Fame at last!

As Eric Morecambe used to say - "there's a novelty!" Watchkeeper has recently received an e-mail from Melissa Garcia which says

I would like to promote ****** on your blog. It's screen capture software. In exchange for promotion you will receive a full copy of the product. You need to create a short post with a few sentences about ****** (like I wrote below) and include this back link: (etc etc).

Of course, Ernie Wise would have said "like what I wrote below".

Melissa obviously thinks Watchkeeper's Log has such power and influence in the land that it's well worth getting her product mentioned on it. Well, the bad news for Melissa is that it's not going to happen.

That Watchkeeper is anti-BBC and anti the TV licensing scam is apparent. In the same vein, Watchkeeper is also anti large corporations making large amounts of money by selling computer applications. This is because there are invariably ordinary people producing equivalent applications for love and the betterment of humanity. I refer, of course, to the Open Source community.

If you follow the link above, you should know that the Open Source Initiative's Website is itself powered by the Open Source CMS (content management system) Drupal, which Watchkeeper widely uses in other contexts. It's a feature-rich Website package for free.

Need a Microsoft Office-compatible office suite with word processor, spreadsheet, presentation and database applications? Look no further than the epitome of Open Source, Open Office.org.

Need a powerful image handling application? Look to the GIMP. Need an audio package? Look to Audacity. The Audacity Website is hosted on Sourceforge, itself a goldmine of Open Source applications. Just search for whatever you're after.

So no, Melissa, I won't be promoting your software. Anyone wanting screen capture software has many Open Source applications from which to choose, and save the $17.99 they might have spent on ******. For example, here are the Top Ten screen recording applications (not all Open Source, but all free), and for a simple screen capture ****** equivalent look to Greenshot or ZScreen.

One last thought. You do know that the prt scr key on your keyboard will save an image of the current screen to the clipboard, don't you? You can then paste it into your image handler (Paint, IrfanView, GIMP etc) to manipulate and save it. You can even paste it into Writer or Word. Pressing prt scr saves the whole screen; holding down the alt key then pressing prt scr saves just the active part of the screen. Try it! Experiment! Enjoy!