Digital Inspiration

Digital TVs with LCD or Plasma displays give near perfect pictures but when you try to capture a CRT TV screen with a digital camera, you are bound to see some scan lines. So how to take a solid, complete picture of the CRT TV screen with your digital camera ? If you have a TV Tuner card in your PC, the bundled software (or ChrisTV, Windows Movie Maker) will easily let you take screenshots of any TV show frame. But if you want to shoot your TV with a camera, you have to do it very slowly as Dave Johnson explains- you need to use a shutter speed of less than 1/30 second. The easiest way to do that is to set your camera to its shutter priority mode (usually indicated by an "S") and use the camera controls to change the shutter speed until you see a speed of 1/15, 1/20, or 1/25 in the viewfinder. What if your camera doesn't have a shutter priority mode? Well, try the program mode. Usually, you can shift the shutter speed up or down by using the camera's controls--the ...

At the Macworld Expo 2006, Adobe announced Adobe Lightroom [codenamed Shadowland ] as an alternative to Apple Aperture . Adobe Lightroom combines features and technologies from a number of the applications within the Creative Suite. The majority comes from Photoshop Camera Raw plug-in and the Adobe Bridge asset manager, though other parts have their heritage in the InDesign and GoLive layout packages. Existing Adobe customers were concerned that Adobe might replace Adobe Bridge with Lightroom in future. However, Gunar Penikis, Adobe Bridge Product Manager, says that Adobe has no such plans. According to Gunar, Adobe Lightroom is highly tailored for a pro photographer workflow while Adobe Bridge is designed to be the file management hub for the creative professional. Bridge is focussed on being at the center of the creative workflow - for print, web and video.

Robert Cringely of Infoworld calls ZoneAlarm a perfect spy and further writes that ZoneAlarm Security Suite has been phoning home , even when told not to. James Borck discovered ZA 6.0 was surreptitiously sending encrypted data back to four different servers, despite disabling all of the suite’s communications options. Zone Labs denied the flaw for nearly two months, then eventually chalked it up to a “bug” in the software - even though instructions to contact the servers were set out in the program’s XML code. ZoneLabs says a fix for the flaw will be coming soon and users can get around the bug by modifying their Host file settings . As ZoneLabs suggests, to block ZoneAlarm Firewall from phoning home , add the following line to your Windows hosts file: # Block access to ZoneLabs Server 127.0.0.1 zonelabs.com Remember that blocking access to ZoneLab Servers would also block access to Smart Defence Advisor, AntiSpyware and Antivirus updates.

PCWelt, a German computer magazine, rated Copernic Desktop Search (CDS) as best of breed when compared to Google Desktop Search 2, MSN Desktop Search 2.5 and Yahoo Desktop Search 1.2. The magazine cited CDS' ease of use, concise search results and video and music search as the top reasons why it surpassed its competition. [ via ] Meanwhile EMC announced that it has added Google Desktop for Enterprise to its single-query search function on the Documentum Enterprise Content Integration (ECI) Services to find unstructured data across an enterprise. EMC already supports Google Web Search and Google Search appliance.

Marc Leibowitz, director of strategic partnerships at Google, speaks on revenue sharing with Adsense Publishers. JenSense recently quoted a NYTimes report on Shawn Hogan that says Google pays Adsense publishers 78.5 cents on the dollar as revenue share. The NYTimes report author Bob Tedeschi derived the magical figure 78.5 from the latest Form 10-Q given in the SEC filings . Though Google has never officially disclosed details on revenue sharing, Redmond Report points to a FolioMag story where Marc Leibowitz, director of strategic partnerships at Google, speaks on Adsense Publisher cut: As a rule, Google pays out 50 cents of every dollar to partners - and can range up to the full dollar, depending on the size of the relationship Marc quoted this figure while responding to reports that Adsense publishers revenue from the Google’s AdSense contextual search advertising program seemed to decline. Marc also said that Google is making a concerted effort to weed out “made-...