Archive for: October 9, 2008

During a recent evaluation of ZoneAlarm Internet Security Suite 2009 I signed up for the free IdentityGuard service. ZoneAlarm users get a year of IdentityGuard free. I didn't think any more of it until today, when I got an e-mail notice warning that "Your IDENTITY GUARD® monitoring service has detected recent activity in your file." Alarming!

I quickly logged into the site and called up the incident report. TMCC? Who's that? A closer look revealed an account type of "Auto Financing" and a balance of $0. Aha! TM must be Toyota Motors. I recently made the last payment on an auto loan, and the termination of that loan was change enough to cause an IdentityGuard alert. It's encouraging to know that the service actually works! If this minor event is enough to trigger it, surely a real problem like a malefactor attempting to open credit in my name would be caught. - Neil J. Rubenking.

The PC Magazine Software Team has already shown you how to spruce up your videos without spending a penny, in our free video-editor roundup. Now, for folks who are looking to take their videos to the next level and aren't shy about dropping few dollars, we've rounded up our favorite consumer video editors.

The four editors included in this roundup each has something to offer for your video-editing needs. For the best overall value, our current Editors' Choice, CyberLink PowerDirector 7 Ultra, packs the optimal combination of speed and extensive features. Users looking for a capable editor that doesn't need a high-octane system to run smoothly will like Corel's VideoStudio Pro X2; it's a solid video editor that lets you work with HD content, yet runs great on less powerful PCs.

If simplicity is your top concern, Pinnacle Studio Ultimate Version 12 is the easiest of the four to use—it's a perfect starting point for beginners. But for you techies who prefer power over ease of use, Sony's Vegas Movie Studio 9 Platinum Pro Pack lets you get your hands dirty by giving you intricate control over the video-editing process.

Find out more by reading the complete roundup on PCMag.com.And check out our other recent software reviews, after the jump.

Adobe CS4 Coverage: It's about that time of the year when Adobe revamps its industry-leading design suite for creative professionals and serious amateurs. Check out our Adobe coverage page to get a sneak peek at what's in store for ...

Q: What I'd really love to be able to do is somehow search and select multiple comments to delete. Like, say, being able to delete all comments in a document that did not contain a certain text tag. A reviewer's second pass is labeled "2R" or something, and I have to delete all previous comments, only leaving those. - RDP.

A: Word doesn't offer any easy way to directly search and manipulate comments so you'll have to use a simple macro. It might look like this:

Sub RidComments()   Dim c As Comment   For Each c In ActiveDocument.Comments     If InStr(c.Range.Text, "2R")=0 Then       c.Delete     End If   Next c End Sub

The Comment object has a number of useful properties. The Author property identifies who wrote the comment, for example, and the Date property specifies when the comment was created. - Neil J. Rubenking.

Something that's remarkably annoying about the way the iPhone and the iPod Touch handle e-mail is that you can't compose messages in landscape mode. If you're surfing the Web and turn the iPhone sideways, the browser window turns, and if you touch the URL bar, a landscape keyboard appears. When you're in your e-mail however, turning the device sideways does nothing. Thanks to app developer Mike Schneider, an iPhone app called TouchType rescues us from portrait-mode e-mail editing.

TouchType is 99 cents and is available on the Apple App Store, either via iTunes on your desktop or directly on your iPhone or iPod Touch. Once the application is installed, you can either use it to compose your messages in landscape mode or you can start your message in portrait-mode and switch over to TouchType to finish your reply.

If you start your message in TouchType, the app auto-populates your e-mail with your text when you're finished. If you start a reply in the iPhone's native mail application, you can click the home button to go back to the home screen, open TouchType, and TouchType pulls any information you've already entered into your new message into its own interface so you can complete the message in landscape-mode and touch the send button to send the message. Unfortunately, the app only works with e-mail; notes and text messages are not supported.

A number of people will doubtlessly gripe that the app isn't free (although 99 cents isn't particularly steep) or complain that TouchType offers functionality that really should be in Apple's ...

We first wrote about "Artificial Beauty" here on AppScout in February 2007. Whitney Reynolds wrote of the Israeli researchers whose results are "noticeable, but not dramatic." The work continues, including a paper from this August's SIGGRAPH meeting.

"Data-Driven Enhancement of Facial Attractiveness" is all about making the human face more beautiful through mathematics. We've known for a while a more symmetrical face is a prettier face. USA Weekend quoted studies, such as those conducted by Randy Thornhill (University of New Mexico) and Karl Grammer (University of Vienna), which "confirm that beauty is simply balance: The more symmetrical a face, the more appealing it appears."

A few examples after the jump.

Turning what we know into a practical application isn't easy. The geometry of a face must be quantified, before subtle changes can be applied. No one is looking at aesthetics. It's math, math math.

Source: Data-Driven Enhancement of Facial Attractiveness - "Given a frontal portrait as input we first (semi-automatically) identify a set of facial landmarks (feature points). Using a planar graph with these feature points as vertices, we extract a vector of distances corresponding to the lengths of the edges in the graph. This vector is fed into the beautification engine, which yields a modified vector of distances, possessing a higher predicted beauty score than that of the original vector. Next, the planar graph is re-embedded in the plane attempting to make the new edge lengths as close as possible to the modified distances. The resulting new positions of the feature points define a 2D warp field that we use to warp the ...

If you've ever been stuck with a non-functioning computer and a functioning iPod that has all your music on it, you are not alone. What's worse is if you have to format or replace your hard drive or reinstall your operating system. Now you're left with a clean hard drive, but the only backup of your digital music collection lives on the iPod and leaves you no way to retrieve it. If you're a Mac user, Senuti can help. Senuti (iTunes spelled backwards) is a tiny application that will bypass iTunes and restore your music collection from an iPod. It can also play the music on your iPod without forcing a sync.

Senuti will help you recover the contents of your iPod if your music library is somehow lost or damaged. It's a Universal Binary, which means the app works equally well on older PowerPC Macs and newer Intel Macs, and supports virtually every version of iTunes, including 8. Senuti is free, and requires Mac OS 10.4 to run. For Mac users still on Mac OS 10.3, there's an older version of Senuti available.

The app works because a copies of your iTunes contents--library, playlists, preferences, and file locations--are all stored in a database file on your iPod. Senuti uses that file to quickly recreate your iTunes library and all of its contents on your desktop or laptop. Senuti also allows you to select the destination folder for your restores, so you don't overwrite your iTunes library without reviewing the files first.

You could certainly enable disk use on ...

David Kernell, who was indicted on one count of accessing a computer without authorization, pleaded innocent to the charges on Wednesday.

Kernell, the son of Rep. Mike Kernell of Memphis, Tenn., who is a Democrat, was accused of reverse-engineering the password of Gov. Sarah Palin's Yahoo email account, and accessing it without her permission.

Kernell was released without posting bond, but the court imposed several conditions, according to the Associated Press. Kernell, an economics student at the University of Tennessee, is not allowed to own a computer and can use the Internet only for checking e-mail and doing class work, the AP reported.

The trial is set for Dec. 16. If convicted, Kernell could face up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

McAfee reg VirusScan reg Enterprise protects your desktop and file servers from a wide range of threats including viruses worms Trojan horses and potentially unwanted code and programs McAfee reg VirusScan reg 8 takes anti virus protection to the next level integrating elements of intrusion prevention and firewall technology into a single solution for PCs and file servers This powerful combination delivers truly proactive protection from the newest of today rsquo s threats including buffer overflow exploits and blended attacks and features advanced outbreak management responses to reduce the damage and costs of outbreaks Everything is managed by McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator reg or ProtectionPilot trade for scalable security policy compliance and graphical reporting nbsp

Google, it seems, is getting an early start to its annual April Fool's shenanigans. First the company added a "Goggles" feature to Gmail, in order to cut down on drunk e-mailings, and now YouTube is taking a page directly out of Webcomic XKCD with its Read Aloud Comment feature.

The above comic (shamelessly stolen from Google Blogoscoped) ran a few weeks ago. It's a fairly sublime look at the horror show that is the YouTube comment system, infamous amongst anyone who has taken the time to do more than just watch funny videos on the site (not recommended).

The new feature lets users preview comments aloud using speech-to-text technology. The biggest regret here, I think, is that the feature is not mandatory--and that YouTube didn't borrow some of those simple math problems from the Goggles feature.

Have you ever glanced over your child's shoulder at the computer screen only to see a URL that seems... weird? Deviantart.com? What could that be? Something, well, deviant? The new free SiteCAT lookup service from parental control vendor CyberPatrol makes it easy to check out any Web site. Just type in the URL at http://www.cyberpatrol.com/lookup.asp to learn how CyberPatrol categorizes the site.

It's not just a matter of good versus bad sites: CyberPatrol assigns 45 distinct categories. Nine categories are "blocked," among them Adult, Gambling, and XXX. Among the 36 "allowed" categories are innocuous ones such as Arts, Entertainment, and News. (That suspicious-sounding deviantart.com is correctly identified as an Arts site.) The "allowed" group also includes some you might consider mildly worrisome, like Chat, Lingerie, and Weapon Related. What you do about the answer is up to you--there's no actual blocking involved. Maybe you don't agree with the category assigned to a site? No problem! The results page includes a large panel for your comments.

The service is similar in some ways to SiteAdvisor and LinkScanner, both of which let you enter a URL and receive a rating. But CyberPatrol doesn't plan to expand its SiteCAT lookup service to mark up search results the way the other two do. It's just a simple way to find out about the sites your kids (or employees) visit.

Filed under: Desktops, LaptopsAMD’s breakup into two separate companies is positive to have wide-ranging affect in the industry, and unsurprisingly, Intel’s among the first to react — it’s warning that it has “serious questions about that transaction” as it relates to its patent cross-licensing agr…

design blogs VoIP software palm sun microsystems developer msn linux aol microsoft itunes server internet computers windows ibm electronics apple mozilla open source web hardware blogging games mac yahoo seo video iphone hackers red hat hacking fun rss google podcast macintosh

Gadgets

Let’s get one thing straight: You can’t go wrong by buying an iPod. Any iPod. But that’s not to say the decisions amidst which iPod to buy aren’t tough. In fact, it can be downright mighty. The tiny iPod shuffle is awesome for working out, but it lacks a screen. The iPod nano has a screen bu…

google video palm aol blogging open source server electronics games developer fun sun microsystems web macintosh design iphone hackers mac mozilla apple hacking computers red hat msn software microsoft seo rss VoIP linux windows itunes blogs podcast hardware yahoo ibm internet

Macintosh