There are many tasks in life which are still nearly impossible to perform with computer.

Often these tasks are extremely simple tasks for humans to perform. Let’s take the task of summarizing. A computer is completely unprepared for dealing with matters of language, whereas you or I may be able to read a paragraph and very quickly summarize it. Crowdsourcing is a method born out of this dilemma. How does an individual or business with tasks like these find the workers needed to complete these tasks quickly? A website owned by Amazon, currently in beta, is one such solution. Workers pick up very small amounts of money for completing these simple tasks. Employers get these tasks completed very quickly for cheap, because they are outsourced to a large crowd of individuals. Often times, employers get thousands of human intelligence tasks completed in an hour. In a nutshell: Crowdsourcing is an innovative new way to use technology to aid humans in completing tasks that only humans can complete. It gets work from employers to the maximum number of humans as fast as possible.

Windows XP users familiar with the picture resizer powertool which adds a basic batch picture re-scaling tool to explorer were upset to realize that the XP power tools don’t work with Vista.

The basic function offered by this tool was pretty handy. Enter the VSO Image Resizer, a completely free software tool that can re-scale a folder of pictures, save it as a JPEG, GIF, TIFF or BMP at the quality that you specity. The tool launches from the right-click drop down menu in explorer and offers simple and basic functions in an intuitive interface. For non-commercial use there is no cost for the software. It even works on Windows XP.

StrokeIt – A Mouse gesture software I recently stumbled upon. It is called the Mouse Gestures. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the term, let me explain.

Mouse gesture is an ingenious way of tracking the way you move your mouse and convert it to a specific command for your computer. Now, some of the impatient among you might ask but we move our mouse all the time in all the ways; so, how the tracking is done exactly. The answer is that in order to make Mouse Gestures the user has to press one of the buttons on the mouse like the left-click, the middle-click etc. When the user makes gestures through the mouse while keeping one of the mouse buttons pressed the software tracks the gesture and triggers the specific command associated with that gesture. Coming to the software StrokeIt, the command to be associated with a gesture can be anything from opening an application to performing a specific action inside an already running application. For example, while watching a movie on Windows Media Player you can draw a ‘P’ symbol from your mouse and the movie will Pause, or you can draw a ‘C’ symbol and the player would Close altogether. What’s even better is that, with StrokeIt, the users can define their own custom gestures. That is, apart from the pre-defined gestures the users can satiate their creative desires by creating their very own artistic gestures and associate a command with it. For example, I have a specific symbol each for opening my web browser, opening a particular bookmark, and even for downloading its contents to my hard drive. Give it a shot, its worth it.