So you are not happy with the pictures you have taken during the holidays and you just want to trash them. Wait a sec. What if they look great when you put them into the FotoSketcher? Well, it’s a tiny portable application that turns your photos into paintings. And that too in a just a couple of clicks.

FotoSketcher is simple in its use. You don’t even have to install it — just open an image file in FotoSketcher and select your own settings. There are various styles available: pencil sketch, pen and ink drawing, various painting renderings. There’s a gallery showing some creations by FotoSketcher users.

Most broadband users in the USA or Europe enjoy unlimited bandwidth. But not everyone is fortunate enough. In India, BSNL (the largest broadband provider of the country) offers various packages but most of them has bandwidth limitations. Once your bandwidth allocation is over, you have to pay more for additional usage. In such cases, it is useful to keep a record of how much bandwidth you are using. Here are some bandwidth monitors that comes handy to keep a tab on bandwidth usage.

FreeMeter

FreeMeter is tiny standalone application that runs on .NET framework 2.0. It requires no installation. Once you start the program it shows graph containing the usage details. You can change the update interval.

It also offers a ping and trace-route utility. You can view records of monthly, daily or weekly bandwidth usage. So much in just 118KiB!

NetMeter

NetMeter has a much more pleasing interface and offers more features. It can even generate a projected bandwidth usage on monthly, daily or weekly basis. You can specify which networks to track and which not to. This is useful if you are connected to several networks.

iTraffic

iTraffic is yet another application good at monitoring bandwidth usage. Apart from the graph showing network traffic, iTraffic also lets you select specific interfaces to monitor. You can even select IP addresses to ignore network traffic. (It uses WinPCap to do so.)

BitMeterOS

BitMeterOS is a cross platform bandwidth monitoring tool written in C. It can monitor or ignore specific networks only. You can also use it from commandline. BitMeter can be run as a Windows service, i.e. it runs in the background once your system is up. It also offers an audio notification every time a certain amount (to be fixed by the user) of data is transferred (uploaded or downloaded).

vnStat

vnStat is a commandline-based bandwidth monitoring tool which runs on Linux and BSD platforms. In ubuntu you can install it by:

sudo apt-get install vnstat

Once it is installed, just type vnstat to view traffic logs. vnStat can monitor specific networks only and it creates a separate database for each network interface. You can even view the logs in your browser. This post has detailed instructions about how to do the same.

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YouTube is beta-testing real-time comment-search. This new feature, available at Test Tube, enables users to search for comments in real-time — keywords are searched in comments as they are being posted in YouTube.

It also shows a list of "trending topics" — popular search terms. This new feature is a reminder that almost all social media sites would finally have to go real-time.

Via: YouTube Blog
Tags: YouTube, Google

With only 2 days to go before Windows 7 hits the stores, Microsoft has released a countdown widget that gives you 'valuable' tips about customising Windows 7. You can embed this widget to your Facebook, MySpace profiles, Blogger sidebar, iGoogle gadget among many other places, to show your Windows 7-love.

The widget shows a new tip daily. You can tweet the current tip that's being shown. Since it's a flash widget, unfortunately you can't style it your way.

Tags: Windows 7

Ever since Google has announced that they would be sending 100000 invites for Google Wave, there has been a lot of buzz over the 'net — 'Google Wave' finds a pretty place in Twitter's trending topics for some time now. And now, some eBay users have started selling their Wave invites for anything between $0.99 and $89.

This is not the first time that web-application invites are being sold on eBay. Desitorrents, the leading Indian forum, stopped giving invites to its users when someone auctioned an invite.

I think web-applications should be designed in a way so that invites cannot be transferred, i.e. an invite can be used by a certain email address only. Again, Google Wave is a social application. This means Wave is completely useless if your friends and family (or colleagues) are not using it. It's pretty interesting to see people wasting money on a web-application invite, at a time of financial turmoil.

[Via The Wall Street Journal]

Have you ever missed your favourite bookmarks while surfing the 'net from your friends PC? Do you always search for instructions for setting up email profiles for email-clients? If so, MailBrowserBackup is for you. It's a tiny utility (only 508 KiB) that backs up email-clients and browser profiles. All you have to do is to restore profiles from the back-up files.

The list of browsers, email clients, instant messengers it supports is a long one.

• Mozilla Firefox
• Flock
• Windows Mail
• Windows Live Mail
• Windows Live Messenger
• Windows Live Messenger Plus!
• Internet Explorer
• Outlook 2003/2007
• Windows Contacts
• Windows Calendar
• Mozilla Thunderbird
• Opera
• Apple Safari
• Google Chrome
• SRWare Iron
• FileZilla FTP Client
• Notepad++
• Pidgin

MailBrowserBackup runs on .NET Framework 2.0+. It's free and open-source and installation is super-simple.

It's a very useful application. But with more and more people switching to cloud-computing, back-up utilities like this one will find few takers.