On their website, it says “DVD Flick aims to be a simple but at the same time powerful DVD Authoring tool. It can take a number of video files stored on your computer and turn them into a DVD that will play back on your DVD player, Media Center or Home Cinema Set. You can add additional custom audio tracks, subtitles as well as a menu for easier navigation.”

The modus operandi is fairly simple: if you want to create a DVD, you just add all the videofiles to your project -DVD Flick supports over 60 video formats and 40 audio formats so it’s not very likely you’ll run into problems here. If they’re available, you can also add subtitles and/or additional audiostreams. If you want to get your DVD fast you probably won’t need to dive deep in the project settings -with the target bitrate set to auto-fit, the default options are quite ok.

Fancy menu designs!

Creating a menu is as easy as falling off a log: you just click on Menu settings and you choose a fancy design. If you don’t like any of the preset designs, then you can always create your own but you’d have to download an additional tool.

The project settings

Before you actually burn your DVD it’s not a bad idea to have a look at the project settings -you don’t want to end up with an NTSC if you’re in Europe, for one. By default DVD Flick will create 4.3 Gb DVDs, but if you want to burn a double layer, then it’s just a matter of selecting it in the target size pulldown menu.

If you’re ready with everything, hit the Create DVD button to export the DVD to an ISO or to burn it straight onto a DVD.

This minor upgrade fixes 34 problems, and if you’ve experienced problems with any of these problems before, then now is a good time to do the update. And if you don’t want to download the upgrade, then you can always go upgrade automatically via the Tools > Upgrade menu in your blog’s admin area.

While unfortunately many web 2.0 applications are merely a matter of novelty over substance -how many timelines have you embedded in your blog so far?- Backboard does performs one of the essential tasks in any professional domain, really, be that education or a private company, and that is collecting feedback.  Backboard allows you to do just that: the basic idea is that you can upload documents or enter a web address and then ask colleagues, friends, or anyone, really, what they think of your document/website.

Three simple steps will get you going, but there's more if you want to...

The system even allows for secure uploads, but only so if you have a premium account, which you can try out for a limited period if you want to (the free account gives you unlimited Backboards, 5 MB maximum size per file, and no SSL by the way). You then need to specify who should be able to access and assess your document: you can give free access to the whole wide world, but maybe you will be more comfortable with selecting your own executioners yourself, in which case you simply list their e-mails in a text box and that’s it. Additionally, you can also provide an access code which your reviewers then have to enter before they can view your document.

Reviewing a document then is as easy as either inserting general comments, or you can use the red pencil to indicate certain sections of the document and then comment on just those sections. The owner of the document gets informed whether or not you have given feedback yet. A simple test with a pdf document resulted in this:

Provide general feedback or comment on specific sections of a document

I haven’t tried many different formats yet, but th system should have no problems with Word (DOC/DOCX), Excel (XLS/XLSX), PowerPoint (PPT/PPTX), WPD, ODT, ODP, ODS, RTF, PDF, TXT, HTML, SQL and JS), images (GIF, JPEG, PNG, TIFF, BMP and PSD), vector graphics (AI, EPS, PS), web pages or other URLs, and free-form text.

Next time you need a couple of opinions, give it a try -I don’t think you’ll regret it.

Juice: its Magic works just fine!

While Webmynd is activated whenever you use the Firefox search box, Juice appears whenever you drag and drop content in the right hand margin of your browser. In order to give you the most relevant results Juice does not solely rely on Google, luckily enough: for names of people or places it will use Wikipedia, while film titles will often result in IMDB-pages. Juice also gives you the possibility to store images or videos so that later on you can look at them when you have more time. It is a pity in that respect that it does not hover over your Firefox, so to speak, and that your stored images are saved in the active Firefox window only. To be honest, I am largely undecided on whether that’s a bad thing. Probably not. Social integrationwise, Juice comes with a decent set of sites you can share your results on, such as del.icio.us, digg, reddit, and the likes. Alongside that, you can also bring up a list with the most relevant tweets on your search term. I’m not that much into Twitter, so I am not particularly impressed with this feature; they might have left it out, for all I care. One thing I do find a pity is that nowhere you can tweak the settings and add your own favourite sites, for instance.

Webmynd searches your own favourite sites

Webmynd -also available for Explorer, by the way- searches, in their own words, the real web: it, too, uses more than just Google and delivers the most relevant tweets -sigh- or the most recent Wikipedia articles. With Webmynd you can add your own favourite sites, such as a dictionaries, for instance, which I think is a great feature. Webmynd will always take previous search results into account, which makes it easier to find exactly that one article you’ve  read before. It also keeps a log of the sites you visit, though you can disable this feature if you want to. Finally, Webmynd, like Juice, gives you the option to share the results on facebook, linkedIn and the whole shebang.

The latest version can be downloaded from their site, and contains the following changes:

WordPress 2.8.6 Security Release

2.8.6 fixes two security problems that can be exploited by registered, logged in users who have posting privileges. If you have untrusted authors on your blog, upgrading to 2.8.6 is recommended.

The first problem is an XSS vulnerability in Press This discovered by Benjamin Flesch. The second problem, discovered by Dawid Golunski, is an issue with sanitizing uploaded file names that can be exploited in certain Apache configurations. Thanks to Benjamin and Dawid for finding and reporting these.

From February 7–13, 2010 in Ghent (Belgium) vzw Let’s Learn IT organizes the workshop:

Web 2.0, Multimedia & Presentation Skills: Empowering IT Competences For Today’s Job Market (Workshop Reference number: 2009-1-BE3-GRU13-01100)

The main objective behind this workshop is to give the participants a decent training on how they can use computers to enhance their chances for finding a job. The focus will be on various web 2.0 applications, presentation tools, and digital audio and video.

Objectives

Participants will have learnt the following:

• how to use computers and computer peripherals to create multimedia presentations;
• how to use modern web 2.0 applications like wikis, blogs and social community websites;
• how to work with digital audio and video;
• how to give an efficient presentation.

Interested?

Thanks to the Grundtvig programme of the European Commission and the Flemish National Agency, vzw Let’s Learn IT can offer this workshop completely free of charge (flight ticket, hotel, breakfast lunch & dinner will be paid by us) to 20 unemployed candidates. If you are interested in attending this workshop, you can send us a letter (or email) of motivation in which you tell us why you would like to attend this workshop. You will need to prove that at the moment of applying you are officially unemployed.

• Where? Ghent, Belgium
• When? February 7-13, 2010
• Who? Unemployed European citizens
• Costs? All costs related to the programme will be paid for by the organization

For more information, please visit Let’s Learn IT.

Using Drop Resizer is all very simple: download & install it and select in the dialogue box one particular directory where you want to store the pictures that need resizing. The only thing else you need to do is to copy the images you want to send via mail to that particular folder and Drop Resizer will resize them according to the settings you chose yourself:

Should you want to start using Drop Resizer, then do consider these issues:

• Make sure you have the most recent updates of the MS Net Framework on your system.
• Do not copy the originals to the Drop Resize-directory: your high res images will be permanently resized, a shame if you want to reuse them for any other purpose.
• JPG is the only fileformat which is currently supported.

If you’re like me, then you probably can’t wait until Google finally does what many other companies have already done for them (i.e. making GDrive available, so that you can use those countless gigabytes for something more useful than, say, collecting the last 100,000 emails you have been sent). Alas, alas…no GDrive yet, but still, there’s something else to get you excited about.

Google Sites now allows you to integrate files from all of Google’s other sites: presentations or spreadsheets that you’ve added to Google Docs, or videos from Youtube, or pictures from Picasa…it can all be added with a few simple mouse clicks.

The really good news is that you don’t lose file space in Sites when you integrate pictures from Picasa, for instance, which is very interesting when you want to create a webquest with Google Sites or so…

Wat op de home van Format Factory te lezen staat, mag er wel zijn:

All to MP4/3GP/MPG/AVI/WMV/FLV/SWF.
All to MP3/WMA/AMR/OGG/AAC/WAV.
All to JPG/BMP/PNG/TIF/ICO/GIF/TGA.
Rip DVD to video file , Rip Music CD to audio file.
MP4 files support iPod/iPhone/PSP/BlackBerry format.

Yep, dat heb je goed gelezen: de meest courante video- en audioformaten kun je in een wip omzetten naar, ehm, gelijk wat eigenlijk. MKV naar SWF, of FLV naar MP4? Geen probleem. Dit is hoe je te werk gaat:

• Selecteer in het videoluik aan de linkerkant het gewenste doelformaat.

De beschikbare videoformaten

• De optie Converteren naar Mobiel apparaat neigt wat naar Adobe’s Device Central: een centrale waarin allerhande presets voor evenzoveel verschillende apparaatjes te vinden zijn, gaande van Sony’s PSP, Apple’s iPhone & iPod, Archos, de Creative Zen, naar allerhande nokia’s & LG’s.

Toestelletje selecteren -huppaaa!

• Je krijgt een nieuw scherm met daarin de mogelijkheid om het nieuwe formaat aan te passen, indien je dat zou willen, en waar je ook het bronbestand kunt localiseren. Klik daarna op start en laat de handel lopen -it’s that easy!

Conversie afstellen, bronvideo & doellocatie selecteren en laat maar lopen!

“Waarom, o waarom is dit nu zo speciaal en goed?“, vraagt mijn imaginary friend. Wel, het antwoord is redelijk simpel:

1. Gratis.
2. Snel.
3. Swiss Army knife.

Een laatste reden waarom dit eigenlijk toch wel een straf programma zie je op deze afbeelding:

Goodies!!

Kleine test gisteren bij mij thuis: zonder dat ik enige versie van AnyDVD of DVD43 staan heb slaagde dit pakket erin om een commerciële, beveiligde DVD om te zetten naar een zeer treffelijke avi. Dat het een joekel van 1.8 Gb was, bedek ik met de spreekwoordelijke mantel der liefde -ik had ook maar niet gewoon de basisinstellingen moeten nemen. Ik schat dat de hele operatie ongeveer twee uur heeft geduurd. Dat kan misschien veel lijken, maar als je bedenkt dat onder de motorkap de DVD eerst geript wordt en daarna geconverteerd dient te worden naar het uitvoerformaat, dan valt dat zeker best wel mee. Het zuipt redelijk veel processor juice, maar die vlieger gaat voor andere conversiepakketten evengoed op. Ik hoop natuurlijk stellig dat het omzeilen van de beveiliging geen lucky shot was. Daarnaast kan het ook beschadigde video- en audiobestanden repareren. Kom, geef toe, twijfel je nog?