Published on Friday, Jan. 15, 2010 1:31PM EST Last updated on Monday, Jan. 18, 2010 9:16AM EST
Photo retouching and general Photoshop wizardry can seem otherworldly—how on earth did they massage all the blemishes out of that model's face?—but at least it's a process you can follow visually. You can sit behind a Photoshop jockey and watch how they employ various tools to, say, turn a daytime landscape into a night scene, and even if you can't wield the tools, you can at least grasp the basic principles at work.
Levelator (tested v2.0.3 Windows)
Free field/podcast audio cleaner for Windows/Mac/Linux by The Conversations Network
The same doesn't apply to audio, however. There's nothing to see except a waveform, and there's not much the untrained eye can do to figure out how it translates into sound. The process of making adjustments is more abstract as well—you can point to the blemishes on a person's face and say they need to be removed, but what do you do to remove the hiss from a recording?
Original audio
In this clip of Globe reporter Jill Mahoney interviewing a subject in Haiti you can hear the levels are starkly different
Levelatored audio
And here's what the clip sounds like after running through the Levelator and then converted into an Mp3.
Amateur podcasters, documentarians, radio producers and pretty much anyone else who deals with largely spoken-word audio should have Levelator in their arsenal of audio tools. The utility helps to smooth out the audio levels of a recording—a common problem when you have several people or several bits of audio that were all recorded at differing volume levels and conditions. The best part? All you do is drag your source file onto Levelator, and it spits out the final file into the same folder, all normalized and compressed as needed.
If you're an experienced audio producer, you can probably do a better job with a full audio editing suite. But for anyone with little to no experience with sound editing, Levelator can vastly improve the quality of your sound files with practically no effort or expertise necessary. Use it, and your listeners will thank you for it.
BlockChalk
Free location-based bulletin board for iPhone/Palm Pre/Android (via browser); iPod Touch partially supported via wifi-based location tracking by BlockChalk
Twitter owes much of its growth to the popularity of always-connected mobile devices. Without text messages or 3G data connections, Twitter would be stuck firmly in the land of desktop computing, and not on the go where people spend most of their lives. But only recently has the service begun to take further advantage of the anywhere, anytime nature of smartphones; Twitter is slowly rolling out a geolocation API that will allow you to tag your posts with your current location, so you can tell people where you were when you made a post.
Thing is, we're not all social media stars who want to broadcast what we're thinking, let alone where we are, at all times. Services like Foursquare and Gowalla require you to reveal your location to others, and for many people that's too much to ask. Enter BlockChalk, a service that on the surface seems to have a lot in common with the future location-aware Twitter: it encourages short posts, and it tags all your messages with your current location. The big difference? BlockChalk is anonymous.
As a result, BlockChalk doesn't feel so much like Twitter; you're not actively following personalities or talking to your friends. Instead, it acts a lot more like a community message board for the 21st century—an odd mix of restaurant reviews, grocery questions and, potentially, the missed connections section of Cragislist. At the moment, BlockChalk's main issue is the small user base; people seem to be using the service in downtown Toronto, but Vancouver's West End hasn't seen any new messages in months. But BlockChalk has the potential to form its own unique style of community—one based not on the people you already know, but on the people who live near you.
Digital cameras keep gaining megapixels. Only a few years ago, a camera with a six-megapixel sensor was an expensive purchase. But manufacturers kept upping the ante, and one camera arms race later, six megapixels is positively old-school; nowadays you can pick up ten-megapixel cameras for a pittance.
The legacy of that arms race is that even the most basic camera can produce images that take up a lot of disk space: a six-megapixel photo can take up about three megabytes. That's great if you plan to blow up your photos to 8x10s, but it's counterproductive if all you want to do is e-mail a set of photos to your relatives. The photos are far too big to view comfortably at full size on any computer monitor, and meanwhile you're using up precious e-mail attachment space that could be used to cram in more snapshots.
Pretty much any image application will resize photos nowadays, but none is easier to use than ShrinkPic. Install it, and the utility hides in your system tray, waiting for a big photo to cross its path. Upload a photo using your web browser, attach a few photos to an e-mail or send some shots to a friend via IM, and ShrinkPic will intercept the photos and automatically shrink them before sending them on their way.
It's a nearly invisible process; you only know ShrinkPic is doing something because it pops up a notification telling you how many bytes you saved. The utility supports most of the major browsers, e-mail clients, webmail services and messaging clients, though notably ShrinkPic doesn't recognize multi-IM applications like Pidgin. If you stick to Windows Live Messenger and Skype, though, ShrinkPic can ensure that you never have to think about resizing a photo again.
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