Posts Tagged ‘free’

Posted on July 14, 2008 - by snipe

Track Your Stolen Laptop (for Free) with Adeona

Adeona is the first Open Source system for tracking the location of your lost or stolen laptop that does not rely on a proprietary, central service. This means that you can install Adeona on your laptop and go — there’s no need to rely on a single third party. What’s more, Adeona addresses a critical privacy goal different from existing commercial offerings. It is privacy-preserving. This means that no one besides the owner (or an agent of the owner’s choosing) can use Adeona to track a laptop. Unlike other systems, users of Adeona can rest assured that no one can abuse the system in order to track where they use their laptop.

From the Adeona website:

Adeona is named after the Roman goddess of safe returns. This system is the result of recent academic research started at the University of Washington, with participants now also at the University of California San Diego and the University of California Davis. The foundations of the Adeona design — and an analysis of its security and privacy properties — are published in a research paper at the 2008 USENIX Security Symposium.

Best of all, Adeona is free, and has downloads available for Windows, Mac and Linux. As an added bonus, Mac Powerbook users can configure Adeona to work with the built-in iSight camera and freeware software isightcapture to take a photo of your laptop-mooking perp. Like your location information, these images are privacy-protected so that only the laptop owner (or an agent of the owner’s choosing) can access them.

Learn more at the Adeona website, or get started with Adeona now!

Posted on June 27, 2008 - by snipe

Cinemaphiles Stay Organized with Coollector

For the movie buffs, this free app let’s you track movies (DVDs, VHS, BLU-RAY, you name it) that you own, don’t own but have seen, have loaned out to others, want to see, want to own, and so on. It can be used to store your movie library information and even find the lowest prices on movies you want to own. The internal database has over 68,000 movie titles, with a built-in encyclopedia of over 89,000 actors and 42,000 titles. And best of all, it’s free and free of spyware or malware - so download it today. Windows only.

Posted on June 22, 2008 - by snipe

Free Online Image Editors

Even if you’ve got a good graphics package (and more specifically if you don’t), there may be times when you just need something lightweight to resize or crop images. Fortunately, there are two great options available to you that make basic image editing a breeze.

Resize2Email:

This handy little app is lightweight and fast. The available options are pretty basic - you can upload an image to the server and crop, resize, and/or rotate the image. This website is so easy, I had recommended it to one of the editors at a newspaper I was working at, and he loved me for it. One nice option is that you can preset the size of the crop box - so if you know you need an image to be 300 pixels wide for a predefined image block, Resize2Email makes that a breeze. Although I have Photoshop (and several other graphic design packages) installed on all of my machines, I still use Resize2Email quite often because its fast and easy, and I can do what I needed to do using their website before Photoshop would even be done loading. (I have a lot of fonts. No, I mean a lot. Really.) Check it out at Resize2Email.Com!

Photoshop Express:

Before you get too excited, this is a pared down version of Photoshop - considerable pared down, but really, in a web app, that’s probably not a bad thing - and it still gives you 90% of the tools that anyone would need for mid-level photo corrections and manipulation. It allows cropping, lighting corrections, hue manipulation, and a ton more. Its definitely more feature-rich than Resize2Email, but it requires a sign-up, and its a flash application, so it can be a little slow on older machines. It also offers the ability to interface with your photos on Facebook, Flickr, and severak other online photo storage communities. Check it out at Photoshop.Com/express!