Google Earth API plugin now Available

Google knows that you want a to access most of the key features of Google Earth in your web browser that is why they are making it possible for you through a browser plugin. Without the need to download and install the stand alone Google earth application, you can now see 3D models of buildings and view KML files in Google Earth. This plugin works for Internet explorer and Firefox but this is not available in Mozilla's addon page. The plugin is Windows only.

Good Blogging and Podcasting Tools That You can Have For Free

I love freewares that really deliver what they promise. Here are some good blogging tools that are for free and really delivers what you are looking for without nicking a dime from your pocket.


1. Thingamablog

This is a blogging application and RSS feed reader that allows the user to easily publish a blog without relying on any knowledge of HTML. This cool tool does not require you to use any third party service because it publishes the blog directly to the FTP server or network location of your choice. It has a very clean word processor-like interface that makes it easy for you to keep track of your blogs' entries. It also comes will a number of professional template designs that you can use. It is very easy to use, just a few clicks and your blog is online. Additional features are its ability to keep track of your favorites XML/RSS feeds with the integrated feed reader interface and ability to generate an a RSS compatible version of your own blog and import entries from RSS/Atom feeds. This baby is compatible with Windows ME, XP, 2003, and of course Vista. For more info and for download visit Thingamablog website.


2. Blog

This free software with a simple name that spells it all simply delivers what is being promised by its name. This automatic web log program works well, and produces very simple layouts compared to other stand alone blogs such as blogger but very easy to use. It allows you to easily update your site without requiring you to learn HTML. It maintains a template driven uniformity in design. To use it, simply set the app up with the necessary information for logging into your site via FTP, define a template to specify the look for your page and then type in your entries in the main Blog window and click Publish and Blog does the rest. If you are into HTML then you have more power over the templates because you can customize them to match with your site design. Blog also is capable of generating archival entries for old posts. The program also includes a site manager for maintaining multiple sites and an FTP upload utility. For more details and for download visit the publisher site .


3. LiveJournal Poster Scout

This is a plug-in for IE that makes it possible for LiveJournal users to post selected text from any webpage directly into their LiveJournal blog. Very easy to use. To download the plug in visit this site.


4. WildVoice Podcast Studio

If you are into recording your your podcast with a microphone and adding background music then you use this free app. It can also insert sound effects (creaking door, gun shot, dog bark, chimes, cat's meow and more than 100 others) to your recording to give it more color. It also allows you to organize your recordings in multiple segments that can later be combined to create a single mp3 file. It is also possible to automatically upload and publish your podcast on WildVoice website, all you need to do is sign up for a free account.This app is compatible with Windows XP and needs .NET Framework 1 . For download visit WildVoice.com

HP Discovers Memristor

Some of the things that make our lives easier today are resistors, capacitors, and inductors. How about adding a fourth one to make our lives much much easier? How about adding the memsistor? Yes this long-lost theoretical electrical circuit actually exists and HP, a company that do not manufacture chip, discovered it.

We all know about resistors, which resist the flow of electricity; capacitors, which are used to store electricity; and inductors which allow the flow of electric current without changing it. But do you know about memsistor, which measures how much electric current has passed a wire? Stan Williams, the head of the Information and Quantum Systems Laboratory at HP, say that a reseach they did has proven the possibility of the memsistor becoming available in the coming years.

What good would memsistor give us? It could give us energy-efficient memory chips that are capable of storing far more data in a given space than what we currently have. Memsistors require less silicon, consumes less energy and it does not require that many transistors so you can say goodbye to your flash memory chips because it would be repleced soom. But as of now, engineers are still learning how to design computers using this new components. Because HP does not make chips, it will license its invention to companies that manufacture chips.

Never Mind the Li-ion Here Comes Silver-Zinc

Worried that your notebook's Li-ion battery is not that safe, that it could explode any second because it contains flamable dimethyl carbonate? Worry no more, this August ZPower (a California battery maker) will begin shipping a safer alternative to Li-ion, the Silver-zinc notebook batteries. Silver-zinc batteries are water-based and offer 40% more runtime than your flamable lithuin-ion batteries. Zpower's Silver-zinc is also green, it is 95% recyclable and reusable. There are also plans about making the batteries available to mobile devices in the near future.

Easy Blogging with ScribbleLive

Liveblogging doesn't get much easier with ScribbleLive. If you are in a hurry to liveblog and do not want to go through the hussle of signing up for an account then ScribbleLive is for you. All one needs to do to create a blog and start updating immediately is to use one's Windows Live login or OpenID or Facebook. The downside is that there is no other way of using the site if you do not have any of the three mentioned accounts. So if that is the case there is the need to sign up to any of the three to be able to use the site. Once you have logged in all you need to do is liveblog an event, hit the save button and your entry would be there for every one to read. There are two ways of sorting your entries; entries shown with the oldest first or the other way around. You can also invite readers to contribute to your blog by sharing a URL. There's one problem though, it is not possible to embed a liveblog on your own site. But there is a buzz that an embeddable widget is coming soon.

Lavasoft has released Ad-Aware 2008

Ad-Aware 2008 has just been released by Lavasoft. This popular antispyware has three versions : the Free version, the Plus version, and the Pro version. Though the Free version lacks some features like tech support, anti-virus software, scheduled scans, and real-time spyware detection, it is still worth downloading because it, like previuos versions, does its job quiet well. This latest version does not use that much resource (meaning it is light), updates faster, and has an enhanced roorkit removal system. This is what you'll have if you opt for the $26.95 Ad-Aware Plus. If you will have the $39.95 Ad-Aware Pro you will have all of the features in Plus and an additional command line support, network drive scanning, and a process watch module.

CinemaNow Via your Windows Media Center

Do you remember CinemaNow? I know that most of us is now into Netflix, Amazon, or Joost and has forgotten good old CinemaNow. Here's a little good news for us: beginning today you could access the service of CinemaNow through your Windows Media Center. Surprised? Sound awesome huh! Of course there is a need for you to register for a CinemaNow account for you to be able to enjoy it. And you also need to be using Windows Vista Home Premium and Windows Vista Ultimate for you to have Windows Media Center. In Media Center just go to More TV section and there you will find CinemaNow's icon. Cinema now is kind of a late comer in this game because MovieLink and Vongo have had Windows MCE applications for some time now. But CinemaNow could offer users with around 34000 movies, around 3,000 music videos and 3,000 TV episodes. Would Amazon, Apple, and Netflix release Widnows MCE applications? Let's wait and see.

Microsoft Bribing People to Use Its Live Search Engine

You've probably heard about Live Search Engine. But I know that majority of internet users do not know about this search engine. Try Googling it so that you will know where to find it and what it is for. When it comes to Operating Systems Windows is the undisputed flavor of the century but when it comes to search engines Google is the king of the jungle. But Microsoft
is now in a somewhat pityfully desperate attempt to take over search engine dominance. It is now bribing people to use their search engine. They have this what they call "Live Search Cashback". what does it mean? The word cash is there probably it is something good. It works like this : if you use Live Search engine to search for some particular products there is a possibility that you will earn if you buy these products. When you buy a qualifying product that you've searched through Live Search engine Microsoft will put in your "cashback account" a tiny fraction of the amount of the product. Of course the more you search and buy the more cash will go to your account.When your balance reaches $5 or more they will send you the money.
Microsoft has already partnered with big name companies. Sounds good but what Microsoft failed to see is the fact that most of the time i use a search engine I only think of one thing: that i will find what i am searching for and only one thing can give it to me, Google. I know that this is the case for almost all internet users. The fact that with Live Search Cashback you won't be making any money if you do not shell out some, it is not actually motivation enough to the average internet user whose reason to use a search engine is not all the time to buy. I think it would have been better if they just have some sort of raffle or something. Everytime you use Live search engine you will have a ticket of some sort that goes into your account that will qualify you for the weekly or monthly raffle. Sounds funny but better than the cashback thingy.

Now You can Preview the Contents of ZIP or RAR File Before Downloading

We all share the feeling of disappointment and frustration we feel after waiting for hours for a large file to finish downloading only to find out that its content is not what we wanted. Now Firefox has an answer for this. A new add-on for Firefox is now available and it is called ArchView . This add-on will let you preview the contents of a RAR or ZIP file before it is even downloaded. And what makes it very cool is the fact that you can even choose what to download and what not to download from the contents of the RAR or ZIP files. If the RAR or ZIP file has multi[ple contents and you only need one of those multiple contents then there is no need for you to download the whole RAR file, just the content that you want.

When installed ArchView hangs out in your status bar. Click on it to enable or disable it or change its settings. Future version sees the inclusion of other formats like ISO and 7z. Archview supports Firefox 2 and Firefox 3. But don't be surprised if the version available at the official FireFox add-on download page says that it is not compatible with Firefox 3 beta 5 r and Firefox 3 RC1. But this is not actually true. The best thing to do just install the plugin directly from its developer's page if your version of Firefox is later than 3 beta 4.

But what if the file is password-protected? Go, install the plug-in and see for your self.

Anim8or Now on its 8th Year

I stumbled upon anim8or four years ago while looking for a cheaper alternative for the leading 3D authoring softwares that most professionals use. I thought that because it was freeware it would be very inferior compared to those softwares that you pay for. Anyway i downloaded it and tried it.I realized after fooling around with it for about an hour that it was a very powerful 3D authoring tool. From modeling to animation to rendering, it has all the things i needed. The ease of use also blew me away. The tool bar is very straight-forward. Mind you, this software is a stand-alone, no need to install and very light. The first version of anim8or that i've use was v0.85, that was in 2004. Now anim8or is in v0.96 and v0.97 is coming soon. I am one of those who are looking forward to the coming of v1.0 of this small but very powerful 3d authoring tool.

What are the features of anim8or? Yes of course it has 3D Modeler, you can build and modify 3D model. There are also built-in primitives primitives like spheres, cylinders, and platonic solids. It is also capable of mesh-editing, subdivision, splining, extrusion, lathing, beveling, and more.It also has support for TrueType font and OpenGL-based realtime operation. It can also export to .3DS and it can import and modify the following files : 3DS (3D Studio), .LWO (Lightwave), and .OBJ (Wavefront) object. It has openGL shader for realistic prebiew.

As for the animation it has boning support. You can make scenes and export them to .AVI, .jpg, or .gif. It also supports textures, bump maps, soft shadows, spotlights, fog, and much more.


for more information visit anim8or website.

Photoshop Clipping Mask trick

This little trick which involves manipulating layers is quiet simple but it is a very powerful device for photomontages. It is important for a Photoshop artist to know how to make layers interact with each other. If you are new to Photoshop probably you do not know that Layers is one of the features that make Photoshop the best among the rest. Now is the time for you to start experimenting and playing with Layers.

In this example we will be changing the shirt of the child in the image, from a plain white to something that is printed. I have used two images, image A and image B. Image A is the image with the child and image B will be use to “change” the child’s shirt.

Don’t mind the lighting problem of image A because we will take care of that in the next tutorial, for the mean time we’ll just change the child’s white shirt into something that is printed.

The first thing to do is to make a selection of the shirt. There are many ways to make the selection, you may use the magnetic lasso, pen tool, or you may choose to use quick masking or any other method that suits you. After the selection has been made create a new layer out of what has been selected by pressing Crtl+J.

Now after pressing Crtl+J you will see that another layer is added in the Layers panel.

The next thing to do is place image B as another layer. You can do this by clicking File in the menu bar and choosing Place.

image B will cover the child’s shirt :

Now create clipping mask by pressing Alt+Crtl+G (if like me, you are using CS3). For earlier versions just use Crtl+G. The result would be like what is shown below:

But we are not satisfied with the result yet, we need play with the Layer modes to achieve realism. You can change the layer modes by selecting from the pop-up menu at
the top of the Layers palette. Or you can use keyboard shortcuts to do this, just hold down Shft+Alt while typing the first letter of the name of the mode you would like to use. You can also manipulate the opacity of the layer to achieve realism. In this exercise i used the modes Multiply, and Difference and adjusted the opacity of thew concerned layer. Below are the different results of the different modes i used.

This is multiply:

This is difference:

Here i played with opacity, notice how the real plain white shirt blended with the flowers creating the illusion that the flowers were actually printed on the shirt.

That’s it. The possibilities with Photoshop is limitless, all you need to have are a few tricks in the bag and imagination to create. The next tutorial would be about how to fix a picture with a bad lighting (like what i’ve used above).

Flash Player 10 beta available now

Adobe has just made the prerelease version of Flash Player 10 available for download. Almost as impressive as the player itself is the fact that the beta is available for Windows, OS X AND Linux (including Ubuntu support)!

For the full list of features and known issues, check out the release notes, but some of the highlights are:

• New text engine
• Ubuntu OS support
• Custom filters and effects
• Large bitmap support

Adobe's demo page for Flash Player 10 is pretty impressive; we especially liked the inverse kinematic and native 3D demos.

Adobe recommends uninstalling previous versions of Flash Player before installing 10 beta. Downloads are available here.

Splashtop Linux interface coming soon to every Asus motherboard

We've seen the Splashtop instant-on OS demoed on ASUS gear in the past, and now it looks like the company is making the love official: it's going to start shipping it on all its motherboards. ASUS is calling the platform "Express Gate," but it's the same instant-on, ready-to-browse environment we've known about since October: an embedded Linux distro that runs Firefox and Skype off a memory chip linked directly to the BIOS. You might want to hit that link and check out the screenshots, actually -- with ASUS set to ship over a million mobos a month with the feature, chances are it'll be on a machine near you relatively soon.


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Discover clev.er domain nam.es with DomainFinder

Say your name is Jessica and you plan to launch a personal website but the web domain jessica.com is already registered. You then try other common options like .org or .net but unfortunately, none of them are available.

What you can not try is different permutations and combinations of domain names - something like jessi.ca, j.essi.ca je.ssi.ca, jes.si.ca or jes.si/ca - they are all valid domains and if you’re lucky, some of them may be up for grabs.

To get such ideas for domain name, head over to domainfinder.geekfg.net and type a word or even a phrase. For instance, if you type "Paris Hilton", it will suggestion parish.il/ton which is for Israel.





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Amazon to collect taxes in NY while fighting NY in court

While Amazon plans to fight New York's recent decision to start collecting, the company has updated its tax collection page to let NY customers know that it will begin collecting tax on June 1st.

The state of New York recently passed legislation which requires any company with affiliates in the state to collect taxes on any items sold in New York. That covers companies like Amazon which allow individual bloggers and web site operators to add links to Amazon products on their web sites. Amazon doesn't actually have any warehouses or business offices in New York. But thousands of New Yorkers who blog who run part time businesses from their home are considered representatives of the company under the state law, which means Amazon has to collect taxes.

Yesterday, Overstock.com decided that the easiest way to avoid paying taxes was to temporarily suspend its relationships with New York-based affiliates. But Amazon, which has already vowed to fight the new law in court, must be making a fair amount of money from New York based affiliates, because the company will instead collect taxes until the issue is resolved, even if that discourages some New Yorkers from buying products through Amazon.

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SomethingStore: Buy something for $10

Got $10 burning a hole in your pocket, but don't know what to spend it on? No problem. Just visit SomethingStore, place an order, and within 7 days the company will ship something to your door. You won't know what it is, and you may hate it. But hey, shipping is free.

The concept reminds us a lot of the random bag of crap that often concludes Woot-Offs. For some reason, that random bag of goodies is one of the most popular items you can buy, even if you don't know what's in it. We chalk it up to the hope that you could get something worth far more than the price you paid. But the element of surprise also makes the whole thing a little more exciting.

If you'd rather know exactly what you're getting for your money, make sure to check out Wants for Sale tomorrow. Artists Justin Gignac and Christine Santora use the site to sell paintings of things they want - for the price of the actual items. Buy a picture of a piece of pizza or a Nintendo Wii and Gignac and Santora will use the money to buy the item. They'll have a fresh batch of paintings available Friday. And this time they're going with a theme - Vegas. You'll be able to help them fund a trip to Vegas by purchasing art.

Or you could just save your money for retirement, your kids' college fund, or to buy things you actually want for yourself. But what's the fun in that?

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Microsoft releases Virtual PC 2007 SP1

Microsoft has released a new version of its free virtualization sotware with support for the latest Microsoft operating system updates. Virtual PC 2007 SP1 includes support for Windows Vista SP1 and Windows XP SP3 as host and guest operating systems. That means you can run the virtualization environment if you're using those operating systems, or if you want to emulate them. Microsoft also threw in Windows Server 2008 Standard for good measure.

Like its predecessor, Virtual PC 2007 SP1 does not officially support Windows XP Home Edition or Windows Vista Home Premium or Home Basic. But for the most part, it will run just fine on those operating systems. You will, however, get a warning message telling you that you're using an unsupported OS when you install the software.

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Amazon sues NY state over tax collection

The state of New York is set to begin collecting tax from some online retailers who do business in the state. And by some online retailers, we mean the law is targeted pretty firmly at Amazon, and may also affect some others. Not surprisingly, Amazon is none to thrilled, and the New York Times reports that the company has responded with a lawsuit against the state of New York.

Now, here's the interesting bit. Nobody's disputing that New York residents are supposed to be paying state sales taxes for items purchased from out of state retailers and shipped to New York. Even before the law was passed, people living in New York and many other states were supposed to keep track of such purchases on their own and send a check to the state. Of course, nobody actually does this, but it's the law. No, the issue is whether Amazon should be required to collect taxes

Typically you only need to collect state taxes if you have an office or other presence in the state. For example, if Amazon had a New York warehouse or distribution center. And then you need to collect taxes on everything sold to state residents, whether it went through that office, warehouse, or distribution center or not. But the law claims that because New York residents can sign up to be Amazon "affiliates," which means the post links to Amazon products on their web pages and make a commission, Amazon does maintain a presence in the state. Which sounds kind of weak if you ask us. But that's the crux of the law, and it's also the crux of the lawsuit.

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How To Import and Export Firefox Extension Preferences

Many Firefox extensions add their own entries to the Firefox configuration that can be accessed by typing about:config in the address bar of Firefox. It is relatively easy to backup the full Firefox user profile that includes the extension preferences but problems arise if only selected preferences from some specific extensions are needed. I’m thinking of a scenario where a user copied his profile from his main computer to his notebook and installed an extension on the main computer afterwards.

This could also be helpful if you regularly install and uninstall Firefox on the same computer or if you want to merge profiles. The OPIE - Ordered Preference Import/Export - extension provides the user with means to import and export preferences from selected Firefox extensions. Some or all of the extensions can be selected during export and they can be saved in a single file or separate files for each extension. The latter is useful for merging profiles or sending preferences of specific extensions to another computer.

The import of preferences works pretty much the same way. The only difference is that a previously exported file is selected that is imported into Firefox. The results are shown in the same window.

The files are saved with the .prefs extension so that they are better recognizable. The benefit of using OPIE instead of a full Firefox backup extension like FEBE - Firefox Environment Backup Extension - is that OPIE can selectively export and import preferences while all other extensions that backup Firefox settings can only import and export all settings.

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Share your multimedia collection automatically with iGliss

Ever felt like there were too many steps to sharing your media online with your friends? Wished you could share all your favorite items such as videos, pictures, blog posts and more in one convenient place? Then iGliss may be just what you’ve been looking for.

Labeled as a “media content management service”, iGliss has just relaunched its redesigned beta that allows people to better manage their uploaded and shared media. You can choose to do the old uploading by hand style if you like, or you can download their PC content manager that will locate your media for you and automatically upload it, taking all the human interaction out of it for you. Once up, other users can search the site for your content by using the tags and descriptions, and then share it with even more people.

Besides sharing your own content, you can also share videos you enjoy on YouTube, RSS feeds of your favorite sites, basically anything that can be shared on the web can be shared here.

Overall, I can see it being somewhat useful for folks do share a heck of a lot, but for people like me who just aren’t into sharing every video they come across, it just won’t serve much of a purpose. I was also a bit disturbed by my inability to find privacy settings for what you share. This isn’t to say they aren’t there, but after spending 30-minutes looking around, I was unable to locate them, and this would worry me about sharing something you may not have meant to.

It’s worth a look, with a slick interface, but unless you are a heavy sharer, and careful in what you share, it may not be for you.

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Fax Documents Over the Internet for Free to any Phone number in US

You may have come across several web based faxing services that let you send faxes over the Internet for free but they all impose certain limitations.

For instance, they may not let you fax more than two pages at once or may add advertisements in the fax cover sheet or may not support rich text documents.

drop.io (pronounced as "drop-ee-o") overcomes all such problems and lets you fax Word documents, PDF files and even Excel a spreadsheet via Internet to any phone number in the United States for free.

You can send unlimited number of faxes without registration, there are no ads attached to the fax sheets and each fax document can have up to 20 pages.

To send a fax, just upload the document (or PDF) to drop.io and click the "Drop It" button. On the next screen, click the ’send as fax’ near your document and enter the 10 digit fax number of the recipient. Hit Send and your fax will be printed on the recipient’s fax machine in few minutes.

The drop.io may useful for content publishers outside US as well if they need to fax DMCA notices (for reporting plagiarism) to a web hosting company that may be based in US.

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How to import an export Firefox passwords

Its definitely hard to remember the usernames and passwords for all the websites that we visit daily. The benefit of using a smart browser like Firefox is that it saves the login credentials within the Firefox password manager and retrieves them automatically when you visit a particular website thus allowing you to access it.

But what if you want to print out that login credentials list for future reference or want to save it as a document list somewhere within your operating system. Password Export, a Firefox addon, is there to help you in this regard.

This Firefox addon will let you export a CSV/XML formatted list of all the login credentials stored within the Firefox password manager. This list will have the usernames, passwords, emails and URLs of all the sites that you have ever logged into through Firefox.

Not only can you export the list but you can also import it on another PC or operating system (e.g. Ubuntu) so that you don’t have to enter your login credentials again and again when you visit known websites daily.

Password Exporter can be installed from the link below:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2848



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iSwish: Yet another pretty iPhone clone for Windows Mobile

While Flick Software's iSwish Project certainly isn't the first attempt we've seen to emulate the iPhone interface for Windows Mobile, it's definitely one of the prettiest, most effective looking. At least if we go on the video above. But if you look closely, you'll notice a few things in this video:

1. While the demonstration shows a user zooming in and out of pictures by "pinching" the screen, our guess is that the device, which doesn't recognize multi-touch is actually just detecting the motion of one finger.
2. The program launcher interface is pretty, but at least once in the video, we're pretty sure we caught the producers stopping and restarting the video to make it look like an application actually started up more quickly.

The biggest problem with any iPhone clone for Windows Mobile is that beauty is only skin deep. The software appears to include a program launcher and support for SummerBoard themes, and maybe a program or two. But once you launch your application, you'll find that you've still got the same Windows Mobile software running under the hood. Some of it's pretty, some of it's functional, and some is anything but (Pocket Internet Explorer, anybody?)

Flick's iSwish is due out sometime in May, and should work with a variety of Windows Mobile devices, including older gizmos like the Dell Axim X50, which does not (officially) run Windows Mobile 6. So there's hope if you've got an older PDA or phone.







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Advertising abhors a vacuum: AdSense headed for Feedburner feeds

It's been almost a year since Google acquired RSS service Feedburner or $100 million. But in that year, we've seen very little integration of Google services into Feedburner, or vice versa. Sure, it's now easier to redirect your Blogspot feed to Feedburner, but that's about it.

Now, according to the official Feedburner blog, the company is getting ready to roll out the thing we'd all kind of been expecting: Google AdSense integration. What that means is you're probably going to start seeing much more advertising in your RSS reader.

While there are already a few ways to place ads in an RSS feed, a huge number of blogs and web sites use Feedburner to polish and publish their feeds. Being able to place ads in their feeds with just a few clicks of a button almost certainly means that many of those content publishers will be flipping the switch as soon as they can. Up until now, most web publishers viewed RSS feeds as a loss leader. You give away some of your content, ad-free, in the hopes of gaining loyal readers who will tell their friends about the site. But if you can also get a few of them to click on ads even if they rarely visit your actual web page, why wouldn't you do it?

What do you think? Are you a web publisher looking forward to Google AdSense/Feedburner integration? Or are you a loyal blog reader preparing to unsubscribe to any feeds that start displaying ads?

FLV.to saves YouTube videos as MP3 files

Want to convert YouTube videos to MP3 format and save it to your computer? There is a new tool called FLVto that lets you convert any Youtube music video to MP3 file and then download it to your PC. So next time you find some cool music video on the Youtube you can use this app to quickly get it in MP3 format. No registration required.

Once the file is on your PC you can either use your favorite media player to play it on your desktop or start-up iTunes and transfer it to iPod or some other mobile device.

When it comes to conversion, you can either upload a file from your PC or simply copy and paste the URL for the video you want to convert. As long the video is in Flash format it should work fine. Once the conversion is finished you will be prompted to download the file to your computer.

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YouTube's Pretend Presidential Debate: Not A Bad Idea, Really

YouTube announced that it's going to host a presidential debate in September in New Orleans. Big question: will any of the candidates show up?

Nope. That's because this isn't a real, bona-fide presidential debate: There are four of them (three presidentail debates and vp debate) and all of them have been set up by Commission on Presidential Debates many moons ago. The pretend YouTube debate isn't on the schedule.

The would-be debateis a publicity stunt, but that's not necessarily a bad thing: In this case YouTube, the city of New Orleans and the state of Louisiana are trying to remind the country that the city got wiped out nearly three years ago and hasn't really recovered. They make their case in the video below.

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StarBurn: Free disc burning, audio ripping utility

There are plenty of free CD/DVD burners for Windows, and to be honest we haven't often been tempted to look beyond CDBurnerXP and InfraRecorder, which both seem to handle pretty much any tasks you can throw at them. But while reading an article about BurnOn over at Life Rocks 2.0, we noticed a link in the comments to StarBurn. And while we might check out BurnOn later, we were kind of blown away by StarBurn.

The application can handle all of your basic tasks like burning data, audio, and video discs. It supports a wide variety of formats including CD, DVD, Blu-Ray, and HD-DVD. And it has some nifty features like the ability to either rip audio CDs or compress audio already on your computer to MP3, WMA, or OGG formats.

One StarBurn feature that you don't often see bundled with disc burning utilities is a virtual drive mounting application. In other words, you can use StarBurn to create a disc image or ISO file, and then mount that file as a virtual disc so you can see how it performs without actually burning the file to a disc and sticking it in a drive. This can come in handy if you want to see check an image before burning it, or if you want to mount an image you've created or downloaded on a system that doesn't have a working optical drive.

StarBurn is free unless youw ant the network version, which offers network burning features and costs a whopping $495. The full functionality is included in the free version, but you can only use the network features during a 30 day free trial period.