How to Send Personalized Love Notes With Bitstrips

 

Whether you love it or love to hate it, Valentine’s Day is around the corner, and lovers everywhere will be expressing their affection. The latest Facebook craze of Bitstrips wants to help you share your feelings with personalized and humorous cartoons meant for your significant other. Bitstrips are uploading 75 new Valentine-themed comics to the app midday today. Here’s how to personalize your Valentine’s Day love notes. 

1. Log into your Facebook account.

2. Search for Bitstrips.

3. Select the Bitstrips app. Make sure to click the one that  says App in the description below its name.

MORE: Top 5 Facebook Annoyances and How to Fix Them

4. Click the green “Get started by designing your avatar” arrow. If you’ve already created an avatar, you can skip to step 7. 

5. Tweak your avatar so it looks more like you by clicking “Yes, fine tune it.” Bitstrips generates one for you based on your photos, so you don’t have to start from scratch. Click Next to move through the 26 customizations from hair color to skin tone. 

6. Hit “No, it’s perfect like this!” to confirm you are pleased with your avatar.

7. Click Make a Greeting Card from the tabs at the top. 

8. Choose the person to whom you want to send your Valentine’s Day Bitstrip. Friends are arranged in alphabetical order by first name. If you cannot find a friend on the first page, choose a different category from the top of the listing.

You can send your Bitstrip to any friend on Facebook, regardless of whether they have Bitstrips accounts or avatars. 

9. Search for “Valentine’s Day” in the box at the top right labeled Search Cards.

10. Pick the scene that appeals to you most. 

11. Make changes if you wish. Bitstrips has already generated a humorous caption, but if you prefer, you can change it by clicking the text box below the comic.

12. Hit Share.

Your Bitstrip will be shared on your wall, and your comic costar will receive a notification. Even if you’re feeling extra cynical this Valentine’s Day, you might still enjoy posting sarcastic Bitstrips, so give it a go!

Cherlynn joined the Laptopmag team in June 2013 and has since been writing about all things tech and digital with a focus on mobile and Internet software development. She also edits and reports occasionally on video. She graduated with a M.S. in Journalism (Broadcast) from Columbia University in May 2013 and has been designing personal websites since 2001.

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pNotes review: Make sticky notes simple or fancy

pNotes Half sticky-notes and half notepad, this open-source utility is worth a look.

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Despite the name, pNotes is not a notepad as such. Instead, it is the digital equivalent of yellow sticky notes, and as anyone who is addicted to using the real paper ones will tell you, these things are incredibly useful for simple lists and notes.

PNotes is a simple but powerful sticky note app that sits in the toolbar.

PNotes is fantastic because it is so simple. When you want to make a note, you just click the sticky note icon in the WIndows taskbar, and a new note pops up on your screen. As well as just typing what you want to remember, you can also use a wide range of formatting options, such as line alignment, font color, font size, font type, highlighting, and bulleting. You can also strikethrough text, which is ideal for to-do lists. You can delete notes simply by closing them in the top right-hand corner with your mouse.

Note: The Download button takes you to the vendor's site, where you can download the latest version of the software.

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Review: Notable.ac lets teachers and students share slides and notes

Notable.ac Notable is a great idea for students and lecturers alike, but still has some growing to do.

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Some note-taking techniques are kludgey: printing out slide decks and writing on them, for instance, or copying and pasting images into a word processor. Notable.ac is another take on the note-taking problem, this time in the form of a free-to-use Web app.

Sharing and collaborating on notes is easy with Notable.ac.

Notable.ac is more than a note-taking app. It's a complete course platform for both students and lecturers. Once a course is created in the system, anyone can upload the course's slides, and the entire class can join in and either collaborate on notes or write their own private ones on slides.

No highlighting features are currently available, but you can tie slide notes to certain points on the slide for easier reference. The lecturer panel, currently available only by request, also provides some trends and insights into the class's behavior.

Notable is a great alternative to university-provided platforms—and with some added features, it can really give classes a boost.

Note: The Download button takes you to to the vendor's website, where you can use this Web-based software.

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Review: Audio Notetaker lets you sit back and listen while it takes notes

Every student or conference attendee knows the ever-present dilemma: listen to the presentation, or try to take notes? Sonocent Audio Notetaker is an ambitious product that brings an end to this plight...at least some of the time.

Audio Notetaker analyzes audio recorded either by the program or outside it to create speech bars that are easy to navigate. You can enhance these bars with colors, text, images, screenshots, slides, and PDF documents, and add text and references to boot. Audio Notetaker can record live lectures, interviews, Skype calls, and even online talks a la TED. It makes it possible to concentrate on listening while taking minimal notes, and easily go over the recorded material later.

Audio Notetaker is a truly innovative way to handle recordings, but at its current price of $150 for a perpetual license, it's not an impulse buy. It also crashed multiple times while I tried it, causing me to lose my work, so frequent saves are advised. It's a great product if you can soak the cost.

Note: The Download button takes you to to the vendor's website, where you can download the software.

Yaara is a foodie, horse-lover, and biologist who enjoys being a geek as a full-time job.
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Review: Roccat Isku FX gaming keyboard hits all the right notes

There was a time when my de facto response for “which gaming keyboard should I buy” would’ve been something Razer-flavored—likely the Razer BlackWidow Ultimate ($140). Keyboard recommendations are serious business: You’ll spend all of your work and play time hammering away at these slabs of plastic, and Razer’s mechanical wares are solid, capable devices with excellent customization options—in spite of onerous software.

Roccat’s Isku FX gives me pause. It’s a bit cheaper than most gaming keyboards at $90, and offers loads of programmable keys and on-the-fly macro recording. But the Isku FX’s keys aren’t mechanical, which accounts for the disparity in price. That’s unfortunate—I’m a sucker for the clackity-clack of a cluster of Cherry MX Blue switches, and going back to comparatively soft membrane keys felt wrong, somehow.

I got over it. The Isku FX’s keys are comfortably sized and evenly spaced, so I had no trouble settling right in to work and play. The keys are backlit, and you can toggle the brightness and disable the annoying pulsing effect through Roccat’s software. Yes, you will need to install driver software; the keyboard will work out of the box, but you’ll need to head to Roccat’s website and grab a relatively small 20MB package to tweak the keyboard’s settings.

You can customize the color and lighting patterns of the keys by tweaking the driver software.

The keyboard’s layout is fairly standard, though there are a few extras scattered about. Five macro keys run along the left side of the keyboard, joined by three thumb-keys nested under the spacebar, and the macro-recording key, dedicated media keys, and a backlight toggle button planted at the top of the keyboard. The Caps-lock key has been replaced by the Easy-shift button, which can paired with a number of keys on the keyboard to activate a secondary input option. 

Only a subset of the Isku FX’s keys are programmable: the function row, media keys, the aforementioned macro and thumb keys, and that section of keys surrounding WASD that Roccat as dubbed the “easy-zone.” You can assign a secondary function to your macro keys and the keys in the easy-zone, activated whenever you press the easy-shift button. Your “Q” key will always be the letter Q, but pressing easy-shift and Q in tandem will toggle whatever additional functionality you’ve assigned through Roccat’s software. This can be as simple as calling up another key or key combination (Q becomes Alt + J), or calling up a pre-recorded macro.

Only a few of the keys are programmable, and you can activate their preprogrammed functions by holding down the easy-shift key on the left in conjunction with each key.

You can also create timers, a rather interesting function that I’ve yet to see on other peripherals. Assign a number of seconds to a macro key or trigger it with an Easy Shift Combo, and a comically raspy voice will bellow out “10” when there are ten seconds left, count down from 5, and then shout “Go!” when the timer is up. I’ll admit it’s a bit of a niche function, but if you’re playing a game where important actions happen at regular intervals (I’m thinking League of Legends’ waves of enemies) this could come in handy. I’d really love it if it timers could be built into macros, as being able to trigger an ability in an MMO and having an auditory cue of when said ability was ready for use again would be nifty; actually, can we get some game developers on that issue instead?

These customization options might seem to pale in comparison to what Razer offers — reprogram any key to do whatever you’d like — but I actually like the simplicity. Most of my key-customization happens inside of games anyway, and with a total of five profiles and two potential functions for every key within reach of my hand, there’s already enough modification-overkill built in to sate my needs. Couple this with the backlight’s decent attempt at emulating every color in the spectrum and you will not want for personalization options.

And there are achievements! I’m normally one to scoff at ridiculous extras and achievements for PC peripherals are high up on that list, but Roccat’s R.A.D. system is innocuous and genuinely interesting (to me at least). It tracks the number of times you’ve used the game-centric keys like WASD (that’s four more strokes for me right there!), the macro-keys, and the easy-shift and multimedia keys, and assigns achievements based on…well, I’m not entirely sure, as I’ve only earned one for my first 35,000 WASD strokes, an amount I’ve just about doubled. But I love the idea of quantifying little tidbits like this, and it’s easily ignored if you don’t care. The Isku FX’s driver software is otherwise painless: once I’d configured everything to my liking I largely ignored it (well, besides obsessively checking my key-press statistics).

The Isku FX excels at its primary role: turning key presses into on-screen action or words. And it does so at a fair price, and bundling lots of customization options with software that stays out of your way. I also appreciate the dedicated media keys, which are a significantly better option than futzing around with function-key combinations. I’d still prefer to pay a bit extra for the satisfying crunch and accuracy afforded by a proper mechanical keyboard. But if you don’t care about mechanical keys? Great—the Isku FX will not disappoint. 

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Tomboy: Powerful, and Free, Database for Notes

Take the intuitive simplicity of jotting down a quick note in Notepad, combine it with the ever-present nature of Stickies, and add easy linking between topics that's even more instant than TiddlyWiki. You've got Tomboy: A free application that makes managing your knowledge easy and fast.

Tomboy did not start its life as a Windows application: It is a part of the open source Gnome project, which is a desktop environment for Linux. To use it, you first need to install something called GTK# for .NET, a toolkit used to create cross-platform graphical user interfaces. This is a separate download, but the Tomboy installer links to it.

Tomboy stays out of the way while providing powerful search, formatting, and linking features. Once you have Tomboy installed, it looks like a native Windows application. If you are used to the tiny-looking notes that Stickies creates, you may be surprised to discover that in Tomboy, each note is a free-floating window that looks like a full application, complete with all the Windows chrome (minimize/restore/close buttons, toolbar, and so on). This also means that all notes are visible as individual windows when you hit Alt-Tab to switch applications, so you may not want to have many Tomboy notes open on your screen at any one time. Of course, you can always paste several notes into one big note, in which case you will have just one window.

Getting started with Tomboy couldn't be easier: Just start typing. Your text is automatically saved as you type; don't try to hit Ctrl-S to save your note. Counterintuitively (at least for Windows users), Ctrl-S triggers strikethrough formatting, so you'll need to wean yourself off any obsessive saving habit you may have unless you want all of your text to look like it's up for deletion. Hotkeys are one of the few areas where Tomboy doesn't integrate so smoothly with Windows: You can specify system-wide hotkeys, but you do this by typing out their name (you literally have to spell it out, "+F3," angle brackets and all) rather than by hitting the keys you want to use like on most other hotkey-aware applications.

One of the most powerful features in Tomboy is inter-note linking. This is something Stickies can't do, and it turns Tomboy into a powerful knowledge management system a bit like TiddlyWiki. Often, you don't even have to think about creating links: Just type the name of an existing note and it automatically turns into a link, with no double square brackets or any other formatting. If you ever rename the note you linked to, Tomboy will offer to rename all links to it, so there are never any broken links. It is also easy to create new notes by linking to them: Select some text and press Ctrl-L. The text you selected becomes a link, and you find yourself within the new note, ready to write. Tomboy stays true to the Wiki format by optionally supporting CamelCase: It can turn words melded together LikeThis into links.

Once you no longer need a note, just close its window and Tomboy will store it for future reference. If you ever need it again, you can click the Search button on any other note (or press Ctrl-Shift-F) and open the Search All Notes window. Type any fragment of text into the search box, and Tomboy searches all notes (both open and closed), as fast as you can type.

Apart from its clunky two-part installation process on Windows and slightly quirky hotkeys, Tomboy is very easy to get started with. Instead of reading lengthy explanations and tutorials, you just suddenly find yourself writing whatever it is you wanted to write, while Tomboy stays out of the way.

--Erez Zukerman

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Windows Phone 7.5 OTA Update Will Allow Multiple SMS Attachments with Video, Voice Notes

As advanced as Windows Phone 7.5 is in terms of its user interface and software, it has lagged behind other platforms in terms of SMS support as it only allows you to attach a single photo — not video or audio — to each of your messages. Fortunately, that’s about to change with an upcoming OTA update due later this Spring that will allow users to attach multiple photos, videos, or voice notes to a single SMS message. 

Today at Mobile World Congress, Microsoft’s Greg Sullivan showed us Windows Phone 7.5's upcoming SMS improvement on a Nokia Lumia 610. He began by attaching two photos to a message, then showed how the menu allows you to also choose videos from your library, and to record a short voice comment that also sends along with the SMS message. In all, he attached two photos, one video, and an audio recording to a single text message.

Sullivan explained that improved SMS support is just the most visible improvement the update, which also includes a host of subtle performance and security enhancements. Perhaps the most important invisible feature of the new build will be its ability to support lower-end hardware like that found on the Lumia 610. After the update, new Windows Phone handsets will be able to support as little as 256MB of RAM and will also handle the lower-end Qualcomm 7X27A CPU, which is a bit slower than current processors. 

With slightly lower end specs, Microsoft and its partners can target more value-conscious consumers in countries where subsidized phones are not the norm. Along with the build update, Microsoft is adding 28 additional countries where carriers will sell Windows Phone devices. To support those markets, Microsoft has to update its marketplace and also include support for WCDMA connectivity which is very popular in China. In many of these markets, users pay by the SMS message so they need multiple attachment support to avoid running up the bill.

While the operating system itself and its built-in apps run flawlessly on lower-end Windows Phones like the Lumia 610, their lower amount of RAM and processing power means that certain third party applications may not run. Fortunately, with the new update, Microsoft will flag apps that don’t meet your phone’s specifications in its market and prevent you from downloading them.

Sullivan told us that lower-end phones like the Lumia 610 will come with the new Windows Phone 7.5 build preloaded, but all current Windows Phone 7.5 users will receive an automatic update sometime shortly after the lower-end devices ship. No build number has been announced.

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