Filed under: Internet, Utilities, Windows, Web services, Freeware, web 2.0

If you’re looking for a cheap and simple way to record screencasts and post them to your blog or other website, it doesn’t get much cheaper or easier than FreeScreenCast. There are two parts to FreeScreenCast: a dekstop recording application for Windows and a web site where you can upload and share your screencasts.

The ScreenCast Recorder application is incredibly simple to use. The image above shows pretty much all of your options. You can change the screen area to record, but you can’t change your file types, frame rates, or anything else.

When you’re done you can save your files, but good luck figuring out where they’re stored. That’s because the utility hides them away as TMP files in your local settings folder. The easiest way to find a video is to click the preview button and examine the file properties in your media player of choice. If you want to edit your videos, that’s pretty much what you’ll have to do. But once you’ve edited your videos, you probably won’t be able to upload them to the FreeScreenCast web site because you need to use the ScreenCast Recorder to upload your files.

While FreeScreenCast’s recorder lacks some of the features you’ll find in programs like CamStudio, Camtasia, or Jing, the audio and video quality is significantly better than what you’ll get using an on the web tool like Screencast-o-matic.

Once your files are uploaded to the FreeScreenCast site you can share the link or embed the videos in your website. Check out a swift sample we put together after the jump.

Update: FreeScreenCast’s Jason Askew tells us that a future release might include the capability to export WMV files.

[via MakeUseOf]

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I Don’t Believe in Imaginary Property writes “The US Supreme Court refused without comment the ACLU’s appeal of a lower court ruling that prevented them from suing over the government’s warrantless TSP program. The problem was a Catch-22: they lack legal ’standing’ to sue over it because they can’t prove that they were suspected terrorists, but neither can they find out who was actually suspected, because this is a matter of national security.” Update: 02/20 00:17 GMT by KD : Removed an incorrect statement after a reader pointed out that, with the expiration of the Protect America Act this weekend, foreign surveillance will revert to oversight by the FISA court.

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Firmafest writes to let us know that ‘DVD Jon’ Lech Johansen’s company has released an open beta of DoubleTwist, a desktop application that allows the user to replicate media to any device. There’s a Facebook app too. The software is available for download at Doubletwistventures.com. Currently only Windows is supported, but a Macintosh version is on the way.

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An anonymous reader writes “The Church of Scientology can delete auctions from eBay with no supervision under the VeRO program, and has used this to delete all resale of the e-meters Scientologists use. This is to stop members from buying used units from ex-members instead of buying from the official (and very expensive) source. Given Scientology’s record of fraud and abuse, should eBay give them this level of trust? Will this set a precedent for other companies that want to halt the aftermarket resale of their products?”

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draevil writes “Britain’s National Consumer Council has finished an investigation into the practice of software End User License Agreements(EULAs) with the conclusion that many consumers are signing away their legal rights and agreeing to unfair terms, which they could never have scrutinized before purchase. The report also acknowledges that even if the EULA were available prior to buy, it would be unreasonable to expect an average consumer to understand the terms to which they were agreeing. Here are the full report (PDF) and a summary.” The NCC recommends that the European Commission bring softwre licenses under the same consumer protections that apply to other products in the EU.

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I Don’t Believe in Imaginary Property writes “For a long time now, lawyers and any serious law students have been bound to paid services like LexusNexis for access to case law, but that is slowly changing. Carl Malamud has posted free electronic duplicates of every U.S. Supreme Court decision and Court of Appeals ruling since 1950, 1.8 million rulings in all, online for free. While the rulings themselves have long been government works not subject to copyright, courts still charge several cents per page for copies and they’re inconvenient to access, so lawyers usually turn to legal publishers which are more costly but more convenient, providing helpful things like notes about related cases, summaries of the holdings, and information about if and when the case was overturned. This free database isn’t Carl’s first, either. He convinced the SEC to provide EDGAR, and helped get both the Smithsonian and Congressional hearings on the web.”

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beuges writes “The Associated Press is reporting that Microsoft will make full versions of their development tools available to students. “The Redmond-based software maker said late Monday it will let students download Visual Studio Professional Edition, a software development environment; Expression Studio, which includes graphic design and Web site and hybrid Web-desktop programming tools; and XNA Game Studio 2.0, a video game development program. Gates stated students will want to try Microsoft’s tools because they’re more powerful than the open-source combination of Linux-based operating systems, the Apache Web server, the MySQL database and the PHP scripting language used to make complex Web sites. But Gates stated giving away Microsoft software isn’t intended to turn students against open source software entirely. Rather, he hopes it will just add one more tool to their belt.””

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Filed under: World wide web, Office, Web services, web 2.0

Document sharing service Scribd has launched a new platform called iPaper that makes it simple to upload and embed PDF and Office documents on any web site. The iPaper viewer is based on Adobe Flash, which means it loads quickly and can be embedded on any web page just as easily as a YouTube video.

You can share documents by uploading them to Scribd and grabbing the embed code. Scribd has also released an API that lets web publishers add iPaper tools to their own sites. The company is also letting publishers embed Google AdSense ads in documents, which lets you monetize your content.

The document viewer is pretty slick. You can view multi-page documents easily. And you can navigate huge documents using your mouse or keyboard. Check out a sample after the jump.

[via GigaOm]

Continue reading Scribd launches iPaper: Embed documents on any site

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Filed under: Blogging, Web services, Open Source

The powerful Open Source CMS Drupal has released its latest version onto the world. Drupal 6 adds a host of new features, including an easier installation process, built-in OpenID support and updates to the theming structure.

As far as content management systems (CMS) go, Drupal is easily one of the most powerful, especially for scaling large sites with multiple authors. But that power has always come at a slight cost to usability - especially for new users. We’ve been playing with Drupal 6’s various release candidates (we haven’t installed the final release on our test set-up yet) and have been extremely impressed at the changes made in streamlining and simplifying the installation and overall management system. Is it as simple as WordPress, well no — that’s not really Drupal’s aim — but it is much more intuitive than Drupal 5, which in itself was a step-up from Drupal 4. New users should check out this 12 minute screencast on Drupal’s site, it walks you through the entire process.

If you’re looking for a scalable, customizable CMS solution to host either a huge site or lots of different sites, you owe it to yourself to give Drupal a look.

[via CMSWire]

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