More than once you would have noticed that a wave or a ripple like effect in pictures. The effect is pretty similar to the picture shown below, where it would seem like the picture is reflected on a bed of water which moves about in a wave like fashion. Most of the time it is enabled only by the use of Java in it, which means that you need the JRE to view such a picture on your PC.

However, a web based service called Wave My Pic is providing a service using which you can convert any picture from your PC to a picture with a wave or ripple effect for free. The service does not have any advanced features like cropping your images and such, but it simply adds the ripple effect and provides an animated GIF image for you to download, instead of a Java based one.

Keep in mind that the taller your image, the bigger the reflection will be and it won’t look too nice. Also, a number of options are provided to help you post the image to different social sites as well. The images have the logo of the site at the bottom, so that may be a disadvantage to some. Do check out the site for a sample image as the one I got was around 400 KB in size and I couldn’t post here. Please do leave your comments on this service. Thanks for reading!

Creating a ringtone from your Mp3s may not be the easiest thing to do, provided you don’t have the right tools. There are a number of audio cutters out there using which you can create your ringtones. But the fact is that most of those are clunky software which don’t provide a good interface for the user. And professional sound editing tools like Sound Forge cost a bomb.

So, here is a web based service that you can use to create your own ringtones from the mp3s that you have or those that are available on the web. Audiko is a service available in both russian and english. To get started off with Audiko, you need to upload the song or music track to the site.

Uploading

You can either upload the track from your PC or from the web. That is, if the music track is available on the web, then you simply specify the direct URL to the track and the site auto downloads the track for editing. Once the upload/download is done, Audiko analyzes the track and gets it ready for editing.

Editing

You then need to select a part of the song that needs to be made into the ringtone. The selection can be a maximum of 40 seconds long. You can move the wave bar and select the part you want to. You can click on the selection to play it. This can get a better idea of what you want to select.

You can also add the fade in and fade out options, so that the ringtone fades in when it starts and fades out at the end. You can’t however mix several small parts into a ringtone using Audiko.

Downloading

Once the editing is done, simply click on the create ringtone button to get your ringtone ready for download. The site is also iPhone compatible and there are 3 different download options.

• Download to PC
• Download to iPhone (m4r format)
• Download via WAP

A code to embed the tone on your blog or website is also given for your convenience.

Conclusion

Overall I feel that the service is a simple and easy to use service to create ringtones quickly from your songs. Also, since no external software is needed, you don’t need to worry about cluttering your PC. Advanced features are not available, but I don’t see why you need them for creating simple ringtones.

This would be a good choice to create ringtones without hassle and I would recommend this for sure. Do leave your comments regarding this service and the tools you use to create ringtones as well! Thanks for reading!

Who Is The Owner, a site related to Who Is Hosting This, offers to provide information regarding the owner of any domain name along with all their available contact details. All you need to do is enter the domain name and the security code and the information is delivered to you.

Does It Work? 

It does, to an extent. However, the service does not display only the contact name and details, but the entire WHOIS record of a particular domain name. Now, that means you get the details of the web host, the nameservers and the domain name registration and expiry details as well.

The incredible fact (if the site owners haven’t realized) is that the complete WHOIS record can be got from atleast a 100 different and better WHOIS sites like Whois.sc or Who.is etc. Here are a few of my observations

•  Contact details are in the WHOIS, but that doesn’t justify showing the complete WHOIS record and claiming them as contact details

Who Is The Owner is a free online tool which enables you to discover who is the owner of any domain by querying more than 350 whois servers in the world.

• You don’t need 350 WHOIS servers to show the complete WHOIS record, one is more than sufficient (for each domain extension, that is)
• A WHOIS service is a WHOIS service even if you name it Who Is The Owner

Naming this a simple WHOIS site would pretty much give the same result as it is giving out right now. If you are an amateur, then this is one site that can continue to amuse you. The rest of you can switch to Whois.sc or Who.is and those are my personal recommendations!

What Whois service do you use? Do drop in your comments! Thanks for reading!

PS: Forgive my bashing, but a site that doesn’t do exactly as it says, fails to earn my respect!

Consider that you are doing a review of any particular product, software or anything else on your site. It becomes essential to watermark your image to prevent other sites from using the same images without credit. Watermarking an image is simply adding text or a small image within the original image to indicate that you own the copyrights to the image. Watermarking could be done with Photoshop, GIMP etc.

But for those who aren’t experienced in handling such software, here is a simple tool that helps you watermark your images and provides numerous options in doing so as well. PicMarkr is a recently launched service. To start watermarking your images, you start by uploading them to the site.

You can also use images directly from your flickr account as well. A max of 5 images can be uploaded at a time, each having a size less than 5 MB. You are given the option to resize the uploaded pictures as well.

Types of Watermarking

The types of watermarking available at PicMarkr are text, image and tiled. In text watermarking, you enter some text to display on the images, select the style of the text to be displayed and also the position in the image where it should be placed.

For the image watermarking, you can upload a small logo and choose its position on the image.

Tiled watermarking means, you can display some text or a logo throughout the image. This can ensure that people don’t use your image after cutting out or blurring the part of image that has the watermark.

Once you choose your options, click Continue and the watermark is applied in a few seconds and your image gets ready. You can either download the images as a image itself, or in a zip archive. You can also upload all the images directly to your flickr account as well.

This is certainly one of the easy to use services I’ve come across. Plus it’s pretty fast and boasts of quite a handful of useful features as well. I would recommend this to anyone if you want to watermark your images quickly. What do you think about this service? Do leave your comments and thanks for reading!

This is one of the useful tools I’ve come across recently. The Alphabetizer is basically a service that helps you manipulate lists apart from its primary service of arranging a list in alphabetic order. The list you enter can be of different forms and still you can get yourself a meaningful output. Let’s look into how this works

The Alphabetizer

The first service, which is the arranging of list elements in alphabetical order. A list is simply a set of words separated by commas, semicolons or any other separators. These lists can simply be copy pasted into The Alphabetizer and you get the output at once. Usually, the terms are separated by a new line, meaning one term in every line.

However, you can use commas, semicolons, spaces or anything else for that matter. The service reads the list and gives you the output in the same form it received. It also gives the number of items that are sorted as well. It is essential that all the terms are separated by the same separator, if not the service stops arranging once it hits a unusual symbol!

Other Services

There are other smaller but useful services to manipulate your lists as well. Here are a few

Appending Text

You can add some text to the beginning and end of each term in the form of a label of some sort

Strip HTML

You can choose to strip HTML codes from the input and sort only the rest of the required text. Useful if you are copy pasting from a HTML Source!

Make Lowercase

You can change all the text to lowercase while sorting.

Capitalize First Word

Capitalize the first word of each list term.

Remove Duplicates

Remove duplicate terms from a list. Can be useful if same terms are added many times in large lists.

Reverse/Randomize

You can reverse the entire list to be arranged in reverse alphabetical order or simply the reverse order. Also, you can randomize the list. This can be used the give random numbers to participants in a contest and so on.

Numbering Results

You can make the list a true list by using numbers or letters before every term.

Apart from this you can prevent the Alphabetization of the list and at the same time use these other functions as well. It is a simple looking tool, but I’ve found it quite useful recently! What do you think about this? Do let me know! Thanks for reading!