I'll share another piece of bloat-free software I re-discovered today thanks to Fletch: The XviD codec. I tried it today in Windows 7 instead of what I usually install (DivX) and I must say that it's a LOT smoother than DivX when you are editing video, and it reads DivX-encoded content without any problem. With DivX, fast-forwarding and jumping to a specific point while cutting videos together or while synchronizing subtitles was a pain in the neck, but XviD runs smooth as a hot knife in butter. (And I recently wasted $ in upgrading my DivX license... ) Here's the link to download XviD for Windows: (Sorry, OSX, there's no XviD build for you) http://www.xvid.org/Downloads.15.0.html Tip: if you plan to save your sequences for further edit in Windows Live Movie Maker or any other editor, it's best to set an i-frame (or keyframe) every 30 frames. This will make seeking to a point and rewinding even smoother. To do this, Click the "more" button next to the General Purpose quality preset, [image: naoq_01.PNG] Say yes in the next dialog, and enter a maximum i-frame interval of 30. [image: dUv7_02.PNG] As I said, do this if you plan to further edit your video, as this way it will be faster when seeking.

sad...funny but sad.

They'll have to get much cheaper before they tempt me...and I'd probably only use them to read stuff from Project Gutenberg and the like. If I'm paying good money for a contemporary title, I want it in wood pulp. Also, I think all the Amazon readers have a huge discrepancy between the screen size and device size...what percentage of the time are you actually going to be using the keyboard they devote so much real estate to? Edit: I see those nice folks at PG have already made it simple to get thousands of free titles onto Kindle. http://ireaderreview.com/2008/01/18/getting-project-gutenberg-books-on-your-kindle/

The colour cube one reminds me of a DC jim made, does pretty much the same thing and looks similarly cool.

@unknownuser said: Looks a bit 'gimmicky', but the cooling aspect would certainly be of benefit... I stick a pencil under the back of mine to lift it a bit and keep it cool Exactly. I also use something to keep it away from the desk for better cooling. Most of these "official" laptop stands even have fans built in and push the air towards the normal coolers of the laptop.

Basically CAD, 3d modellation, Photoshop, Rendering.

What about realising Sketchup's inference engine in javascript and using SVG (or maybe better O3D) for the graphics. This is what the Google Building Maker uses. It would work on nearly ANY operating system.... At the current time, I would not like to edit big projects in a javascript app because of performance. But the increasing use of cloud computing by google makes me hopeful. It would be possible in far future and Building Maker is a step in this direction. I think the intuitive way of modeling in Sketchup is idealfor portable touch devices. But a real "iPhone" or "Android" version of Sketchup would be similar to the Sketchup for Linux requests and would need in some way a completely new development.

Thanks for the tip, William. However, what I was looking for was a way to apply this to thousands of images in a short time, and so far Irfanview via the command line has been the only effective way.

ha.. i was talking about the first 3 in the list.

Thanks for the heads up, Remus... (wonder why I haven't received this info from Adobe... I'm have an Adobe ID, since I'm a registered user of the CS3 package as well as Lightroom 2...)

Hi. Has anyone found a solution for the problem Solo mentioned earlier? I've got Win XP 64 and the plugin doesn't work with the 64 bit Demo. There isn't any menu or toolbar of Fryrender in Sketchup. But it doesn't give an error. Thanks

Thanks Solo, I will try it and I will wait for TheaRender

@frederik said: You might also find the free XnView handy... Yes, it's very handy if you use HDR's ... since no other image viewers don't create thumbnails for HDR-s

It's a bit over my budget but thanks for the advice.

nice! this works perfectly. thanks!

Just had a final look through using an app called Disk Investigator that allowed me raw access to all the clusters on the HD. Did a scan for text I knew was present, but I wasn't able to find the version I was looking for. At least not intact. Whatever wasn't an old version turned out to be a scrambled mess. Think the overwrite happened a couple of days ago - so there'd been quite a bit of disk activity. I was hoping for an release of Selection Toys v2.0 this weekend - not any more. Buggerit!

modelhead, could you explain the techniques that you mentioned here? Besides turning on hardware acceleration, I wasn't aware that there were techniques that could be applied to speed up a scene. I'm very interested as this could help out with speed issues.

I have a 22" Samsung now and I use it with its "native" resolution; 1680x1050. Some things are a bit tiny (especially for my wrong eyes) but generally speaking, I am fine with it.

I used to think that it must have been Dell who were funding Psystar, but after this latest move, I can't help feeling now that it is Steve Ballmer & Microsoft pushing this. You have to remember that a Mac is a 'product' NOT necessarily a PC as such (although it is!). While PC's are quite capable of running OS X, you miss out on the elegance of an Apple product- and lets face it, Apple's products do look wonderful don't they? I was a big Dieter Rams/ Braun fan too you know http://gizmodo.com/343641/1960s-braun-products-hold-the-secrets-to-apples-future

Remus, appreciate the help. I just tried that fix and heres the message I got. And I do have that dll file in my system32. Mike [image: Tkpa_Capture.JPG] [image: Nofe_Capture2.JPG]