scan

Amazon just announced a pretty big update to its Cloud Player service. The enhancements include scan and match, increased storage, and the free upgrading of lesser audio tracks to 256 Kbps.

With the new service, gone are the days of 5GB of free storage. You can now store all of your Amazon purchased music, along with 250 songs purchased elsewhere for free. Or, you can pay the $25 fee for 250,000 songs worth of storage per year.

The scan-and-match service will scan your computer's hard drive for music, and then match your music catalog with Amazon's catalog. … Read more

Chances are you have a stack of photo albums collecting dust in a closet somewhere. Maybe they make for a fun coffee table chat, but if you want to share your memories with friends and family online, or simply create a backup of your photos, where do you start?

There are several ways to go about digitizing your printed photo collection. Depending on how many photos you have and how DIY-eager you are, your choice will vary.

1. For the highest quality, use a scanner To ensure minimal loss in original photo quality, use a flatbed scanner. This might be … Read more

Rock the Vote is credited with creating the first telephone voter registration system. Now it has introduced the first shirt-activated voter registration system.

The Scan to Vote T-shirt is part of a larger campaign aimed at signing up 1.5 million new voters before election day rolls around this fall. The shirts are available for $28 through Threads 4 Thought.

Scan the QR code printed on the shirt and you end up at the Scan to Vote Web site and can walk through the process of registering to vote online.… Read more

Scanbox, created by Australian design company Limemouse, works as a miniature studio in a box perfect for scanning documents (up to A4 size), receipts, 3D objects, or even a page from a book.

At first glance, the $15 Scanbox may appear like some sort of strange geometric shape, but the peculiar design optimizes lighting conditions for the perfect shot. It only takes a few moments to set up the device, as the user simply aligns a few high-strength magnets built into the box.

A stencil of a smartphone with a square hole sits on top so that the user knows exactly where to place the camera lens every time. When the photo shoot ends, the Scanbox folds back up into a flat shape for easy transportation. … Read more

WiseCleaner's Wise Disk Cleaner Professional is now free to all home users, so we took a look at it to see how it fared against the large and growing field of freeware system cleaners. We found it easy to use but thorough, with expert options (and frequent warnings to keep novices from trying them) though most users will find Wise Disk Cleaner's default settings perfectly safe.

Wise Disk Cleaner's interface leans toward the "clean and simple" end of the system utility style chart, with none of the huge fonts and overbearing logos found in some … Read more

The free and paid versions of Lookout Mobile Security (download) have added two new features today that work together to protect you against malicious apps, especially those installed by side-loading or from third-party marketplaces.

While Lookout scans apps installed from Google Play by default, it now asks you if you want it to scan apps from other sources with Install Monitoring. This is for people who have changed their Android settings to allow non-marketplace apps on their phones. Side-loading is when you download an app to your phone and manually tap on the APK to install it. You can also … Read more

Researchers at the University of Liverpool say they have developed a new imaging technique that will help them identify, and thus analyze, tissue fibers in the heart that control whether the muscle beats regularly.

Using a micro CT scanner, the team imaged hearts whose tissue had been highlighted using iodine. The scientists discovered that certain tissue -- the conducting tissue that sends an electrical wave to trigger each heartbeat -- absorbed less of the solution than the muscular tissue.

This contrast made it easier to identify which tissue was producing electrical activity in 3D, which has until this study had … Read more

Once upon a time, duplicate files were so evil that no expense and effort was spared to hunt them down, terminate them, and erase every trace of their existence. Hard drives grew, and duplicate files became less of a problem. Then came digital cameras, MP3s, and video, and suddenly duplicate files are once again threatening to take over the world, but today's duplicates are sometimes bigger than entire hard drives were back when dupes were space-sucking villains.

Fortunately, the duplicate file finders have kept pace, and today's tools are far better than yesterday's at identifying and filtering … Read more

Whether you need to scan a document for signatures or you're prepping for tax season, this app is extremely useful.

There have been many attempts at document scanners on the Android Market. Most of the time these apps will utilize your camera and turn pictures you take into JPEGs or PDFs. Unfortunately, it's really difficult to take pictures of proportional rectangles in real life and have them look the same on your phone. 

That's why HandyScanner is so useful; it corrects the common issues with taking photos of documents, and even allows you to … Read more