tag:freeware

Hana & Sarah’s blog

You are using too many softwares running at the same time and you feel that you need a bigger monitor. Well before buy that new monitor, you might want to try Virtual Dimension first. This is a SourceForge hosted free GPL licensed virtual desktop manager. You can manage multiple virtual screens as many as you want .

Actually Virtual Dimension gives you full control over the how to manage and process applications, I was just surprised and never use any other virtual desktop manager.

Some of the nice things that you can with Virtual Dimension are

• You can move application around between virtual desktop so easily by moving the icon from one desktop to another
• You can easily make the application to show in all desktop by right click on the icon and click on “All desktops” menu. For some applications, like application launcher, you will need to access from all desktops.
• It comes with a very nice transparency function. You make the windows transparent! By using the short cut key, you can easily turn on and off the transparency. Or you can save the settings so it is transparent whenever you execute the application. So great!

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I have been searching for some good free video format converters for a while. I have actually installed and tried in my desktop PC. The results were astonishing! Some of them do work better than the commercial ones.

Most of them are based on the FFmpeg LGPL software and other open source utilities. FFmpeg is a great piece of software, but it contains only console commands and does not come with any fancy Graphical User Interfaces (GUI). Basically these freewares that I will initroduce act as a the front GUI for FFmpeg. So FFmpeg is not for a casual innocent PC user.

I tried several freewares. Some are worthless to mention and some are very nice. There are the three finalists.

• MediaCoder
• Any Video Converter
• Super

MediaCoder

This is probaly the most powerful video format converter with the every options that you will ever need.
You can drag and drop the source files just like Any Video Converter. And you can play around with the option contol in the lower pane. Note that it shows nice little summery of the output file format and expected size if you click on the ‘Summery’ tab. When you’re done with changing the options, you click on the ‘Start’ Button to execute the conversion. The output file will be created in the same folder where the original source file is located by default.

Here is the description from the website.

MediaCoder is a free universal batch media transcoder, which nicely integrates most popular audio/video codecs and tools into an all-in-one solution. With a flexible and extendable architecture, new codecs and tools are added in constantly as well as supports for new devices. MediaCoder intends to be the swiss army knife for media transcoding in all time and at this moment, it already has millions of users from 170+ countries all over the planet.

And Here are the supported formats ( * supported as input only)

MP3, Vorbis, AAC, AAC+, AAC+v2, MusePack, Speex, AMR, WMA, RealAudio, mp3PRO*
FLAC, WavPack, Monkey’s Audio, OptimFrog, AAC Lossless, TTA, WAV/PCM, Waveform
H.264, XviD, DivX, MPEG 1/2/4, Theora, Flash Video, Dirac, 3ivx*, RealVideo*, Windows Media Video
AVI, MPEG/VOB, Matroska, MP4, PMP, RealMedia*, ASF, Quicktime*, OGM*
CD, DVD, VCD, SVCD, CUESheet*, HTTP*, FTP*, RTSP*, UDP*

When I tried to convert wmv to avi, it did work fine. But when I tried wmv to flv conversion. ffmpeg.exe has crashed and MediaCoder did not respond properly so I had to close it.

• Interface: 7 of 10
• Easy to use: 5 of 10
• Available functions/options: 10 of 10
• Stability: 6 of 10
• To Flv conversion: Didn’t work
• Final Verdict: It’s OK if you want to control all the details of the output video.

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Few years ago, I was looking for some free streaming video service solutions for my website, but couldn’t find any. There was Media Streaming Server from Microsoft, but I am using LINUX. Eventually I gave up searching that I lost interest.

But now that many movie sharing web sites are using Flash Video ( files extension .flv) I decided to take some time to learn how to embed streaming video to a website using Freewares.

Flash Video is a technology that supports streaming video naturally using Adobe Flash Player. You do not need to buy that expensive streaming media server for this. Users do require to install Adobe Flash Player in their computer in order to view this Flash videos. But most of the casual users already have the Flash installed so don’t worry. You can learn all about the Flash Video technology at Flash Video Wikipedia.

Note that if you are looking for an easy solution, you should think about utilizing sharing services such as YouTube. It’s a great service that you can upload regular movie files - such as .avi, .wmv - and it will be automatically converted to flash video. Once you upload your movie, you will get little html <embed> code snippets that you can insert to your web page.
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PuTTY is the best SSH client and it’s free. But it lacks of this little function that I really want - Automatic login.

So I have searched many Google pages and found this PuTTY Connection Manager which I explained details in my previous post. It is a very good software.

But somehow I wanted the auto login function without the extra programs. I wanted it to be done directly with PuTTY, not within the frame of PuTTY Connection Manager.

And I found this software called AutoHotKey (http://www.autohotkey.com/) which can automate keyboard and mouse actions. But I gave up to use it at that time because I was too lazy to read all the instructions and to come up with a script for the auto login.

But yesterday, I decided to take a look again and this time I successfully created the Auto Login script! To tell you the truth, it was not easy but it is worth it. I am proud of myself

So here is the script.

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; You need to define the full path where the putty.exe exists . 'putty_profile' should be existing profile name.
v_program=%A_ProgramFiles%\PuTTY\putty.exe -load putty_profile
v_userid=youruserid
v_passwd=yourpasswd
; msec to wait before sending userid
v_wait_userid=1000
; msec to wait before sending password
v_wait_passwd=500
 
;-------------------------------------------------
; To make modifier keys to work properly (such as Shift)
SetKeyDelay, 0, 10
 
run, %v_program% , , , newpid
 
;you need to wait a little for the window to initialize
;sleep, 100
winwait, ahk_pid %newpid%
 
;wait for the login prompt to appear
sleep, %v_wait_userid%
ControlSend, , %v_userid%{enter}, ahk_pid %newpid%
 
sleep, %v_wait_passwd%
ControlSend, , %v_passwd%{enter}, ahk_pid %newpid%
 
;create unique title so you won't be lost 
WinGetTitle, v_title, ahk_pid %newpid%
v_newtitle=%v_title% - %newpid%
WinSetTitle, ahk_pid %newpid%,,%v_newtitle%

If you want to try this yourself, you will need to change some information.
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Automatic Login or Login Macro function - Have you ever wanted to make the PuTTY login session automatic?

PuTTY is a great free telnet ssh client and I wouldn’t trade with any other client. But it lacks of this minor function that I really want - Automatic login.

Maybe the automatic login is not a big deal. You can just type in the userid and the password each time you log in to the development server . But if you do that regularly everyday, opening several times throughout the whole day, you would understand and agree with my little wish.

So I been looking for the solution , going through the every results of the Google search.

And here is the great helper application that can do automatic login macro!
PuTTY Connection Manager (http://puttycm.free.fr/) is the great .NET 2.0 application that can do the automatic login. Moreover, it supports tabbed windows just like the Firefox does it. Also it has quick connection menu bar that you just type in the address and connect which can be also useful.

Features

• Tabs and dockable windows for PuTTY instances.
• Able to load the profiles created from PuTTY.
• Login macro - You can define Userid and Password and extra commands to execute after login.

Requirements

• Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0
• PuTTY ( download from here http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html)

It can be little confusing when you first use the software and to use that Login Macro. By default the PuTTY CM shows existing PuTTY Session profiles in the TreeView located in the right pane. Don’t be fooled, you cannot set Login Macro with the existing PuTTY Session profiles. You will need to create a new database to do that.

1. Create a new database from File menu.
2. You will see the newly created database icon in the right pane, above the PuTTY Session item. Copy the profile you want to set Login macro from the PuTTY Sessions and paste into the new database you just created. You can use traditional ctrl+C and ctrl+V shortcut.
3. Right mouse click on the newly created item under the database and select Configuration.
4. A new window dialog will show up with the same connection information as the original PuTTY profile. Check on the “Enable Login Macro Mode”.
5. Select “Login Macro” in the left TreeView and you will be able to define the userid ,password, timeout seconds, and post login commands.
6. After inputting data, click on the OK button and connect by double clicking the item.

Also, don’t forget to save your database settings, so you can use the settings later on.

Come visit again for more information on PuTTY Automation.