Windows: If you're not about to manually convert that pile of images in front of you but you've found the batch converters you've tried to be lacking, free and portable Photo Magician offers both fine tweaking and drag and drop simplicity.

Photo Magician has two modes: full and quick convert. In the full mode you select an input and output folder and options like whether or not you want to scan the sub folders, overwrite the originals, speed up conversion by ditching the image preview, and unify the image format to a format of your select, among other options.

Photo Magician also supports presets covering popular portable devices and common image sizes. You can select Custom to set your own sizes if they aren't covered by the presets but unfortunately you can't save the custom presets you create, an oversight we'd love to see corrected in future versions of an otherwise strong program.

Full conversion mode aside you can also click "Quick Convert Mode" in the menu bar of Photo Magician and the program will minimize to the magician's hat—see at left here—like a sidebar gadget. Drop Photos right onto the hat and they will be automatically converted and saved after being reduced by the percentage you've selected.

Photo Magician is portable freeware, Windows only. Have a favorite tool—image-related or otherwise—for batching tasks? Let's hear about it in the comments.

Photo Magician [Softpedia via Addictive Tips] Jason Fitzpatrick1802864928587887186514950724067238588034

Tell you what, I've just had a look through mine, and from a detached perspective, some of it's a bit weird. My inventory of just one of my desk drawers is as follows :

6 lighters
1 tube of toothpaste
1 toothbrush
1 pair of nail clippers
1 packet of nicotine-replacement gum
2 packets of KFC salt
1 packet of brown sauce
1 packet of Bachelor's "Chicken & Country Vegetable" soup
1 mostly new box of co-codamol
1 packet of anadin
2 novelty shotglasses
1 copy of Metal Hammer, January 2001 edition
1 bottle of covonia cough syrup
2 packets of filters
1 packet of ibruprofen 400 mgs
2 Damanta gig flyers
1 bag of small pebbles
1 small bottle of ouzo
1 sheet of blue carbon paper (what century is this?)
1 canister of deodorant
1 almost depleted box of Turkish Delight
1 copy of "Bad Science" by Ben Goldacre
1 broken section of shatterproof ruler
1 stapled collection of receipts, various
4 packets of rizlas in various states of usage
1 plastic spork
1 packet moist wipes
2 rolls of surgical tape
1 CD containing jpeg artwork for a comedy t-shirt
1 ancient lemsip
1 packet of marbles
2 pairs of sunglasses






Feel free to share yours with me. Is everybody like this? I want to know.

Joojoo tablets, no video chat on planes?, Facebook prodded on panic buttons, Flash vs HTML5 - timed!, Windows 7 - too easy?, AOL v Bebo, Jimmy Wales interviewed, Zeus strangled

A quick burst of links for you to chew over, as picked by the Technology team

jkkmobile: JooJoo tablet dissected: Reveals Atom N270 and Nvidia Ion
Remember that tablet computer - the CrunchPad - that Michael Arrington was going to, ahem, make? Now called the JooJoo and disentangled from Arrington (not that he's happy about that; lawsuits should still be lingering somewhere), it's got FCC approval in the US and may be on sale from March 25. Or Americans could wait a week and buy an iPad. Hmm, wonder what they'll do?

Video Chat on the Plane? Illegal? OK? Legal Gray Area? - John Battelle's Searchblog
"Cameras not allowed!". Well, "two-way devices" not allowed on planes. Except.. er... they provided the Wi-Fi. But they block it. Except for Apple's iChat. Until now.

MPs Urge Facebook to Add Child Protection Button >> eWEEK Europe UK
Harriet Harman urges "swift action" on buttons. However, she might not have considered what's really needed to add it.

Relative Performance of Rich Media Content across Browsers and Operating Systems >> Mike Chambers
"# From these tests, Flash content does not perform consistently worse on Mac than on Windows. # There is a wide range of CPU usage for HTML 5 video, depending on the browser / operating system it is being played back on, with Mac generally being slower. # Canvas / JavaScript animations (at least those tested) seem to have high CPU usage, and generally run slower on Mac than on Windows (although not in all cases)."

Why one IT guy found Windows 7 to be too user-friendly - CIO Symmetry
Installation of Windows 7 only takes three clicks? How can you justify an IT staff with that?

AOL Has a Boo-Boo on Its Bebo
"What's interesting is the predicament facing AOL. Due to some complex tax laws, it may actually make better financial sense for AOL to just shut Bebo down." Scary stuff: will Bebo become the first big one to vanish?

A Crowdsourced Interview With Mr Wikipedia - video at All Things D
In this case, it was "crowdsourced" by asking for suggestions on Twitter

Zeus botnets suffer mighty blow after ISP taken offline • The Register
"The takedown is the result of two network service providers, Ukraine-based Ihome and Russia-based Oversun Mercury, severing their ties with [east European ISP] Troyak, said Mary Landesman [of ScanSafe], who cited data returned by Robotex.com. The move meant that all the ISP's customers, law-abiding or otherwise, were immediately unable to connect to the outside world."

Facebook Credits Now the First Payment Option in FarmVille - Inside Facebook
Facebook's virtual currency, Credits, is growing in popularity

Hackers love to exploit PDF bugs, says researcher
"According to F-Secure, 61% of the nearly 900 targeted attacks it's tracked in the first two months of 2010 exploited a vulnerability in Reader, Adobe's popular PDF viewer. By comparison, Microsoft's Word was exploited in just 24% of the attacks, and bugs in its Excel spreadsheet and PowerPoint presentation maker were leveraged only a combined 14% of the time." But do the exploits work against Apple's PDF-reading Preview? We await news.

You can follow Guardian Technology's linkbucket on delicious

Charles Arthur
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Charles Arthur

I love this newspaper!

Dig news fails? Check out Probably Bad News

Picture by: dunno source Submitted by: dunno source via Fail Uploader

If music executives sold bottled water, they'd be calling for a ban on tapwater downloads. But their industry is proving resilient

Illegal downloads continue to be a cause of Armageddon within the music industry and a source of endless fascination outside. Business leaders still regularly moan that illegal downloads are destroying their livelihood, especially if representatives of government are within hearing range. At the first Music 4.5 conference in London last week, speakers took it as read that "kids are not buying music anymore" and that they must look elsewhere for revenues. Evidence of the demise of purchased music is everywhere to be seen, except for one place: the statistics.

In fact it is easier to make the case that the music industry, far from imploding, is one of the great success stories of the recession. The most dramatic example of this is in what kids are supposed not to be buying any more: single tracks. Last year sales of singles soared to an all-time record of 152.7m units, an astonishing 33% rise in a year when the whole economy (GDP) contracted by 3.3%. If the music pundits seriously think that these are not being bought by kids, then it shows how out of touch they are with their customers. These same youngsters who were – and probably still are – massively downloading free music from the internet were prepared to pay up to £3 a pop for an insipid ringtone (interestingly, not included on the industry's statistics unless they are full-track ones). Why? Because there is an easy payment system on phones which didn't exist on the web. Now there is an easy payment system (iTunes et al) on the web they are starting to pay again. If the big music companies had spent their energies dreaming up a payments mechanism for web downloads instead of suing their customers they could have swept all before them. Instead they were like the crew of a sinking boat that blames the sea instead of trying to mend the leak. If they were in the bottled water industry, they would probably be urging the government to stop free downloads of tap water at home as unfair competition. Yet the bottled water industry should have been their model. It got away with charging us lots of money for a product that was no better than free tapwater through clever marketing.

Even now practically everyone I meet from the music industry protests that it couldn't be expected to combat the technological disruption that was eroding its traditional model. What piffle. Lots of books have been written about disruptive technologies. They can't say they weren't warned. As it turned out, pretty well every system for monetising music – iTunes, Spotify, We7, Shazam, Nokia's Comes with Music et al – has come from outside the industry. What a missed opportunity.

Sales of singles are, of course, only one part of the industry. There has, unsurprisingly, been a fall in sales of albums – down from 133.6m units to 128.9m last year, not helped by the closure of key UK retail chains Zavvi and Woolworths – but that was more than offset by growth elsewhere in sponsorship, live shows and merchandising where there is something of a boom happening in Britain. Overall, the music industry grew by an amazing 4.7% in recession-ridden 2008, according to PRS for Music, and will probably be resilient when the full 2009 figures come in. A key fact is that last year income from live music overtook that from recorded music for the first time. Don't think tracks, think music.

Clearly, the industry is changing. Consumers can now buy the singles they want without being locked into buying albums containing other tracks they don't want. That may bring in less income but it is the gateway to other revenues. The people who allegedly won't pay for downloads will pay huge sums to hear their favourite artists live or be part of the merchandising experience. Maybe illegal downloads – which, needless to say, I don't approve of – should be looked on as a massive crowd-sourced marketing operation to generate money for gigs, memorabilia and future sales.

The future lies in capitalising on the whole musical experience, as the admirable Music 4.5 initiative well knows: it seeks to bring together artists and entrepreneurs to plot the future. If the quality of the five-minute pitches made at the conference by budding businesses is anything to go by, the future is bright. I loved the way Songkick.com is moving beyond Last.fm by linking songs you and your friends like with information about the band's past and present gigs, enabling you to talk about them after the show. MusicGlue offers free downloads in exchange for email addresses which, over time, will produce geographic patterns showing where there is a dense enough cluster of fans to justify a gig. CloseCallMusic encourages people to interact with live music as it happens, while TuneRights is trying to crowd-source the financing of records. Audiofuel, which matches music to your jogging beat, aims to be the new Ministry of Sound. I loved what Decibel is planning – to have a vast data base of meta tags so you can find out details of each member of the band: that Jimi Hendrix played as a session man on a Little Richard track, for instance. That is just the sort of value-added that will lure people away from free downloads. Nick Hornby would love it.

These were only some of the pitches made which suggest that the future of the industry may continue to reside in bottom-up initiatives rather than the top-down approach of the major labels. The music industry, to be fair, is still a very heavy investor as a new study shows, but it had better be alert if it doesn't want to be upstaged even more. The sad fact is that around 90% of start-ups fail – but it is vital for future employment, as well as the health of the music industry that we spend money to find the winners. A revolution is under way.

• File sharing
• Intellectual property
• Music industry

Victor Keegan
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Victor Keegan

p>I went to Conservative party headquarters yesterday to interview George Osborne for the News of the World. You’ll be pleased to hear he was aware of my blog where I asked for people to suggest questions for George Osborne as people in his office had looked through it. Let’s hope they didn’t show him every post [...]Martin Lewis

NICK Clegg has pledged to raise the amount of semen coating the inside of Britain's tube socks by at least a fifth.(author unknown)

Last night was especially fun. A day off (Wednesday had been a travelling day from Eastbourne to Hull) always brings a slight scattiness to the performance, which was all part of the fun created by a terrific audience. Eastbourne crowds are lovely but famously quiet, so it was encouraging to really feel the presence of the audience again. The participants too were lively and fun – all very much appreciated. I really loved the show.

It was a real pleasure to meet so many of you afterwards too: thank you those of you who bought prezzies for me and the crew. Particular mention to the delightful Elizabeth who had brought far too many generous gifts wrapped in impressively home-produced ‘Derren Brown’ wrapping paper. Thank you all. And I know Coops was very impressed with his Roast Beef Monster Munch T-shirt last night: an excellent coup, I thought, pun intended.

It is such a sweet thing to occasionally be handed a little prezzie from someone who’s enjoyed the show, but please don’t go over the top with them. Think we’re going to need a bigger truck…

Today I must persevere with TV writing accompanied by the brilliant Iain: some pressure is on to assemble ideas into a produceable format. Together we shall pace my small room and sweat blood until a new nugget of sparkling televisual gold is alchemically formed. Or not: more likely we’ll settle on an idea that seems ridiculous in the morning. I’m also doing a TV interview this afternoon for BBC ‘Look North’, during which I shall insist on looking North. They want to do it in a dressing room, but I don’t think they’ve seen how small the dressing rooms are. I don’t have long to think of a few amusing things to have in the background… false goatees lined up on polystyrene heads, that sort of thing.

Thanking you.

x

“Jan Vormann, 26, has taken his project from its humble beginnings at an art fair in Rome and brightened up thousands of people’s days with his brightly coloured plastic version of Polyfilla. From the old quarter of Tel Aviv in Israel to the grand Bryant Park of New York, Mr Vormann has acted either independently or with the city’s permission to leave a little part of his childhood behind.

Estimating to have used upwards of 1,000 of the little Danish building blocks, Mr Vormann enlists the help of passers-by intrigued by his careful placing of the Lego bricks. “I like to think of my work as a Repair Manifesto,” said the Berlin-based installation artist. “My work draws attention to the smallest parts of our cities that are falling apart because of the brightness of the Lego. “It draws people’s attention through the coloured blocks and makes them aware that this wall or statue or construction is not complete anymore, for whatever reason. “In the case of my latest project in New York which I completed in early March, I simply wanted to help the Mayor Bloomberg brighten up the great city.”"

Read more at The Telegraph

Google's growth animated and digital teddy bears storming Worthing seafront in this week's roundup

"Meet Google. The noun that became a verb." That's how this little film starts, going on to list all the vast projects that the company is involved at the moment using lovely animation. Made in the style of the viral "Did you know?" videos, it gives you a pretty good impression why people call Google a "frenemy". So is Google Darth Vader? Or just a business?

Remember Charlie Brooker's parody of TV news reporting recently? Here's the American equivalent. Enjoy the Onion ripping apart up-to-the-minute coverage of some irrelevant story that has no ramifications whatsoever. Excellent – but not to be watched if you dislike strong language or dead fish.

Finally, we have teddy bears invading Worthing seafront. They hop above the streets, play with some cars, and kill some pigeons – all the stuff that you do when you are an animated teddy bear in a viral video fantasy from a rather talented young man.

1 The Beast File- Google (HUNGRY BEAST)
If you want to know why they call Google a "frenemy," watch this info-animation from Hungry Beast for Australian TV channel ABC.

2 BMW S1000 RR. Dinner for RR
You know that conjuring trick where you pull out the tablecloth so quickly and smoohtly that dinner remains undisturbed? Well, BMW has tried it with a food bank and one of their motorbikes, and ...

3 The Handsome Men's Club
A post-Oscars Jimmy Kimmel gets Robert Downey Jr, Sting, Patrick Dempsey, Tad Dampsey, Ethan Hawke, Ben Affleck, Matt Demon and others to make fun of Handsome Men – that is, themselves. Really kicks of with when Lenny starts to sing. So who is most handsome?

4 Turning into Michael Jackson
Amazing transformation: Why beauty operations? Séverine takes you on a tour using make up and scotch tape to look like Michael Jackson!

5 Teddys storm Worthing sea front
Cutie of the week! Watch an endless row of teddy bears taking over the seafront of Worthing. Internet creativity as its best.

6 Iron Man 2 Trailer 2
Marvel Comics meet blockbuster featuring machines, special effects, Robert Downey Jr, Scarlett Johansson and Mickey Rourke to perform a film fest coming in May. But the trailer has already made it into the charts.

7 TRON: LEGACY - Official Trailer
Another movie in which technology plays the main role, and this time its a father and son tale that puts us back into 1980s cyberspace. Oh, but in 3D. Is that enough?

8 NEW E*TRADE Baby - Girlfriend
Animated human baby boy and baby girl have a serious relationship talk. What happened last night? And was that milkoholic Lindsay there as well? Very well made ad, deserves to go viral.

9 PS22 Chorus "LISZTOMANIA" Phoenix
You think Glee is TV fiction? Than watch this! Here is the pop video of the week featuring the elementary school chorus from Public School 22 in Graniteville, Staten Island, who cover Lisztomania by Phoenix.

10 Captain Kirk deals with a strange alien culture
Looking at the screen, Spock and Kirk can't really believe their eyes. Or ears.

Source: Mostly taken by Unruly Media, but heavily inspired by Mag.ma. Compiled from data gathered at 18:00 on 11 March 2010.

• Digital media
• Google

Mercedes Bunz
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Mercedes Bunz

This video is rather surprising – just keep watching you will be amazed.

Fashion Fail

I saw him on vacation.

Love fashion fails? Check out Poorly Dressed

Picture by: dunno source Submitted by: dunno source via Fail Uploader

I’m not a junkie for this kind of thing but occasionally one comes across something remarkable. I would recommend: Style: Towards Clarity and Grace by Joseph Williams. I first read this a decade ago and I’ll admit I haven’t felt the need to return recently. But it was a real eye-opener. Rather than offering rules such [...]Tim Harford

A THEME park inspired by the graphic cruelty of 'torture porn' horror films is too mild for most British children, it was claimed yesterday.(author unknown)

“The theory of gravity proposed by Albert Einstein nearly a century ago can explain the dance of galaxies around one another just as well as it can model the motion of planets around the sun, according to a new study.

The finding suggests that the invisible substance called dark matter and the even more mysterious force known as dark energy are not just figments of physicists’ imaginations.

For centuries Isaac Newton’s law of universal gravitation worked well enough to explain gravity on Earth. But astronomers eventually saw discrepancies in the way larger objects such as planets interacted.

Einstein’s general theory of relativity, published in 1916, proposed that gravity works on large scales because matter warps the fabric of space and time, also known as space-time. (See “Einstein and Beyond” in National Geographic magazine.)

This notion has been used to successfully explain phenomena in our solar system, such as the slight alterations in Mercury’s orbit around the sun, which Newton’s gravity couldn’t account for.

The existence of dark matter and dark energy is based on the assumption that Einstein’s gravity is affecting galaxies billions of light-years from Earth in the same way that it affects objects in our solar system.

Based on general relativity, for example, scientists think dark matter exists because some cosmic objects behave as if they have more mass than we can see.

But until now, tests of general relativity on galactic scales have been inconclusive.”

Read more at National Geographic

TEDIOUS prog rockers group Pink Floyd have won their legal bid to make you listen to every last bit of their ghastly albums.(author unknown)

Here's the idea. The government recommends a diet for healthy living (right pyramid), but at the same time there are billions of dollars of lopsided subsidies (left pyramid) whose distribution doesn't look anything like the former. The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) used the above 3-d pyramids to present this information.

Interesting point. Funky presentation. Discuss (remakes highly recommended).

[via The Consumerist]

y u gotz such a long face?

(news/society/no-ban-on-teachers-who-watch-grey%27s-anatomy-201003122551/) TEACHERS who watch the offensive US medical drama Grey's Anatomy will not be banned from the classroom, the government has confirmed.(author unknown)

• We reported an interesting twist in the saga of the digital economy bill last night, when it emerged that the controversial clause added by the Liberal Democrats - which has been criticised for threatening sites like YouTube that don't carefully monitor user content - was actually drafted by British music industry body the BPI. The battle between the different lobby groups looks set to continue - and get more vicious - as the bill draws closer to becoming law.

• After a week in which its appeal over a near-$300m patent lawsuit failed, some good news for Microsoft: the Xbox 360 overtook Nintendo's Wii to become America's most biggest-selling games console in February. Less promising? Games sales dropped by 15% in the same month, despite the launch of high-profile titles like BioShock 2.

• And given that it's Friday, I'd like to leave you with a . Jason Kottke points me in the direction of this fascinating article about the work of David Cope - who has spent years developing a piece of software that can compose classical music. The crucial addition to his latest iteration is that it doesn't just lob in any old notes or copy the patterns set by old masters like Bach and Mozart, but actually analyses how to break the rules to make its compositions sound more real. Listen to the compositions and you might have a hard time distinguishing it from the real thing. That opens up some amazing - if slightly worrisome - possibilities.

You can follow our links and commentary each day through Twitter (@guardiantech, @gdngames or our personal accounts) or by watching our Delicious feed.

• Digital Britain
• Law and technology
• File sharing
• Piracy
• Microsoft
• Xbox
• Digital music and audio

Bobbie Johnson
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Bobbie Johnson