viewer

Got a photo gallery you want to spice up? Check out TiltViewer. Like CoolIris' PicLens, it takes your photos and places them on a dynamic 3D wall that can be zoomed around with your mouse. Clicking any thumbnail will scale it up as big as your browser window is, and you can flip any shot to view the metadata--complete with customizable links that go towards that photo's sale page, or to download links.

The big difference between the PicLens and TiltViewer is that the latter doesn't require the viewer to have any sort of browser plug-in installed to … Read more

Even for the most effective night-vision goggles, there's always been one problem: It's difficult to be discreet while looking like "Buffalo Bill" from Silence of the Lambs.

But there may a more discreet way to carry out surreptitious missions with the "Infrar-Red Personal Night Viewer," which provides nocturnal vision on a 3.5-inch screen built into a handheld device. Better still, as OhGizmo notes, the 500-line-resolution display comes through in black and white, rather than that creepy green glow.

Not everyone wants to, or can, pay for a copy of Microsoft Office. Some of us, instead, chose to run free software that competes with Office, such as Open Office or Star Office or IBM's Symphony.

As a user of Open Office, I can attest that it's formatting of Word documents is far from perfect, and, there is no way to know how good a formatting job it is doing on any particular document. To get perfect rendering, I also use the free Office viewers that Microsoft provides for Word, Excel and PowerPoint. You can download them at … Read more

I download and review a lot of great software, but obviously I don't keep everything. Some programs don't make the cut simply because I have a better option on my computer already or I have no use for them at work. But other applications I've downloaded have withstood the test of time and remain useful on a day-to-day basis. I'm talking about my must-have applications.

I've already given you my Big Three free security applications which should be the first programs you download when setting up a computer. Clearly if you haven't downloaded software … Read more

The FastStone Image Viewer is a good find for a multipurpose image tool. Although the main interface looks too cluttered with buttons at first glance, the three main windows are intuitive enough once get your bearings and several included skins make it easy on the eyes.

Clicking a thumbnail puts a larger view of the shot in the lower-left pane, and you zoom in simply by dragging the mouse around. You can resize, crop, remove red-eye, and adjust color, brightness, and contrast. You'll also find a few simple effects and filters, including Lens, Waves, and Morphs. Other nifty features … Read more

Some people like to know everything there is to know about what their PC is doing. Not me. I just want the dang thing to work, and when it stops working, I want the simplest, surest, fastest, and cheapest fix available, skip the details.

This puts me at odds with PC pros who believe there's nothing blissful about tech ignorance. Okay, I see their point, but there are a world of things I'd rather be doing than scrolling through Windows event logs.

When I described ways to diagnose a hanging application, several readers took me to task for … Read more

Remember ListPic, the service that used to scrape Craigslist for photos in listings and present them in a wonderfully simple visual browser? Well it's still around, albeit with listings from Oodle instead of Craigslist proper. If you're still jonesing for that visual Craigslist experience, there's a Firefox extension aptly named Craigslist image preview that you're going to enjoy. It will automatically pull up photo thumbnails from each posting and put them into the search results so you can eyeball each item before spending the extra click to see the photos.

This works for everything, not just … Read more

For Army researchers looking to give robot operators new ways to "see" via unmanned ground vehicles on the battlefield one thing is clear, legacy video doesn't cut it anymore.

It's not just broadcast quality or resolution that needs improvement, but the level of "telepresence": the sense of increased situational awareness that allows a robot driver to shoot and move and make fast decisions.

One possible upgrade is the three-axis Head-Aimed Remote Viewer (HARV), a dome enclosed, three-axel gimbal-mounted camera that slews around to match operator head movement. Wherever the soldier/operator looks, the unit … Read more

Every computer user needs a good screen capture utility at one time or another. Whether doing a Web research project, getting a slick new desktop background, or just adding to an image collection, the flexibility of these utilities make them much more useful than the full-screen capture in Windows. As a reviewer of software, I often need to take screenshots of programs I'm reviewing. A screen capture utility lets me capture the whole program, or just a section of the screen depending on what I want to call out.

Windows comes with the Print Screen function which saves a … Read more