I’m not at ALA right now. I did go to Disneyland earlier this year, though, and had a fantastic time. My favorite rides are Splash Mountain and California Screamin’. Oh, wait, this isn’t my travel blog.
Ahem.
On occasion, I need to convert a file from one thing to another, like .jpg to .tiff or .doc to .pdf. My early attempts to achieve this apparently Herculean task were met with utter defeat as I browsed through downloadable free software, searched the antediluvian wells of my computer’s bowels for hidden programs that I might have missed, or asked for software to be purchased and installed on my work computer. Then I discovered Zamzar.
Zamzar is free online file conversion without an account. You go to the site, upload your file, tell them what you want it converted to, and have it emailed to you. Depending on the file size, this process can take a little while, but in the experiment I did for this post, I received my converted file in about a minute. You can create an account to get faster conversion times and online storage for your converted files, if that is something you need, too.
Besides converting your own files, you can also convert files that are already online and have them emailed to you. As an experiment, I had Zamzar convert one of my One Minute Critic videos on YouTube to .mp3 format. Now I have a sound file of the video. Pretty neat!
One thing that I don’t like is that you can’t convert a jpg to a pdf or vice versa – So if I have a document of some kind that I want to upload to flickr, I might have problems. That’s fairly minor concern I think – and plus, I’m pretty sure that somewhere on my computer I have a program that does that, if I can just find it again. {:0)
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Cool post Sam! Yeah, I often find I’m needing to convert files from one format to another, this will really make it easier.
I checked out your One Minute Critic site…I love it! Awesome idea and fun to watch all of the entries.
Thanks Jane - it’s been a great project to work on, and one i hope to keep doing for a long time. I was thinking about trying to take it to library conferences and see if i could induce attending librarians to review a book or two while they’re there, but I’m not sure how to make that happen - would i be presenting, or more like a vendor? And where could i find a place that wasn’t too noisy? These are the questions that occupy my mind.