Image editing software can be quite expensive, but Paint.NET and GIMP are great alternatives that are free to use.

Every once in a while I notice I never got around to blogging about software that I like a lot. So I want to mention to image editors that are free but chock full of functionality. Both are great alternatives to such expensive commercial suites as Adobe Photoshop and the likes. Yes, Photoshop is the standard and has even made it to being a verb. That does not mean you have to shell out hundreds of bucks just to create your own mashup image, or to get rid of that zit on the picture you plan to post to that dating site.

When I started to mess around with some basic image editing a couple of years ago, I started with GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program). GIMP is free and it is available for Linux, Mac, and Windows. GIMP has a ton of options, but I found slightly hard to learn. Probably because it has so many options, I got lost in figuring out how to use it. I also found its user interface hard to get used to. I consider this program best for real serious editing.

My current program of choice is Paint.NET. Also free, but Windows only. Windows is not even enough, you need Microsoft's .NET Framework. Don't worry though. If you don't have .NET installed, the Paint.NET installer will install it for you. Pain.NET's interface is easier to get used to, and its basic options are easy to use. But even with this program, more detailed image manipulation is possible.

No doubt there must be many more alternatives to Photoshop that you can chose from. Right now, I am very satisfied with Paint.NET, and knowing I can switch to GIMP if Paint.NET seems insufficient. If you are looking for a program to get started, I suggest you try Paint.NET first.

Canadian author Peter Watts got into trouble with US border guards during an 'exit search' on his way out of the US. It seems he has been found guilty of obstructing or resisting the border guards, because (going by his own account, see below) he did not do as he was being told right away, but asked 'why' before complying. (Hey, this is my interpretation of the event and the information I will take with me next time I happen to come across a US law enforcement official)

“After Beaudry had finished whaling on me in the car, and stepped outside, and ordered me out of the vehicle; after I’d complied with that, and was standing motionless beside the car, and Beaudry told me to get on the ground — I just stood there, saying “What is the problem?”, just before Beaudry maced me.

And that, said the Prosecutor in her final remarks — that, right there, was failure to comply. That was enough to convict. ” [Source]

So the lesson I learn from this, is to never question and always obey. Which is extremely contrary to my usual approach, as I hate injustice and would want to know why I am being treated like a suspect or criminal. I know we're all supposed to make sure we know all the laws and regulations of both our own country and of any country we visit, but most of the time I rely on common sense. This is one of those cases where that would be a big mistake. A compounding problem is that nowhere will it state what the limits of power are. What kind of commands can be issued that you cannot question? My guess is “any” and that is what I will have to go by in a similar situation. Which I hope to never end up in.

I hope April 26 will bring a sensible 'sentence' in this case, one of little impact on mr. Watts life. Well, besides the actual conviction of course, which is extremely bad in itself.

Many years ago, at that great time of the Amiga, one of the shooters I enjoyed was the series of Alien Breed games. The games were very detailed for that time, and game play was pretty intense. And just when I thought I killed them all, the aliens are back. This time on the Xbox 360 (and PS3/PC as well, I think). The new game is called Alien Breed Evolution, and I spent some time playing the trial game last night. It has a similar game play as the original game, but incredibly updated and stunning graphics and an even darker feel than the original. I find it a very impressing game for the Xbox Live Arcade service.

I won't give you a complete review of the game, as I only played the trial. Besides, I just read this long review, which does a much better job of reviewing than I could ever do. I will, however, give you a comparison of one of the original games and the new version. The video of the original is actually a game-play video over 2 hours long. Great memories!

Alien Breed Evolution (Xbox ):



Alien Breed Tower Assault (Amiga):

For those readers interested in bird watching, you no longer have to go outside to have an opportunity to see Dutch birds. Over at the site of the Dutch Bird Protection organisation, you can view live web cam streams of 7 (soon to be different types of birds, including owls and storks.

I could have sworn I posted about this site or a similar one previously, but I cannot find my own post about it. How odd.

[Source]

As you may know, I kind of hate the idea of walking around with a passport that has an RFID chip with all kinds of personal data on it. Back in '06, I created my own little shielding cover, made of tin foil (how appropriate). Of course that did not last too long. So I decided to give myself a Christmas present, in the form of an actual commercially made RFID blocking passport case. This one made by Travelon.

The Travelon case is not quite what I expected, as I thought it would be completely sealed. Instead, both covers seem to provide protection, but the middle part is still open. I haven't had a chance to test any signal blocking, but I do hope the covers are enough of a protection. If nothing else, at least it makes me feel a little more secure than carrying the passport uncovered. Which is what I had been doing lately, since my homebrew cover didn't last too long. And really, $20 for some peace of mind is not much. The Travelon has enough room for a passport and some (credit) cards and it is not too bulky at that. I have no doubts I will enjoy using it on any next trips. Or course it still means taking the passport out of the case every time officials need to handle it, but that means quite limited exposure, compared to carrying it unprotected for the entire trip.


Buy Travelon RFID Blocking Passport Case

Sooner or later it can happen to the most cautious of us: some file got accidentally deleted and you have no backup of the file. Or perhaps your hard drive crashed for some reason. Some tools can be of help in situations like these.

I had to provide some phone support to someone who ended up with a hard drive failure. For some reason, Windows no longer recognized a drive partition as an NTFS drive containing data, but thought it was a RAW drive. No way to just copy the files to a working drive. To recover the partition, we ended up using TestDisk (TestDisk download and step-by-step instructions). When you run TestDisk, it pretty much opens a DOS box running the program to analyze damaged drives. Following the step-by-step instructions, you should be able to recover at least some of the partition data and files, which can be copied off of the drive.

In situations where the drive itself is still working fine, but you just deleted the files, Recuva or FreeUndelete can be of help. Recuva is very straight-forward with a nice GUI. Simply select the drive that contains deleted files, and set it to recover. Recovered files should be stored on a different drive, so you won't overwrite any deleted data while recovering (which would make recovering that deleted data impossible). FreeUndelete has a more basic GUI, but works like a charm as well.

All three of these programs will undelete files you deleted, no matter whether those are movies, executables, or photos. Must-have software for people who value their photographs.

New Dutch legislation has led to a do-not-call registry. For the past few years, a voluntary registry already existed, but of course there were plenty of telemarketing companies that did not bother to exclude people who registered with that service. But last week, the registry went online at http://www.bel-me-niet.nl/. Quite a success, too. The first day the site stopped working due to high traffic.

Of course I registered right away, and calls should stop about four weeks from now. I wonder if they will. It would be quite a relief, that is for sure. I know there is a US national registry as well (https://www.donotcall.gov/) but I also know there are still plenty of unwanted calls in spite of that registry. Hopefully the Dutch telemarketers will actually stop now. Long overdue, if you ask me.

Sometimes you want an easy way to have a site forget who you are, without logging off. CookieSwap makes this a breeze.

Blogline has always been my feed reader of choice, but lately its service is less than enjoyable. When looking for an alternative, I want another online reader, because that gives me maximum flexibility. I may give FeedShow a go soon, but Google Reader is supposed to be really good as well. The problem with Google? Single Sign On that authenticates me for all their services. So once I sign in to Google Reader, it knows who I am in Gmail, and it tracks all my Google searches. This is not something I want.

The Firefox add-on CookieSwap is just what I need. With CookieSwap, you can create different profiles. This way, I can have a profile that has me logged in as user GolbA, from which I access Gmail. Profile two knows me as GolbB, to read RSS feeds. And profile three has me completely logged out of Google, so I can search in a slightly more anonymous way. Switching is easy. CookieSwap adds a button on the browser (status) bar and a click brings up a choice of profiles. Double-clicking cycles to the next profile.

The only drawback of sorts is that switching profiles switches profiles for all tabs and browser instances. In other words, if you are logged into Gmail (or Bloglines or anything else) and it automatically tries to reload after you switch profiles, it will find you logged out. When you switch again, it will log you in again and show your mail. Well, this is how it behaved when I tried it, I don't use Gmail too often. It seems every time you switch a profile, the open page(s) get reloaded. This may not always be what you want, so make sure you thoroughly test this add-on for your own situation before relying on it.

Over two years ago, Wizards of the Coast (subsidiary of Hasbro, publisher of D&D and Magic: the Gathering) announced plans to create a social community site for gamers, called Gleemax. Nothing ever came of that. For some reason, probably financial, it never happened. Instead, what we got was a slightly revamped forum. A community, sure, but not a new one. And certainly not the kind of site I had in mind when I first heard of it. But now something new is coming.

The Magic (Online) forum is down for ten days, while they upgrade to a new site that will include such innovative features as “friends lists, groups, an invite system and calendar, blogs and wiki.” (or so the status message at the forum site says. Ten days without the forum, what will I do? Well, just go on living and playing. The forum was of marginal interest to me, I never participated much, but it was good to read other people's experiences.

I wonder what the new community site will turn out to be like. Once again I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and see what they come up with. A true social community for gamers would be cool. Then again, a social community for Magic: the Gathering players may seem a little strange at first. The actual online games are usually devoid of any social interaction. Except for some exchanges of “gl, hf” and the occasional derogatory remark. Of course there are some exceptions, but to build a community around them seems like quite a challenge to me.

If your computer runs Windows, odds are you have probably seen the infamous Blue Screen Of Death (BSOD) before. This is the (blue) screen with white text, telling you your computer crashed. Most of the time it contains all kinds of technical looking text. People usually ignore this and reboot. But this screen actually contains helpful information.

When your computer crashes and shows a BSOD, it also creates a small log file with the same information. This can be helpful if you or your friendly technician (grandchild, neighbor) want to try and fix the issue. There are several programs that let you recover the BSOD information so you can analyze it at a later time. Because of recent computer problems, I know of at least two of these programs: WhoCrashed and BlueScreenView. Note: some antivirus or spyware software will flag the BlueScreenView site and/or some of its products because they can be used to recover passwords or do other helpful things that can be used for bad reasons, see the SiteAdvisor page for the site for more information.

Both programs perform similar actions. WhoCrashed gives very basic information, while BlueScreenView gives more elaborate information. Run either program and it will check the Windows default location for the log files (called minidump files) to analyze. With BlueScreenView, you have the option of searching for those files in a different location. I don't think WhoCrashed has that option.

As you may have gathered, the success of both programs is dependent on minidump files actually being available. To make sure Windows creates these files, go to your Control Panel, then select System. Go to Advanced, and then select Startup and Recovery - Settings. You should also be able to see and change the location of the dump files at this point.