"I See You!!!" - Yugma

Yugma is a desktop sharing tool. It has a premium version with reasonable prices but since we don't like spending money we're going to talk about the free version.

Yugma is fairly simple to use. Just go to http://www.yugma.com/ and create yourself an account. Once you have done this you can start a session. Once your session is created you can tell others what your Session ID is and tell them to go to yugma.com on their PC's and click "Join Session." From there they will be asked to enter their name and Session ID and, ta da, now they can see your screen. If you want to see their screen just click the "Change Presenter" button and select the user who's screen you would like to see. They will have to allow you to on their end but other than that its simple as pie. You are also not limited to one attendee. With the free version you get up to ten. Use Yugma to hold meetings when no other room is available. "But how do we get 10 people on the phone?", you say. Well Yugma provides a conference line for free. Unfortunatly its not toll free, but hopefully with the use of cell phones, VOIP, or even Skype that won't be to much of an issue.

When you first start using Yugma your "free" version has all the functionality of the Premium version. Most of the features will downgrade after fifteen days but I still believe you are left with enough to make Yugma a valuable tool. Here is the complete list of free features:

• Up to 10 attendees
• Desktop Sharing
• Annotations and Whiteboarding tools
• Free Teleconfrencing (only long distance charges apply)
• Change Presenter
• Public and Private chat (send messages to all attendees or just one)
• Cross Operating System compatibility (Windows, Mac, and Linux)
• Widgets (for use on your desktop, website, or emails)
• MS Outlook and Skype compatibility (Use Action>Invite to Share Desktops to send email invites to your session)

The only feature I wish carried over to the free version is the "Give Mouse and Keyboard Control" feature. This would be great for inviting someone to help fix your computer or to fix someone else's. I use Yugma, as I said, for meetings and to help others with their computer problems (seeing their screen sure does make helping them a tad less frustrating). I don't, however, use Yugma to connect into my many PC's. For that I use LogMeIn but that's another post.

Go to Yumga

Resize Pics Online Free - picresize 2.0

How many times did you want to simply make an image smaller? Whether it be for sending a picture to friends via email or posting it to an e-bay auction, this always seems to be something that has to be done. This especially seems to be the case with digital photographs taken from your handy dandy digital camera because your camera assumes that you wanted to print that hilarious picture of the kids picking grandpa's nose as he lay fast asleep in his Lazy Boy in gargantuan movie poster size.

Well why don't you give this a try. Picresize 2.0 is a website that lets you upload an image of any size and resize it to, you guessed it, any size. It also has the ability to crop your images as well as apply some spiffy effects like rotation, grayscale, and even oil paint (sorry no sepia for you wild west old-timey picture fans). There is a limited batch mode which lets you resize multiple photos at the same time and quick mode lets users that are more familiar with Picresize's capabilities upload and download their photos on the same page. If you are having trouble figuring out how the site works, there is a even a handy video tutorial.

And if all of this wasn't enough, there is promise of a Picresize 3.0 right there on the first page. Who knows what fun photo fine-tuning features are coming next?

Go to Picresize 2.0

The New and Improved Winamp 5.5

This is my first post anywhere ever. I hope to do more in the beginning and will eventually slow to about 1 or 2 posts a week. Oh well, let's get started.

Winamp has been my media player of choice for quite a long time. It's price point has always been a plus for me (free) and that has always out-weighed its short-comings. Well the good news is its still the same price less all those short-comings. No more are the days of trying to fit the Control, Playlist, Media Library, Video, and Visualization windows onto the same screen. With the new Winamp 5.5 comes the new default skin "Bento." This skin is simplicity at it's best. It is the first of its kind in that its the first SUI (Single User Interface) skin for Winamp. Yup, that's right, the first single window Winamp. The control window is coupled with an "Info" section which can be changed into the Equalizer, a mini-Visualization window, among other things. To the right of that is the playlist section. Below all this is a tabbed-interface with the Media Library, Video, Visualization, and Browser.

I believe that this is the first media player to give iTunes a run for its money. There really isn't anything that iTunes can do that Winamp cannot. It even has built in iPod and Podcast support. The new Auto-Tag feature makes organizing your music a breeze. I personally like the new "Smart Views". "Smart Views" are more of a filter than a playlist. For instance, I have a lot of music for other people in my music collection. Well I don't feel like looking through all those files just to get to my music so I gave all of my music files a specific comment that I filter by in my "Smart View". Its like my own Media Library inside my Media Library.

Bottom line, Winamp is the perfect all-purpose media player. It can basically do everything you need it to do and if it can't well there is probably a plugin to fix that for you too. The only thing I don't use Winamp for is playing High Quality (i.e. HD and DVD quality) movies on my Television. For that I use VideoLAN's VLC Player, but thats another post.

Download Winamp