There are a couple of ways to backup your computer. You could perform regular backups of your important files and data so that you can restore them if your goes kaput and you have to build a new system or reinstall the operating system and programs from scratch. Or you can create a complete disk image that you can use to restore your computer to exactly the state it was in the moment you created the backup.
While there are plenty of free utilities for performing both types of backup, most free disk imaging software requires you to reboot your computer and load Linux or simplified version of Windows to complete the image. That means you can't create your backup while you're using your PC to do other things. But Macrium Reflect Free Edition lets you create an image of your Windows system while using Windows.
Macrium Reflect comes in 32 bit and 64 bit versions and is compatible with Windows XP and Vista. You can image a complete disk or just individual partitions. And you can save your images to a local hard drive, network drive, or optical disc. You can also schedule backups and create restore discs using Linux or BartPE.
We were able to backup a partition with 12GB of data in just about 16 minutes. Since Macrium Reflect lets you create compressed backups, the image weighed in at just 8GB.
There are some features that you can only access by paying $40 for a fully licensed copy of Macrium Reflect, including Windows Server 2003 compatibility, differential and incremental backups, and the abililty to backup and restore individual files and folders. But the free edition is still pretty useful and provides an easy to use alternative to previously mentioned DriveImage XML.
Though it is currently accessible only to a closed set of beta testers, it seems the 22 minds behind Polar Rose are trying to create a sort of "Google" for people pictures -- a system that is always indexing visual information. But that's only the beginning of the service.
Beta testers have recently been given access to an Internet Explorer and Firefox plug-in that will scan faces on a loaded web-page, placing an orange or red rose icon in the lower right-hand corner of every face on the page. The color of the icon depends on whether or not the system can stick a name to the face, and this is determined by whether or not the face has been registered with the system. Any unnamed faces can be registered with the system from there, though, don't expect miracles. The plug-in struggles with low-quality or poorly lit photos.
This is "cool," of course, and we tend to like advanced stuff like this even if it's not personally useful to us. But what happens if a web-user doesn't want his/her face indexed? As is often with new technology/services (stop-light cameras, Google, Facebook, RFID cards, etc.) this may one day begin to spark the paranoia of privacy rights activists -- assuming it gets big enough to get noticed by less nerdy common folk.
Photobucket, a popular image-hosting site, will get basic image-editing features (resizing, cropping, coloring, rotating, etc.) thanks to FotoFlexer, an in-browser, web-based picture editor.
For those who use both services, this is probably unsurprising as FotoFlexer already lets users save their edited pictures to their Photobucket accounts -- as well as any Facebook, Myspace, Yahoo Flickr, and Google Picasa accounts that they know the usernames and passwords to.
Well, at least this saves Photobucket users the hassle of logging into a separate site to do a little basic editing, which comes to a total of 48 seconds saved per photo edited according to our highly (un)scientific calculations.
So you've got a a web site, and you want to let people get in touch with you. But you know if you list your email address on that web page you're likely to get dozens of new messages every day asking if you'd like various parts of your anatomy enlarged. While you could use a service like Contactify to add a contact box to your site, there's also a much simpler solution: Just embed your email address in an image file so that screen scraping tools won't recognize it.
Creating an image with your email address isn't that difficult. Most basic image editing applications will let you embed text in a picture file. But Spam Proof eMail Generator makes things even easier. You don't have to download any application to your desktop. You can select from a group of fonts, colors, and text sizes. And you don't even need to host your image online. The generator will create an image for you and give you then give you an embed code and an image link.
We can think of many reasons why it'd be a good idea to password protect an image, and, whatever your reason may be (patent pictures, blueprints of the Death Star, or maybe a couple naughty shots of the wife), sometimes it's best that others don't find out. To solve this problem, we present Lockimage.
It consists of just one file and doesn't need to be installed. Lockimage will convert any picture into a "password protected executable," which means the file will open on any PC without the Lockimage program. This means, however, the modified file is no longer considered an image file, so this may not be the right solution for some.
Lockimage is similar to Locknote, which uses a similar method of locking files. It's also a Windows-only application, and it's probably best to use this against non-hacker types. With the program being open-source, the recipe isn't exactly a secret.
Google recently filed for a patent to protect a sophisticated search system designed to find text in images. The most obvious use of the the technology is to find text in pictures through Google Images, but that's just the beginning.
Currently, Google uses the technology in Google Maps Street View, but, as usual, the company would like to expand into other areas of money-making. It is currently putting together what may be called Google Product View, a service that could revolutionize the way we shop and revitalize walk-in stores.
Product View requires automatic machines to index the inventory of regular, walk-in stores. Consumers can search local stores or a specific location for rare items, preventing them from having to call individual stores and dealing with disgruntled 19 year olds. Google plans on integrating Product View with its other services including the company's advertising efforts and Google Maps.
Sometimes you need to process, crop, clip, or otherwise edit an image file in a hurry--and Photoshop takes longer to launch than most folks are willing to wait when a simple image modification is all that's needed. That's why we were pretty excited to find out about Photo Drop, a Mac Dashboard widget that really seems to speed up quicky image edits.
Since Photo Drop is a widget, you can drag files to it from other widgets or even from your desktop (drag the file to a hotcorner to activate Dashboard and then drop it on the Photo Drop widget). When you're done with your edits, drag it back out to the Finder and off you go.
Photo Drop provides several handy manipulations including cropping, resizing, borders, and some tasty eye candy like "1-bit", which will convert your photo into a strictly black and white image. We're digging it.
You don't need a tank to drive down the street. And sometimes you don't need Photoshop to edit a photo. IrfanView is one of our favorite light weight image viewing/editing applications. Need to open an image, view a slideshow? Check. Want to crop, resize, pixelize, blur, or brighten a photo? Check.
This week IrfanView released version 4.10. The latest update includes support for even more file types and comes packed with new editing features:
New paint plugin that lets you draw lines, circles and boxes on an image (just hit F12 to bring up the paint menu)
Support for embedded color profiles in JPG/TIF files
Lossless JPG Crop added
Support for FLV files
Auto adjust colors on selected portions of an image
A bunch of other bug fixes, tweaks, and new features for editing, opening, and viewing images and multimedia files.
And best of all, you can open and close IrfanView a few dozen times in the amount of time it would take you to load Photoshop. Oh yeah, and it's free. That's nice too.
If you find yourself taking screenshots of online applications, images, and content you find around the web, like the DLS bloggers often do, you might want to consider thumbalizr.
Thumbalizr is a handy website that takes a screenshot of any webpage. No more hitting the "Print Screen" button and pasting in Photoshop. Thumbalizr takes all the dirty work away and makes it as simple as entering a URL into a form field. Thumbalizr then pumps out a screen shot in 5 common pixel widths. Choose from 320, 640, 800, 1024, and 1280 widths, or you can even do a custom one. The application will actually take a screen grab of just a single screen view, or even the whole web page, from <html> tag, to </html>. Thumbalizr might not be good for zooming in on a particular area, but for capturing a general space its great.
We've not mentioned Pixelmator before, but our colleagues over at The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) have. Pixelmator is arguably one of the intriguing looking Mac applications in a while, and whilst the user interface looks great, so does the feature list.
Layer-based editing, an array of selection, painting and editing tools, real-time filters and a metric ton of file formats with which it's compatible (thanks to its under-lying ImageMagick base) make this a very attractive addition to those of us unable to afford, or unwilling to budget for, Photoshop. Unfortunately, that is as much as we know at the moment, as the program has been kept strictly under wraps until today. The good news is that a closed beta test is now going on to fix any bugs that are in what would appear to be a complex piece of software so hopefully it won't be too long before everyone can enjoy the features this baby-Photoshop-esque application has to offer.
So now that Yahoo owns Flickr why not integrate all these crazy, top notch, up to the second, newsworthy photos into Yahoo's image search? It only makes sense.
We wrote about this happening, and it's taken quite a while to do, but Yahoo has finally included Flickr photos in its queried search results. When images are uploaded to Flickr accounts worldwide and tagged, Yahoo gains access to these additions via a live feed from the Flickr service. When users then search in Yahoo, Flickr images will be marked with a Flickr account name. Searchers can then choose to view and search all photos by that particular user.
So as long as images are tagged correctly, they should start showing up in searches on Yahoo's Image Search.
Still not satisfied with the new Google Image search page? This Greasemonkey script should make things a bit easier. With GoogleNlarge, you just need to do your Google image search as you normally would. Only now you only need to hover your mouse over the google thumbnail image and leave the rest up to the Greasemonkey script.
Hovering over the thumbnails will make the full sized image appear on the side of the screen. The only thing you need for this script is Firefox and Greasemonkey... and obviously Google image search results, too.
We just felt a great tremor in the web - as if millions of mobloggers cried out in unified celebration. Tumblr, the new tumblelog service that we're already big fans of, just introduced a mobile uploads feature which allows anyone with an email-capable phone to get their tumbling on. Sending a message with a photo to a private email address that you obtain in your settings will publish it to your tumblelog, and the subject line will be used as a caption.
We specify a message with a photo not only because this is the language Tumblr uses for the feature, but also because sending a simple SMS or email with nothing but text seems to fall on deaf ears; nothing was published, which is at least a minor bummer. What about all those witty or "what'd they say?" one-liners we hear in public, Tumblr? Here's hoping that you really mean 'beta' with this feature, as it could use some fleshing out.
Another major addition to the Tumblr service is permalinks. Depending on the default theme design (or how you customize your own), each of your posts should now contain a permalink for optimum linking and re-blogging by all. Be on the lookout, however, as some of the themes actually hide the permalink until you mouse over the post.
Getting a $20 Million paycheck for having your photo used on a Yahoo sign in page is not a bad deal, if you're a celebrity that is. That's what one Ohio woman and her legal team are hoping for. It seems like "Mary" discovered her photo being used without her permission on a sign up confirmation page for Yahoo's email system and nabbed up three law firms to fight her battle. Whats in it for the law firms? Exposure, and possibly a big payday.
Apparently "Mary's" right of publicity was violated. Now keep in mind she isn't a celebrity, just your average everyday woman from Ohio who wants her payday from a multi billion dollar company.
It seems odd that Yahoo would use her photo if it wasn't part of a stock photo library; there are tons of generic looking stock people out there to choose from. If they did use her photo from a service like Flickr or Yahoo Image search there most likely is something in the small print to protect Yahoo. We'll have to see how this one pans out.
ImageChef is a family-friendly site that allows you to create custom images for your blog, forum signature or general amusement. Without having to register any kind of account, you can modify text in a variety of image templates. The resulting pictures can be easily saved or emailed to friends.
ImageChef will host your pictures if you're a registered user (registration is free), and provide the snip-its of code so that you can embed your artwork in your MySpace, Friendster or TypePad account.
Though sometimes cheesy, the provided image templates do allow for some creative Tom Foolerly. If you find yourself wasting a lot of time, please feel free - no, encouraged! - to post a link to your creation via the comments.
We've not mentioned Pixelmator before, but our colleagues over at The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) 
