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Cool tool: Photo Story 3 for Windows

Looks like a great free tool from Microsoft; Photo Story 3 for Windows

It creates a WMV video slideshow from your pictures with special effects, titles, captions, soundtracks and voice narration. A lot more interesting than a basic slideshow.

I say looks like as it doesn't install on Win2k3 since it requires a "Genuine Windows Validation". My parents will have to survive with a normal jpeg slideshow of the grandchildren this year as well.

Via [Larry Ostermann's WebLog]

 

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Free .info domains at Dotster

Get up to 25 .info domains for free at Dotster.com

Caution: AutoRenew of the new domains are on by default. Turn it off unless you want to pay automatically for the domains after 1 year.

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Cool tool: Restoration

A college was looking for an undelete tool for Windows. I found several but all were shareware or required installation (a big no-no for undelete utils). Mike came to the rescue and pointed out Restoration. Pretty cool as you can copy the tool to a SD Card or a floppy and run it without installing anything. It restores files in "copy mode" so you can restore the deleted file to a different drive. Works with FAT, NTFS, removable drives like SD cards, digital cameras etc.

It found loads of very old files on my machine that has since been overwritten. Scary that it finds all the old file names even after a complete defrag…
Anyone know of a tool that can delete such 'historical' info on NTFS?

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Historic Gaza vote

Sharon wins historic Gaza vote. Great news that hopefully helps end a conflict instead of starting a new one:

Israel's parliament last night voted for the first time in 37 years of occupation to remove Jewish settlements from the Palestinian territories in a historic move that Ariel Sharon said paved the way to the end of the conflict.

...

Some opponents have accused Mr Sharon of "caving in to terrorism" and of being a traitor because he is considered the godfather of the settlements and oversaw the massive expansion of Israel's West Bank and Gaza colonies during the 70s and 80s.
But the latest opinion poll, in the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, shows overwhelming public support for the withdrawal, with 65% of Israelis in favour and 26% opposed.

Via [Guardian]

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iTunes in Italy!!!

iTunes is finally available in Italy and a whole bunch of other countries. It has tons of music, you can burn as many CDs as you want of the songs you buy, including MP3 CDs. Buying the new U2: Vertigo single now and can't wait for the whole album to be released. Cool Or What?

I tried earlier this summer but was very disappointed when I couldn't buy a couple of songs on any of the big stores:

• MSN Music has loads of music but they only sell to the US :-(


• Rhapsody requires a $9 monthly subscription for streaming. It is possible to download an burn songs but you pay an additional + $0.79 for each song. This makes sense if you buy tons of music or can listen to the streaming the whole day. I'm usually stuck behind some http proxy so I can only listen at night :-(


• Wippit has some UK movies but not the big names :-(

Guess I'll swap my Rhomba for an iPod sooner or later. Maybe the new U2 special edition iPod 

Or the iPod Photo edition

 

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Konfabulator for Windows!

I spend my days on the command line prompt or in Visual Studio .NET full screen . Konfabulator looks just gorgeous so I guess I'll have to change my ways and write a command line widget whenever it is released for Windows.

Konfabulator is a JavaScript runtime engine for Mac OS X (and Windows :-) that lets you run little files called Widgets that can do pretty much whatever you want them to. Widgets can be alarm clocks, calculators, can tell you your AirPort signal strength, will fetch the latest stock quotes for your preferred symbols, and even give your current local weather.

...

The format for these Widgets is completely open and easy to learn so creating your own Widgets is an extremely easy task.

For the "skinning" crowd, Konfabulator is a dream come true. You can easily change the look, feel, layout, even functionality of a Widget so that it matches your lifestyle, your desktop, or the pants or skirt you have on that day.

 

Via:
[Jeff Sandquist]

 

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Total Lunar eclipse 27/28 October 2004

Unless you are living in Australia that is. The lunar eclipse map shows where the Lunar eclipse 27/28 October can be seen.

The local weather forecast is for clouds (27th) and rain (28th) so I probably can't see it :-(