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Bumptop – The Latest In Desktop Enhancement – 3D Desktops

Konrad Walsh-(admin) — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 16:31:27 +0000

Why is when you hear of something for the first time ever, you hear about three times that week. It’s like an obscure word that you never heard and then its on the radio and TV that week. Anyway, it’s something I’ve never figured out.

When RichardX13 wrote the other about FLS Launcher, which is an application manager, one of our readers emailed me about Bumptop.

To be honest, I am not a fan of desktop “revampers”. Any I have tried in the past have been more annoying than useful. So with reluctance, I had a look a Bumptop. And its actually pretty good.

What s Bumptop?

It puts your desktop into 3D box. So you have walls top and side and behind you. It gets its name from the way movement of objects bump each other and cause it to shake. It has social network integration with Flickr, Facebook and Twitter. These a very basic but still give you quick access to updates. It also supports multiple monitor setups, which is cool.

It uses very little CPU/Ram resources, which is good because otherwise I would uninstalled it immediately. You can also apply themes to change its look.

When you start off, it walks you through the basics in about 5 steps. I suggest you watch these to get the most out of it.

There is a free version and a pro version. I am going to keep plaing with it and probably check out the pro features. Here is a table from their site with differences.

The differences from the Free version on the left and the Pro features on the right

Themes

You can configure it with themes to suit your style:

There is a decent community following that are developing the own themes. However the software allows lots of customization at the user level.

Social Networking

As I said, it has social networks covered, albeit at a basic level but good enough to keep your status updated easily and to quickly send an email. I haven’t figured out yet if I can configure the email widget to start a Gmail Compose Mail window instead of Outlook but I would love to see that feature.

Some video to whet your appetite:

You can check it out over on their site: Bumptop

What desktop enhancement are you using? Is it better than this? Let us know in the comments

[UPDATE: Bumptop available for Mac and Mashables has 100 invites to give for the Pro version. Click here for a chance. Mashables]

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Sticky Notes	Limit 2	Unlimited
Multitouch gestures (Crop, Shove, Scrunch, Fan out and more!)
Unlimited updates for 1.x version
Toss files onto USB keys
Most used files automatically grow
Flipping through Piles
Thumbnail Previews (Transparent PSDs, HDRs and more!)	Watermarked
Customer Support	Limited	Premium Support

G o o d S t u f f	Physics Engine
	Full Windows 7 Support (32 and 64 bit)
	3D Visualization
	Piles
	Intuitive Gestures
	Themes
	Widgets (Facebook, Twitter, email and printer)
	Zooming Photo Slideshows

Support Sunday: How To Set Up And Optimize uTorrent

Konrad Walsh-(admin) — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 22:30:00 +0000

Many people use uTorrent and never actually set it up for their type of connection or needs. So here we are going to delve into it in a little detail to get you your way. Hopefully , you will be able to get faster and more reliable results with this information. Bear in mind, it is not supposed to be an exhaustive walk-through, but rather to suit novices.

Torrents? uTorrent?

Without being overly technical, I want to explain this in simple terms, explaining just enough for you to get going. A torrent is a really small file that contains the link back information to the original file/program/movie/show/album that you are looking to download. The torrent file is conveniently label abc123.torrent. The file contains the name and sizes and more importantly the location of the files out on the internets. FYI- downloading torrents is NOT illegal. Downloaded pirated software etc., is.
A magnet link – is and I quote Wikipedia:

Such a link typically identifies a file not by location or name, but by content; more precisely, by the content’s hash value.

Since it refers to a file based on content or metadata, rather than by location, a magnet link can be considered a kind of Uniform Resource Name, rather than the more common Uniform Resource Locators. Although it could be used for other applications, it is particularly useful in a peer-to-peer context, because it allows resources to be referenced without the need for a continuously available host.

As far as you and I are concern, its a faster, more direct way to download with peer to peer.

So first of all, download uTorrent here. Run through the setup installation accepting the defaults, except that last option. This offers you the Ask toolbar. Make your own decision here bearing in mind that accepting it supports the free uTorrent. If you don’t like, uninstall it after.

Now we’ll get started

Start up uTorrent by clicking on its icon or find it in the start menu.

When it opens a one time only pop up appears called a speed guide. It is designed to help you choose your speed settings that will optimize the running of uTorrent. In the first dropdown box, you have a list of speeds that say xx/256, xx/512 etc.

You want to choose the one that suits your UPLOAD speed. I have a 7 meg line at home and an upload of 512. So I chose xx/512. You can choose accordingly.

Next is the port number. This is very important to get decent speeds. As you can see in the screen shot, it automatically chose 34999 for me. This is fine, however, I need to go to my router and create a port forward to my desktop/PC IP address for that particular port. Next Sunday, I will write about how to configure your router for port forwarding. When that’s done, I will update this post on getting a green icon in uTorrent. In the meantime, ask in the comments below and I will answer you.

Click use selected settings.

Now go to Options > Preferences.

Rather than me writing this out word for word, just follow the screen shots from here and copy each screen and make it identical to your setup. I will circle my changes:

Click the Associate Button and Start with Windows

Now head to UI Settings:

I like being able to double click files to start/stop them. Saves extra right-clicks

Move on to the directories tab:

Do this, because it makes finding and organizing everything a lot easier later on. However, these are up to you.

Now the connections tab, but you have this part done earlier.

The blue messy bit is my actual port. You chose this earlier.

Bandwidth Tab:

These are my settings. You can see my Upload is a max 10. This means it will upload slower, but won't choke your network so much. My download is 350 which allows me to still browse the net comfortably whilst downloading. This is on a 7 meg line. You need to reduce these according to your connection. If I had a 1 meg line, I would reduce my download speed to 50.

The rest of the settings are up to you. The queuing area is how many concurrent downloads will happen at once. If you leave that low, you generally have a better experience.

Hope you have fun with this and follow on to this post tomorrow on how to download a torrent and use it -

How To Download Movies And TV Shows Torrents

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Is 4GB Of RAM And More Benefical?

Konrad Walsh-(admin) — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 22:35:18 +0000

With the price of upgrading system RAM extremely low these days, people are always asking me whether it’s really worth it to upgrade beyond 4GB; today we’ll answer that question for everybody.

More RAM Means Better Multi-Tasking

First, let’s take a moment to clarify what exactly more RAM can (and can’t) do for you. The biggest benefit of upgrading your PC’s memory is better multi-tasking, especially for those of us using RAM-hogging applications like Photoshop, Outlook, or Firefox 5 minutes after we’ve opened it. Having a lot of memory means that you can quickly switch back and forth between the different applications without Windows writing the process memory out to the pagefile. (The pagefile performs much the same purpose as RAM, but the data is stored on your much slower hard drive.) To put it another way, your RAM generally does not make your PC faster, it just allows it to do more things at once. If your single application uses 200 MB of RAM, it won’t matter if you’ve got 2 or 8GB of total system memory, but if you’ve got 10 windows open using 200 MB each, then you are probably going to benefit from an upgrade.

What Applications Actually Use 4GB+ of RAM?

It’s true, very few applications are going to use large chunks of your system memory, but there are some applications that will benefit greatly from an upgrade—image editing applications like Photoshop, video/audio editing applications, or virtual machines like VirtualBox or VMware will use as much RAM as you can spare. On my desktop with 8GB of RAM, I’m able to run all of the above at the same time, without showing any signs of slowdown when switching from one application to another.

More RAM Will Not Make Single Tasks Faster

Other than the specific applications that hog your RAM, if you think bumping your RAM from 3GB to 8GB is going to increase the speed of a regular application-like a video game—you should think again. The only thing that additional RAM does is allow your computer to do more things at once, not actually make it faster. So if you normally have a few dozen windows open before you launch your video game, you’ll see some speed improvement by upgrading, or you could just close a few apps.

How Do You Know When to Upgrade?

If you are running with 2GB or less RAM in your system, you could probably benefit from an upgrade unless you barely use your PC or run a single application at a time—it should be easy to open up Task Manager and check whether your memory usage is reaching the limit. If you consider yourself a power user, you’ll want to consider upgrading your PC to 3 or 4GB of RAM. So what if you already have 3GB+ installed? Should you drop the cash for 6 or even 8GB of RAM? To really analyze whether your PC is using the memory properly or paging to the disk, the best tool is the Resource Monitor included in Windows 7 or Vista—it gives you a quick view at exactly what resources are being used, and what they are being used for. The key thing to pay attention to is the Hard Faults/sec graph, which tells you how many times an application attempted to read memory that Windows was forced to push into the pagefile because of a lack of memory.

What About 32-bit vs 64-bit?

So you’ve upgraded your PC with 8GB of system RAM, only to find out that Windows doesn’t see all of it. The reason is simple: 32-bit versions of Windows XP, 7, or Vista cannot use more than 4GB of system RAM—at least not without an ugly and unsupported hack. If you want to actually use all of that RAM that you installed, you’ll need to install a 64-bit version of Windows.

The Bottom Line

Let’s break it down into a couple of bullet points for easier digestion:

If you are a regular user, just light browsing, IM, or YouTube, you are probably just fine with 2GB of RAM—but check Resource Monitor if you aren’t sure.
If you consider yourself a power user but don’t use Photoshop or virtual machines, you should probably have 3-4GB of RAM installed.
If you are a power user with virtual machines or you do heavy audio/video/image editing, you should consider upgrading with as much RAM as you can afford—just keep in mind that you’ll need a 64-bit version of Windows to take advantage of it all.

This article appeared on Lifehacker

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Get Higher Grade Security From Your Webcam(s) – With Vitamin D

Konrad Walsh-(admin) — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 20:36:10 +0000

Here is a great piece of security for getting the most out of your web-cam. If your like me you have one or more of these and have never ever video chatted with any one nor recorded a video. However there are plenty of uses for them if your creative. (No!.. not those kind). You can use it for security. Lets face it, your PC is probably on all day. Its a great opportunity to keep an eye on things. The problem is that most software out there is clunky and well, rubbish. And even if it does work, the annoying thing is searching through hours of videos to fine 30 seconds of necessary video. Well all that has changed with some software called Vitamin D. Simple to use! Free! And very good!

It’s not motion detection, it’s people detection
Motion detection can be triggered by swaying branches, pets, or even light changes from clouds. Professional-grade security systems track objects but cost thousands of dollars and require expert calibration and tuning. Vitamin D Video uses a revolutionary form of intelligent computing, based on how the brain works, that can outperform state-of-the-art systems in many real world cases.

This video explains it better:

Feature List:

If you are interested in general home security and/or monitoring but don’t know where to start, a few examples of what you can do are:
- Record who comes to your door while you are away
- Help your neighborhood watch group by monitoring the street or your backyard while you are out.
- Send yourself a notification when your child comes home from school.
- Set up a schedule to record inside your house while you are at work or on vacation.
- Monitor activity at a second home when you are absent.
- Catch if there are kids in your pool, or find out who (or what) is knocking over your trash cans.
- Watch the backyard or a room where your pet is supposed to be (or not supposed to be!).
For small businesses or retail locations, a few examples of what you can do beyond having an archive of video are:
- Monitor a back door or unattended lobby area.
- See who goes in and out of a specific room or secure area.
- Figure out who is littering in front of your store, writing graffiti on your walls, loitering suspiciously after hours, etc.
- Help verify if an alarm is false, before the police arrive (and potentially fine you).
- Set up some very basic flow analysis (“retail analytics”) for your store, e.g., quickly scan to see how many people lingered in front of an end cap or entered a section of your store.

Check it out over on there site: Vitamin D

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Windows 7 Was My Idea!!!

Konrad Walsh-(admin) — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 19:17:14 +0000

Some pretty clever marketing from Microsoft… Here is one of the promo videos that we don’t see over here.