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gHacks technology news

A technology blog covering software, mobile phones, gadgets, security, the Internet and other relevant areas.

Getting to Know The GIMP InterfaceYesterday

For many people, the biggest hurdle to using The GIMP is the user interface. When The GIMP began it started out with a very different UI than any other application. That UI was sustained, pretty much as-is, until The GIMP 2.6. With the adoption of 2.6 the user interface took a turn towards being more user-friendly. But with the new interface came enough change to confuse some of the old school users like myself. But like any user interface, once you get to know your way around the UI, it’s second nature.

So let’s break The GIMP’s UI into its constituent pieces and make using this excellent application a snap to use.

When you open up The GIMP it defaults to three main windows: The Main Window, The Toolbox, and the Utility Window. These are the meat and potatoes of The GIMP. To get a better understanding of the whole we have to break it down into its pieces. We’ll start with the Main Window.

Main Window

Main Window

From the Main Window all actions can take place. But the main action with the Main Window is opening and saving images. If you were a user prior to 2.6 this is where you will notice the biggest changes. One of the issues new users had was that once an image was opened they didn’t realize there was a right click mouse menu t

Document Scanning With Digital CamerasYesterday

Document scanning can be done with digital cameras. The process is very similar to scanning documents with a scanner. Instead of using a scanner that is connected to the computer to scan the document a picture of the document is taken and uploaded to the computer. The result is the same: A document in electronic form on the computer. Using a digital camera for document scanning might not result in professional scans that high quality scanners produce but it certainly is enough for every day scanning activities.

Results vary depending on the digital camera used but it can be basically said that most digital cameras should be able to produce a good enough scan. It is a good idea to use enough lighting and place the document on a one colored background. This makes it easier later on to process the scanned document in an image editor.

It really depends on the purpose of the scan. If you just want to scan a document to a friend or family member a simple image might suffice but if you have to send it to authorities, business or other formal contacts you might want to make sure that it looks extra fine.

The one colored background ensures that it is easy to copy and paste the document to create a new document that is using the exact document borders as its resolution. This looks way more professional than a document photographed on a kitchen table.

The scanned document can then be printed or send electronically. It is really an easy and ef

Samsung SS805 SSDYesterday

Solid State Drives (SSDs) have many advantages over conventional hard drives like their faster access time, lower power consumption and silence while running. The read speed of SSD drives can be compared to those fast 15,000-rpm state of the art hard drives.

The only real downside of SSDs was their rather low write speed which was especially true for last generation’s drives. This is quickly changing with the release of this generation’s SSDs that have a twice as fast write speed as last generation thanks to multiple parallel channels and interleaving single-layer cell NAND flash memory.

Samsung has announced a state of the art SSD that is aiming for a release in the first quarter of 2009. The Samsung SS805 Solid State Drive will offer 100 Gigabytes of storage space with a sustained sequential read rate of up to 250MB/sec. and a sustained sequential write rate of up to 170MB/sec.

To put that in comparison. The OCZ Core Series II SSD drive that I bought last year had a sustained sequential read rate of up to 170 MB/sec. and a sustained sequential write rate of up to 98MB/sec. and won almost every read speed benchmark at that time.

Samsung’s SS805 SSD will increase the read speed by about 50% and the write speed by almost 100% in comparison. The only factor that could play a role in the drive’s success is the retail price of the device.

Intel’s 32 Gigabyte X25 Solid State Drive retails currently for a price of $650-7

Firefox Price ComparisonYesterday

Experienced users use the Internet to research prices before they make a purchase. While they use the Internet for price comparison they do not necessarily make the purchase on the Internet. A handy tool for Firefox users is Right-Click Buy which offers an easy way to check items on price comparison sites from within Firefox. The add-on is currently only useful to US and UK Firefox users as there are only sites available for those two countries.

The Firefox add-on adds itself to the right-click menu. If a phrase has been selected on a webpage it will offer to search for it on various price comparison sites but also directly on shopping sites like eBay, Amazon and various other shopping portals. The sites that are displayed in the right-click menu can be configured by the user. There is however no option (currently) to add custom sites to the list. Only the sites that the software developer has added can be selected.

There is however a large selection of price comparison sites and shopping sites available and it is up to the user to add the ones that he is interested in or regularly using.

The selected shopping portal or price comparison site will be opened in a new tab in Firefox. There is als

Hard Drive Data RetrievalYesterday

Disk Investigator is a pretty unique hard drive data retrieval tool that takes a totally different approach than the usual hard drive data recovery tools. What Disk Investigator does is to provide direct access to the raw data sectors of a selected hard drive so that the hard drive’s data can be explored up to the last bit.

The user can perform a sector to sector analysis of the hard drive, display the raw file contents or perform a search on the selected hard drive or partition.

The default view can be switched between disk and directories view. While the disk view is displaying the hard drive data sectors the directories view is providing access to the file structure. A click on a file will open a raw file data viewer in a separate browser

So what will you find when your run a search or analyze the data on the hard drive? You will be able to discover opened urls, passwords, email contents, document contents and more. The easiest way to discover the data is by performing a search for it. You might be surprised at the wealth of information that can be discovered when running Disk Investigator.