TechnoPhillia!!

Have you ever been to picnik.com? It happens to be one of my favorite online photo editing sites. It’s well organized and very easy to use, and performs many of the tasks that most of us would expect a good photo editor to do.

When you are short on time and can’t afford to sit and spend hours editing your photo albums before sharing them with your friends, picnik.com comes well in handy and gives you quick, yet fine results. And moreover, it’s fun to use!

Its features:

Of course, it is not as high-end as Photoshop, but you can perform most common tasks like-

1. Auto-Fix the image in just a click
2. Fine tune results with Picnik’s advanced options
3. Rotate, Crop and Resize
4. Change the exposure
5. Modify colors by changing the warmth, saturation, and the white balance.
6. Sharpen more
7. Correct red-eye
8. Add special effects, from artsy to fun
9. Add jazzy text fonts the image using their type tool
10. Add various shapes in the form of stickers and frames to liven up the image
11. Perform unlimited Undo’s, and more...
    

Striking stuff…

Picnik allows you to upload images only from your computer, but also from:

1. Facebook, Flickr, My Space, Photobuckt, Picassa, Web Albums, and more.
2. You could even upload a picture from your Web cam.
3. It works on Mac, Windows, and Linux!

So, will it cost me?

Unless you don’t want to upgrade to its Premium version, Picnik is absolutely FREE!
The Premium Upgrade would cost you $24.95 a year, which is approximately 2 bucks a month.

Altogether, this site is quite impressive. Not just for fun alone, this photo editing tool will also give you excellent results in no time at all. See for yourself.

Link: picnik

A favicon is short for favorite icon, which is also known as the website icon, shortcut icon, url icon, or bookmark icon. It is a small, 16×16 pixel square icon that you could see in the browser’s address bar next to a page’s name in a list of bookmarks.

There are various ways you could create your favorite icon and favicon.cc will help you achieve that quite easily.

This site will allow you to draw your own icon, with or without animation and even import an existing image that you could further edit to suit requirements. Preview the favicon in the ‘Preview’ window or in the address bar of this site and once you think you’re done, download it or even publish it under an open license.

How does it work?

1. Choose a color or colors you wish to use.
2. Click on the squares and paint your logo desired.
3. Use animation if necessary
4. Preview your favicon
5. Download when done
6. Put the favicon.ico file into your directory
7. Optionally publish it under the CC (Creative Commons) license

Hope you enjoy creating your very own favicon!

Link: favicon.cc

There have been a lot of changes in the computer arena since the first (affordable) PC came out in late 1980s. Of all the things that have changed :

• Monitors – From big bulky CRT to the sleek LCD
• Processors - From the 8386 to the Celerons then Pentiums and C2Ds
• RAM – from the wimpy 16MB to the massive 4GB+
• Sound Cards – from mono/stereo to dedicated 5.1 Dolby Digital
• Graphics – from 8MB VRAM to the present 1GB+ DDR5 Crossfire / SLI

Computer is not just a computer. Its a consumer device. Its a multimedia hub, download machine, jukebox, learning tool, video/audio creation studio.

In spite, all these changes, the hard disks have remained at the same plane. Sure their prices have dropped and a 500GB costs Rs. 3000 only what remains the same is the way they work is the same as they used to a decade back.

As I keep mentioning about here at CG, Hard Disks are the slowest part and thus the limiting agent in the performance of any rig. The read/write headers and the spindle being a mechanical device. The seek times , average latency times prove to be a hindrance is the speed.All mechanical devices eventually FAIL.

I myself have suffered bad sector problems. Hard Disks are now on there way out! With the coming of SSDs(Solid State Drives) hard disks will now be phased out (but) slowly.

So, what’s so special about SSDs? To keep it simple, you can consider an SSD an a large non-volatile RAM. Sort of a refined pen drive with large amount of storage space and high speed data transfer speeds. Its therefore, allows direct access reducing average latency times.

P.S : Geeks can say – SSDs are made of NAND gates just like my pen drive albeit with better circuitry.

Benefits of SSD

• No disk fragmentation
• High transfer rate, so copying/reading files will be faster
• Silent. No noise and your computer can work buzz free without emitting vinyl scratching sounds.
• Fast Booting times and faster application startups
• No HDD crashes, bad sectors
• Power Savings

Fantastic! I wanna have mah SSD. How much does it cost?

That’s where things go a bit sour. Being fairly new in the market they are very expensive at the moment. An 80GB SSD costs USD 1000 or Rs45000 approx! Scream…..

There is still hope, prices will come down with the increase in production. Dell Adamo sells with an 80GB SSD and costs USD 2000 or Rs.1.5 lakh. Its focused towards the lifestyle segment and business class.

In another 6 months prices will come down and hopefully, you’ll hear me getting one in another 1 year or so!