Nowadays, I communicate alot with people remotely (e.g. my family who lives overseas and people I outsource work to). Sometimes what I want to say cannot be communicated via email or even chat. That’s when screen captures and video captures really help.

I’ve been a huge fan of TechSmith’s Snag-It. The $49.95 cost is well worth its capabilities.

I’ve also tried TechSmith’s Camtasia video capture utility. And while I did find it useful, I just found the $299 cost to be just too high for the few times that I’d actually use it. Every so often, I’d smack my head and seriously consider buying it to solve a particular problem, baulk at the price, and then figure out a solution without needing Camtasia.

Earlier this week, a fellow geek pointed me to Jing. Jing, which interestingly enough is a product from TechSmith (makers of SnagIt and Camtasia), is totally free. It has screen capture and video capture capabilities. While the user interface is slightly different from SnagIt and Camtasia, the functionality is the same plus more! With Jing, you also get free access to Screencast (where you can host the videos you make). It’s not time limited, but it is bandwidth limited. So if you’re doing a serious amount of sharing, you will have to pay to upgrade your account.

But you don’t need to upload your captures to Screencast. You can easily save them as local files or you can move it into the clipboard (so that you can paste it on-the-fly to programs such as Photoshop).

I’m just totally amazed that such an awesome program is free. Check it out now!

I’ve had my Apple iPhone for awhile now, but what really irks me for all the music-power of the iPhone, is how incredibly difficult it is to get good ringtones for it!

Sure you can pay $0.99 to iTunes to download a ringtone, but that feature is really limited. I had already purchased the JXL Remix of Elvis’ A Little Less Conversation (regular iTunes), liked the song, and figured that it’d be a cool ringtone. So after paying another $0.99 to get the “ringtone version”, it turned out that the sound quality was crap. The ringtone (which sounds fine on my PC’s speakers) sounded tinny and crackly on the iPhone’s ringer. Technically speaking, the ringtone’s “range” was set too wide and too loud to be handled by the iPhone’s ringer. And because the ringtone was encrypted by Apple’s proprietary AAC encoding, there was no way for me to lower the volume (even though iTunes allows you to “modify” the default volume of songs on iTunes, it does not offer this feature for ringtones). Basically, $0.99 down the drain!

After alot of searching (there were various articles online which explains how to make your own ringtones for free, but all of these loopholes had since been closed by Apple), I discovered the best way to get around the problem was to create ringtones myself using a few simple tools. The process is:

• Find a MP3 (or WAV or some other unencrypted music format) version of the song you’d like to convert to a ringtone.
• Install Wavepad. It’s free, so you can’t beat that!
• Using Wavepad, you can edit the song as you desire. Trim, increase/decrease volume, fade in/out, and a million other effects.
• Install iPhoneRingtoneMaker. There’s a full-feature-but-limited-use free-trial, but it is really worth the money! Just make sure you read their home page, to ensure that the current version of iTunes is supported before you pay money!
• Using iPhoneRingtoneMaker, load the song/ringtone you just created - two-clicks and viola it’s in your iTunes ringtones folder.
• Sync your iPhone, and then set it to use your new ringtone!

For $14.95 (the price of iPhoneRingtoneMaker), there’s really no easier way to get ringtones onto your iPhone! You can download 15 crappy ringtones (at $0.99 each) from Apple iTunes, or just make great quality ones them yourself (with fade in/out effects so that it actually sounds like a real ringtone).

I fully support musicians and artists (the MP3s I have were purchased legally from places like Amazon MP3 Store and Music Today). I love my iPhone, and I’d also love to support iTunes, but until they get me a real way of putting quality ringtones on my iPhone, there is no other practical option available to me.

For the record (no pun intended), and to give my favorite band a bump:

• I purchased The Eagles latest album (Long Road Out Of Eden, in FLAC lossless encoding).
• Used WinAmp to convert FLAC to WAV format. And then used iTunes to import the WAV files as MP3. The instructions on how to do this bit can be found here.
• Then I used WavePad to edit the MP3 (creating new files with the shorter ringtone version).
• And finally iPhoneRingtoneMaker to import that new MP3 back into iTunes/iPhone as a ringtone.

Net result, I now officially own The Eagles’ latest album. And my iPhone has some ringtones that I really love!

This morning, Google announced their free TiSP (Toilet Internet Service Provider) service!

Here’s an quote from the official Press Release.

Users who sign up online for the TiSP system will receive a full home self-installation kit … Home installation is a simple matter of GFlushing™ the fiber-optic cable down to the nearest TiSP Access Node … Within sixty minutes, the Access Node’s crack team of Plumbing Hardware Dispatchers (PHDs) should have your internet connection up and running.

It’s nice to see the guys and gals over at Google having fun on April Fools!

The pages probably won’t stay up after today, so here are the pages saved forever.

Google’s home page with the link to TiSP

Google’s Press Release for TiSP

TiSP home page

TiSP “How it works” page

TiSP FAQ page

If you haven’t heard by now, there’s a new search engine that’s getting abit of press. ChaCha Serach, is one of the newer and more popular kids of the block. The catch-cry is that the searches are powered by humans!

Basically it’s like a normal search engine (presumably using google-like relevance ranking) but after you get the results, you have an option of asking a “guide” for help. Which, then spawns a chat-window and the human-expert helps you find the answer you need. Further details of how the guide system works can be found here.

There are invitations floating around the Internet, for people to sign up as a guide. I don’t have the details, but I’m led to believe that guides do the work out of the goodness of their hearts (i.e. they don’t get paid) and can do it on their own schedule (which presumably means there’s alot of guides for each topic to ensure adequate coverage). I haven’t actually used the ChaCha guide system yet… I feel guilty to call them up just so that I can “test their value”.

For the record, most people are classifying ChaCha as a Web 2.0 Search Engine. Although, going back to human help would seem to make it a Web 0.5 Search Engine

For a tech-geek, I have to admit… I don’t have a MySpace account and wouldn’t know what to do with it if I did. I don’t understand the need to make “friends” with total strangers (I guess I was taught too well to “never speak to strangers!”).

As if I wasn’t far enough behind the “hip” crowd, along comes Twitter. The growth of Twitter is astounding, everyone’s talking about it, and everyone mother is throwing out invitations to join. If I were to summarize Twitter, it’s basically a public Instant Messenging service. The object (so it seems to me) is to put short sentences regularly and often about what you’re doing at any point of the day. I think it’s something to do with letting people know what you’re up to, although I haven’t quite figured out what other people are supposed to do with that information. Start a private conversation because you both frequent the same pizza joint? Try to meet you at some location? Stalk you? I just don’t get it

Anyway, this is an interesting picture that describes how Twitter fits into the grand scheme of technological-connectedness (yes I just made that term up).

While my view is in a miniscule minority, I am not alone. Other like-minded people (who explain Twitter much better) are: passionate and blyberg.