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Once upon a time, only tabloid newspapers and Soviet dictators had the power to make unwanted objects and people vanish from photographs. Thanks to digital photography and free tools like PhotoWipe from Hanov Solutions, though, anyone can send un-persons down the memory hole. You can also use it to remove signs and logos to meet copyright restrictions, reveal hidden details in your pictures, and make creative images, not just banish old flames and new enemies from your snapshots.

As is fitting for a simple-to-use, highly focused tool, PhotoWipe's interface is sparse; just a basic suite of file menus and … Read more

High-end audio, just like high-end everything else--cars, clothes, watches, boats--is in large part about style. Sure, high-performance is part of the appeal, but exquisite build quality and eye-catching designs are essential for market success.

With that in mind I put together a nice assortment of some of the more dazzling high-end components currently on the scene.

Magico's speakers are built with solid, massively inert structures designed to ensure the only sound you hear comes from the speaker's tweeter, midrange, and woofer drivers. No other speaker I've heard approaches Magico's resolution and precision. The company's latest designs upped the ante and now feature even more extensive frames designed to quell structure borne resonance to produce the highest-resolution sound possible.

Founded in 1991 by legendary audio designer Nelson Pass, Pass Laboratories, sells its unique amplifiers, preamplifiers and speakers throughout the world. The company has been based in Foresthill, California, since its beginning, and is widely regarded as one of the most innovative audio brands in the world. Many Pass Labs amplifiers, like my XA100.5 are pure Class A designs, and deliver breathtakingly beautiful sound.

The Ayre MX-R mono amplifier (you need two for stereo) is a looker, but pardon me for a second while I get tweaky and gush over the MX-R's zero-feedback and fully-balanced circuitry. Ayre's founder and chief engineer Charles Hansen invests vast amounts of time fussing over the tiniest circuit details, listening obsessively to eke out a sound that gets his designs ever closer to perfection. Some of the MX-R's resistors and capacitors are built to his specifications.

The Krell Modulari Duo Reference is a blatantly original, thoroughly masculine design, but at 44 inches tall, 11 inches wide, and 29 inches deep, it can still fit in average size rooms. Each speaker weighs 345 pounds, it's fair to assume the bulk of the weight can be attributed to its thick-walled aluminum construction. If the goal was to make an absolutely dead cabinet, I'd say Krell has done it. The speaker's design shows a clear aesthetic kinship with Krell electronics.… Read more

This program moves beyond napkin sketching to communicating ideas in 3D. SketchUp takes what may traditionally be seen as a complicated task and adds an intuitiveness many design programs fail to achieve. On first impression, this sketch-based 3D-modeling program may look as if it has sacrificed function for simplicity, but that's not the case. Despite the extremely user-friendly interface, SketchUp offers a suite of powerful 3D drawing tools that lets you experiment and play with new designs.

All actions are carried out using two button bars, one that runs down the left side and another that sits along the … Read more

If you think your eyes have played tricks on you before, check out this video. It shows four little wooden balls that seem to defy gravity by rolling uphill on four slopes built of cardboard. The balls seem drawn to the slopes' peaks, as if by magnetism. That's why this bizarre creation, by Kokichi Sugihara of the Meiji Institute for Advanced Study of Mathematical Sciences in Kawasaki, Japan, won the 2010 Best Visual Illusion of the Year Contest.

The illusion is entitled "Impossible Motion: Magnet-like Slopes." When turned around, it becomes apparent that the slopes are actually … Read more

Catch the Egg is an unusual, accelerometer-based game in which you carefully time a quick hand movement to catch a virtual egg.

Given its unique premise, Catch the Egg comes with a fairly long tutorial (with some unfortunately clumsy English) that takes you step-by-step through the egg-catching process. You begin by looking out on a desert road, and you have to raise your iPhone or iPod Touch over your head, parallel to the ground, to see a virtual egg far above you. Once you lock an aiming reticle onto the egg, a timer starts counting down until the egg drops. … Read more

Much has been made lately about the trend toward solid-state drives. Now a new Intel technology, code-named Braidwood, may delay that trend, blending the performance of solid-state drives with the economy of old-style hard drives.

Braidwood--like its predecessor, Intel's Turbo Memory technology (formerly code-named Robson)--is basically a solid-state cache for all the disks in the system.

I heard about Braidwood earlier this summer on CNET (see "Intel 'Braidwood' chip targets snappier software" by Brooke Crothers). But I shrugged it off, assuming it would be no better than Turbo Memory, which left a bad taste in the mouth of many PC makers, end users, and Microsoft execs. Turbo Memory (and Turbo Memory 2.0) wasn't cheap, and it definitely wasn't worth the cost. The PC industry operates on such slim margins that every dollar's worth of hardware has to earn its keep--and Robson didn't.

But then I read an EE Times article this week by Mark LePedus describing a new report from Jim Handy of analyst firm Objective Analysis.

The 62-page report is titled "Intel's Braidwood: Death to SSDs?"

Handy's report argues persuasively that Braidwood might actually be worthwhile, and that got my attention. I've known him a long time, and he's a very good analyst--he's been covering memory and caching technology a lot longer than I have. He wrote one of the standard references for computer system architects, "The Cache Memory Book."

So I sent Handy a note, and he sent me a copy of the report. And now that I've read it, I'm inclined to agree with his conclusions, assuming the information he's obtained about Braidwood is accurate. It does seem reasonable, at least.

The first thing to understand is why flash memory can be a good disk cache. This boils down to its much faster access times: microseconds, not milliseconds. Flash can actually take much longer to write than a hard disk. But for reads, it's really quick. So if you can be smart about putting the right hard-disk data in the cache, especially by choosing the right time to do those write operations, you can save huge amounts of time on future disk reads.

… Read more

Be prepared for some joy and a lot of frustration with 3D Maker. Getting the most out of this application will require you to understand 3D terminology, have sets of photos optimized for 3D, and own a pair of those red-green movie glasses.

3D Maker offers a floating palette with big, friendly buttons and a menu bar for additional tasks and filter. We selected a picture and clicked a button to convert. The application quickly rendered it in 3D (albeit with a large watermark in the trial version). Testing other 3D options quickly led to frustration. 3D Maker lacks certain … Read more

Keeping Microsoft Outlook's calendar functions open without having to launch the entire e-mail application will be very handy for users who rely on a different e-mail client. But we had some view problems during our tests that may prove a problem to some users.

Outlook on the Desktop lives up to its name: it loads an icon into the system tray, so merely clicking it launches the calendar. Configuring the font, colors, and the view (Day/Week/Month, entry previews, categories, and so forth) is simply a matter of choosing an option from a right-click menu. This free little … Read more

One of the best features in Windows 7 is its revamped taskbar and its program-pinning. Combining the utility of customization, big and legible icons, and stylish preview windows, it radically changes the Windows interface. Until it's released, Windows XP users will have to get by with third-party docking programs.

One of the most popular Windows dock replacements, ObjectDock, replaces the taskbar with a colorful, animated dock similar to the taskbar in Mac OS X. It displays icons for currently running programs and hosts quick-launch icons for your favorite programs. As you pass the cursor over each icon, ObjectDock magnifies … Read more