Windows
| Microsoft Songsmith makes a song from your vocals
Ever fancied writing a song but could never play an instrument? Microsoft Research have released a programme called Songsmith. Songsmith records you singing into a computer microphone and automatically generates a musical melody to accompany it. This is how Microsoft are marketing it:
It’s a 98MB download. The free trial is fully-functional and lasts for six hours of use (measured as 6 hours whilst the program is running and active; not minimised). After that, it’s either 29 dollars or 29 euros to buy it. What a cool programme! Via Long Zheng. | |
| Universal Document Converter: Review Universal Document Creator is a small windows application ($69) which allows you to “convert” your documents into Adobe PDF files or image files. It works by installing itself as a printer on your system meaning you can use the converter from any programme through the Print dialog.
“Export” rather than “convert” would be a much more appropiate way to describe the function of the software. This is particularly evident in the “Document to PDF” feature. Dedicated tools which are designed to work with PDF files (e.g. Adobe Acrobat and PrimoPDF) will convert your original documents that fonts, text and shapes are embedded in the PDF file. The resulting document is pieced together by the PDF reader. This is fantastic as the document remains accessible, the textual information is not lost and files are much smaller. However, with Universal Document Converter, the PDF is exported as a bunch of pixels leading to much larger and inaccessible files and grainy text That said – Universal Document Converter is good at doing it’s core job – exporting your documents to image files. Though the Printer Properties dialog, users are able to configure various aspects such as paper size and file quality. It’s certainly a lot easier than haphazardly print screening everything. The ability to integrate it into your existing flow through the COM-interface is certainly nice and the software can be set up so that it is installed as a network printer. At $69 for a single user license, Universal Document Converter can be a tad expensive. If you’re looking for a tool to write PDFs, my advice would be to stay clear. Universal Document Converter will do the job for you, but in a way which I do not find satisfactory. Universal Document Converter does do a good job of exporting your CAD/DTP/Powerpoints as image files and provides all kinds of options such as compression, quality and pallet choice. If you’ve got a lot of documents to convert to images and you’d like to automate the process, Universal Document Converter could be for you. This review is an advertising feature. fCoder provided me with a full version of Universal Document Creator for this review. | |
| Obama adds 11MB to everyone’s Vista install
It seems like Barack Obama has added 11MB to installs of Windows Vista across the world and is responsible for Microsoft pumping a 56MB download across the world. The Register reports.
Oh, and it’s an important update. It means that you won’t get Osama suggested for when you type Obama into Microsoft Word Mozilla Firefox still suggests Osama as a correction for Obama. Does your name trigger a red wavy underline or an interesting spelling suggestion in Microsoft Word? Via Uneasy Silence. | |
| The Mystery White Box of MSN/Windows Live Messenger
I’ve noticed that this evening some mystery white boxes have begun to appear in Windows Live Messenger beneath display pictures. It’s just a strange white square which doesn’t seem to do anything. Why am I making a post about such a seemingly banal thing you ask? Well… It’s not in all conversation windows. And I’ve heard that certain people using Windows Live Messenger 9 see a Microsoft Office icon rather than a blank square. The reason why this is possibly significant is because it could hint that Microsoft is launching a way for people to collaborate on Microsoft Office documents through Windows Live Messenger. A way to collaborate on work through WLM and Office certainly seems a lot more natural than using Google Docs. I had a phase where I developed a few small applications which integrated with Windows Live Messenger and there was definitely a hint of future Office integration in there. In the “What am I listening to?” music feature, changing one argument in the API function call would give you the Office logo instead in the message My prediction is that Microsoft is just about to launch a feature where you can collaborate on documents. The only thing is there doesn’t seem to be any logic in which contacts the white box appears with. I thought it might have been visible for people who used Office 2007 but that doesn’t seem to be the case, nor does it seem to matter whether the other person has a copy of Office running. Watch this space… | |
| AVG8 deleted all my e-mail
Grr… I allowed AVG 8 to run a computer scan for viruses earlier. When it came back, it said it had detected 96 threats and automatically removed them all; I didn’t think anything of it because they were just attachments in e-mails in my inbox. Unfortunately, Mozilla Thunderbird stores all of it’s e-mail in one file and some of my spam e-mails had contained viruses inside them. So AVG decided to the entire Inbox file meaning I’ve now essentially lost 4 years of e-mail. Included in those e-mails were all kinds of things including invoices, essays, important e-mails, website login details, letters and university administrative documents. Deleted by AVG, not moved to the Virus Vault. I’m really annoyed with AVG at the moment. I am very lucky in the fact that I use Google Mail and it archives all e-mail which has been downloaded via POP3 rather than throwing them away as most e-mail services would. So I’ve probably still got copies of most of those e-mails lying around somewhere. There’s probably a month worth of e-mail in several accounts I need to trawl through to find the ones which I’ve not yet attended to or had previously marked as “to be read”. I have several e-mail accounts for different purposes and Thunderbird downloaded e-mail from them all to compile a big inbox of all new e-mail. It’s not a catastrophic data loss. I can only thank Google for having a backup. But it could easily have been one. It’s very frustrating: trawling through backups is really the last thing I really want to do right now with exams coming up. Says Mozillazine:
Apparently AVG7 worked fine with Thunderbird too: it’s AVG8 which introduces the problem where the entire inbox is deleted. I’ve disabled “Automatically heal/remove infections” so in the future hopefully AVG will ask before deleting my inbox. Well, now you know. Safeguard your inbox from AVG8 before you upgrade. | |
| UK Piracy Levels Falling The BBC reports that the piracy levels in business in the UK are falling for the first time in 3 years. The piracy rate has fallen 1% to 26%.
The BSA (Business Software Association) claim the reduction in piracy is due to education. Perhaps it’s partially due to that, but I think other factors are at play. First of all, Microsoft has essentially been giving away it’s flagship products for free or a very low prices to students. Certainly students and teenagers used to use a lot of pirated software because they have no income of their own, no credit card or way to buy software and also have greater knowledge of how to use programmes such as P2P. I believe quite a few people have been taking up the offer of discounted software from Microsoft so I think this has helped in reducing piracy. Secondly, with so much good quality open source software out there these days there is no good reason to buy pirated software. Open source software is usually at least as good as their commercial counterparts and are much easier to obtain than their commercial counterparts. I’ve been thinking about the economics of open source software. It’s surprising that software which costs absolutely nothing could be economically sustainable especially when so much of economic theory says that software which is developed by commercial companies should be much more innovative and of a higher quality. I really don’t agree with software piracy but I think with the wide availability of decent open source software, I don’t think there are any good reasons for it either. | |
| Best Anti-Virus Software? And McAfee Spam… Here’s a question I wanted to put out to all of you. I currently use AVG Anti-Virus. This is despite having had one years of free McAfee Anti-Virus over the last year (with my broadband subscription) and at the moment I’ve got a free 3 month subscription to Norton Anti-Virus (I haven’t even installed it). I only managed to use McAfee for about 2 days before deciding it was a resource hog. Recently, I recieved no fewer than eight e-mails from McAfee in short succession asking me to renew my subscription. Subject in bold and quote from email below. In chronological order:
As you can see, McAfee are pretty desperate to get me to renew. The deadline for a renewal was extended seven times and the amount of saving fluctuated everywhere. And interestingly, renewing 7 days before the end of the subscription would have meant paying the full price whilst renewing on the day it ended, you would have saved 33%. What I’d be really interested in is this: which anti-virus solution do you use? Is it worth paying for anti-virus? Should Mac and Linux users install anti-virus? | |
| Apple EULA forbid install of Safari on Windows This is pretty funny. Apparently after Apple installed Safari through the backdoor on millions of computers, it turns out the EULA for Safari actually said that users are only permitted to install Safari on “a single Apple-labeled computer at a time.” In other words, it’s illegal to install “Safari for Windows” on a Windows computer. Now, if everybody has indeed installed “Safari for Windows” knowingly in the ways that Apple fans claim: users read through the dialogs and specifically choose to install Safari, it is a surprise that it has taken a week for somebody to notice this clause in the EULA. I mean, if a couple of million of people have agreed to a license they obviously haven’t read (and this clause is near the top), what are the chances that anybody even bothered reading the software update dialog, finding out what Safari even was and whether they wanted it on their computer? The EULA has been updated since this story broke. | |
| Free Microsoft Software: Visual Studio, Windows 2003, Expression If you’re a student, you can download free Microsoft software from Microsoft’s DreamSpark website.
Your university will verify that you are a student. If you currently attend college you can get an ISIC Card for £9 to verify that you’re a student. Products available include:
Not bad for free eh? | |
| McAfee Security Center Being an avid blogger, I would like to exercise my huge influence over this internets by publicly declaring how much of an idiot I am for installing McAfee SecurityCenter, which is perhaps the worst piece of software I have ever used. I’ve been a happy user of AVG Anti-Virus and Sygate Personal Firewall for quite a while but seeing as I got given a 12-month subscription to McAfee, I thought: "Hey, you get what you pay for" and promptly installed it. And there the problems began.
I’m back to AVG and Sygate now, and the only positive outcome of installing McAfee was managing to waste the money of my ISP who provided it to me. </rant> |
