by james paslis | Feb 4, 2017 | Uncategorized
Download video clips from YouTube and other websites, convert them to different audio and video formats as well as play clips in a built-in media player
YouTube Downloader Converter is a tool that facilitates an attractive interface and plenty of features to help you download video clips from YouTube, Facebook, Dailymotion, Instagram and other websites.
Donwload, convert and play YouTube videos
It’s capable of getting clips with the highest quality available for download, keeping the videos with their original format, turning them into other type of clips for playback on media devices, and extracting the audio streams to create MP3s or other types of music files.
The application also come bundled with a local conversion tool (so that encoding is not limited to downloads but also offline files), along with a media player to show you the results.
Attractive and easy-to-use interface
Following an uncomplicated setup operation, YouTube Downloader Converter gets integrated into the systray for quick access, displays a small dropbox on the desktop for the same purpose, and brings up the main window. It has an intuitive layout with the downloading, conversion and activity details split in separate areas.
To download a video, it only takes to paste the URL and indicate the saving directory on the disk as well as the quality level. By default, clips are saved with their original file type. However, you can instruct the tool to convert them to a different audio or video format automatically after downloading.
Extensive file type support
There are many file extension options available in this regard, such as WMV, MP4, AVI, FLV, MKV, DVD, MP3, WAV and WMA, in addition to ready formats for media devices like Apple, Android, Motorola, Nokia and Sony. What’s more, you can control the audio and video properties when it comes to the size, frame rate, bit rate, sample rate, and codec. New presets can be created with customized settings.
As soon as a download job begins, you can visit the activity section to preview the thumbnail, check out the source and destination details, length, size and status, as well as open the output folder when the task is over or directly open the video in the media player provided by YouTube Downloader Converter.
Trim videos and adjust the volume level
Conversion tasks for local video files (FLV, MP4 and WEBM format only) are similar in steps. The only difference is that, this time, you can also cut out a part of the video by specifying the start and end time, as well as increase or decrease the volume level.
The software tool completed tasks swiftly in our tests while remaining light on system resources usage. It worked error-free on Windows 10. All aspects considered, YouTube Downloader Converter brings a bunch of useful options to the table to help you download, convert and play video clips. It’s also wrapped in an eye-catching and easy-to-use interface.
https://youtubedownloader.com/
by james paslis | Feb 4, 2017 | Uncategorized, World
In an unassuming corner of Margate, Kent in England is a spectacular series of underground passageways covered in millions of seashells. The Margate Grotto was discovered in 1835, but it is still unknown how old the grotto really is, or who built it.
Ancient Roman temple, a rich aristocrat’s folly, or a secret Knights Templar construction? Here is a look at the mysterious Margate Grotto.
Shell Grotto
Located in Margate, Kent in Southeast England, the ornate subterranean passageway is almost completely covered in mosaics created entirely of seashells, totaling about 4.6 million shells.The grotto was discovered under a field in 1835 by James Newlove, a schoolteacher, with the first mention of it appearing in an article in the Kentish Gazette in 1838, announcing its forthcoming opening as a public attraction.
The exact age and purpose of the grotto remain unknown. Some have speculated that it served as a hideaway for smugglers, as all the shells—mussels, cockles, whelks, limpets, scallops, and oysters—are English in origin, though it’s unclear if smugglers would have time to decorate the walls. Others believe the grotto was a prehistoric construction built either as an astronomical calendar or a funerary building.
Seashell-decorated grottoes were popular among European nobility during the 1700s. Many believe the Margate grotto was built by an English nobleman who returned from seeing such an installation abroad, and wanted one of his own. Such displays of wealth and opulence were often meant to impress guests, however, making the secret location of the Margate grotto away from any large estates puzzling.
The grotto would also have taken considerable manpower to construct, with locals needed to transport and place all the millions of shells. No historical records mention any such project, however.Some believe the grotto may be a Roman construction, though again there is little substantial evidence to support the theory.The grotto changed owners in 1932, and has remained in private ownership ever since, with the new owner installing cleaner electric lighting and undertaking cleaning of the shells over the years.
Mick Twyman of the Margate Historical Society recently put forward the hypothesis that the grotto was built by the Knights Templar sometime in the 1100s, based on an analysis of the angles used in its construction, as well as the appearance of several altars inside.It has been suggested that the shells in the grotto be carbon dated to determine their origin, but work has been delayed since a large number of shell samples would be needed to weed out the earliest shells from those used in restorations.
Various restoration work has been done on the grotto over the years, as it has suffered the effects of water penetration. The previous gas lighting also stained many of the shells with soot. In 2008, the non-profit Friends of the Shell Grotto were formed to help conserve and preserve the grotto as a unique historical monument.
by james paslis | Feb 3, 2017 | Uncategorized, World
A solid, non-working Colt 1911 static model by TaylarRoids is printed on a household printer; is this a digital blueprint? Credit: Richard Matthews
3-D printed guns are back in the news after Queensland set a legal precedent for giving Kyle Wirth a six-month suspended sentence for fabricating a number of gun parts.
As presiding Judge Katherine McGuinness acknowledged, Wirth didn’t produce an entire gun – it took police to add a few key parts in order for the gun to successfully fire a bullet – but he was “trying to make a gun”.
As such, she said “there is a real need to deter and protect the public from such offending”.
But if it’s illegal to build a gun via conventional means without a licence, what’s the concern over making guns using 3-D printers in particular?
And for those who are either researching the capabilities of 3-D printers – a form of additive manufacturing – or using them at home or in their business, it’s important to understand the legal boundaries under which they can be used.
3-D printed firearms in Australia
3-D printed guns currently occupy a grey area in terms of their legality in many jurisdictions around Australia. For example, the South Australian Police released a guide outlining which kinds of imitation firearms are considered legal.
The distinction between a “regulated imitation firearm” and a children’s toy is significant, as a South Australian man discovered in 2015. He was charged with a firearms offence after police found a toy gun in a box along with a single shotgun shell.
Is a list of coordinates in three dimensional space a digital reproduction of a technical drawing?
The judge acquitted him because the gun was clearly a child’s cap gun and could not be modified to fire the shell.
However, according to the South Australian Police’s guide, the “gun” pictured at the top of this article, although non-functional, is technically neither a “moulded imitation firearm” nor is it an “imitation firearm carved from timber, plastic or other material”. This means it’s unclear how it would be regarded by police or the courts.
New South Wales takes a different approach on the issue. The Firearms and Weapons Prohibition Legislation Amendment Bill 2015 made it illegal to possess digital files that can be used to manufacture firearms on “3-D printers or electronic milling machines”.
The act was amended “to create a new offence of possessing digital blueprints”, although the definition of a “digital blueprint” is a little ambiguous. As defined, it captures “any type of digital (or electronic) reproduction of a technical drawing of the design of an object”. As written, this could even mean a photograph of a technical drawing. But technical drawing files are not always needed for 3-D printing.
In 3-D printing, drawing files are used to create GCode, a computer control language used to guide the print head and the amount of plastic to extrude. Is GCode a digital reproduction? Even if it is, it does not stop someone 3-D printing gun parts in another jurisdiction in Australia or overseas where they’re not illegal and then posting it back to NSW.
It was this fear that drove the Queensland Palmer United Party to introduce a bill in 2014 to make 3-D printing of firearms illegal. It was rejected by the parliamentary committee and never reintroduced.
When Labor took power in Queensland following the 2015 election, it defended the move and released a statement stating that “Queensland already has legislation dealing with the unlawful manufacture of weapons that carries with it some of the harshest penalties in Australia”.
Hence Kyle Wirth was charged in 2015 with manufacturing offensive weapons, including a plastic knuckle duster. He was not charged under any legislation that prevented him from 3-D printing parts, as the PUP bill would have outlawed.
The parts Wirth printed and stored in bags. Credit: Queensland Police Service
Plastic or not, it is illegal under nationally unified gun laws to make a gun without a licence. If this is the case, why did NSW feel the need to ban digital blueprints? The answer could come from the future prospects of 3-D printing.
Towards the future
In the next 20 years we will be able to print drugs, metals and substances at an atomic level – possibly all at home.
Regulation of these things is currently predicated on the idea that producing them typically required expertise and specialised equipment. But that may no be the case for long.
This will mean we need a new unified approach to legislation that specifically speaks to the capabilities of 3-D printers, and the distribution of the files they use.
New South Wales is the only state that has started outlawing the digital blueprints needed for additive manufacturing of illegal objects. This is a step in the right direction.
However, we need a classification of digital blueprints. AustralianClassification is already responsible for passing judgement on a wide array of media. In the future we will likely see such an agency extended to cover digital blueprints available or for sale to the public.
by james paslis | Feb 3, 2017 | Uncategorized
Last year, when Apple canceled its own Thunderbolt-equipped monitor line, it offered LG’s UltraFine 5K as a successor. The UltraFine 5K appears to be a fine monitor, as far as it goes, but it suffers from one critical problem — it dies if you put it near a router.
The LG UltraFine 5K is the closest thing to a true Thunderbolt-equipped replacement for the old Apple panel, even though it lacks some of the flexibility of that older panel, according to 9to5 Mac. Put it within two meters (6.6 feet) of a router, however, and it starts going haywire. The closer the panel is to the router, the worse the problem gets. 9to5 Mac reports that the panel would constantly freeze, flicker, and disconnect. At first, they suspected that the monitor was simply defective, but LG Support technicians identified the router’s proximity as a potential problem. Moving the monitor to another room, well away from the router, solved the problem altogether.
There’s no word whether the problem can be solved and LG has stated that this is an issue solely for the 5K UltraFine. The company writes: “The issue that you are having only happens for the 5K monitors we have, not to other LG monitors. We recommend to have the router placed at least 2 meters away from the monitor. If the same issue persists let us know so we can assist you accordingly.”
The LG 5K UltraFine is a $1,200 monitor, not a $100 bargain-basement display, but it’s not clear if anything can be done about the problem. Presumably the issue isn’t the cable, but something to do with the display’s shielding. There may be aftermarket ways to solve the issue, but most solutions likely involve opening the monitor, and that’ll void your warranty.
To make a long story short — the LG UltraFine 5K appears to be a fine monitor if you can guarantee you won’t need to set it up near a router, and an uncertain purchase under all other circumstances. It’s definitely not the kind of fire-and-forget purchase Apple has historically claimed to offer, and it indirectly speaks to a danger I discussed late last year: Apple built its brand-name, in part, on offering advanced product designs that worked together in ways that the PC industry rarely matched. Apple peripherals were always more expensive than their competitors, but they did make a value argument to justify that expense. Now that the company has outsourced its peripheral manufacturing to third parties, its customers are at the mercy of the kind of problems the PC world is more accustomed to. That may not sit well with Apple customers in general.
by james paslis | Feb 3, 2017 | Uncategorized
Microsoft has only been in the PC system game for a few years now, but over the last couple of years they have made a lot of progress rather quickly. These days they have a solid foundation of products available, with the Surface Pro 4 being one of the best convertible tablets, the Surface Book being a very solid convertible laptop, and also the more specialized products like the Hololens, and Surface Hub. Going into their October 2016 event, the one missing piece of their PC product lineup was a desktop computer, but with the announcement and release of the Surface Studio, that particular gap has now been filled.
But the Surface Studio is not your typical desktop PC. Even at first glance, the sleek, beautiful lines are readily apparent, and once powered on, it is rare for anyone to first glimpse the 28.125-inch 4500×3000 display and not say “wow”. It’s not only the very high resolution, but also the 3:2 aspect ratio that is unheard of in this segment, that makes the display stand out as something unique.
Microsoft has become one of the superlative hardware manufacturers in only the short span of four years or so, and the Surface Studio is one of their finest designs yet. However, from the very first Surface RT, Microsoft always tries to add something different, but more importantly interesting, to their designs, and in the case of the Surface Studio, it is the zero-gravity hinge, which allows the all-in-one to be quickly and easily tilted back to a 20° angle, letting it be used as a huge, digital drafting table. Microsoft announced the Surface Studio at their October Windows event, where they also announced the next Windows 10 Update, called the Creator’s Update, and it is wonderful to see them building hardware to truly bring out the exclusive features of their software.
Packed into the base of the Surface Studio is a laptop-class computer, with three different models available now. The base model, coming in at $2999, features an Intel Core i5-6440HQ processor, 8 GB of memory, a 1 TB hybrid drive with a 64 GB SSD cache, and a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 965M GPU. The mid-level model, which costs $3499, bumps the CPU up to an Intel Core i7-6820HQ, doubles the RAM to 16 GB, and doubles the SSD cache to a PCIe 128 GB model, with the same 1 TB HDD and GTX 965M. The highest priced model, at $4199, is an Intel Core i7-6820HQ, 32 GB of RAM, a 2 TB hybrid drive with a 128 GB PCIe cache, and a NVIDIA GTX 980M GPU with 4 GB of memory.
| Microsoft Surface Studio |
|
Base |
Middle |
Top (As Tested) |
| CPU |
Intel Core i5-6440HQ
Quad-Core, 2.6-3.5 GHz
6 MB Cache, 45W TDP, No Hyperthreading |
Intel Core i7-6820HQ
Quad-Core, 2.7-3.6 GHz
8 MB Cache, 45W TDP, Hyperthreading |
| GPU |
NVIDIA GTX 965M
1024 CUDA Cores
944 Mhz + Boost
2 GB GDDR5 128-bit memory |
NVIDIA GTX 980M
1536 CUDA Cores
1038 Mhz + Boost
4 GB GDDR5 256-bit memory |
| RAM |
8 GB DDR4 |
16 GB DDR4 |
32 GB DDR4 |
| Storage |
1 TB Hybrid Drive
64 GB SATA SSD Cache / 1 TB SATA HDD |
1 TB Hybrid Drive
128 GB PCIe SSD Cache / 1 TB SATA HDD |
2 TB Hybrid Drive
128 GB PCIe SSD Cache / 2 TB SATA HDD |
| IO |
4 USB 3.0 ports – one high power port
Full size SD Card Slot
Headset Jack
Xbox Wireless Connectivity
DisplayPort |
| Display |
28.125-inch PixelSense Display
4500 x 3000 resolution
192 DPI
sRGB, DCI-P3, P3 D65 color modes |
| Webcam |
5 MP Webcam
Windows Hello Facial Recognition |
| Networking |
Marvel AVASTAR 802.11ac
Intel I219-LM Gigabit Ethernet |
| Price |
$2,999 |
$3,499 |
$4,199 |
There was quite a bit of discussion at the time of the Surface Studio launch over the fact that it was equipped with older technology. Intel’s Kaby Lake quad-core parts just launched at CES this year, so Skylake quad-core CPUs were the latest generation available at launch. The Maxwell based graphics options chosen were not the latest generation mobile graphics from NVIDIA, with the GTX 965M and GTX 980M available in the Studio. The Pascal based GTX 1060 and GTX 1070 would have been much more powerful substitutes, but they are not pin-compatible drop-in components with the Maxwell GPUs in the Surface Studio, meaning a new board design and thermal considerations would have been necessary late in the design phase, and Microsoft appears to have been conservative here to avoid missing their launch window.
Microsoft has also been very conservative with their I/O choices, with four USB 3.0 Type-A ports on the back of the Studio, along with a SD card slot, and mini DisplayPort. As with the Surface Pro 4 and Surface Book, Microsoft has continued to provide only the older USB-A ports, and not even offer a single USB-C port, let alone with Thunderbolt. Anyone purchasing a Studio will likely be using it for several years, and the lack of USB-C is going to be an issue in the future, if not already today. The Surface team really needs to reconsider this as it is already a detriment to not include any.
There also must be some questions raised about the use of a hybrid drive in a PC of this price. We’ll dig in to the experience later, but Microsoft could and should offer a larger SSD as the boot disk, complimented by a HDD as a secondary disk, at least on the highest end model. A 512 GB NVMe SSD as the boot drive would appease much of the criticism. The computer does cost over $4000 after all, and while much of the cost of the device is in the display, SSDs have been the biggest improvement in user experience on the PC in a long time.
by james paslis | Feb 1, 2017 | Uncategorized
Protect your identity and your data
In these dark times of hackers intercepting data, governments spying on their citizens’ perfectly legal activities and YouTube geo-blocking videos in some countries because of record companies’ nastygrams a virtual private networking app, or VPN for short, is increasingly important.
There are many VPN apps out there, but very few that rhyme with toast. More importantly, CyberGhost VPN is really, really good.
Why you need it
The internet can be a dangerous place, and if you’re sharing data you don’t want to fall into the wrong hands then it’s a scary place too. Sadly we think the need for VPNs for everyday browsing is just going to keep on growing.
VPNs are routinely used to protect companies’ important files and emails, and the same tech is just as effective in ensuring nobody hacks your laptop when you’re on a public Wi-Fi hotspot. In many cases you also get the happy bonus of bypassing geographical restrictions on things such as online video services, where a clip might be licensed for viewing in one country but not in another, and on websites that really, really, really don’t want you to see anything other than the one for the country you’re in.
Download here: CyberGhost VPN
