About two years ago I embarked upon a quest to find an alternative to Photoshop 6 that was affordable and would allow me to do more than just edit photographs.

This led me to PaintShop Pro 9 which I quite liked but felt that it started up slowly. When PSP X came out about four months later, I upgraded because the upgrade pricing was very reasonable and it was touted as being both much quicker to startup and less resource intensive than PSP 9 (and I was an idiot and opened my wallet without even downloading the trial first!). In practice, its startup was significantly slower and resource usage more intensive... I stayed away from PSP XI, having learned my lesson with the upgrade to X and noted the howls of protest from PSP sages that I encountered everywhere on the internet.

Despite this, I was thrilled when I won a full version in an online contest! However, although my initial installation incorporated the first patch, rather than improving upon X in the startup and resource utilizaiton departments, it is easily the worst of the three, taking over a minute and half to load! PSP 9, at 32 seconds to load, is positively QUICK in comparison.

Thus I found myself on another mission - to come up with a powerful alternative that wouldn’t cripple my aging notebook. Zaine’s excellent The Great Software List site led me to PhotoFiltre. It loads very quickly (13 seconds), has a simple, uncluttered GUI and does everything that I need it to do and then some. The free version (currently 6.27) is more than capable of replacing PaintShop Pro in my workflow, but I very quickly found myself springing for a license for the Studio version because I really wanted to support development.

What is Inksaver ? - That sounds like a silly question. It saves Ink or in other words Money because Inkjet Ink not only cost two arms and two legs, but is more expensive than vintage wine and oil at more than US$2000 a gallon.

And your Gosh it's cheap Guzzlejet (I mean Inkjet) printer is basically like a High powered SUV in that it is thirsty and drinks lots of it even when you don't step on the accelerator.

How do you fix the problem ?

In one word. Inksaver !

So if you want to save money, read on. And believe it or not, like Fineprint, (which also saves you Inkmoney https://www.donation...dex.php?topic=6519.0 )
and Print2Flash ( https://www.donation...dex.php?topic=7969.0 ),
Inksaver is unbelievably also another Work of Art and is almost idiot proof to use, and which I forgot about since it works wonderfully and so unobtrusively in the background.

Wubi - Painless, partion-free WindowsXP/Ubuntu dual booting

Wubi is an Ubuntu installer that you run from inside Windows.  It installs Ubuntu to a virtual disk file without making any changes to your partitions or doing any formats.  As such, it should be completely safe to install.  Since it is utilizing a virtual disk file on your hard drive, it has the advantage over live cds of retaining changes, installations, etc through rebooting of the system and allowing you to install as much as you want as long as you have the hard drive space to spare.  It also boots considerably faster than a live cd, and is almost as fast as a regular installation.  Unlike live cds, however, it does take up hard drive space and obviously leaves traces behind.

The Wubi program is a mere 9.9mb, but you will need the most recent ubuntu alternate iso.  You can either download it youself and put it in the same directory as Wubi before you run it, or you can have the program download it for you.  I chose to download it myself from a close mirror rather than letting the program download it.

...

Background: I wanted to read a small PDF file that contained a comparison of Vista fonts with WinXP fonts - so fired up Foxit Reader and was appauled that the render quality was so poor I could not see the text correctly.

So... here is a quick comparison of the render quality of all the free  PDF viewers that I could find.

Super Flexible File Synchronizer, soon to be renamed ExtremeSync         

If you're not using this type of software, let's start with what a synchronizer does. A synchronization program is used to backup, replicate, restore, and/or distribute files — to another computer; to a backup device; to another network; USB drive, and so on. The purpose is to have two complete copies of your data at any given time. A synchronization program can also restore lost or damaged files and settings if needed. Primarily it is used to keep a running, or rollover backup copy of your files to whatever destination or media you choose.

Why not just use a popular backup program? Good question, and the answer is you'll want both. While synchronization is similar, it's not the same thing. A synchronization program serves different needs than a backup program. Backup programs tend to focus their features on storing and then restoring files and data, whereas a synchronization program coordinates the unification of files between two (or more) locations, reconciling their differences according to your needs, thus providing an accurate and timely copy of one's files. Synchronization also has a "set it and forget it" quality where jobs or profiles can be automatically scheduled to run on any timetable you desire.

Once you work with a good and accurate synchronization program, you will quickly come to rely on it. Fortunately, there are several good programs in this software category. But Super Flexible File Synchronizer has distinguished itself by its accuracy, reliability, and killer feature set.

Jan-S posted about this little game earlier today: https://www.donation...dex.php?topic=8227.0.  After downloading it and trying it out, and laughing so hard that I cried, I had to let you all know what its all about.

This is a tiny little game (86kb!!!!!) that "simulates" sumo wrestling.  All you do is try to shove your opponent down.

The trick is that your wrestler moves like it has had way to much to drink.  Most rounds consist of running into your opponent, pushing once or twice, and laughing maniacally as one or both loose their balance and crash to the mat.  The first wrestler to contact the ground with something other than their feet loses.  After the round, the wrestlers try to stand up with comic results as they stumble around and fall into the walls surrounding the ring.

I haven't laughed so hard in ages.  My wife of two years told me that she has never heard me laugh as hard as I did when I first started playing.  I'm sure it will get old eventually (though the two player will probably extend that), but for the laughs and the fact that it is so tiny, I have to give this full marks: 5 out of 5. 

It won at BreakPoint 2007 (whatever that is): http://breakpoint.un...rgrund.net/after.php