In Depth: 35 cool and fun things to try with your PC
Spreadsheets, word processing and databases. Limiting a modern PC to running these bread and butter tasks is like buying a Ferrari and driving it to the corner shop.
The question is, with a fast processor, a quick internet connection and a little imagination, what can a PC really do?
We've asked our writers to kick back and let their imaginations run riot. Security expert Jon Thompson inevitably got involved with spying and subterfuge, uber geek Mike Williams remote controlled his home PC with Twitter and joker Jamie Middleton decided to change the world. So read on and spare a thought for those PCs condemned to a life of office work.
1. Keep high-def YouTube videos
There are quite a few sites, plug-ins and apps that allow you to download videos from YouTube in Flash Video format. However, these can be quite a poor reflection of the originally uploaded video. In a large and increasing number of cases, you can also download high-quality and even high-definition versions of YouTube videos by slightly changing the URL.
It works like this. When you find a video you want to download, change the domain from www.youtube.com to www.youtubekeep.com and hit [Enter]. You'll go to a YouTubeKeep page that features download options for the video. Select what you want, click 'Download' and save the file. Don't be tempted to download illegal content and never redistribute what you've downloaded.
2. Get classic movies free
Many films from the golden age of cinema have fallen out of copyright. This means that it's now legal to download and watch many films and short features in your home. To make sure that you stay on the right side of the law, however, it's best to download them from a legal cinema archive.
One such archive is www.publicdomaintorrents.com, which provides content as torrents. You'll have to install a torrent client such as Vuze to download the files, but once done you'll have access to a large number of classics including Laurel and Hardy, Charlie Chaplin and some surprisingly good forgotten gems.
3. Stream live TV
When you're on the move or on holiday, it can be frustrating to miss your favourite shows. But because many broadcasters stream their content live, sites have sprung up allowing you to watch TV from all around the world, giving you access to literally thousands of channels.
One such service is WWITV, which boasts a database of over 3,000 channels from all around the world. Simply select a country and then select a channel from the list. An entry of 'on site' in the Stream column indicates that you'll be connected to the broadcaster's site rather than watching on WWITV.
4. Unblock foreign TV sites
When you're used to the web's lack of geographical borders, it comes as an irritation to discover that many broadcasters block foreign viewers from accessing their online TV programmes. However, you can bypass this using a public proxy.
A public proxy is a computer that's situated in the same country as the broadcaster. The broadcaster's content management system allows the proxy access to its media files. The proxy in turn passes that content on to you.
You need a proxy located in the same country as the broadcaster that you're trying to access content from, and there's a big list that covers most territories at www.publicproxyservers.com. One of the best for accessing US content is www.proxypass.us.
When you come across a page that is blocked, type its URL into ProxyPass' URL box and hit [Enter]. All being well, you should gain immediate access to the media stream.
5. Make video come alive
VLC is an amazingly versatile video player packed with unsung features
Are you stuck with a movie or music file in a format that Windows Media Player refuses to acknowledge, let alone play? You need an alternative in the form of VLC Media Player from VideoLAN.
The list of video formats VLC Player can handle is extensive, but few users seem to know that it can also transcode files into other formats.
To do so, load a video and press [Ctrl]+[R]. Click 'Add' and select the videos you want to transcode. Click 'Convert/ Save' and a new window will pop up asking for the destination folder. Enter this, and select a profile (the format for the file you want to create). If you want to watch the video as it is transcoded to check the progress, select the 'Display the output' tickbox. Finally, click 'Start'.
Search for video input drivers
VLC is an extremely versatile piece of software. As well as playing all the popular (and less popular) video and audio formats, it can sometimes help out when drivers aren't available in Windows Vista for video input devices such as obsolete but perfectly serviceable webcams.
To see if this works for you, connect your device and select 'Open Capture Device' from the Media menu. Select the video device from the dropdown list in the resultant pop-up window. If it doesn't appear, try clicking the 'Refresh' button. Click 'Play' and you should start receiving output from the device.
If you've ever wanted to watch videos as ASCII art, VLC player can help you here. Select 'Preferences' from the Tools menu and click on the Video section. Select the Output dropdown list and select 'Colour ASCII art video output'. Click 'Save' and open a file to watch the result.
6. Value your neighbours' house
The Land Registry is a government agency that records who owns what property. It also has a searchable database of average property prices. It's useful to find out how prices are doing in your neighbourhood, and if you've decided to move house then you can tell how much your new home should really be costing you.
To have a look, click 'House Prices' and then 'Search the Index'. Select 'Choose a single location' and then enter a postcode or area. Confirm your choice and select 'House Type Breakdown Report'.
To see current prices, select the last month as the date range and click 'Next'. To see how prices in your area have increased or declined over time, select the time period that you're interested in instead.
7. Get local statistics
Thinking of moving and want to know how safe, healthy and educated your chosen area is? There's an easy way of discovering the levels of crime and a lot more besides on the National Audit Office's website. Click on the Regional Statistics tab and select the area of the UK that you're after.
Click the 'Neighbourhood' link at the top of the page and then enter the postcode you're interested in into the Neighbourhood Summary box. Across the top of the resultant page are tabs that break down the initial summary page by topics such as health (including life expectancy), education and local crime figures broken down by type.
For even more information, click on the More tab and select 'Complete Topic List' from the resulting options. This allows you to access incredibly detailed data about the makeup, living conditions and even lifestyles of the area you're interested in.
8. Check out a company's history
Here's a way to find out if a company you're dealing with has had financial problems such as bankruptcy. All limited companies must notify Companies House of significant events and file annual accounts.
Creditgate allows you to see this history. Enter the company name in the search box, hit [Enter] and select it from the results. The subsequent page displays a list of all the records held by Companies House. You can buy each piece of information for a more detailed view, but the titles themselves are often a giveaway.
9. Trace an email automatically
When you're worried that an email isn't what it claims to be, you should inspect the headers, which give chapter and verse on where it came from. But reading headers is a fiddly business.
Luckily, there are websites that will do it for you. One such service is IP-address.com. Save the dodgy email as a text file, then copy and paste from the top to the line that reads 'Content-Type: multipart/mixed'. Enter this into the input box on the site and click 'Trace Email Sender'. You'll know for sure exactly who sent it within seconds.
10. Crack Windows passwords
Don't worry if you've had a memory lapse – your Windows machine can be persuaded to divulge its secrets Have you ever forgotten the password to an old Windows machine account but needed to get at the contents?
It happens occasionally. If you can log into the PC under a Guest account, Cain & Abel is for you. It's an extremely powerful password cracker that also happens to be free. Cain is the user interface to the application, while Abel is a system service that does the background work.
Download the program from here. After installing the executable, which includes the Pcap library to allow your network card to sniff your LAN for passwords, open the Cain directory under Program Files and copy the 'Abel.dll' and 'Abel.exe' files to C:\Windows.
Next, double-click Abel.exe to install the service. Now, from the Start menu, select 'Run' and enter services.msc. This will display a list of services. Find Abel and right-click on it to start it (this saves having to reboot).
Forcing entry
To test the software, set up a dummy Windows account and give it a password, then run Cain from the Start menu. Next, click on the Cracker tab. The list of current password crackers is displayed in the left-hand pane. Click on 'LM & NTLM Hashes' and press the large black cross button at the top of the interface. Click 'Next' on the pop-up window to continue.
The spreadsheet in the main pane will now fill with the details of your Windows log-in accounts. Right-click the dummy account and move the mouse over 'Brute-Force Attack'. Under the submenu that appears, click on 'LM Hashes'. A window will appear. Abel will try all possible combinations of symbols selected in the Charset dropdown menu. Click 'Start' and, if the password is a dictionary word, the program should crack it with alarming speed.
11. Read the classics
When you're stuck for some reading material and don't want to pay to download ebooks to your reader, why not settle down with one of those classics you've always meant to read? You can do so for free at the Project Gutenberg website, www.gutenberg.org.
If you already know the surname of the author of the book you're interested in, simply enter it into the 'Author' input box at the top left of the main page and hit [Enter] to see the list of works included in the archive. You can also click the 'Browse Catalogue' link to select an author or title by its initial letter.
If you don't know what to read, click the 'Bookshelf' link to sort the archive by subject. Click on a bookshelf to access several sub-bookshelves and finally the books themselves. Now click on a book to download it.
12. Emulate old systems
Your PC owes a great debt to a litany of forefathers, so you should be able to enjoy that history on your PC. And you can – software emulators can transform your PC into anything from a ZX-80 to a Commodore Amiga.
That said, legally running old software isn't the most straightforward of tasks. Many publishers still retain the rights to distribute old titles, so while games may be readily available online, they're usually not technically legal to obtain. Similarly, many emulators are forced to make use of the system ROMs of their target machine, clouding their legitimacy.
That's not to say you're without options. Infogrames – the current owner of the Atari brand – offers a selection of classic games at www.atari.com/arcade.
You can turn your PC into one running an older version of Windows using DOSBox, which includes a reverse-engineered and legitimate version of DOS suitable for running any old software you might have hanging around.
And a few publishers have smiled kindly on the emulation scene and released their software for legal use on emulators – check out www.mame dev.org/roms for a selection of arcade games and www.iancgbell.clara.net/elite for versions of classic space trader game Elite that are suitable for just about every emulator.
13. Look back in time
The internet might be all about now, but there's a growing movement dedicated to preserving its blocky, 256-colour past. The web is constantly reinventing itself: pages are updated over the top of old ones, while unused sites fall into disuse and eventually die. Even sites set up to record major world events have fallen prey to this creeping online amnesia.
It's only by setting aside funds to preserve sites set up to cover events such as the Olympic Games that they're still available for browsing. But what about the rest of the web?
Tackling this problem is an ongoing project that has been at the forefront of preserving our online heritage since 1996. The Internet Archive is a non-profit organisation that allows people to revisit past events to see how they were covered, discussed and argued about at the time.
Access to the archive is free. Simply surf to the site, enter the URL you're interested in (including http://) into the Wayback Machine search box at the top of the screen and click 'Take Me Back'. With 150 billion pages already collected, there's a very good chance that the one you're looking for is in the archive.
Entering a URL produces a set of lists, grouped by year, of collected updates to the website. Click on one of these to see the site as it was at the time. The links on the old site should also work as the pages are served from the archive instead of the web itself.
As well as this massive archive of websites, The Internet Archive also plays host to large collections of moving images, live music, audio and texts. Each is catalogued into sub-collections to help you find what you're looking for.
In the Web section, there are even more sub-collections, but one in particular stands out. It's a list of pioneering sites that embraced the new technology of the web and helped establish it as the global phenomenon it is today. See here to check it out yourself.
14. Visit yesterday's web
The internet hasn't always been about YouTube, Facebook and Google. Long ago, there was a time when everything was grey, text was blue and the only fonts available were Arial and Times Roman. Relive those pioneering days (or thank your lucky stars that they're just a memory) with Deja Vu's old browser emulator.
Click on one of the web browsers in the list to see how the web would have looked back in 1994. Some of the browsers never made it out of the 1990s, but others – like Netscape – went on to become the bedrock of today's hyper-functional browsers.
15. Search The Times' archive
When you want to read historical reports, The Times' archive may be just what you're looking for. The newspaper has digitised every single issue published from when it first began printing on 1 January 1785 right through to 31 December 1985.
If you want to search for specific dates and keywords, you'll have to subscribe. A day pass costs آ£4.95, but if you click on the Topics index in the grey 'Featured Searches' box, you can read multiple reports about a large selection of events for free.
16. Manage your finances
See all your expenses listed and broken down by category with Kublax Kublax helps you manage your finances by letting you view the status of all your UK bank accounts, be they current, savings or credit cards. It also lets you analyse your spending.
Once you've signed up, enter your various bank log-in details to retrieve your account information from the banks. If you're worried about security, don't be: Kublax uses the same encryption system as the US Federal Reserve, so it can't be too shoddy.
More to the point, Kublax doesn't actually let you move any money out of or between your accounts – it's a budgeting tool, not a banking utility. If you aren't happy about giving Kublax your bank details then you can choose to manually upload your downloaded bank statements instead (the site accepts both OFX and QIF files).
Kublax will then automatically recognise and categorise each of your transactions. Spend آ£20 in Topshop and Kublax adds that to your 'clothing' spend. It's a very fast way of breaking down your incomings and outgoings.
Breaking things down
Your income and outgoings are displayed as a pie chart, and clicking on each segment shows you what transactions are included within it. You can also set budgets for each category (for example, آ£100 for groceries) and set up email alerts to warn you when you reach 90 per cent of your budgeted allowance, or even if there is any unusual activity on a little-used account.
It also has the ability to send calendar alerts to warn you a few days before a regular bill is due to be paid so that you can make sure you have the funds for it. An added benefit of Kublax is that it lets you compare your data anonymously with other users to see if you are spending too much in a certain area. For example, you could compare your bank charges with others to see if you would spend less with a different establishment.
17. Disaster-proof your life
KnowYourStuff lets you create an inventory of all your belongings, meaning that if disaster does strike you'll be able to make a better, faster and smoother insurance claim.
Backed by the American Insurance Information Institute, the site lets you record each item by make, model and serial number, and you can add photos and scans of purchase receipts or appraisal forms. Keeping this online means your record will still be available if your house and PC do go up in smoke.
18. Access your to-do list from anywhere
Although there are many online tools out there offering to-do lists and reminder services, Remember The Milk stands out because of the number of sites and services that you can add it to – making checking your to-do list easy no matter what you're doing.
You can receive Remember The Milk reminders via email, SMS and various instant messenger services, and you can add them to (and even edit them from) your Google calendar. You can even add a Remember The Milk to-do list to the right-hand side of your Gmail homepage, giving you a visual reminder of what you need to do next each time that you sign in to check your email.
19. Install all your favourite applications in one go
Getting a new PC is a double-edged sword. On one hand it will be fast and flash; but on the other, you have to complete the time-consuming task of searching the web for your favourite free apps and then installing them.
To give this a miss, try installation app Ninite, which allows you to download the latest versions of all the most popular free applications in one click – so everything from Skype to Messenger, OpenOffice.org and iTunes can be installed in one fell swoop.
What's more, each installation carried out by Ninite is the default for the program, with none of those irritating add-ons like toolbars and installers included.
20. Sync and share files between work and home
Are you always forgetting that pesky USB key? If so, give Dropbox a go. It's a free tool for synchronising files across different computers.
Just install Dropbox on the PCs and laptops you work on and a Dropbox folder will appear in your Documents folder. Anything dragged in there (up to a 2GB limit) will be automatically updated on all your other computers when they connect to the web, meaning that you always have the latest version of your files wherever you are.
If you're using a computer that doesn't have Dropbox installed, you can still download and upload your files to your Dropbox folder just by logging onto the website. Dropbox also lets you share your files with other Dropbox users, so you can collaborate on projects together. There's a handy 30-day undo history too, so if you accidentally delete an essential file, you can get it back without any trouble.
21. Recycle your unwanted possessions
Got an old sofa or bed you no longer need? Don't take it down the rubbish tip – list it on one of the recycling websites like www.freecycle.com, www.ilovefreegle.com or www.reuseitnetwork.org.
Here you join your local community site (or set up your own if one doesn't already exist) and list your unwanted possessions so that others in your area can come and pick them up from your home if they have a use for them. It's also a very useful (and cheap) way of furnishing a new flat or getting hold of common stuff like baby clothes and equipment that can cost a fortune but are only needed for a couple of years.
22. See the world from your PC
Keep up to date with some of the most spectacular sights in the world by accessing the many thousands of webcams set up around our planet. Sites such as www.earthcam.com have extensive lists of webcam sites around the world where you can see astonishing geological features, rare animals in their natural habitat and even busy shopping districts (if that's your idea of a good time).
As well as making holiday planning a lot easier, it's also a great way of seeing notable events such as hurricanes or erupting volcanoes in real-time – you just need to find a webcam in the area.
23. Change the world
Distributed computing is a way of combining the spare computing power of numerous PCs to help analyse complex scientific data, allowing scientists to speed up their research. This method is famously used by SETI, who exploit it to analyse the skies for signs of extra-terrestrial life, but there are many other projects that could use your computer's help.
Your spare runtime can be funnelled off to help people who are really trying to make a difference – and all you need to do is download a small program onto your PC.
Forget searching for little green men: distributed computing projects cover everything from modelling drugs in the fight against AIDS to monitoring climate change, researching different ways to end our reliance on fossil fuels and probing the limits of our knowledge about the universe.
Lending a hand
The site www.worldcommunitygrid.org has a list of projects that you can join. Among their number are those trying to model drugs to fight muscular dystrophy and various forms of cancer. There are also groups discovering new drugs by studying how proteins fold, and even people trying to find ways to make eco-friendly fuels and more productive rice strains to feed the world more efficiently.
BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) also has a list of groups who want your help to push back the boundaries of research. It includes projects trying to model climate change, attempting to stop the spread of malaria and trying to create artificial intelligence by reverse engineering the brain.
If you fancy looking out into the cosmos you can even get involved with tracking asteroids that could harm the Earth or trying to detect gravitational waves.
24. Rearrange your living space
Ever wondered whether your front room would look better with the sofa under the window? Website www.roomfulexpress.icovia.com helps you to make a simple plan of your room and its furniture and then let you experiment with how different rearrangements would work, all without putting your back out.
Simply drag furniture icons onto your roomplan before resizing and rotating them to match your current living arrangements. Once you've got a plan of your room you can save it, meaning that if you fancy rearranging everything all over again in the future, help is just a login away.
25. Get a premium bonds payout!
There's nothing that helps more to truly change your life than a fat wedge of cash – and it could be out there waiting for you already. Each year millions of pounds of prizes go unclaimed by Premium Bond winners. As there is no time limit on claiming – the prize is held until the winner is tracked down – you won't have missed out if you moved house without updating your Premium bond details.
There are over 400,000 prizes still waiting to be claimed, and the oldest dates back to the first draw in June 1957 – so it's well worth checking whether you're one of the lucky ones at www.nsandi.com.
26. Become an online TV star
If there's a celebrity inside you just bursting to get out, get online and become a meme! Got a good idea for a TV show, or fancy broadcasting your thoughts to the masses? Then don't just sit there – do something about it!
Create an account at Livestream and you'll be able to create a complete TV channel with your own logo, graphics and Twitter promotions, and then broadcast your programmes to the masses. You won't be around to run your channel all the time, of course, so once it's set up click 'Launch Studio | Manage Library' to import videos that will be shown when you're not available.
You can import videos from YouTube, podcasts and most web servers, or upload videos from your own PC (FL, MOV, AVI, WMV, MP4, M4V and 3GP formats are supported). Form these clips into storyboards, then drag and drop them onto the Auto-pilot Playlist, which defines what's broadcasted when you're not around.
That's the theory, anyway, but in practice you could also use the playlist to create a channel that, say, just broadcast your favourite videos from other sources.
Lighting up the small screen
Once the library is complete, clicking 'Broadcast Live' will let you broadcast images from any webcam connected to your system. Multiple cameras are supported, and you can run cued pre-recorded video clips and add overlays, tickers, logos and more.
If the web interface is more than you need, download the free Livestream Procaster. This provides a simpler way to broadcast from a single camera, but it also has other useful capabilities. For example, if you choose 'Screen' in the Source box and then click 'Go Live', you'll broadcast the contents of your PC screen with optional text or audio chat, which is useful if you want to run some kind of tutorial.
And Procaster can even hook into DirectX or OpenGL games and display what you're seeing (click through 'Game | Go Live | Launch game' and press [Ctrl]+[F1]), which is perfect if you're a gaming wizard and want to show off your skills.
27. Remote control your PC via Twitter
Twitter can be useful. No, really. Install TweetMyPC and you'll be able to lock, shut down or reboot your PC, download a file, send a file on your PC to a Gmail address and more just by tweeting.
First, create a Twitter account. Turn off public access to this so that people can't see what you're doing (click 'Settings | Account' and then check the 'Protect my tweets' box). Don't follow anyone on this account.
Next, download TweetMyPC, enter your log-in details and click 'Save And Close'. To see if it works, type a tweet like Screenshot. All being well, TweetMyPC will take a screenshot of your PC, post it online and send a link to your Gmail address.
28. Find your celebrity double
Are you a dead ringer for Pierce Brosnan – or maybe you fancy yourself as more of a Shane MacGowan? Either way, your PC can settle any arguments on the subject. First, take a clear hi-res picture of yourself looking square on at the camera.
Next, upload it to www.myheritage.com/face-recognition along with pictures of the celebrities whose noses, eyes and chins you're claiming as your own. The site will use the miracle of face recognition and facial feature analysis to produce a reading about whom you most resemble.
The site can also be used to decide which parent a child looks most like. Behind the fun is some impressive maths.
29. Share a mouse and keyboard
Synergy is far better than using a KVM switch. It enables you to control multiple PCs with one keyboard and mouse – even if they're running different operating systems.
First, decide which machine to use as the controller and download Synergy to it. The others will be clients. In the app, click 'Share this computer's keyboard and mouse' and then select 'Configure'. Now add each PC and that's pretty much it, bar setting up rules for screen size scaling.
When you're done with the dominant PC, install Synergy on the others, select 'Use another computer's shared keyboard and mouse' and enter the hostname of your main PC.
30. Control your apps with mouse gestures
Mouse gestures are productivity boosting shortcuts. Instead of clicking a button or using the keyboard, just hold down a mouse button and move the cursor in a certain way to get the job done.
Your apps don't support them? Not a problem: install StrokeIt and it'll give you time-saving gestures for the desktop (minimise or restore all windows), Media Player (zoom, play, stop), Explorer (back, forward) and more.
Other gestures work just about everywhere – for instance, drawing a U-shape with the mouse sends an Undo command to the foreground application, whatever it is. And if you can't find a gesture for the action you're after anywhere, simply click 'File | New Action' and create it for yourself.
31. Make a Wi-Fi CCTV system
Worried about being burgled? Leave your PC guarding the house With the right software, your PC could become a powerful home security system, monitoring several areas simultaneously and alerting you at the first sign of any intruders. All you need is a collection of webcams and some know-how.
Firstly, install the trial version of Active WebCam. It displays a 'Trial version' logo but won't time out, so it's good enough for us. Launch the program, set up a camera and select 'Settings | Motion Detection'. Make sure motion detection is turned on, with the sensitivity you need it to be (turn it down if there's a pet wandering around to reduce the chance of accidental alerts) and tell the program to alert you via email should it detect something.
Now click 'File | New Camera' to add each new camera, using the Motion tab to define how it's treated. That's just about it. Test Active WebCam by sending someone into each area and confirming that you're notified, then just leave the program to watch over your home.
32. Use your Windows phone as a spy camera
Your Windows Mobile smartphone can send video images from its camera to whoever you like. But you don't have to be present to make this happen. If you leave the phone in a room where you'd like to know what's going on, it's easy to stream video from there and monitor what's happening from another PC.
First sign up for a free VZOchat account. Then visit http://m.vzochat.com in your smartphone browser, download the VZOmobile software and install it. Click 'Options | Integration' and make sure it's set up to run at startup and automatically accept incoming calls. Stay logged into VZOmobile and leave the camera pointing at what you want to watch.
Now go to a PC, install the desktop version of the software and create a new account. Place a call to your mobile account, and if all's gone well you should see the room you're monitoring. The free version cuts off after a minute.
33. Create your own wireless hotspot
Sharing your broadband is easy thanks to a little-known Windows 7 feature called Virtual Wi-Fi. It turns your internet connection into a software-based wireless router. Once set up, any nearby friend with a laptop, iPod Touch or other Wi-Fi-enabled device will be able to see your system, connect to it and access the internet.
It's an impressive feature, but there's a problem – you need compatible drivers for your wireless device, and right now they're hard to find. Check with your manufacturer to see what's available. Or, if you know your chipset, take a look at the small print for Intel's latest 32-bit and 64-bit drivers to see what might work for you. If you're in luck and you find a driver that supports virtual Wi-Fi, you should be able to start your hotspot manually.
Click Start, type cmd, right-click 'cmd.exe' and select 'Run As Administrator'. Then enter the command netsh wlan set hostednetworkmode=allow ssid=private key=passphrase, replacing 'private' and 'passphrase' with your own choices, and making sure that the passphrase is easy to remember yet impossible for anybody else to guess.
Activating the hotspot
Next, enter the command netsh wlan start hostednetwork to fire up your hotspot. Finally, click 'Control Panel | Network and Internet | Network and Sharing Centre | Change Adaptor Settings', right-click your internet connection and select 'Properties'. Click the Sharing tab, check the 'Allow other network users to connect...' box and choose your virtual Wi-Fi adaptor.
Anyone nearby should now be able to see the virtual router you've just detected and connect to it once they've entered your passphrase.
Too much like hard work? You could create a batch file to run the netsh commands, but there's an even simpler alternative: install Virtual Router and the entire set-up process will be automated for you.
34. Browse safely on other PCs
When you use other people's PCs to get online, you may be leaving behind traces of data. Luckily there's an easy solution: carry a bootable browsing environment around with you. Download a Ubuntu Live CD and burn it to disc or create a bootable USB flash drive (see here for more details).
Now boot from this on any PC and click 'Try Ubuntu...' followed by 'Applications | Internet | Firefox'. You'll now be able to browse without compromising privacy.
35. Make cash with live PC support
You may be used to helping people solve their PC problems, so why not use your knowledge to earn a little extra cash? You'll need a website with FTP access and MySQL support. Install LiveZilla to add live chat, where site visitors can click a button to open a chat window on your PC.
Then sign up at PayPal, go to the Merchant Services tab and create a 'Buy Now' button with your charges. Integrate this with the LiveZilla button (instructions are here) and people will only be able to chat if they pay first.
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Review: Philips 46PFL9704H
Using LED backlighting in LCD TVs is no longer news. Over the last few months we've seen a flurry of new TVs from a growing number of brands all exploiting the technology. Yet the Philips 46PFL9704H makes LED feel all shiny and futuristic again, simply by virtue of how damn good it is.
The 46PFL9704's play for your AV heart begins as soon as you take in its crisp, metallic (brushed aluminium, metallurgy fans), two-tone design, offset by the spectacle of Philips' Ambilight system spilling from three of the TV's sides.
If you dont have the space for the 46PFL9704 then there is the 40-inch version as well, available for around آ£1800.
Its siren call merely grows louder, too, with the discovery of five HDMIs, an Ethernet port and a USB input among its connections.
The 46PFL9704's feature count, meanwhile, is fearsome, even by Philips' usual 'kitchen sink' standards. The interesting stuff starts, of course, with that all-important LED backlighting system. This takes the 'traditional' direct approach, rather than the edgemounted system pushed by ultraslim TVs like Samsung's B7000 and B8000 models.
As a result, the 46PFL9704 can deliver local dimming, where clusters of LEDs can have their brightness adjusted individually depending on the content of the part of the picture they serve. In theory this allows pitch blacks (where the LED arrays are switched off) to sit right along side ultra-bright whites (where the LED arrays are switched on fully).
What's more, the 46PFL9704 sports a massive 224 individually-controllable LED segments – 75 per cent more than was present in last year's 42PFL9803. This ought to reduce local dimming's issues with lost shadow detail and 'haloing' around bright objects.
Crazy contrast
The potentially much more precise LED lighting has been partnered with a new panel design, resulting in Philips' ground-breaking claimed contrast ratio of 5,000,000:1. Of course, anyone who believes such a figure probably also reckons the moon is made of cheese and the Earth is flat, but our Tech Lab's measurements of a 343,000:1 contrast ratio in Vivid mode, and 224,000:1 in Standard, are very impressive.
The other big attractions of the 46PFL9704 are its built-in internet access, and a potent brew of video processing that chiefly comprises Philips' أ¼ber-powerful Perfect Pixel HD system and a 200Hz engine (actually a combination of 100Hz with a scanning backlight).
In the current market, Philips 'net functions are the most advanced, particularly the inclusion of an Opera web browser, meaning you are unrestricted in the web content you can call up on your bigscreen.
Going through everything Perfect Pixel HD does would take far too much space, so suffice it to say that although you need to take care with some settings (more on this later), when the Perfect Pixel-driven images are at their best they are arguably the finest I've seen from an LCD TV.
Suck it and see
Such hyperbole will doubtless have our more cynical readers headed straight for their nearest AV Moaner forum. But it's hard to imagine anyone watching a well-calibrated 46PFL9704 disagreeing with me.
The single most devastating element of the 46PFL9704's pictures is their black level response, in terms of both the depth of grey-free black reached while showing the spacescapes of the latest Star Trek opus on Blu-ray, and the amount of shadow detail reproduced with dark interior shots. This latter achievement is particularly startling, since the loss of shadow detail is usually considered one of the weaknesses of direct LED technology.
The Philips' viewing angle is good, too, so the black level response hardly reduces at all if you have to watch the TV from an angle. Making the 46PFL9704's black level prowess all the more dramatic is the extreme brightness and vibrancy of the rest of its pictures. Here again you can clearly appreciate the worth of LED local dimming, as the image scarcely needs to dim its overall brightness at all to keep black levels looking excellent, even when an image contains a stark mixture of brights and darks.
Colours are exceptionally rich, yet they're painted with excellent subtlety, range and blend finesse, meaning that the 46PFL9704 is as at home with EastEnders as it is with The Incredibles.
Next there's Perfect Pixel HD's effective touch with sharpness. As well as producing extremely precise clarity and detailing with HD, the 46PFL9704 makes standard definition pictures look sharper and more 'HD' than possibly any other brand can manage. This extra detail is accompanied, too, by nowhere near as much noise as I've seen on other manufacturer's engines.
On the downside, the HD Natural Motion system can still generate some low-level artefacts, like shimmering around the edges of moving objects, even if you use it on its lowest setting. But these artefacts are less distracting than ever before, leaving the benefits of the processing standing prouder. Plus, of course, you can turn the system off entirely – though inevitably this will lead to a marginal increase in motion blur.
Other negatives include problems with the advanced sharpness tools. They're poorly thought out and can make pictures look ridiculously noisy. Also, none of the presets get close to 6,500K.
Finally, there is a trace of haloing around very bright objects. But you only really notice this if you're sat stupidly close to the screen.
It's back to good news with the 46PFL9704's audio performance. The TV uses the tried-and-tested Philips system of two dome tweeters in the front and two mid-bass drivers mounted in large volume speaker boxes on the rear. The result is powerful, dynamic and clear.
King of the castle
Yes, the 46PFL9704 is expensive. Yes, the 46PFL9704 is demanding. But provided you show it the care and attention it deserves, the 46PFL9704 is also nothing short of outstanding.
Of course, 2010 looks like being the Year of LED TV, with ever more feature-packed and slickly-designed models set to launch in the coming months, but I can easily recommend this current Philips TV to anyone after a high-end bigscreen.
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Review: JVC DLA-HD950
Just when the likes of Sony, Vivitek and Epson thought it was safe to get back in projector waters, JVC's D-ILA technology is back, making its rivals' lives very uncomfortable again with the DLA-HD950.
The DLA-HD950 is a high-end (آ£6,000) model that should be amply equipped to show how far JVC's D-ILA talents have progressed since 2009's excellent HD350 and HD750. Especially as, like the HD750, the HD950 has breezed through the Certified Display Program of the world-renowned THX AV kit evaluation group.
From the outside, the HD950 doesn't actually show much sign of progression over its HD750 forebear. That's not really a bad thing, though, since the elegant elliptical profile, curved rear corners, appealing glossy finish, recessed lens barrel and Sherman tank-like build quality are right up your average AV nut's street.
As I expect of a آ£6K projector, the flexibility and finesse of the HD950's fully motorised optical adjustments is impressive. The zoom extends to an excellent 2x and you can shift the image 80 per cent up or down vertically, or 34 per cent horizontally. The latter should allow you to forgo the haphazard keystone correction system for getting the edges of your pictures straight.
The HD950 can also be used with an external anamorphic lens, and its lens aperture can be set to one of 16 positions depending on your personal tastes/room set up, compared with just three available on its cheaper sibling, the HD550.
Ready for your room
JVC has made no secret about its desire to make headway in the custom install market, so it's natural that this PJ's connections include an RS-232 control port and a 12V trigger output. Inside, the HD950's optical wire grid D-ILA engine produces a claimed brightness output of 900 Lumens and contrast ratio of 50,000:1.
This latter figure is particularly remarkable because it's a native figure, achieved without resorting to an image-dimming dynamic iris like those found on LCD and SXRD projectors. While the HD950 has so far talked a good talk, it hasn't really explained why it's better than the HD750.
But if you look closely enough, there are potentially significant differences. For a start, the HD950 is licensed with the ISF C3 system, enabling trained engineers to professionally calibrate the projector for your particular room and screen characteristics.
Then there's the HD950's use of Clear Motion Drive processing. This proprietary JVC engine generates extra intermediate frames to reduce judder and boost clarity.
Other key features include a dedicated THX picture setting mode; numerous Gamma presets, plus loads of flexibility for defining your own setting; and a colour management system that allows you to finetune the hue, saturation and brightness of all six of the primary video colours.
It's worth stressing, too, that the HD950 doesn't skimp on 'general' picture processing, with the widely acclaimed HQV Reon-VX video processor onboard, complete with excellent I/P conversion, scaling and full 10bit 4:4:4 processing.
The darkness
Even though rival projection technologies have made considerable advances in the black level department recently, the HD950 stands out from the crowd when you're watching dark scenes such as the opening space battle of Star Wars III, recorded in HD from Sky (well, I had to go for a George Lucas film given this projector's THX certification!).
There are three reasons why dark scenes look so tasty on the HD950. First, it just gets closer to producing a real, cinematic black colour than any other sub-آ£10K projector I've seen.
Second, since it doesn't need to reduce brightness to produce a convincing black level, it makes dark scenes look much punchier, and more stable and consistent than projectors that use dynamic irises.
Finally, the fact that the HD950 can maintain high brightness and deep black level response within the same frame allows it to reproduce levels of subtlety and clarity, when it comes to greyscale and shadow detail, that you just don't get anywhere else without spending megabucks.
For instance, during the raid of the dark Nazca tomb in Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of The Crystal Skull (Blu-ray, another Lucas connection), I got a much richer sense of the texture and detail of the tomb's walls on the HD950 than I did on, say, Sony's similarly specced VW85.
The HD950's subtlety isn't limited to shadow detailing, either. It also seems better at reproducing subtle colour tone shifts than any of JVC's previous projectors – a fact which inevitably helps pictures look more three-dimensional and natural. As natural as two Jedi knights fighting a light-sabre battle on a lava planet ever could look, anyway...
To get colours looking precisely how I wanted them, I had to visit the colour calibration screen. But if you can't be bothered with this, either the THX or Cinema 2 settings deliver very impressive 'preset' results.
As noted before with D-ILA projectors, the HD950's Full HD images are stunningly sharp and detailed, clearly reproducing the grain in a good HD movie transfer, and picking out all those HD essentials like skin pores, blades of grass and Harrison Ford's wrinkles during Indy's adventures on South American plains.
Add to all these glories an absence of noise (colour moire, the rainbow effect, visible pixel structure and dot crawl are all dismissed), a general feeling of jaw-dropping precision, and an exemplary running noise (JVC has somehow turned one of the noisier projection technologies into one that runs almost silently, and the low quoted 19dB figure seems entirely believable), and you truly have an awe-inspiring performance for a آ£5K-آ£6K price point.
That's not to say I have nothing to moan about, though. I didn't take to the Clear Motion Drive system at all, for instance, finding its visible side effects tough to live with, even when watching HD (though it's not designed for use with 1080p24 BD material). It's just as well you can switch it off, although doing this inevitably results in a little judder in the pictures. But to me, at least, this feels sympathetic to the experience of watching a film in a cinema, and is never bad enough to actually distract you.
Unforgiving accuracy
My only other concern is that the HD950's exceptional accuracy makes it very unforgiving of poor quality sources. For instance, while playing Dragon's Age on the Xbox 360, I became aware of some quite distracting blocking and striping noise around the edges of some objects that I'd been blissfully unaware of while playing the game previously on Vivitek's budget, sub-آ£1K H1085 projector.
Of course, being negative about the HD950 because it's too accurate isn't fair. But I just thought you should know, in case you're thinking of feeding one loads of Freeview broadcasts or something daft...
So let's finish on the high the HD950 so richly deserves. It's an incremental improvement on the HD750 rather than a huge advance, but given how good the HD750 was, the fact that the HD950 improves on it at all – especially with colours and setup flexibility – has to be a cause for celebration.
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In Depth: How to create the perfect viral campaign
Creating the perfect viral campaign is both much harder and much easier than it looks.
Easier because all we're really talking about is making something people like and want to share; harder because there are lots of things to mess up along the way.
So what do we mean by the perfect viral campaign? Well, as a punter I'd want something hilariously funny and clever, which won me kudos for sending it to my friends. It should also make me really like the company behind it (and at least want to consider the product it was punting). That's pretty much a 10/10.
What I wouldn't want is some tired old rubbish, cynically designed to appeal to The Internets by some marketing hack that bored me, wasted my time, made me angry and made me hate everything about the company and product. That would be decidedly less than 10/10.
Where to start with virals
So, funny, clever, want to buy stuff, but how? First off, don't start out thinking about what your client wants. Come to that later. Start by thinking about what the audience wants. To do this, you'll need to get to know them intimately, maybe even become one of them. This will probably be both time-consuming and complex, but it can also be great fun.
Next, write something that's either enjoyable, informative, useful, shocking, sexy, cute, or whatever else it takes to entertain the audience. If you (like me) can't be entertaining, then find someone who can. If you can't find someone who can, give up.
Simply entertaining people isn't enough, though. Lots of very entertaining content resolutely fails to go viral. Some people watch it (yay!), but they don't talk about it (boo!). And if they don't talk about it, they're unlikely to share it – and virals are all about people sharing stuff. So introduce something that will make the masses talk.
Uncertainty, odd details, references to memes and/or celebrities are always a good bet. Eventually, you should have an idea that, with some skill, expertise and a bit of luck, could be turned into a big successful viral. Well done, have a biscuit. That was the easy part.
The hard bit is saying something good about the product at the same time without (in italics because it's important) upsetting what was good about the idea in the first place. There are no rules here, no lists of surefire ways to succeed.
As I said before, you need to know your audience – especially the kinds of things they're talking about, what content they're watching with specific reference to the sector, or better still, the product you're advertising. Incorporating elements of this general 'buzz' into your creation will get you a long way.
But if you're essentially nicking other successful ideas, be very careful – at the very least, make sure you add to the idea in some way. Otherwise you'll get the savage online kicking you so richly deserve.
Bear in mind as well, that although you're creating a marketing campaign, your audience's primary reason for watching what you make will be for entertainment. For them, the marketing bit is secondary. This means you're competing with brilliant million-pound TV ads such as the Cadbury's gorilla or Evian's rollerskating babies. You're also competing with the likes of us who've been around the block a few times and know what we're doing. Face your destiny with courage, young grasshopper.
The other thing to remember is that just when you start to think you know everything, it all goes and changes. The internet is a ludicrously dynamic place that evolves in odd and unpredictable ways. That's what makes the job brilliant, but also what stops us from sleeping properly.
For instance, about two years ago, YouTube and blogs came along and changed viral marketing radically. Virals generally stopped being "edgy" and crass, relying on slapstick and boobs, and grew up to become part of polite society.
The Twitter effect
It took a while to adjust, and now, just when the dust has settled on that major upheaval, Twitter is changing everything again. No one's quite sure how yet, beyond the obvious (people link to virals on it), but it promises to be pretty fundamental. In fact, it may well make the term viral marketing itself redundant – because any successful marketing will be viral.
Like any discipline, creating a successful viral campaign requires dedication, creativity, craft, experience and skills honed over time. One of the best ways to get your throat torn out by one of our creatives is to say something like, "Wow, you work in viral marketing? That must be great! You get to sit around all day dicking about and coming up with stupid ideas…" Wrong.
A good idea requires the judicious application of blood, sweat and tears, in more or less equal measure. And coming up with an idea is just the start. Now you've got to make it, produce it, execute it.
Many ATL (Above the Line) agencies rather dismissively outsource this job to production companies. Why? Because it's a massive headache and not hugely profitable. However, it's very important, and at The Viral Factory (TVF) we think anyone who doesn't have full, hands-on control of the production process is a fool. Let someone else bring your idea to life and it won't necessarily be how you want it.
Here are some practical pointers:
1. Anything that smacks of corporate might, lies, subterfuge, fear-mongering, double speak, taking yourself too seriously or censorship is bad.
2. Overt commercial messages are fine, as long as they're entertaining: the Will It Blend? campaign was a brilliant example of what was effectively a product demo being made web-friendly and relevant.
3. The 'us vs. them' mentality that many corporations still adopt doesn't play well. Slick, glossy content is generally not well received, whereas more lo-fi accessible material is, because it's something the audience could make themselves if they wanted to (or at least it's perceived that way), so there's a sense that the playing field is level.
We did a campaign for Samsung that involved drawing a little stickman character onto someone's body to create a stop-frame animation. We could have post-produced the whole thing and made it look great for the money we had. Instead, we did it for real, which looks a bit ropey and was an absolute ballache.
But it was hugely popular (it was watched 10million times on YouTube alone) because the viewers were able to engage with it on their own terms. Any one of them could have made it, had they had the patience and imagination. That changes the relationship between them and the brand.
4. Optimism and positivity are good. But then so are cynicism and dark humour. Less good is setting up the audience for a really great experience and then not delivering (we made this mistake recently and got a right kicking for it. From the audience, not the client. And no, I'm not going to say which campaign it was).
5. Let human qualities show through, rather than hiding behind a corporate mask. Companies, even big scary ones, are generally staffed by people, usually quite nice ones. Letting their voices come through is much more engaging than issuing decrees in the weird, dehumanised, faintly sinister corporate double-speak nonsense that has evolved over the last 20 years.
Re-reading this, I guess you could sum it up thus: be nice, be honest, be real. So there you go, that's the creative bit, and I honestly hope it helps, even if you become competitors and end up beating us at our own game. But that's only the half of it. A perfect viral campaign needs seeding.
For the uninitiated, this is the process by which a viral is launched onto the net, put in front of the first generation of viewers and given the momentum that will carry it on to greater things. If your content is perfectly viral, then in theory, you should be able to stick it on your Facebook profile and by lunchtime the entire world will have seen it.
On planet Earth, however, things don't always pan out quite like that. Two things make seeding important: other content and timing.
Rise above the rest
As I noted earlier, your viral is in competition with pretty much every other bit of content on the web – and there's a lot of it. The latest mind-boggling stat from YouTube is that "every minute, 20 hours of video are uploaded".
Even assuming that 99 per cent of the 20 hours is unwatchable rubbish, that's still 12 minutes of perfectly watchable stuff being uploaded every minute. To stand even the smallest chance of getting on the radar, you've got to get above all of that.
As for the importance of timing, here's a little anecdote. A few years ago, before YouTube existed, we made a viral for Lynx as part of its Click campaign. It was called 'Webcam girls gone wild', which is about as good a title as you can get for the target audience and it had pretty good viral potential. A couple of days before launch, the client pulled the seeding budget, so we did the best we could, pulled a few favours, and it got 100,000 views or so, then sank. Fail.
About four months later, after the main campaign had ended and the site the viral was supposed to drive traffic to had been taken down, the director sent us a link to it on Google Video. It was number one, and had been for about three weeks. It had had 14million views – just too late to be of any use to the client. Had they not pulled the seeding budget, they would have got all that and more during the campaign, the viral would have been hailed as a great success and they would have been verbally fondled by their superiors.
I recently discussed the nuts and bolts of seeding a viral marketing campaign on my blog. There isn't space to reprint it in its entirety here, but here are the salient points.
Seeding activity breaks down into two sorts: paid for placement and outreach. Paid-for placement, as the name suggests, involves finding websites that you'd like your viral to be featured on (usually because they're influential and popular with your audience), and paying them to feature it.
Outreach is the harder bit and is usually what people mean when they refer to seeding. It involves contacting influential users online and making them aware of your viral. Influential people usually run a blog, or have a highly followed or respected Twitter, Digg or Reddit account.
When they post something, lots more people see it, and many of those other folk will, in turn, re-post it. You can't pay them to take your content, because they would find that insulting. They might accept a gift of some sort, but don't bank on it.
The surest way to get them to take on your viral is to meet these key criteria:
1) Already know them;
2) Make something relevant and good;
3) Give it to them while it's still brand new.
First, of course, you have to find the best people to talk to. This doesn't mean writing one email and then sending it to every address you can get your hands on. That will do you no good at all – in fact it will anger a lot of people.
Think about who is most likely to be interested in what you're promoting and, crucially, who will find it worthwhile telling other people about it. Once you've worked that out, you have to get to know them. People generally don't like unsolicited marketing crap from people they've never met.
If your content is brilliant, they might not mind, but if it isn't, beware. If you've already been in contact with them and built up a relationship, though, they're far more likely to respond. Remember to be highly respectful. In their world, these people are well-known and influential – that's why you're trying to get in touch with them, right? So treat them extra nicely, or they'll be rude to you and maybe your client, possibly very publicly.
And that's the last thing you want. In particular, spamming people is the height of disrespect, so contact them personally, whether by phone, email or instant message. Take the time to talk if they're in the mood and if they ask questions, answer promptly and be friendly. Focus on what you can do for them, not the reverse.
Unless they run a marketing blog, it's highly unlikely they'll care what your marketing objectives are. They're interested in anything you can give them that will help them look cool and entertain their audience. Don't expect them to be interested in helping you drive traffic to your site, even if it does have a cool quiz, game, competition or film on it.
There needs to be a quid pro quo arrangement. You have to give them something that attracts traffic to their blog (not forces them to drive people away from it). This means that you should seed embeddable content, in the form of code that they can drop straight onto their page without any messing around.
If you're seeding video, there are lots of different sharing sites you can use to host your clip, and then seed the embed code. If possible, choose YouTube, because it's the one that people trust and it gives the best data.
Route to success
Every viral campaign is different, but certain key aspects remain largely the same. Know your audience, be creative and entertaining, sweat the production but without making it look like you have, seed like the wind, use the force, be lucky, and you too can experience the vertiginous heights, the veritable whirlwind, the smorgasbord of mixed metaphors that is viral success.
Of course, remember that what constitutes viral success is down to the client. You might think it means millions of views, loads of good comments, great ratings, and thousands of blog posts, some on very influential blogs.
But if the client wanted to sell 50,000 widgets and your viral only sold six, none of the above is important. Go back to the original brief you got. Did you achieve the aims outlined there? If you did, then congratulations! Well done! Do you fancy a job?
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Review: Ricoh GXR
The Ricoh GXR system comes in two parts. The body houses the controls, the viewing system, the battery and the memory card. The interchangeable camera unit contains the sensor and the processing hardware.
The idea is that you swap camera units according to the type of job you're doing, and the Ricoh has two to choose from straight out of the box, including an A12 50mm f/2.5 Macro fixed focal length unit and the S10 24‑72mm f/2.5-4.4 VC unit, which we've tested here. All clear?
Now this is where it gets confusing. These camera units have different sized sensors. The 24-72mm unit has a 1/1.7-inch sensor while the 50mm unit offers an APS-C‑sized sensor. This makes the GXR harder to categorise and judge.
Is it a compact camera with an SLR-sized sensor? Sometimes. Or is it an expensive and slightly complicated compact? Again, sometimes.
Of the two units currently available, the 50mm Macro unit is arguably the more exciting in that it uses a larger APS-C-sized sensor. It wasn't available for review, but our hands-on test suggested bigger sensors are surely the future (if there is one) for the GXR. Meanwhile, a recent Ricoh presentation has hinted at a third camera unit, boasting a high-speed CMOS sensor and what looks like a telephoto lens.
Most importantly, once the body and chosen unit are slotted together, the GXR feels like a 'proper' camera. You immediately forget that it's made up of two parts, because the fit is perfect. It's barely bigger than Ricoh's other compacts, and significantly smaller than the Olympus E-P1 or Panasonic GF1 – a fact that could prove very significant later on if we see some more larger sensor camera units arrive.
A league of its own
Apart from the unique design, two things stand out with the GXR: its build quality and its controls. There are some very good high-end compacts around right now, including the Canon G11 and S90 and the Panasonic Lumix LX3, but the GXR is in another league.
The controls are firm, tight and precise, and the layout is excellent. A small but perfectly weighted control dial on the front takes care of a dozen different adjustments, depending on the context, while a rotary controller on the back operates as both a button and a dial for quickly setting ISO, white balance, quality or any number of other functions – it's completely customisable, as are the two separate function buttons on the back.
Plus, if you're still not happy, you can use a direct interface button to produce an on-screen overlay that you can navigate with the directional buttons.
The GXR has a spectacularly good three-inch 920,000-pixel LCD screen, but if you prefer you can connect an optional electronic viewfinder (EVF) to the accessory shoe. This also has 920,000 pixels, and it swivels up to 90آ° for waist level shots or tricky macros. This camera unit focuses right down to 1cm, and while the minimum focus does change when you zoom, it's only a little, increasing to around 3cm.
The macro capabilities, then, are exceptional – which does rather undermine Ricoh's separate 50mm macro camera unit, although that does have the larger sensor and could double as both a portrait and short telephoto lens.
But what about the pictures? The 24-72mm zoom has very good edge-to-edge sharpness and not much distortion (the camera can correct distortion internally too), and the exposure and white balance systems are up to the same high standard.
However, there's a limit to what any 1/1.7-inch sensor can do, and both noise and noise reduction start to creep in as early as ISO200-400. This camera unit does go all the way up to ISO3200, but the small sensor means that the quality's on the slide well before you get that far.
Compared to regular compacts, the GXR looks hugely overpriced. But as a second camera for a serious enthusiast or professional, it deserves to be taken very seriously. The GXR is small enough to slip into a jacket pocket and yet offers experienced photographers direct, hands-on control with a speed and efficiency you simply won't find in another mainstream compact. It's not always about money...
If Ricoh doesn't come up with more camera units, and soon, the GXR may remain just an expensive oddity. However, if a wider selection of camera units follow, especially with APS-C sensors, this camera could turn into a modern classic. Watch this space.
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Interview: Google's Alfred Spector on voice search, hybrid intelligence and beyond
Google has always been tight-lipped about products that haven't launched yet. It's no secret, however, that thanks to the company's bottom-up culture, its engineers are working on tons of new projects at the same time.
Following the mantra of 'release early, release often', the speed at which the search engine giant is churning out tools is staggering. At the heart of it all is Alfred Spector, Google's Vice President of Research and Special Initiatives.
One of the areas Google is making significant advances in is voice search. Spector is astounded by how rapidly it's come along.
The Google Mobile App features 'search by voice' capabilities that are available for the iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile and Android. All versions understand English (including US, UK, Australian and Indian-English accents) but the latest addition, for Nokia S60 phones, even introduces Mandarin speech recognition, which – because of its many different accents and tonal characteristics – posed a huge engineering challenge.
It's the most spoken language in the world, but as it isn't exactly keyboard-friendly, voice search could become immensely popular in China.
Technology challenge
"Voice is one of these grand technology challenges in computer science," Spector explains. "Can a computer understand the human voice? It's been worked on for many decades and what we've realised over the last couple of years is that search, particularly on handheld devices, is amenable to voice as an import mechanism.
"It's very valuable to be able to use voice. All of us know that no matter how good the keyboard, it's tricky to type exactly the right thing into a searchbar, while holding your backpack and everything else."
To get a computer to take account of your voice is no mean feat, of course. "One idea is to take all of the voices that the system hears over time into one huge pan-human voice model. So, on the one hand we have a voice that's higher and with an English accent, and on the other hand my voice, which is deeper and with an American accent. They both go into one model, or it just becomes personalised to the individual; voice scientists are a little unclear as to which is the best approach."
Machine translation
The research department is also making progress in machine translation. Google Translate already features 51 languages, including Swahili and Yiddish. The latest version introduces instant, real-time translation, phonetic input and text-to-speech support (in English).
"We're able to go from any language to any of the others, and there are 51 times 50, so 2,550 possibilities," Spector explains.
"We're focusing on increasing the number of languages because we'd like to handle even those languages where there's not an enormous volume of usage. It will make the web far more valuable to more people if they can access the English-or Chinese language web, for example.
"But we also continue to focus on quality because almost always the translations are valuable but imperfect. Sometimes it comes from training our translation system over more raw data, so we have, say, EU documents in English and French and can compare them and learn rules for translation. The other approach is to bring more knowledge into translation.
"For example, we're using more syntactic knowledge today and doing automated parsing with language. It's been a grand challenge of the field since the late 1950s. Now it's finally achieved mass usage."
The team, led by scientist Franz Josef Och, has been collecting data for more than 100 languages, and the Google Translator Toolkit, which makes use of the 'wisdom of the crowds', now even supports 345 languages, many of which are minority languages.
The editor enables users to translate text, correct the automatic translation and publish it. Spector thinks that this approach is the future. As computers become even faster, handling more and more data – a lot of it in the cloud – machines learn from users and thus become smarter. He calls this concept 'hybrid intelligence'.
"It's very difficult to solve these technological problems without human input," he says. "It's hard to create a robot that's as clever, smart and knowledgeable of the world as we humans are. But it's not as tough to build a computational system like Google, which extends what we do greatly and gradually learns something about the world from us, but that requires our interpretation to make it really successful.
"We need to get computers and people communicating in both directions, so the computer learns from the human and makes the human more effective."
Examples of 'hybrid intelligence' are Google Suggest, which instantly offers popular searches as you type a search query, and the 'did you mean?' feature in Google search, which corrects you when you misspell a query in the searchbar. The more you use it, the better the system gets.
Training computers to become seemingly more intelligent poses major hurdles for Google's engineers. "Computers don't train as efficiently as people do," Spector explains.
"Let's take the chess example. If a Kasparov was the educator, we could count on almost anything he says as being accurate. But if you tried to learn from a million chess players, you learn from my children as well, who play chess but they're 10 and eight. They'll be right sometimes and not right other times. There's noise in that, and some of the noise is spam. One also has to have careful regard for privacy issues."
By collecting enormous amounts of data, Google hopes to create a powerful database that eventually will understand the relationship between words (for example, 'a dog is an animal' and 'a dog has four legs').
The challenge is to try to establish these relationships automatically, using tons of information, instead of having experts teach the system. This database would then improve search results and language translations because it would have a better understanding of the meaning of the words.
Conceptual search
There's also a lot of research around 'conceptual search'. "Let's take a video of a couple in front of the Empire State Building. We watch the video and it's clear they're on their honeymoon. But what is the video about? Is it about love or honeymoons, or is it about renting office space? It's a fundamentally challenging problem."
One example of conceptual search is Google Image Swirl, which was added to Labs in November. Enter a keyword and you get a list of 12 images; clicking on each one brings up a cluster of related pictures. Click on any of them to expand the 'wonder wheel' further.
Google notes that they're not just the most relevant images; the algorithm determines the most relevant group of images with similar appearance and meaning.
To improve the world's data, Google continues to focus on the importance of the open internet. Another Labs project, Google Fusion Tables facilitates data management in the cloud. It enables users to create tables, filter and aggregate data, merge it with other data sources and visualise it with Google Maps or the Google Visualisation API.
The data sets can then be published, shared or kept private and commented on by people around the world. "It's an example of open collaboration," Spector says.
"If it's public, we can crawl it to make it searchable and easily visible to people. We hired one of the best database researchers in the world, Alon Halevy, to lead it."
Google is aiming to make more information available more easily across multiple devices, whether it's images, videos, speech or maps, no matter which language we're using.
Spector calls the impact "totally transparent processing – it revolutionises the role of computation in day-today life. The computer can break down all these barriers to communication and knowledge. No matter what device we're using, we have access to things. We can do translations, there are books or government documents, and some day we hope to have medical records. Whatever you want, no matter where you are, you can find it."
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