Shozu is a software for mobile devices that serves as a hub for you to connect to a long list of social networks. With Shozu, it is not about how fast you can upload your photos, it is about how many social platforms you can connect to at the same time and how effortless you can get everything done.

When I first tried out Shozu on my iPod Touch, I was overwhelmed to see the huge number of social platforms that it supports. Other than the popular Flickr, Photobucket, Picasa, Facebook, Twitter, it also supports some of the smaller networks such as HotSMS, Hyves, Ipernity, ITV Uploaded, moblog:UK, Netlog and many many more.

While Shozu is mainly an application for you to upload and share your photos on the various social networks, there are some additional features that makes it stand out from the rest.

Blog from Shozu

If you are using Blogger, WordPress, LiveJournal, Typepad, or the less familiar Vox, you can now post text/photos to your blog right within Shozu.

Become an online journalist

If you have always dreamt of becoming a journalist, Shozu has just make it slightly easier for you. You can now submit your photos to the various news networks such as CNN Express, BBC News and Reuters. You can even leave your name and telephone in the signature so that the news network can contact you in the event that your materials are picked up by them.

Receive updates from friends

What use does it have if it can’t connect to the popular Facebook and Twitter and receive friends’ updates? Luckily, it can. Shozu has a rather good Twitter and Facebook support. For Facebook, you can receive friends feeds, download their photos to your mobile devices, update your status and get notifications on events.

Listen to podcasts

The podcast features in Shozu comes with a great list of podcast channels that you can subscribe, download and listen to while on the move. While there are plenty of choices to choose from, one thing that I don’t like here is that I cannot add my custom podcast or RSS feeds.

Conclusion

If you need a no-brainer tool to upload and share your photos to various social networks quickly and easily, then Shozu is definitely the application to go for. It is free and works on a large variety of handsets, so you shouldn’t have any problem getting it to run on yours.

iPhone and iPod Touch users can get Shozu at this link.

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This post has two goals in mind: first, it lists a few interesting sources, some that offer photographs that are simply beautiful or quirky, while others are pertinent to events or offer cultural insights. The second goal is to challenge the reader to share with others their finds, ranging from the obvious to the under-appreciated.

Before we proceed, a word of caution: while the sites mentioned here are both interesting and artistic, be warned that not all the content on them may be safe for work.

Flickr’s “Last 7 Days Interesting” Set

It would be sacrilege to speak of photography on the internet without mentioning Flickr, and some might contend (though I do not) that the list can even end right here. The above is a screenshot of Flickr’s page of interesting pictures from the last 7 days. The page can be refreshed to display different subsets of photographs that are almost all reliably worthy of viewing.

Alternative ways to explore Flickr include Flickr Groups, or any of a number of Flickr content showcase sites like FlickRiver, an AIR application called DestroyFlickr (don’t let the name scare you, the authors intent is anything but!), RSS feeds from Flourish (Flickr offers its own RSS feeds, of course), or a Flickr widget from WidgetBox.

Other sites, such as Photo-Eye offer sumptuous visual galleries of professional and artistic photography that are well worth your time.

DeviantART

DeviantART is an old (and favourite) name for chronic wallpaper hunters and admirers of digital art. Also available from this “community of artists” are collections of impressive photographs that are categorised into Still Life, Street, Humorous and other sections.

The Boston Globe’s The Big Picture

A few times each month the Boston Globe presents in its “The Big Picture” web pages, collections of some of the most amazing photographs that range from natural wonders to political events. The page includes an RSS feed, a comments section, and archives are also available.

Views of the News

Sure you scoffed at “the MSM” (MainStream Media, for the uninitiated) during the US election season, but now that that’s all settled, you can quietly return to their online offerings, since many of their websites offer interesting multimedia, including slideshows that provide a pictographic equivalent of current events and news.

The New York Times multimedia page includes photo slideshows, interactive features, audio slide shows, and a Pictures of the Day section.

The German newspaper Spiegel provides a section called “Picture This” (clever!?) updated daily with interesting pictures, typically from Europe.

Time Magazine’s website includes a Photo Essays section that includes sections similar to other such sites, sorting pictures by day, week and year. Also of interest is their “Graphics” section with, well you might have guessed it, graphics highlighting various bits of data (e.g: 5 Truths About Health Care in America). One recent Photo Essay offers a haunting look at The Remains of Detroit.

The BBC gets in on the act with their In Pictures offering the now familiar temporal categories, as well as Audio Slideshows and user contributed content.

Its brethren, the Times Online (broken down by region and kind) and The Guardian (including this cheerful Flickr set that documents the recession) too offer similar photo galleries.

And then there’s Tumblr and Google Maps Sightings

In the last two years, the micro-blogging (or perhaps more accurately, tumblelog) site Tumblr has attracted photography and picture buffs whose posts include their own snapshots as well as interesting pictures found elsewhere. One contributor you will find infinitely resourceful in teasing out the most intriguing and amusing pictures from the nooks and crannies of the internet as well as the real world is Szymon Błaszczyk, author of the Inspire me, now! blog:

So… what are you lookin’ at?    What online photo sources feed your fetish?

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You can easily install any of these apps using the ‘Add/Remove Applications’ from the upper panel.

1. Midori

Midori is a web browser that uses the well-known WebKit rendering engine, providing quite a speed bump from Firefox and standards complying page rendering. Midori is currently packaged into Xubuntu and features include tabs, bookmarks and customizable search engine box. The browser is extensible via Javascript.

2. gDesklets

gDesklets is a platform for widgets, tiny applets sitting on your desktop in a symbiotic relationship of eye candy and usefulness. You can populate your desktop with status meters, icon bars, weather sensors and news tickers.

I managed to configure gDesklets to emulate the OS X Dashboard feature in addition to the standard placement on the desktop.

3. AcidRip

AcidRip is a GTK application for ripping and encoding DVD’s. It neatly wraps MPlayer and MEncoder, which I think is pretty handy, seeing as MPlayer is by far the best bit of video playing kit around for Linux.

As well as creating a simple Graphical Interface for those nervous of the MEncoders command line interface, it also automates the entire process.

4. Cheese Webcam Booth

Cheese is a Photobooth-inspired GNOME application for taking pictures and videos from a webcam. It also includes fancy graphical effects based on the gstreamer-backend.

5. Gmount-iso

Gmount-iso is a small tool written using PyGTK and Glade. It allows you to easily mount your CD images.

6. KGRUBEditor

A tool to view and edit the menu.lst file of the GRUB boot manager. It offers many features and it is the perfect solution for those who want to change the way GRUB works, without messing with the menu.lst file.

7. Flickr Uploader

Postr is a small app that lets you upload photographs to Flickr, with tight integration into the GNOME desktop.

8. DOS Emulator

DOSEMU stands for DOS Emulation, and allows you to run DOS and many DOS programs, including many DPMI applications such as DOOM and Windows 3.1, under Linux.

Features include:

• word size and addressing modes of the iAPX86 processor family’s “real mode,” while still running within the full protected mode environment
• simulate a hardware environment over which DOS programs are accustomed to having control.
• provides DOS services through native Linux services; dosemu can provide a virtual hard disk drive which is actually a Linux directory hierarchy.

9. E-book reader

FBReader is an e-book reader with a lot of great features:

• supports several open e-book formats: fb2, html, chm, plucker, palmdoc, ztxt, tcr (psion text), rtf, oeb, openreader, non-DRM’ed mobipocket, plain text, epub
• reads directly from tar, zip, gzip, bzip2 archives (you can have several books in one archive)
• supports a structured view of your e-book collection
• automatically determines encodings
• automatically generates a table of contents
• keeps the last open book and the last read positions for all open books between runs
• automatic hyphenation (patterns for several languages are included)

10. HomeBank

HomeBank is a fast, simple and easy to use program to manage your bank accounts. It differs from gnucash for the better look and feel, and for the faster start-up speed. It has a lot of features such as easy analysis with graphical charts (statistics, budget, overdrawn, car cost), multi-accounts support, budget management, reminders, import from OFX/QFX-CSV files, visual status of operations. It is based on GTK2.

Let’s hear some other interesting, less-known Linux apps in the comments!

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So here it is, my recommendation of the 8 most useful plugins for Gnome-Do:

1. Locate files

I am definitely not the type who likes to dig several levels down the filesystem to locate a particular file. That is where the ‘Locate file‘ plugin is useful. Load up Gnome-Do (by pressing “Win + Space” key), type the first few characters of the filename and it will fetch the required files for you, no matter how secluded it is.

2. Twitter

Send your tweets from the Gnome-Do without having to open your Twitter client. A good and quick way to update your twitter without having too much distraction.

3. Rhythmbox

If you are like me, who enjoys playing music in the background while working, then this plugin is particularly useful. You can control your Rhythmbox to start playing your favorite track, pause, mute, unmute, volume up/down, change to next/previous track or to display current track info, all within the small Gnome-Do box.

4. Gnome Terminal

Gnome Terminal is useful because it eliminates the need for you to launch the Terminal. Being someone who love the command line interface more than the GUI, I simply love this plugin that allows me to type and run in the command line from Gnome-Do. (I used to have a Terminal shortcut icon on my dock so that I can launch the Terminal quickly. Ever since, I installed this plugin, I have removed the shortcut icon from my dock as I have no longer any use of it)

5. Apturl

Rather than typing ’sudo apt-get install package-name’ everytime you wanted to install a package, now you just need to type the package name and Gnome-do will do the installation for you. The only caveat: this works only if you know the full name of the package and spell it correctly.

6. Opensearch

Opensearch allows you to search from your desktop using a variety of search engines. From Google, Yahoo, eBay, CreativeCommon, Answer.com, Amazon.com to Wikipedia, depending on what you want to find, you can easily get the information you want from Gnome-Do. I particularly like to use CreativeCommon to find photos for my blog.

7. Flickr

Quickly upload your photos to Flickr without accessing your Flickr account in the browser. You can choose to upload one photo or a bunch of photos from a particular folder. It works quietly in the background and does not provide any distraction.

Tomboy Notes

Do you feel disoriented without your Tomboy notes? Well, I do. I use Tomboy notes to keep reference to articles that I have read online. That’s why I find this plugin particularly useful. It provides you with a quick and neat way to create a new note or to dig up material from your existing Tomboy notes. It is very handy when you have all the information at your fingertips.

(To install plugins, load up Gnome-Do by pressing ‘Win + Space’ keys. Click on the arrow at the top right hand corner and select ‘Preferences’. Go to the ‘Plugins’ tab and check the plugins you want.)

What are your favorite Gnome-Do plugins?

(By) Damien Oh is a technology geek who loves to tweak and hack various operating systems to make life easier. Check out his blog at MakeTechEasier.com where he shares all the tips, tricks and tutorials.

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So, let me shed some light about Skitch. It was announced by its creator, plasq about a year ago but only released to the general public as a beta about 6 months or so before this. Somehow, it was widely anticipated by users – can you imagine people being excited about a screenshot (and image) capture application? But they were! Probably it was the cool interface it had or the ease-of-use or something else, but it was so heavily covered during the previous Macworld. To me, it made no sense. What was all the fuss about? Actually, if you delve deeper into the roots of Skitch, you will find that plasq has actually created one of the most iconic Mac applications i.e. Comic Life. So you know, Skitch actually has some heritage.

Since it’s currently available as a public beta, head on over to skitch.com and sign up for a free account. You’ll get to download the application and a free 2GB account which you’ll be able to host and share the images on the Skitch server. But you don’t necessarily need to upload your images to their server if you don’t want to. Skitch provides you with the options to upload to your own FTP, SFTP, Flickr or .Mac account.

After installing Skitch, it will appear in your menu bar, dock, or both, if you choose.

The joy of using it is just about to begin. By invoking certain hotkeys, you’ll bring up the Skitch crosshairs, take a fullscreen snap or the coolest feature that brings Skitch one step further: frame snap!

What this does is opens Skitch but makes its main application window transparent, so you’re actually framing up your screenshot and you’ll be able to see how it looks like after its taken. Pretty neat. This way, you’ll know what size your image is going to result in.

By the way, in case you didn’t know, Mac OS X has a built-in screenshot capture application called Grab. Its hotkeys are:

Skitch takes this one step forward by adding:

Skitch also added the option of allowing you to take snapshots using your built-in iSight. The button is on the right column of the application window. You could have missed it since its pretty obscure. I did.

After taking a snap, Skitch will open up with your image. You will now have a chance to edit your image before sending it out to the web. Remember that Skitch has only a very light built-in editor – it will only be able to do some freehand drawings, add arrows and lines and other pre-defined shapes and also will allow you to type using the ‘letter’ tool. You may also resize, crop and scale your images. If you make a mistake and would like to retract what you’ve added to your image, there’s an ‘Undo’ button at the bottom right corner. Skitch remembers the original state of your image and will restore it if you need to.

Once you’re done and ready to share it, click on the ‘Webpost’ button and that’s it. Your image is now on its way to the Skitch server or your Flickr account (or any other servers you added in Preferences). That’s right — just one click to upload. But if you want to save the image onto your hard drive, you get to choose between several image formats:

So there you go. Skitch is pretty much an awesome application and it would probably make it to my “top applications I can’t live without” list if I had such a list. Nevertheless, I hope you give Skitch a try if you haven’t already. Or if you are currently a Skitch user, let us know how it’s been going for you.

Here’s an introductory video from Skitch’s website showing you how to use Skitch in 3 minutes.

(By) Jackson Chung is a full-time med student attempting to perform a juggling act with relationship, studies and his future. He also manages a Mac news site, Macnifying.

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