Various cool software and more

PicPick will capture your (mind and) screen

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Long ago I wrote about www.jingproject.com (a free and cool screen capture software), but recently I was made aware of a “competitive” product called PicPick which is equally free and cool.

Compared the two products offer some advantages over each other;

Jing: Upload directly to screencast, video capture possibility and also a layered approach (when adding text and arrows onto captures).

PicPick: Lots of different capture modes (eg. freehand) and a build-in graphics editor in which you will work with your capture (ala Paint from windows).

Both:Hotkey support (pipick even separate hotkeys for the different capture modes), option to add both text and arrows to the capture to underline your point.

Which is better is hard to say – I guess it depends on what kind of captures you do the most..   A merge of the two products would be ever so cool 🙂

I think PicPick offer some great options when talking capture modes and also the build in editor is nice, it is however annoying that the editing is not layered (if you add an arrow it is added into the graphics and cant thus be changed later as opposed to Jing).  Maybe you will just have to have both 😉

Get PicPick free here; http://www.picpick.org/home

Get Jing free here; www.jingproject.com

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Photoshop now even more intelligent

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Adobe is making the next version of their “Content Aware Fill” feature in Photoshop even more intelligent, this will allow you to edit out even complex structures from pictures and this without advanced knowledge of photo editing.

See the video for a demonstration, it is quite amazing.

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Capture online video streams

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Here is yet another capture program for capturing online video streams “Web Video Cap” (eg. for youtube etc etc).


Pros; Easy operations, it will capture everything in the background, its from our friends at www.nirsoft.net whom usually makes excellent tools.

Cons; Unless you stop it/configure it, it will capture EVERYTHING/ANYTIME.

As with most other capture products you need to install WinPcap (a resident background driver) so nothing new there.

Download Web Video Capture here; http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/web_video_capture.html

Read much more here; http://www.ghacks.net/2010/04/02/download-online-videos-with-web-video-cap/

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How To Move Large Apps Or Games To Another Drive

If you have Windows 7 you have some interesting new options when it come to moving applications (eg Games etc) to other locations, namely the “mklink” command.

Read the whole story/guide here

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MSN Account password hacked/forgotten

A friend of mine had his MSN account hacked and it was hacked good, thus the security question was obviously changed afterwards 🙁  so there was no way for him to regain access.

It was surprisingly hard but I finally found a link where you can rapport such problems and get assistance;
https://support.live.com/eform.aspx?productKey=wlidvalidation&ct=eformcs&scrx=1

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Parted Magic 4.9

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(Screenshot is from an older version than the current 4.9)

Yet another free partitioning CD (why in the world pay for Partition Magic), this CD will let you boot from it and resize your partitions and much more (free).

http://sourceforge.net/projects/partedmagic/files/

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Proxy bypass

So you are visiting this company that is filtering their Internet traffic, and you for some reason can’t reach this site you just have to visit RIGHT NOW, no problem here’s a list of proxy tools/sites to bypass such security measures;

http://geniushackers.com/blog/2008/01/09/another-list-of-proxy-sites-to-open-blocked-sites/
http://www.ghacks.net/2006/08/04/free-web-proxy-list/ (older list but many still work)

or try these previous posts;
https://readmydamnblog.com/?p=1202 (Utility to browse via US proxy)
https://readmydamnblog.com/?p=1069 (create your own proxy)

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Nagios (windows) alternatives

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As primary a Windows admin I get a bit discouraged by products like Nagios – although it’s definitely a cool product installing it seem complex and with little knowledge on Linux maintaining it even more so.

So are there any Windows (free) alternatives out there?

Yes, and propably more than one, however is there any open source/free versions among these?

I found two;

OpenNMS

http://opennms.org/wiki/Installation:Windows


It claim to run on windows and have basic capabilities, I have not looked into details so I can’t say just how deep it goes (Nagius supports SNMP and very detailed monitoring, OpenNMS at a glance seem more like superficial monitoring).  Anyway, it’s free and may just be enough for you, so take a look at it.

Demo available at;
http://demo.opennms.org/opennms/index.jsp
user and password is both “demo”

SpiceWorks

http://www.spiceworks.com

I actually tested this once (a previous version), it is quite fine for smaller sites (and seem more extensive than OpenNMS), but when it come to wan connected sites it seem a bit heavy (works without agents installed).  Then again, it’s free and this one is quite easy to setup and manage.

Yet other alternatives (Non windows though) is;
http://www.zenoss.com/
http://www.zabbix.com/

And this one that seem commercial;
http://www.groundworkopensource.com/

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Advanced document management

Do you remember the song by U2 – “I still haven’t found what I am looking for”, are you forever lost when trying to keep order in your digital archive, can’t you ever find the document/picture/pdf/spreadsheet you are looking for – well then this may be of interest to you;

Benubird, benubird is a document management system that will analyze and organize your files/documents/spreadsheets etc. and add meta data to your files for better search results.  It seem very clever indeed and it is of cause free (as the bird 😉 )..

Give it a spin if you are working with large amounts of data, it looks very promising.

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