the Firefox browser
since it first came out in 2004,
and I consider it to be the best browser available today; more secure than
Internet Explorer and with a lot more features. Not only is Firefox
customizable to your exact needs, but it detects dangerous sites like
phishing sites and steers you away from them. And if
you don’t have a good email program, their Thunderbird email program
is something you want to check out too. Looking
at personal computer protection
from all the bad things that can harm your computer, I’ve used every
anti-virus program that there is over the years, starting with McAfee
antivirus over 20 years ago, through, Norton, Panda, and all the others, and
I have been using the free version of
AVG now for several years and it’s protected me completely. I
probably spend more time online and going to new sites more than most people, and it’s done a wonderful job. And Microsoft
recently and finally came out with some free anti-virus and spyware utilities
for home computers, including their antivirus security essentials which are new, and windows
defender which has been around awhile, which you can download from their
site. They say
the best things in life are free, and that applies to the computer world as
well. |
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For Raw Bytes This is Frank Delaney (C) 2009 MTA Micro
Technology Associates http://www.mtamicro.com/kpbx.html PO Box 31522 Spokane, Wa 99223-1522 (509)624-7230 |
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