The Swiss army knife of image editors

PhotoScape has to be the Swiss army knife of the photo processing world. This free program is becoming a favourite, and I can understand why. It packs in a surprising number of features, at least one of which is not even in PhotoShop (leastways, not the version of PhotoShop that I have). It gives you:
1. A fairly standard viewer (probably its weakest feature).
2. An Editor, where you can apply a multitude of adjustments and effects to your photos. There is everything from one click auto-levels and contrast to advanced color curves, complete with the ability to load and save presets. There are many color and tone adjustments and a number of filter effects from the practical (noise reduction) to fun (cartoon). You can also spruce up your photos with a variety of fun and funky frames. You can add text, shapes, etc. The editor also offers a flexible crop tool with a circular crop option.
3. Batch Editor, you can apply almost all the functions available in the editor to multiple files at once.
4. A multi-photo layout tool with over 100 choices of grid layouts to chose from. Simply drag and drop your photos into the boxes to create a quick collage.
6. AniGif: create a frame-based animation from multiple photos.
7. Splitter: cut your photo into multiple images based on a grid.
8. Screen Capture: take an image of your full desktop, a window, or a region of your screen.
9. Color Picker: sample colors from anywhere on your screen.
10. Raw Converter: simple converter for saving camera RAW files as JPEGs.
11. Rename: batch edit file names with custom text, date, time, serial numbers.
PhotoScape is free for non-commercial use and runs on Windows 98/Me/NT/2000/XP/Vista. The online help contains several videos to demonstrate the program features.

Top 100 virus websites

The NZ Herald today has a list of the top 100 websites around the world that are guaranteed to infect your computer. You don't have to even download anything from them. Simply visiting will dump a load of nasties onto your system, assuming you have no protection. I suspect that none on the list are likely to be visited by you, but one or two have names that I can see could easily trap people into having a look.

More scroll wheel uses

I've posted before how the scroll wheel on your mouse can be used to open browser links in a new tab, to scroll up and down Word, Excell or PowerPoint pages, or in conjunction with the Control key can zoom in and out of Word, PDF files, etc. Here's another function, perhaps slightly less useful - if you place your cursor on the Ribbon bar in Word or other Microsoft 2007 software, using the wheel will scroll across the various tabs (Home, Insert, View, etc).

Recovering deleted photos

Uh oh! You've deleted some photos from your digital camera and now realise you want them back. Thankfully, all is not lost. Most likely, when your camera is hooked up to your computer by a USB or Firewire cable, it will show up as another drive when you go to My Computer. If it does, you can use a software undelete program to read the files on the camera's memory card, and retrieve the pics. For free software to do the job, I would suggest Glary Undelete, or Recuva.

Sometimes the week gangs up...

I had intended to put up a post today, but ran out of time. And I'm going to be out of town for the next three days. See you Friday, hopefully.