Category: Technology

I work in technology sector. And I do round a clock, not only from 9 to 5. It is my bread and butter, it is my hobby, it is the fascination of my life. And with the current rate of change particular in information technology (IT), there is always something new to learn, to try, to talk about. I often post news, thoughts, and reviews. And when I do, this is the category I use.

Email Roulette

Someone once said that you are really lonely when you don’t even get any letters from SPAMers. Well, if you are really lonely, or really bored, or both, then check the Email Roulette website. It is an interesting service, where you register and send messages. Your messages are delivered to random people whom you don’t know. They choose to either respond or not. You get messages from random people too, and you can also either respond or not. There is an tweak with anonymity too.

See, you are no lonely anymore.

Port forwarding with Putty

Putty, it seems, is the most popular Telnet/SSH client for MS Windows (although it does run UNIX too). It is small, free, stable, and flexible. It has all the functionality one will ever need (with a few exceptions, of course).

Secure Shell (SSH) provides for a number of interesting uses. One of them is port forwarding, also known as tunneling. It is used when there is a need to pass encrypted information between two hosts while the original protocol for information does not support encryption, or another encryption level is required for some reason.

Apparently, Putty can help poor Windows souls with port forwarding too. This step-by-step tutorial with a lot of pictures shows exactly how to do it. The example used is encrypted email traffic.

Now I have a scanner

My brother brought me a scanner – Epson Perfection 1250. I will be scanning lots of pictures from my (and Olga’s for that matter) college years. It is time to digitize all those numerous photo albums.

I was surprised how easy it was to install and configure the scanner. It is a USB device, so I just had to plug it in and it was working. My Fedora Linux Core 1 machine had a number of applications to work with the scanner straight away – Kooka (from KDE guys), XSane, and Gimp (via XSane).

A Primer on Image Histograms and Curves

“A Primer on Image Histograms and Curves” is an excellent tutorial on what does it take to make image perfect. First application of histograms and curves is at scanning images into the computer. There are plenty of others, of course, such as fixing colors, changing the appearence, and creative touch.

If you do anything above rotating or scaling images, read the tutorial – you won’t regret.