Posts Tagged ‘ light ’

Two Adobe Photoshop replacements

You need to edit an image real quick and you are working either on a netbook or someone else’s machine which doesn’t have a copy of your favourite photoshop. Or maybe you never had photoshop in the first place.
Adobe Photoshop has become the premier digital one stop solution for image editing and it should come as no surprise that more than a few would have attempted to ride the photoshop success wave with their own clones.

The first clone which I have been using for a while is the Aviary Phoenix online image editor. Mind you, this has even support for layers and can handle almost anything you might want to get done with an image. Its completely on the cloud (and free as well) and all you need is your trusty Firefox (or any other browser) by your side to edit your image. I guess there’s a sign up required but that’s not so cumbersome. Being a web app has its advantages, such as being able to capture any webpage easily and Aviary even has a firefox addon. Aviary has a complete suite of applications for every possible form of image editing requirement online.

The second is a very light weight application called the Artweaver. Now artweaver is a fully functional free image editor. Users of photoshop would find themselves completely at home because of the interface. What’s more, it even supports export/import as Photoshop format files (PSDs).
The Artweaver interface (I love GITS!!)

Artweaver even has a portable version which you can run off a USB key. You can further enhance artweaver with a number of plugins (which you can find on the download page), you even get to extend it to use XnView, the freeware image viewer.

Both these applications would not be able to replace Photoshop for power users. But when it comes to basic image editing, they get the job done quite well!

2009
07/20
CATEGORY
applications
web2.0
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What should you install on a Netbook?

I got myself a new ASUS EEE PC Seashell netbook last week and have been busy setting it up, customizing it and getting software. Considering that a netbook is meant to run more as an secondary system rather than your only laptop, netbooks are not usually as powerful as laptop (why is why they’re called netbooks, duh..)

Even though they’re called netbooks , its not exactly possible to ensure that they’re always connected to the internet. What if the friendly neighborhood cafe did not have free wifi? And Netbooks without the power of the net are well, just books. Or so we have been lead to believe. Until the making this list that is. My list of perfect software had to make sure it fulfilled two primary needs. Firstly, to be able to run on a machine with limited processing abilities. Secondly, the capability to be used even when you did not have internet access.

Browser: Chrome

Chrome had to be the browser of choice. Light, fast and easy to load. I still am a fan of firefox on my laptop but for my netbook I chose the ultra light chrome with the power of Google Gears. That makes sure I can read my feeds offline, my mail offline, my blog and loads of other Gears compatible stuff offline.

Edited on July 17, 2009: Firefox takes over my netbook. Its impossible not to use firefox especially considering that the internet is the center of your netbook. Plus the font rendering on firefox is much more adaptable to netbooks, which means its much more comfortable to browse the web.

Mail: Thunderbird

I couldn’t find a better mail client than this so I had to surrender to the power of Mozilla. Handles multiple inboxes, junk/spam protection, easy to use. Just like all other good Mozilla products you get the power to use extensions just make sure that you are making an application heavier on a netbook. I just have the minimize to tray extension installed.

Chat: Pidgin

This open source chat agent had to take the cake when it came to chat. Lets me run multiple IM services, light and powerful. Though originally designed to run on linux, Pidgin is now available for windows as well. Pidgin is functional, has an interface that’s the least distracting and comes with a multitude of options to customize it. I use gtalk considering that its the lightest around, considering I do not need multiple IM support.

Office applications: Microsoft Works

I still am using the Microsoft works, but this section might update once I install the Open office. Still considering this section, so do leave your choices in the comments section.

Blogging: Blogdesk

For the first time, I’ve considered the use of an offline blogging tool and after trying quite a few of them, I’ve decided that Blogdesk, albeit its limitations is the winner. Blogdesk has support for most common blogging platforms. I would have recommended the use of Scribefire extension if I were using firefox, but since this is a list, Blogdesk is a blogging tool with a functional interface, but lets you write blogs offline, save them and post them later.

Antivirus: AVG

This is really easy. You would want to keep the resource usage to a minimum and still ensure protection. Stick to AVG . Does a good job and is light on the processor as well.

Desktop enhancements: Launchy

Well, just because its a netbook doesn’t mean you shouldn’t dress up your desktop. How about a OSX styled dock? Rocketdock is only of the fastest and lightest docks out there. I would recommend using Launchy , the keyboard based program launcher especially since it works wonders when the super fast chrome is your default browser.

2009
07/15
CATEGORY
applications
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Celeritas

When I chose to blog about technology as well as physics, I did not realize that physics was quite an unpopular subject for bloggers and web 2.0 enthusiasts. Most probably since noone is interested in boring physics classes. Even in school I was least interested in Physics lessons, primarily because my school lessons focussed on the focal length of lenses and how mirrors reflected each other. Then atlast, I came across Einstein’s theories which intrigued me and made me look at physics with new and renewed interest.

I had discussed about tachyons in one of my earlier posts. Tachyons are theoritical particles which could move at a speed faster than light. However, these particles merely exist in theory because it is impossible for any particle to exceed the speed of light. If a particle were to exceed the speed of light, then it would in fact be able to fly back in time, since it would have arrived before it arrived it had left. But, there is no way any body could exceed the speed of light since, it simply would not be allowed. Let us assume there was an engine which could possibly accelerate to light speeds (299,792,458 miles per second) But after reaching the speed of light, it simply would stop accelerating anymore. So now, the engine is pushing out energy and the body is not moving any faster. Where does the energy go? It gets converted to mass and the mass of the body starts growing to gigantic proportions, but still the body would not move any faster.

The example The speed of light which nothing can overtake is represented by a c which stands for ‘Celeritas‘, which is the latin word for swiftness. This post would really need a more elaborate explanation under the shadow of the all encompassing E = MC² which you could watch out for. or rather not.

2008
06/24
CATEGORY
physics
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The Time is now

there are two things I must write about. About “time” and something else which I forgot. Most probably it was related to IT but I don’t remember anything now. Yeah…got it. I wanted to write about outsourcing. Now the only problem is, I have to read about both to write about them, so I guess both these blogs will have to wait till I am ready…ready to write them…

I write about time not because I love to write about it, but because I love time itself. I love the very concept of the all encompassing, omnipotent, omnipresent “time”.
It is not easy to write this blog, since study of time requires study of far more complex things such as quantum physics, the relativity theories, atoms, dimensions and so on.
But when this post will be done, I want to be really proud of having written something like this. So, I am going to work on this post, one day at a time.

I did read a little bit on the general and specific theory of relativity and as it goes on, I would like to make it really simple for people who are going to read it. The theory of relativity in simple words means that velocity, time, space all are relative to position, velocity, time of the person measuring/looking at them. That was just a statement I made to sum up the whole of the concept.

This is explained by an example by Brian Greene The speed at which you see things move is relative to your own state of motion. Assume that we are looking out of a car window, we see trees, lamp posts move by whereas the car’s dashboard remains static. However, to a bystander, the car’s dashboard seem to be moving whereas the lamp post next to him remains static. I usually hate these seemingly simple examples which only make complex things seem more complex. However, in the case of the theory of relativity I had to make an exception. Now if we were to exaggerate this example to increase the speed to billion miles per second, then the real impact of relativity would come into play and the time and distance calculated from inside the car and outside would be drastically different. And distance is merely a product of time and speed. The second aspect of relativity would deal with the fact that unlike other objects, it is not possible to apply this rule for light. Light is a form of energy which consists of particles known as photons. The cardinal rule is that light is never static. It goes on at a constant speed of 670 million miles per hour no matter where the person watching it stands/moves. i.e. it is sort of immune to the fact that if you run faster it would take much more time for light to catch up with you. All these seem to be loud and gaudy concepts to understand time, so let me touch upon time as well and make it look as gaudy as I possibly can.

Time in itself cannot be defined since time can be expressed only by way of time. Even if I were to tell you that time consisted of days, hours, minutes, seconds etc. it still does not explain it. Since a second is after all a gap of time, which is an specific interval between two states. Now that didnt explain time at all..So thats it, time is inexplicable. Time as we have seen already is different for different people. The movement of time slows down/speeds up relative to our motion/state of rest.

Einstein did not want to name his theory “relativity” he wanted to name it the theory of invariance. This was because he wanted to stress upon the invariance of the speed of light…I would also like to add to the fact that there were two theories of relativity (general and specific) and it was the specific theory which came first. The specific theory was insufficient to explain relativity when there was movement in the frames and hence a theory which could explain when the frames where in movement as well.

2008
02/07
CATEGORY
physics
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