Just feel like tuning up your dull-looking images? Well there’s a lot of ways to go about doing so. To begin with you should have a good image editor. Personally I recommend taking a look at the various products found at Adobe’s website.

Earlier today I downloaded an extra filter to my beloved image editor, Photoshop (CS2), made by Pixelpaper. It didn’t take me long to create a very cool looking image. How to do what I just did doesn’t need more than a few minutes of your time and some playing around with your mouse. The only thing worth mentioning is the structure effect which is found when selecting the “surface tab” and clicking “Bumpmap” rather than the more obvious “Surface” button…

Microsoft has released Internet Explorer 7 but only for Windows XP SP2 users. If you are running a previous version of Microsoft Windows, you´ll need to upgrade to Windows XP SP2 first. A slightly more secure version of Internet Explorer 7 will be released in January 2007 with the Windows Vista operating system.

Notable among the new features within IE 7 for Windows XP are a redesigned interface, tabbed browsing, a built-in RSS feed reader, and a new Favorites Center. Despite nearly two and half years of development, the new browser falls short of complying with Web standards and of matching features found in competing browsers, and despite an aggressive marketing campaign to the contrary, IE 7 is not that much more secure that IE 6, in part because of its reuse of old IE 6 code and a crippling legacy that Microsoft is slow to patch existing IE flaws.

I recently visited Download.com to see if there was a new Web Editor out there that might compete against Dreamweaver (my editor of choice), when it struck me… Most of these reviews looks like they´ve been written by the developers!

While browsing the list of Web editors and reading some user reviews I got the stinct impression that more than 50% of all reviews seemed to come from the developers themselves. Some of them even looked like they were randomly generated by a computer. Paragraph after another without any real content, just line after line of bragging about groovy functions and super-easy menues and error checking.

In case you´ve been living under a rock lately, Opera recently announced that as of version 8.5, they will no longer be charging for usage of their browser.

In the past, previous versions were free for download. However, unless you paid for it, you were greeted by a built-in banner advertisement during the entirety of your web browsing. I had given it a try a few years ago, but simply had not found anything useful enough to merit either paying for it, or tolerating the ads. So, I switched back to Internet Explorer (pre-Firefox).

Earlier this week I discovered I was unable to play some of my own personal videos (*.AVI) on neither my laptop at home nor my desktop in the office. The most frustrating thing about it was that I couldn’t get a decent error message from any of my mediaplayers. Most of them just crashed or they continued at 10% of normal speed (very annoying). Media Player told me that an “unknown error” just occurred, so that didn’t help me much either. Even intense “googling” didn’t sort the problem.

When something that used to work suddenly stops working you better remember what you installed last. In this case I did (for a change) remember, and it was interVideo DVD copy. Apparently this release has some issues with one of the Morgan codec’s, or more precisely doesn’t install it/them properly. As a result some formats are unsupported cause the Morgan codec’s breaks down on execution.

Solution came with a nifty little app called GSpot. With this “Codec Information Appliance” I was able to isolate the problem. The problem with the faulty codec’s from Morgan was simply resolved by re-installing the original codec’s found at Morgan’s website. However this is not the only incident where Windows and media codec’s doesn’t walk hand in hand, but so far Microsoft haven’t written anything helpful on the subject. Thank God for those small helpful apps and gadgets people develop to make life easier on the rest of us…

With GSpot you can open any media file and get current status. It will tell you which codec’s you need and also if the ones you have are not behaving properly like in my case. More or less all the info you need to get the files playing, and your system back to normal.

P.S. Yes you’re right, I never said anything about why I need a DVD copier