vnetpulse

Last week Vnetpulse talked about one of their favorite browsers Google Chrome.  Google Chrome is by far one of the quickest, light weight broswers out there. The only draw back that I have found with Chrome is that Google is collecting data on you.  Which really isn’t a bad thing however; if you think that google has enough of your internet habitits then SRware Iron is the browser for you.  Iron is based off of the Chromium code so it looks and feel like Google Chrome but will not collect any data on your surfing habits.

Download SRware Iron

Now that you have Iron installed it is time to set your default  search engine is default.  To do this, click the wrench and goto Options.  Under the basics tab click the Manage button, when the manage dialoge box pops up select the search engine of your choice, click close and your done.

We here at vnetpulse would love to hear in the comments if you think Google data collection is good or evil?

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Google is going to change the face of commication and collaboration on the web this coming year.  Google Wave promises a revilutionary way of communication that is no longer a static system like our tradional email or instant messaging.

Google is going to change the face of communication and collaboration on the web this coming year.  Google Wave promises a revolutionary way of communication that is no longer a static system like our traditional email or instant messaging.

Lars Rasmussen one of the founding members of Google Wave describes how all of this works in a google blog post.

Lars states; “Here’s how it works: In Google Wave you create a wave and add people to it. Everyone on your wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and even feeds from other sources on the web. They can insert a reply or edit the wave directly. It’s concurrent rich-text editing, where you see on your screen nearly instantly what your fellow collaborators are typing in your wave. That means Google Wave is just as well suited for quick messages as for persistent content — it allows for both collaboration and communication. You can also use “playback” to rewind the wave and see how it evolved.

As with Android, Google Chrome, and many other Google efforts, we plan to make the code open source as a way to encourage the developer community to get involved. Google Wave is very open and extensible, and we’re inviting developers to add all kinds of cool stuff before our public launch. Google Wave has three layers: the product, the platform, and the protocol:

The Google Wave product (available as a developer preview) is the web application people will use to access and edit waves. It’s an HTML 5 app, built on Google Web Toolkit. It includes a rich text editor and other functions like desktop drag-and-drop (which, for example, lets you drag a set of photos right into a wave).

Google Wave can also be considered a platform with a rich set of open APIs that allow developers to embed waves in other web services, and to build new extensions that work inside waves.

The Google Wave protocol is the underlying format for storing and the means of sharing waves, and includes the “live” concurrency control, which allows edits to be reflected instantly across users and services. The protocol is designed for open federation, such that anyone’s Wave services can interoperate with each other and with the Google Wave service. To encourage adoption of the protocol, we intend to open source the code behind Google Wave.”

Google Wave Home Page

VNetpulse will keep you up to date on the advances that are made on Google Wave.

Watch Google Wave keynote presentation

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Last week I was faced with task of editing a friends website at his office and did not have access to my usual software tool, Dreamweaver.  So I searched the web for an appilication that would be similar in fuctionallity but open source.  What I found was a solid replacement for anyone not wanting to spend a bucket of cash to do some web site editing.

Nvu  is a complete web Authoring System that will rival programs like FrontPage and Dreamweaver.  Anyone can create web pages and manage a website with little to no techincal expertise or knowledge of HTML.

Download Nvu

screen shot of Nvu

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Firefox was just too slow and when left minimized Firefox will eat up all of your system resources.  That being said I made the switch; Google Chrome is now my browser of choice.   Let the browser wars really begin…..

The first thing I noticed was the speed in which chrome loads; once clicked chrome loads and is ready for searching.  Just type what you want to search in the address bar and you are off.

Google created a small installer and a simple interface that is out performing my expectations. I will admit that it took me awhile to grow accustom to the simple interface and now I love it. Another great feature of chrome is that it thumbnails your favorite pages on the default home page. Equally impressive is the fact that you can do private browsing just open the browser in incognito mode and none of your browsing history is saved.

If you are like me and tired of bloated browsers slowing you down then go grab and install the code from Chrome now.

Download Google Chrome

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Now that we have all of the videos files with title screens we are ready to author a DVD.  One of the best applications that I have found on the net to do this task is called DVD Flick.  DVD Flick can handle a wide variety of file types, so we can take the avi and wmv files and create a home movie complete with menus.

Here is what the gui looks like when you first open DVD Flick

Now to add the files that we have created we simply click the “Add Title…”  option on the right hand side.   Once we have the files selected we can rearragne them in any order we would like them to play in.  Now that all of the video is selected we can click the “Menu Settings”  at the top of the screen and create a fully function menu.  After everything is setup and good to go we can then click “Create DVD” select the right settings and then wait for our master peice to be encoded and then burned to a DVD.

Download DVD Flick Here

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If you are not a Firefox user, you should be…

In particular if you are involved in the Internet Marketing game….  Firebug allows you to quickly analyze the code of the website that you are visiting….

For example, if I am researching the keyword ‘wealthy affiliate review‘, I can go to the website on google page 1 and check out its code very easily.  I just right click on the screen and select ‘Inspect Element’, and WHAM, the screen splits and shows me the code….  I love it… A software programming collegue of mine who is an absolute genius showed this to me a few weeks ago….

By investigating how the top performing site on Google is optimizing their site for the keyword can help us gain insight as to what we need to do to our website to compete for that particular keyword….

Firebug Inspection

You can see that this website is optimized VERY WELL for the keyword ‘wealthy affiliate review’ by inspecting it with Firebug… The owner of this website has done a great job..  Props to them!

The keyword is included in the header and meta tags several times – as well as title etc…  good optimization techniques were used on this webpage…  you can clearly see that you must do all of the same to your web page if you want to compete for this keyword…  it looks like a very competitive market however…. this web master must have worked very hard to market this site!

If you want to install Firebug, you need to open your firefox browser and select Tools > Add-ons …..

Then select the button that says ‘Get Add-ons’…  Type ‘Firebug’ into the search field, and then select the Add-on!

You can also go to https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1843 to get Firebug….

Firebug Add-on Screen Shot

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I hope you enjoyed the Virtual Dub post…..  My wife and I are continuing our video project……

So I have all of my home video footage captured, cleaned, and outputted to an .avi format, but now what?  Well we are not quite done yet…. my wife has a lot of old pictures that she wants to include in the footage and she also would like to add titles.  Google offers the perfect solution to this problem and it is called Picasa.

Picasa is one of the best free image managers out on the web today.  Picasa has a simple GUI and a clean interface.  Picasa also handles most image formats; the only issue I have encountered so far is with high resolution tiff files.  Picasa also has a movie editor integrated into it; this is the area I will be discussing.

Download Picasa

Once you have installed Picasa and let it scan you drive for images and movies.  Mouse over to the top tool palette and click on “Create” and then drop down to “Movie…”

Once in side the Movie Make tab you can select the photos and movies files that you would like to integrate into you production.  You can also pick the desired output size that you would like.

After picking the files and the size of the video you would like you can also add titles to the sequence under the slide tab.

After entering titles and captions to your sequences simply click the export button and wait for Picasa to work its magic.  Once Picasa has finished the encoding process you will end up with a video file with your nice title and capture movie with all of your stills integrated.   In my next post I will discuss how to make a DVD from all of the files that you have just created.

For more information on Picasa make sure to go through the forums.

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My wife turned to me the other night and asked me if I could turn her old home movies into a DVD for next Christmas so she could give it to her parents.  For my next couple of posts I will discuss video editing and DVD authoring tools I used to take old home movies and convert formats from VHS to DVD.

I use my old P4 2.0GHz tower for capturing so you really don’t need to spend big bucks to do this.   The video capture card that I have is an MSI TV@nywhere; I bought this card because it was cheap and ran on my old P4 motherboard.  I would suggest that you google capture cards and do some research for yourself to find out what card works with your system specification.  Now the software that came stock with capture card was alright but I knew that there be a better application.

This leads to the first tool in which I used to capture and then clean up that quality of the old VHS home movies; Virtualdub.

What is VirtualDub you ask?

VirtualDub is a video capture/processing utility for 32-bit Windows platforms (95/98/ME/NT4/2000/XP), licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL).  It lacks the editing power of a general-purpose editor such as Adobe Premiere, but is streamlined for fast linear operations over video.  It has batch-processing capabilities for processing large numbers of files and can be extended with third-party video filters.  VirtualDub is mainly geared toward processing AVI files, although it can read (not write) MPEG-1 and also handle sets of BMP images.

VirtualDub allows one to quick capture-and-encoding video and also is a utility that can trim and clean up video before exporting to tape or processing with another program.

Ok… so now you know what VirtualDub is but how do you use it?  Well, I found a great guide over at Doom9. They explain it in great detail and I admit that I had to read it a couple times in order to get the right setting for my capturing process.

Download page for VirtualDub

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Is you computer lagging?  Does your boot up time take forever? Have you thought of doing maintenance to your drive but are scared?   I have a simple, safe solution that comes in a nice application called JkDefrag.

JkDefrag comes in a command line utility however there is GUI available that makes defragging your hard drives easy.

Download JkDefrag

Download JkDefragGUI

JkDefragGUI is an Graphical User Interface which allows you to easily select all the features JkDefrag, a freeware defragmentation tool made by Jeroen Kessels has to offer.

But is can do a lot more. JkDefragGUI can schedule a defragmentation, install JkDefrag or it’s screensaver but can also do some small maintenance to your computer. It can be used to schedule a defragmentation of your system files like pagefile and registry files.

JkDefragGUI also supports CCleaner which can be used instead of the internal cleaning function. It can also erase any information which is left behind on your hard disk after erasing files. JkDefragGUI was created for people who don’t have the skills of an advanced user but still want to use the powerful features JkDefrag has to offer or for those people who like a GUI instead of using the command line.

JkDefragGUI is compatible with Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 2008, U3 capable flash memory and with BartPE pre-installed environment.

Tip: for best results on a single drive install of a Windows OS remember to release the page file and on the reboot enter into safe mode before running the defrag application. Once in safe mode remember to stop your antivirus; doing this will help in the optimization and speed of the defragmentation of your drive.

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