Quick Screen Capture is a powerful screen capture and image editing software. Can take and print screenshot from any part of the screen in 10 ways, save file in bmp/jpg/gif format and also can add some annotation. It supports auto saving, copying image to the clipboard. Version 3.0.1 is available for free download
Main Features
Can capture any part of your screen in as many as 10 ways. Details
Supports mini operations to capture an exact area.
Supports hotkey. Define your own hotkeys.
Can automatically save captured images.
Can Save images in 3 popular formats: BMP/JPG/GIF
Copy image to clipboard manually or automatically.
Runs in the system tray area. Supports start minimized.
Auto saving history records.
It has general editing function and one can edit while capture itself. Capturing, editing and saving images for your blogs and websites is very easy. ENJOY !
Steps to Use
1. Download and Install on your PC.
Download from site 1 shown with a round in the image above for which download security is ok by webroot.
2. From the menu select capture.
3. You can take a full screen picture including menu and title bar also as below.
Images of windows, buttons, various shapes like rectangle, circle, square and polygon can be taken.
4. To capture hotkeys can be created. Default hotkey is F11. To create your own hotkey go to menu settings > configure dialog box. Now set focus to the hotkey edit box. Click on the edit box and show the cursor in it and press down the keys you want to set as hotkey. Click "OK" button to enable the setting. If you still see a "Register hotkey error" popup, you can set it again until the popup doesn't appear.
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TATA Tele Services Ltd and Canada-based Research in Motion (RIM), a global leader in wireless technology announced the launch of the dual mode (CDMA + GSM) BlackBerry smartphone in India. The stylish BlackBerry 8830 world edition smartphone will soon be available countrywide. Together with a 'One World-One Number' R-UIM (removable user identity module) card powered by Tata Indicom, users can access email and data as well as make and receive domestic and international calls nationwide on the Tata Indicom CDMA network in India and around the world on GSM/GPRS networks.
Design : It employs the thicker, wider PDA form factor found in the GSM-only BlackBerry 8800. At 4.4 x 2.6 x 0.5 inches and 4.7 ounces, it has a nice heft and feels solid in your hand.
Features : It has a sleek and stylish design with a full QWERTY keyboard, intuitive trackball navigation system and large bright display, high speed email and messaging capabilities, the CDMA-based BlackBerry® 8830 World Edition offers international roaming capability on GSM/GPRS networks.
Some of the powerful features include email, built in GPS, WI-FI support, maps, browser, instant messaging, organizer, media player, and much more.
The BlackBerry 8830 is enterprise friendly. Options like the Browser, organizer, corporate data access, BlackBerry maps and GPS allow you to find the information you need. BlackBerry 8830 also features a Bluetooth and speaker-independent voice dialing.
Tata Indicom has come up with 3 Data Tariff Plans for BlackBerry 8830
(1) Plan Name:GOLD 250
Rental:Rs250/month
Free Data Usage(in KB):Nil
Additional Data Usage:50paise/KB
(2) Plan Name:GOLD 500
Rental:Rs500/month
Free Data Usage(in KB): 500
Additional Data Usage:15paise/KB
(3) Plan Name:GOLD 900
Rental:Rs900/month
Free Data Usage(in KB):Unlimited
Additional Data Usage:NA
The above Gold Plans need to be topped up with any Voice Plan.
International Roaming Ussage in CDMA/GSM countries Rs5/10 KB.
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blackberry smartphone CDMA + GSM BlackBerry 8830
A few years back, being Green meant you participated in recycling programs, commuted to work on your bike when the mood struck, and considered purchasing a hybrid but balked after filling up your SUV for a mere $50.
Now, in 2008, Green, once a buzzword, is a member of the world’s lexicon where the environmental impact of an activity is hugely important. Too, with rising fuel and energy costs, going Green is not only an environmental choice but also a sound fiscal choice.
While the benefits, both environmental and fiscal, are quite lucid, public apathy for going Green has always been a problem, but, with the advent of Web 2.0, social networks have suddenly emerged driving participation in Green activities for thousands of users. An extremely compelling website I stumbled upon recently, bringing together thousands of environmental web users, is CarbonRally.com.
CarbonRally, a web-based activism platform, offers individuals and groups a fun, simple, and social way of creating measurable environmental change. However, unlike many environmental websites out there, CarbonRally.com provides users the opportunity to create “environmental challenges” where teams or individuals can compete against each other to maximize their carbon savings.
While CarbonRally certainly brings more fun into being environmental, the social network contained within the site is an environmental idea engine where user created challenges drive innovative ways to be Green. Who would have realized replacing just three of your light bulbs at home with Compact Fluorescent Bulbs would result in a reduction in carbon emissions by 2.1 lbs per day!
As I navigated the site, my thoughts drifted towards Green IT and how the Green movement has been embraced by global organizations. Many organizations are on the forefront of Green IT where PC virtualization, eco-friendly data centers, and power management techniques all have been implemented on the enterprise level. But, not much has been done to challenge large organizations to be Green.
While CarbonRally.com introduces the concept of communal responsibility of being Green on a very small scale, I believe organizations need to work together and challenge each other to become better global citizens in an effort to reduce carbon emissions. Like the users of CarbonRally.com, organizations need to take a cue from their customers and shareholders and actively change their usage habits and work towards being Green.
As more ideas are generated and energy usage and carbon emissions benchmarks are mandated by, not a governing body, but rather a community of environmentally responsible organizations, being Green will not be the exception but the norm.
For more information on Green IT and Green Computing, check out Wikipedia.
If you want to learn more about Green IT check out this story from ComputerWorld Magazine.
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Apparently, when CERN isn't colliding particles (and ripping massive holes in the space-time continuum), it's busy working on a new "internet" which will be 10,000 times faster than our current version. The project -- known as "the grid" -- is built atop completely fiber optic networks, and utilizes modern routing centers.
By keeping traffic out of our current phone and data systems, the researchers have been able to achieve speeds heretofore unseen on previous networks. The system connects from CERN to 11 centers around the globe, and will be switched on when the Large Hadron Collider is activated, on what the group is calling "Red Button Day."
Project heads believe a network with this speed will lead to all sorts of futuristic innovations -- like true cloud computing, holographic video conferencing, and really, really fast pirating of the entire Nightmare on Elm Street series.
THE internet could soon be made obsolete. The scientists who pioneered it have now built a lightning-fast replacement capable of downloading entire feature films within seconds.
At speeds about 10,000 times faster than a typical broadband connection, “the grid” will be able to send the entire Rolling Stones back catalogue from Britain to Japan in less than two seconds.
The latest spin-off from Cern, the particle physics centre that created the web, the grid could also provide the kind of power needed to transmit holographic images; allow instant online gaming with hundreds of thousands of players; and offer high-definition video telephony for the price of a local call.
David Britton, professor of physics at Glasgow University and a leading figure in the grid project, believes grid technologies could “revolutionise” society. “With this kind of computing power, future generations will have the ability to collaborate and communicate in ways older people like me cannot even imagine,” he said.
he power of the grid will become apparent this summer after what scientists at Cern have termed their “red button” day - the switching-on of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the new particle accelerator built to probe the origin of the universe. The grid will be activated at the same time to capture the data it generates.
Cern, based near Geneva, started the grid computing project seven years ago when researchers realised the LHC would generate annual data equivalent to 56m CDs - enough to make a stack 40 miles high.
This meant that scientists at Cern - where Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the web in 1989 - would no longer be able to use his creation for fear of causing a global collapse.
This is because the internet has evolved by linking together a hotchpotch of cables and routing equipment, much of which was originally designed for telephone calls and therefore lacks the capacity for high-speed data transmission.
By contrast, the grid has been built with dedicated fibre optic cables and modern routing centres, meaning there are no outdated components to slow the deluge of data. The 55,000 servers already installed are expected to rise to 200,000 within the next two years.
Professor Tony Doyle, technical director of the grid project, said: “We need so much processing power, there would even be an issue about getting enough electricity to run the computers if they were all at Cern. The only answer was a new network powerful enough to send the data instantly to research centres in other countries.”
That network, in effect a parallel internet, is now built, using fibre optic cables that run from Cern to 11 centres in the United States, Canada, the Far East, Europe and around the world.
One terminates at the Rutherford Appleton laboratory at Harwell in Oxfordshire.
From each centre, further connections radiate out to a host of other research institutions using existing high-speed academic networks.
It means Britain alone has 8,000 servers on the grid system – so that any student or academic will theoretically be able to hook up to the grid rather than the internet from this autumn.
Ian Bird, project leader for Cern’s high-speed computing project, said grid technology could make the internet so fast that people would stop using desktop computers to store information and entrust it all to the internet.
“It will lead to what’s known as cloud computing, where people keep all their information online and access it from anywhere,” he said.
Computers on the grid can also transmit data at lightning speed. This will allow researchers facing heavy processing tasks to call on the assistance of thousands of other computers around the world. The aim is to eliminate the dreaded “frozen screen” experienced by internet users who ask their machine to handle too much information.
The real goal of the grid is, however, to work with the LHC in tracking down nature’s most elusive particle, the Higgs boson. Predicted in theory but never yet found, the Higgs is supposed to be what gives matter mass.
The LHC has been designed to hunt out this particle - but even at optimum performance it will generate only a few thousand of the particles a year. Analysing the mountain of data will be such a large task that it will keep even the grid’s huge capacity busy for years to come.
Although the grid itself is unlikely to be directly available to domestic internet users, many telecoms providers and businesses are already introducing its pioneering technologies. One of the most potent is so-called dynamic switching, which creates a dedicated channel for internet users trying to download large volumes of data such as films. In theory this would give a standard desktop computer the ability to download a movie in five seconds rather than the current three hours or so.
Additionally, the grid is being made available to dozens of other academic researchers including astronomers and molecular biologists.
It has already been used to help design new drugs against malaria, the mosquito-borne disease that kills 1m people worldwide each year. Researchers used the grid to analyse 140m compounds - a task that would have taken a standard internet-linked PC 420 years.
“Projects like the grid will bring huge changes in business and society as well as science,” Doyle said.
“Holographic video conferencing is not that far away. Online gaming could evolve to include many thousands of people, and social networking could become the main way we communicate.
“The history of the internet shows you cannot predict its real impacts but we know they will be huge.”
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The resulting wave of technical innovation has put cameras everywhere, from satellites to cellphones. But bigger changes in the technology are yet to come.
Thanks to continued advances in software and processing power, research labs are continually exploring new ideas about what cameras and photographs can do.
Freezing motion
Cameras use short exposures, software or even moving sensors to correct for camera shake. But they can't remove motion blur – the fuzzy impressions created by objects moving during the exposure.
Prevention: During the exposure their camera moves quickly to the left before gradually coming to a halt and then accelerating in the opposite direction.The movement ensures that, regardless of its speed, any object moving to either the left or the right is perfectly captured by the camera for a fraction of the exposure.
The object is out of focus at other times during the exposure, and so, in the final photograph, all objects appear as a blurry mess. Crucially, though, all objects – whether moving or static during the exposure – are blurred to the same degree, so the final image can be "de-blurred" quickly and easily.
Goodbye to glare
Although glare caused by bright light sources can be used artistically, it ruins many more photos than it enhances.Glare happens because not all light that hits a lens is focused onto a camera's sensor. A small fraction is reflected inside the lens, emerging in unpredictable places. If a light source is bright enough, this effect can bleach out parts of an image.although rogue light can emerge from any part of a lens, it is always tightly confined to one direction, rather like a laser beam. If light from that direction can be filtered out, glare disappears.
Prevention: A mask is designed that fits between a camera's lens and image sensor, peppered with rows of small holes that each act like a pinhole camera. Each hole captures a tiny circular chunk of the camera lens's output and focuses it on the sensor.
The image on the camera sensor is composed of hundreds of small dots, a bit like a Pointillist painting.
Because glare emerging from the lens is confined to a well defined beam, it only shows up in some of those pinholes, as a tiny bright spot in some of those dots, producing a "salt and pepper" effect across the area that would normally be bleached out entirely.
Software can fill these bright spots in using colour from the rest of the pinhole, producing a glare-free image. This method currently limits the final resolution to the number of holes in the mask, but researchers hope to improve that.
Pared-down pixels
Digital cameras have been marketed for years using the number of pixels or megapixels on the sensor as a gauge of how much detail they can capture.Rice University fellows have developed a one-pixel camera that produces surprisingly good results and think megapixel sensors are wasteful.The pair points out that most of the millions of pixels a camera records are discarded when the final compressed image is produced. But a mathematical technique makes it possible to work backwards, starting with a small sample of information and essentially expanding it into a higher quality image.
The one-pixel camera contains an array of tiny mirrors where the sensor would usually be, each capable of directing light onto the single pixel sensor. At any one time, the camera directs a randomly selected half of the mirrors onto the sensor, capturing just half the image one pixel at a time. That process is repeated up to 200,000 times in just a few seconds to produce a dataset that can be extrapolated into a final image with more pixels than were actually captured.The mathematics behind the technique has improved enough over recent years to make the single-pixel camera "practical and not just a mathematical curiosity" say the researchers. That could help improve battery performance, because standard image compression is very power intensive, they add, although the process still needs to become faster.
Shooting the invisible
Satellite views of the Earth are often obscured by cloud. But a camera that exploits quantum physics to photograph images it can't directly see would have no such problems.University of Maryland fellows have built a prototype of just such a camera that exploits quantum effects that can link pairs of photons.
A 'splitter' divides photons from a single light source into two beams, one headed towards the camera sensor and the other towards the object to be photographed.
When a photon bounces off the toy, it is recorded by a photon detector beside it. Occasionally the photon detector and camera record a photon at exactly the same time. Those two photons are linked by a quantum effect called "two-photon interference", and both occupy a similar position in their respective beams.
Whenever a photon reaches the camera at exactly the same time that its linked partner is detected bouncing off the toy and onto the photon detector's surface, a point is recorded in the image at the corresponding position. After 1000 or more linked photons reach the camera sensor, an image of object becomes clear, even though the camera itself has no view of it.
For further details go to the page Future of Photography.
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About Blog Author - Madhusudan Tata
I am an Engg. grad. of REC-Rourkela and an EPBM grad of IIM-Calcutta. I am in Indian Steel Industry since yr 1990 and still continuing. Pursuing blogging since Sep'08.
December, 2008 is the third month after starting this blog. This month I will be writing posts more in Computer, Software, Gadgets, Tech News and Tech Tips. Keep coming to my blog, read and comment and bookmark them.
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