Soundsnap – royalty free, copyright free sound library 

Soundsnap offer a range of sound effects and loops for you to freely use including in commercial ventures – the sound effects and loops personally recorded by the contributer and added to the library – and they offer you the chance to do the same. (Via)

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If you feel that your computer is running sluggish try cleaning out your Prefetch. It’s a place on your operating system that stores all kinds of temporary files. The theory is that these temporary files would help you to load programs quicker because Windows would “Prefetch” files that would assist in launching this software.

You can find the Prefetch file in C:\Windows\Prefetch

You can highlight everything in that folder and delete it. I promise, you won’t hurt anything.

DO NOT DELETE THE FOLDER ITSELF THOUGH, JUST THE FILES INSIDE THE PREFETCH FOLDER!

From MrPC

If you have lost any data due to your own mistake, even if you’ve deleted something from your recycle bin or if a virus/trojan has deleted data from your computer, this sotware can recover it. Which is why it is called Recuva.

FastStone Image Viewer is a fast, stable, user-friendly image browser, converter and editor. It has a nice array of features that include image viewing, management, comparison, red-eye removal, emailing, resizing, cropping and color adjustments. Its innovative but intuitive full-screen mode provides quick access to EXIF information, thumbnail browser and major functionalities via hidden toolbars that pop up when your mouse touches the four edges of the screen. Other features include a high quality magnifier and a musical slideshow with 150+ transitional effects, as well as lossless JPEG transitions, drop shadow effects, image annotation, scanner support, histogram and much more. It supports all major graphic formats (BMP, JPEG, JPEG 2000, animated GIF, PNG, PCX, TIFF, WMF, ICO and TGA) and popular digital camera RAW formats (CRW, CR2, NEF, PEF, RAF, MRW, ORF, SRF and DNG). FastStone Image Viewer (Free)

The Door, a Creative Flash Animation by Pascal Campion

Pascal Campion is an excellent animator – his portfolio is chockful of fun and very creative animated clips, all done in Flash.This particular one is called simply “Door,” and features a
hapless guy who just wanted to open a door. It’s a simple door … what’s the worst that could happen?

Link: Door [Flash]

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Thank you Sandra.

A team from Technische Universität Darmstadt won the Solar Decathlon competition with a house designed to run totally on sunlight. The Darmstadt Solar Decathlon house has movable solar screens around the outside that power both active and passive solar energy systems. The furniture is tucked into the platform floor that is also used for storage. The roof is insulated with layers that are ten times more efficient than the same amount of conventional insulation. Link.

Also see other Solar Decathlon entries.

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More Matte Paintings