tool

Have you ever really thought about the difference between the way older and present-day recordings affect you? I'm not so much talking about sound quality; older recordings have a very different feel. They have more juice, more soul, more life, and that's why they connect with people in a completely different way than hyperprocessed contemporary music does.

Today, for example, Auto-Tuned vocals are so ubiquitous that my friend, mastering engineer Dave McNair, exclaimed, "The only way to know for sure a vocal hasn't been Auto-Tuned, is an out of tune vocal." So once a new … Read more

Maybe you've heard the phrase "Lean Six Sigma" in the news or at work. This management strategy was developed by Motorola in the 1980s to reduce manufacturing defects, but it's applicable to a wide range of business models. The "sigma" refers to defect rates; "six sigma" is the very low rate Motorola set as its goal, and it's also shorthand for the lean processes that achieved it. Lean6 from Leanmap is a set of free Excel worksheets for implementing Six Sigma techniques. While you might think it's geared strictly toward … Read more

Red-eye: In horror movies, it's usually a bad sign. It's a bad sign in your snapshots, too. Now that digital cameras are everywhere, so is red-eye. Fortunately, so are free tools to remove redeye from your digital snapshots. Like Free Red-eye Reduction Tool, which is both an accurate name and apt description for this simple photo editing app. LifeSniffer's free tool makes it supereasy to correct red-eye from portraits and groups, removing the (occasionally alarming) effect that can make family snapshots look like horror movie stills with just a few mouse clicks.

Free Red-eye Reduction Tool's … Read more

TheFormTool is a free add-on for Microsoft Word. With it, users can create attractive, personalized, professional forms and documents inside Word, using regular Word commands. It also adds many unique capabilities, such as the ability reuse old files as new forms. It's particularly useful to physicians, attorneys, engineers, administrators, and self-employed people--anyone who needs to create clear, legible, archival-quality forms, documents, letters, and records. It's a simplified version of a complex (and expensive) pro tool, but TheFormTool is fully functional and completely free, with no expiration date. TheFormTool requires Microsoft Word 2007 or better, though it's compatible … Read more

A researcher plans to demonstrate an attack on a smartphone at the RSA security conference this week that starts with social engineering via a text message and leads to a malicious Web link that triggers a browser exploit and silently downloads a Trojan.

"It's a demo of a new attack vector on mobile, using a Remote Access Tool" called Nickispy, which showed up a few months ago in China, said Dmitri Alperovitch, formerly of McAfee Labs who is chief technology officer at a brand new startup called CrowdStrike. "No one has publicly demonstrated an end-to-end attack … Read more

In graphics apps, the Clone Stamp Tool "clones" (copies) a small area of an image and "stamps" (pastes) it over another area, such as a blemish you want to hide. It's also called the Rubber Stamp Tool, but it's the Clone Stamp Tool in Photoshop. Photoshop is the Godzilla of graphics, so tools like LifeSniffer's Free Clone Stamp Tool follow the leader. And that should give you a good idea of what Free Clone Stamp Tool does: It provides a basic, serviceable clone stamp tool for touching up digital photos, especially photos of … Read more

Typing in different languages on the Web can be as easy as clicking on a browser button.

With the Google Input Tools extension for Chrome, you can easily type in multiple languages when typing an e-mail, filling out a Web form, or writing anything else on the Web. Here's how:

Step 1: Install the Google Input Tools extension from the Chrome Web Store.

Step 2: Click on the new browser button in the upper right-hand corner of the Chrome browser and select Extension Options. Choose the languages you want from the input tools list, then close the tab.

Step … Read more

Do you handle a lot of image files? Snapshots, archives, and pictures to upload can pile up, especially when they need to be resized, cropped, converted, or watermarked. Sometimes you just want a quick, easy way to do those jobs. Or maybe your PC didn't come bundled with a big-box graphics package and you just want a simple assortment of essential image tools. How about Image Tools? That's the name of IMDrops' free bundle of fast, powerful image apps that handle all the basics we mentioned, and more, including sharing screenshots and uploading image files.

Image Tools has … Read more

Organizing a meeting time with friends or colleagues can be tedious.

With so many schedules to accommodate and little insight into when, exactly, the participants are available, finding the golden time slot often involves a long, seemingly endless e-mail thread.

That's where Doodle comes in. The free service eases your scheduling stress by allowing you to create a poll of several proposed dates and times. Then, each participant indicates availability and a mutual time is found. Simple, right?

Although the service isn't new, I continue to introduce it to colleagues and marvel at the way their attitude changes … Read more