Dr. Bill | The Computer Curmudgeon

Here’s a neat GIF Creator, made available by Imgur.

Create GIFs with Imgur’s new Web tool

c|net – By: Nicole Cozma – “If you a large portion of your Internet time looking at GIFs, then you may have looked for a decent GIF creator to make your own. However, many of the free options only let you upload pictures, don’t allow any trimming or paste their watermark all over the finished product.

As an alternative, Imgur has just unveiled its own GIF creator. This tool is for those who want to capture just the right moments, loop them and then share on Imgur for the masses to see.

The Imgur Video to GIF conversion page makes creating a high-quality GIF really easy. Grab a link for your favorite video, paste it into the text field and then drag the start and finish markers to appropriate spots in your video. GIFs can only be 15 seconds in length, but that should be plenty of time to make something interesting.

After you’re finished making the GIF, you can decide if you want to share directly to Imgur, edit the title and description or grab a deletion link and start over. Want to see the finished product from the above image? Check it out.”

The Amazon Echo is getting a firmware update that will add some neat, new features.

Pandora, iTunes, and Spotify voice control

ZDNet – By James Kendrick – “The Amazon Echo that I found to be a perfect 10 just got even better, as an update adds useful new features and improvements. An email from Amazon is notifying Echo owners that voice control is now possible for Pandora, Spotify, and iTunes through iOS and Android devices.

Prior to this update the Amazon Echo could stream music from phones and tablets from these services, but controlling streaming was not possible through the Echo. It performed as a basic Bluetooth speaker. All media controls, like stop, play, pause, next, and previous, had to be performed on the phone or tablet.

Voice control with the Echo is now supported for Pandora, iTunes, and Spotify. As before, music streaming from these services must be started from the iPhone or Android phone, with voice control supported once streaming is underway.

In addition to this new feature, the update enables the following improvements:

• Increased response speed and accuracy for many of your questions
• Expanded coverage of facts from Wikipedia
• Added new spelling words and definitions.

The update has already been pushed to my Amazon Echo, so check yours for the new features.

There is also a goofy new ‘Simon Says’ feature that can get Alexa to repeat whatever is spoken after the phrase. Amazon believes this will be funny to use from another room by using the microphone in the Echo remote to startle those in the room with the Echo.

The Amazon Echo app used to control settings for the device, already available on Android and iOS, is now available for Android 5.0 (Lollipop).”

Do you have an old DropCam? Get ready to replace it!

Have An Old Dropcam? It’ll Stop Working Soon, But They’ll Give You A New One For Free

TechCrunch – By: Greg Kumparak – “Do you have an old Dropcam? One of those boxy-lookin’ ones from when they first launched the company back in 2009?

Bad news: it’s about to stop working.

Good news: Dropcam will give you a newer one for free to make up for it.

On a support page published over the weekend, Dropcam notes that their oldest models — the Original Dropcam and Dropcam Echo — will stop working as of April 15th, 2015.

Why? The company doesn’t say much to that point, except that those cameras no longer provide “an experience that meets [their] standards”. In less nice words: the original Dropcam has a weak 320×240 resolution and no audio recording, and they don’t want to support it anymore.

So you get a new Dropcam HD (pictured up top) for free. Launched in 2012, the HD isn’t exactly Dropcam’s top-of-the-line model — that’d be the 2013 Dropcam Pro — but it’s considerably beefier than the 2009 Dropcam it’ll replace. Considering that Dropcam was charging $150 for the Dropcam HD up until a few days ago, it’s a pretty solid deal.

(Curiously, Dropcam.com isn’t currently selling the Dropcam HD — just the Pro. A Dropcam rep tells us that the Dropcam HD is ‘now sold out’ except for the inventory set aside for the replacement program; we’re looking into what that means for the HD moving forward.)

Update: Dropcam tells me that they’ll no longer be selling the Dropcam HD (the model they’re giving out for free, here) moving forward, though they’ll continue to support it.

Interested owners of the oldschool Dropcams can find replacement program details here.”

My buddy, Steven J. is right as usual, LibreOffice is just the best!

The best open-source office suite, LibreOffice 4.4, gets new release

ZDNet – By: Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols – “Who says you can’t have fast, good and cheap? The Document Foundation’s latest release of the most popular open-source office suite, LibreOffice 4.4 is quite fast on Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows; it works well on all three desktop operating systems, and it won’t cost you a penny.

Beauty’s in the eye of the beholder, but The Document Foundation claims that LibreOffice 4.4 is the most beautiful LibreOffice ever. I don’t know about that, but I do know that the LibreOffice’s user-interface (UI) is more efficient than ever. Unlike Microsoft Office, which has used a ribbon-based interface since Office 2007, LibreOffice still uses a top-menu based UI. Personally, I prefer LibreOffice’s approach.

Jan ‘Kendy’ Holesovsky, the leader of the design team, explained in a statement that LibreOffice 4.4’s new beauty comes from ‘redesigned menu bars, context menus, toolbars, status bars and rulers to make them much more useful. The Sifr monochrome icon theme is extended and now the default on OS X. We also developed a new Color Selector, improved the Sidebar to integrate more smoothly with menus, and reworked many user interface details to follow today’s UX trends.’

Specifically, the new, improved LibreOffice UI boasts better, clearer contextual menus, sidebars, and right-click context menus. For example, the style drop-down menu now has a split menu to edit or update the selected style.

Behind the good looks, LibreOffice also does a better job of importing and exporting file formats. In particular, LibreOffice now has two new fonts, Carlito and Caladea, that replace Microsoft’s proprietary Calibri, Office 2013’s default font, and Cambria. This, in turn, makes it easier for LibreOffice to import Microsoft Office Open XML (OOXML) formatted files.

LibreOffice also now does a better job of importing Microsoft Visio, Microsoft Publisher and AbiWord files, and Microsoft Works spreadsheets. It also comes with new import filters for Adobe PageMaker, MacDraw, MacDraw II and RagTime for Mac.

You can also now create PDF documents that can be digitally signed. In a world where more and more legal documents, such as contracts, are signed digitally, this functionality makes LibreOffice much more useful in the office.

Another improvement, which I know will make my editors happier, is that LibreOffice has improved the way it tracks changes to manuscripts and spreadsheets. This makes it easier to use LibreOffice, and its native Open Document Format (ODF), when you’re sharing work with colleagues.

Behind all of these improvements, the LibreOffice programming team used Coverity code scanning software to find bugs. Once found, they were cleaned out. The result is a program that should be both safer and have improved performance.

Is this a major release? No. It is a better release? Yes, yes it is. LibreOffice users will be glad to see it, and if you’ve been thinking about replacing your existing office suite with an excellent, free alternative, now’s a great time to give LibreOffice a try.

LibreOffice 4.4 is now available for download. If you really like it, you can donate to The Document Foundation to help the improvements keep coming, but it’s not required.”

I am a big fan of HTML5 and webm video. I was an early adopter here on the site, this is great news!

YouTube says HTML5 video ready for primetime, makes it default

Ars Technica – by Ron Amadeo – “Everyone hates Flash, right? You have to install a plug-in, it’s resource intensive, it doesn’t work on mobile, and it causes all sorts of security problems. YouTube has been working on ridding itself of Adobe’s ancient Web plug-in for several years now, and while the whole site has been slowly transitioning away from Flash, today YouTube announced that it finally serves HTML5 video by default. Users of Chrome, IE 11, Safari 8, and ‘beta versions of Firefox’ will all have a Flash-less experience.

YouTube’s transition seems to have been pretty straightforward. Four years ago, YouTube laid out a laundry list of problems it had with HTML5, and today it has a blog post explaining how it has worked with the Web community to solve each issue.

MediaSource Extensions have enabled YouTube to add adaptive bitrate streaming, which can change video quality on the fly without having to stop and rebuffer the video. YouTube says this has reduced buffering by ’50 percent globally and as much as 80 percent on heavily-congested networks.’

YouTube wanted a standard video codec that was supported by all browsers, but the browser world is currently split between Google’s VP9, a codec that came as a result of the company’s On2 Technologies purchase, and H.264. Naturally, YouTube is in favor of VP9, saying it reduces YouTube’s (massive) bandwidth by 35 percent on average and that videos start ’15-80 percent faster.’

DRM is a key feature that many content creators demand, but it was something HTML5 Video couldn’t deliver for the longest time. This was probably the biggest reason YouTube stuck with Flash and Netflix stuck with Microsoft’s Silverlight. Encrypted Media Extensions added an API to HTML Video which allowed the video to be wrapped in whatever content protection the device supported.

WebRTC enables direct-to-YouTube recording and live broadcasting, the fullscreen API allows for immersive viewing, and YouTube is deprecating the use of a Flash object tag for embedding and recommends using the iframe API.

The move is yet another nail in Flash’s coffin. The platform will still be around for some surprising use cases, but hopefully we can all banish it from our browsers someday.”