If Santa left a new digital camera under your tree this year, our gadget-crazed sister blog Gizmodo offers several great tips for getting the most from your new digital camera. The tips range from extremely simple to some more advanced advice, but every tip is worth its salt, especially if your photography know-how is limited to: 1) Point and 2) Shoot. If you're a seasoned snapper, share your best tips for digicam beginners in the comments.
Windows only: Stalled Printer Repair is a portable application that detects and effectively removes stuck print jobs that are backing up your printer queue.
For whatever reason, Windows can be finicky when you try deleting a print job from the queue. Often that means you're stuck staring at the queue, trying to delete the same job over and over again, and wondering if your efforts are actually helping anything. Stalled Printer Repair hunts down stalled print jobs and removes them with the force necessary so that it actually works. It's portable, so you can stick it on your thumb drive, it's freeware, and it works on most versions of Windows.
Windows only: Free application Capture.NET calls itself "the Swiss Army knife of PC tools," and while it does offer a wide array of functionality, calling it a kitchen-sink style tool may be more accurate.
Capture.NET is a calendar and clock widget, screenshot application, color picker, crap cleaner, font viewer, image converter, backup tool, and more. They may not all seem like they go well together (and let's be honest, they don't), but to be fair, Capture.NET's tools are all well thought-out, and the meager 8MB memory footprint for all the functionality it offers isn't all that bad. Here's a closer look at all the tools in action:
Calendar
This is how Capture.NET looks most of the time. It just sits on your desktop as a calendar, clock, and pixel measuring tool.
Screen Capture
The screen capture tool grabs windows, regions, or your full screen, then opens it in a light and easy to use editor.
Color Picker
No big surprises here. It's a color picker, like countless others.
Privacy Eraser
The Privacy Eraser is sort of like the light version of CCleaner, cleaning out your Recycle Bin, temporary folders, web browsers, and more.
Font Viewer
The font viewer lets you check out text in any font of your choosing.
The many features listed above still don't exhaust Capture.NET's feature set. It does post-its, has a large-text timer, and more. It may not be exactly what you want, but if you already run separate programs to get the same functionality that Capture.NET provides, this lightweight tool might be worth a try. Capture.NET is a free download, requires .NET 2.0.
Actually eating that holiday fruitcake is out of the question. But instead of tossing it check out some of the creations at the Great Fruitcake Recycling Project.
You can turn that traditional holiday treat into a dart board (pictured), knife rack, door stop, or Christmas wreath. Ok, so most of these projects are more about poking fun at the indestructible, preserved-forever nature of ye olde fruitcake instead of actually recycling, but there are some fun ideas here. Did you get a fruitcake this year? What will become of it? Let us know in the comments.
Google has taken a more aggressive approach to moving users away from Internet Explorer, recommending that Gmail users install Firefox or Chrome if they want to see Gmail run "an average of twice as fast."
When you log into Gmail using Internet Explorer, you'll see a "Get faster Gmail" link in the set of links across the top of the page. If you follow the link in IE7, you'll find yourself at this page (pictured above), which claims that Gmail runs an average of twice as fast on Firefox 3 or Chrome than it does IE.
Strangely enough, that same link in IE6 takes you to this page, which recommends upgrading to IE7—so you're in for a bit of a rollercoaster if you follow their suggestions. We practically never open up IE unless we have to around here, so we certainly can't say from experience that IE runs Gmail that much more slowly, so if you've got more experience switching between browsers with Gmail, share your experience in the comments.
So. Whadja get under the tree this year? And what are you going to do to hack it? Yap it up in today's open comment thread.
This is your weekly chance to ask or say anything on your mind in our comments. Fellow readers are standing by to reply to your new gadget setup questions below. Don't forget to hit the arrow on the lower right hand side of any comment to reply directly to it. Go nuts! Photo by Fauxen.
On Monday we told you about the Mac Giving Tree, a software giveaway of great Mac shareware. At the time the folks at MacHeist kept a few of the downloads undisclosed until Christmas, and now they're here. One's a game (whatevs), one's a compact RSS reader, and, more importantly, the third is the excellent password manager and form filler, 1Password. This app will normally set you back $40, so if you think you might have use for it, grab the download now. If you've got more than one Mac, check out how to sync passwords between computers using 1Password and Dropbox.
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