Naveen’s Blog

If you were following me on Twitter, you might have already noticed that I was tweeting from my LG Cookie Pep and testing few apps for it.

Anyway, last week, I was downloading and testing few best mobile video converters available on the net. After a day of testing, I found that XMedia Recode is the best video converter that can convert videos for almost all mobiles. It has a list of mobile brands and models to select and it will convert the video compatible for that model. Best of it, it is a free software.

Once you installed it, click open file and select the video to be converted for your mobile. Then, in “Profile,” select the brand of your mobile and in the below list, select the model of your mobile. Then, click on the “Add Job” button in toolbar. Then, the “Encode” button will active and click it to convert. It also has an option to shut down the system automatically when the conversion completes.

You can also use it for normal video conversions. Choose the profile name “Custom” and you can see more than 20 types of formats you can convert your video into.

Click for a bigger and clear image

It can convert for Acer, Apple, Archos, Asus, BlackBerry, Cowon, Creative, Elson, Epson, Garmin-Asus, Hauppauge, HTC, Hyundai, Intenso, iRiver, LG, Loewe, Motorola, Nikon, Nintendo, Nokia, O2, Palm, Phillips, Pocket PC, Samsung, SanDisk, Sony Ericsson, Sony, Sony PlayStation 3, PSP, Toshiba, T-Mobile, Vodafone, Western Digital TV Box, Xbox, Zune, and YouTube (as of version 2.2.4.2).

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A week ago, I have purchased another system as we got a small project to work on. It is an online project and both systems need to have Internet. We have Sify connection at home and now we have to share it in both systems. I never tried before connecting two systems or sharing an internet connection. I have digged the net and found that we can share the internet using router. Router is a bit expensive one, so further digged the net for a simple workaround to connect both computers and share a single internet connection.

I found that using LAN card and crossover cable, we can setup a LAN connection and share the internet connection. Everything I did, but network icon in system tray was showing limited or no connection. For another one hour, I tried all sort of things, but failed. I put the same IPs in both systems, it did not connect. Then, I selected the option of obtaining IP automatically, again failed. Everyone one the net was describing about connecting it step-by-step, but no one explained about IPs. At last, I searched for it on Microsoft website and in an article, I found the IP numbers to put in, which are the default when you connect in LAN.

Following is a step-by-step instruction to connect two systems and share the internet connection.

Things you need: LAN Card and crossover cable.

Install LAN card in one of two systems, which will act as a Host. You need to connect to the internet through this computer. Connect one of two pins to the Host system and another pin to the second system. Once you connect both through cable, you can see the network icons glowing in your system tray. Sometimes, it may show the message that it is acquiring the IP address.

Click for bigger & clear image

Now, go to the Control Panel>Network and Internet Connection>Network Setup Wizard in Host system, in which you have installed an extra LAN card.  Look at the screenshot on the right side.

It will show a popup. Click two times and follow the below screenshots.  Click on the images for a bigger and clear images.

Select “Just finish the wizard” on the last window and we are done with the Host system.  I named it as “Home.”

In the Client system, run the same network setup wizard, but this time select the connection method as second one, look at the image below. Rest of the process is same.

Now, in the Host system, you will be entering the IP address provided by the Internet provider. In the Client system, enter the below IP details and click ok. Now, you will see a popup from the second connection telling that it is now connected at 10 mbps speed.

Now when you connect the Host system to internet, you can access it from the Client system too.

Pros:
1. Any type of Internet connection works.
2. Low cost of implementation (Rs.200-250)
3. Easy to install.

Cons:
1. You can only connect two systems.
2. Host always to be on to access net on the Client system.

If you still have problem, post in comments and I will try to answer.

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I found this amazing software called Image Composite Editor (ICE) by Microsfot while searching for free software to stitch photos. I found few other free photo stitching softwares too, but they were difficult to install, took lot of time to stitch, and/or producing low-quality images.

Using photo stitching software, you can stitch a set of overlapping photos taken of a location into a single image. Assume that you want to shoot a wide-angled scene with your mobile camera, you can take photos of that scene into rectangular grid of rows and columns and then using photo stitching software, you can create a high-resolution single image.

Microsoft Image Composite Editor (ICE) is available as a free software. It can stitch giga pixels of images into one single image. No other software can match its speed. It is available for both 32-bit and 64-bit windows and supported up to Windows 7.

Click the image for a bigger and clear image

Flickr has a group for the images stitched with Microsoft ICE, http://www.flickr.com/groups/922872@N23/.  Check the photos created with it and you will understand what you can do with this little free application.

For example purpose, I have captured the Microsft webpage into 4 different parts of unequal lengths and stitched into one. Click the below images to see, how good it stitched the images into one.

This is a photo taken from the ICE group on Flickr as an example for panoramic image created with stitching 14 photos into one:

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I had Symantec antivirus software (network version that I got free with Sify internet connection) running for the last six months and my system got affected more than 3 times with viruses, which are mainly from external USB drives. Before that I had AVG Free, which also failed to recognize few viruses.

A month ago, I came across a report from AV-Comparatives analyzing around 16 antivirus software available in the market. It has divided the tests into 8 categories and ranked the products as Gold, Silver, and Bronze. As usual, I have gone through the report and the products to see whether they have free versions for my system. What caught my eye was free antivirus tool from Microsoft (yes it is free) called, Microsoft Security Essentials. It has secured 2 Gold ratings and one Bronze in overall 8 categories. So, I wanted to give it a try and the results were amazing! To date, my system has not been affected by any virus and has even cleaned the viruses from System Restore Folder. Detection is too fast and now, I am free of USB virus worries.

“Microsoft Security Essentials provides real-time protection for your home PC that guards against viruses, spyware, and other malicious software.

Microsoft Security Essentials is a free download from Microsoft that is simple to install, easy to use, and always kept up to date so you can be assured your PC is protected by the latest technology. It’s easy to tell if your PC is secure — when you’re green, you’re good. It’s that simple.” says Microsoft on its website.

Click For a Bigger & Clear Image

The best things I have noted in it are:

• Small in size. Around 9 MB. Updates are around 40 MB in size. (AVG Free installation file itself is around 76 MB)
• Simple graphical interface.
• Good detection of USB viruses.
• Able to clean the viruses that are in System Restore Folder.
• Free (I am crazy of free software)

Down sides:

• You need to have genuine copy of Windows. Before installing it, software verified that you are running genuine Windows OS.
• You cannot clean or delete the viruses until it finishes the scan. So, if power failure occurs in between, then you need to start again, which is really irritating.
• Sometimes it does not turn green (which tells that it is running) automatically, though it is running. We need to click it open to turn it green.

Caught the Viruses

Except those down sides, which I hope Microsoft will update in the future upgrades, it is the best free antivirus I have run ever. It is much better than Free AVG version. Few of my friends told me that installing it made the system slow down, though I never experienced it on Windows XP running on 512 MB RAM. Make sure that you installed the latest .Net Framework (3.5 SP1), which I think is the cause of slow down. Try it and tell me your experiences in comments section.

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I am a fan of tiny tools.  I wrote about few feature-rich tiny tools including tiny screen zooming software, tiny browser, tiny ISO mounting software, etc.

Today, I was searching for a tool to edit mp3 tags and embed album art into the files and found this tiny tool with amazing features.  “Mp3 Tag Tools” with a project name of “massid3lib” on SourceForge, is a tiny tool, just 281 KB, to batch edit mp3 files and embed the album art and lyrics directly into the mp3 file.

Features:

• You can edit ID3V1.1 and V2.x, copy from one to another, and sync them.
• Embed album art (album picture) and lyrics into the files.
• Batch edit the tags and embed album picture.



• At just a click of button, you can correct the case automatically.



• “Clean Filenames” option will remove excess whitespace, capitalizes after symbols & prefixes.
• Batch rename the files using a custom format.
• Sort all the mp3 files into artist, album, genre or in combination formats.  Very useful option to sort the songs according to artist or genre.



• A lot more other features.  Visit the project page to discover all the features.

Get it from the project homepage on SF | Direct Download @ Ziddu

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You might not be knowing that there is an excellent MS Office alternative exists called OpenOffice.  OpenOffice is a free open-source office suite.  I have been using OpenOffice lately as I have been working on creating some PDFs.  The new OpenOffice 3.1 version is equipped with lot of features and it has been improving day by day.  Lot of excellent extensions making it fun to work on OpenOffice.  It has the features that are not available on MS Office like exporting the documents to PDF, presentations to flash files, spreadsheets to XML files, etc.  Also, you can import the MS Office documents directly into OpenOffice and save them in their original MS Office format.

OpenOffice is lacking one useful option in OpenOffice Writer (Word in MS Office), which is “initial caps”.  I don’t know why they are not including it, but it is the widely used option in my work.  As I started working with OpenOffice Writer, I have started getting trouble.  I had to manually do the initial capitalization.  So, I have searched the OpenOffice forums and web to lean how to get that functionality in OpenOffice writer.  So, this post combines those all tricks in one place and gives step-by-step information on how to get that functionality in Writer.

You can achieve this functionality by using macros and assigning it to a keyboard shortcut, which is Shift+F3 in MS Word.

Download the macro code first.  Then, open the OpenOffice Writer.  Go to Tools>Macros>Organize Macros>OpenOffice.org Basic

On the left side, you can see a folder “Standard.” Expand it and you can see Module1.  Select it and then click the button “Edit” on the right side.  It opens a code window.  Now select the code already there and delete.  Now paste the macro code you have downloaded from the above link.  If you want to rename this macro, then go to the bottom of the window and right click on the tab, which reads “Module1.”  Then, close the window.

Now your macro is ready.  You need to assign a key to it.  Click on “Tools” from the menu bar on the top and select “Customize.”  You can alternatively press Alt+T followed by C to open the customization window.  Select the tab “Keyboard.”  Below that in the “Shortcut Keys” section select a short key, normally it is Shift+F3 in Word by default.  Then in the “Category” section, expand OpenOffice.org Macros>User>Standard>Module1(if you have not renamed it earlier).  Then click the button “Modify” on the right side.  You are done!  Now you can initial capitalize the words same as you were doing in MS Word.

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While going through an online software selling website, I have seen approx. $25 costing registry cleaner in the hot selling products list.  I wondered why people are shelling out that much when there are a number of free registry cleaners are available.  So, this post has come out from that doubt and show the people a free registry cleaner that I have been using for years.

What is a Registry Cleaner?
Registry cleaner is a software that cleans the unwanted registry entries, invalid paths, invalid ActiveX, unused file extensions, etc. thus by speeding up the system.  Registry is a database where Windows Operating System stores its settings and options.

One of the best and free registry cleaner is RegSeeker.  It come as a standalone product, which does not need any installation.  Just copy the folder onto desktop or just drop into your Program Files folder.

If you use it for the first time, you can see that hundreds of invalid and unwanted registry entries and after deleting them, you can see a slight boost in your system’s performance.  Sometimes when you uninstall a software, it just deletes the files in Program Files folder, but keeps the entries in registry like software key, which troubles sometimes when you change the key.  I have had these problems and resolved it easily by running Registry Cleaner.

It also comes with features like tweaks for XP, listing and uninstallation of installed products, and searching and deleting registry entries right from RegSeeker.

RegSeeker Homepage: http://www.hoverdesk.net/freeware.htm

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I have installed Ubuntu on Windows XP just to see how the new version is looking and try some features. At the end of the day, I have uninstalled it, but struck with the problem of bootloader. After installing Ubuntu, it has made changes to Windows bootloader so that while booting we can select Windows XP or Ubuntu from the list. Though I uninstalled the Ubuntu, the bootloader continued to show both operating systems and it was really annoying.

So, I have searched the Internet if there is any solution and what everyone was to use the Windows XP CD to repair it. Once we boot into the XP CD, we need to type “fixmbr” into recovery console to repair it. So, I digged the net to see if there is a simple solution and came with this. It worked for me great and there is no need to have XP CD. Follow these steps and you are done.

• Right click on “My Computer” and click “Properties” which is at the end of the menu.
• Select the “Advanced” tab from the list of tabs. Then, click “Settings” button in the “Startup and Recovery” section at the bottom.
• It will open up a new window and then click “Edit” button, which will load boot.ini in notepad where you can edit it.

A normal boot.info file look like this:

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS=”Microsoft Windows XP Professional”/fastdetect

Though I have uninstalled the Ubuntu, the boot.ini was looking like this:

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS=”Microsoft Windows XP Professional”/noexecute= optin/fastdetect
c:\wubildr.mbr=”Ubuntu”

I have just copied the normal boot.ini code into the boot.ini, saved it, and restarted. Voila…..I got rid of the nagging dual boot window.  Below are the screenshots to guide you visually.

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