Yet another freeware videoconverter, seems quite ok and supports HD.
At that price give it a spin 😉
Just heard about this today, have not tested it but it was given high praises.
Songbird an open source music player and music organizer, should support the more popular players and formats.
From the website.
Songbird is an open-source customizable music player that’s under active development.
We’re working on creating a non-proprietary, cross platform, extensible tool that will help enable new ways to playback, manage, and discover music. There are lots of ways to contribute your time to the project. We’d love your help!
There are several features we’re proud of, but we’ll be the first to admit that others need ironing out, are experimental, or are just plain missing. There’s still a lot to do.
You must have heard of virtual machines and virtual software (Softgrid and ThinApp former Thinstall) these solutions are really cool and offer a lot in security and ease, however they are not really good for adhoc projects.
Say you need to test a new application but are not sure you want to keep it, well you can fire up a virtual machine and install the software here, however fireing up a virtual machine takes time, memory and ressources so in other words its not ‘easy’ and convient. Well a little known program takes care of this, SandboxIE, with this baby you can download your application and just right click on it and say run sandboxed.
So how does it work, well its quite ingenious actually. The software will create a “sandbox” for the application (could be anything – a single exe file – Microsoft office or an installation software) anything this software does is written in the sandbox and NOT in your filesystem (both filesystem and registry are sandboxed), however the software can READ anything on your filesystem/registry – the software thus does not know its sandboxed it will preform just as it would in real world. You can even browse the sandbox and see what files are installed and where (or what changes would be made by the software).
SandboxIE has buildin support for internet browsing security, hence you will by default have a shortcut for launching your Internet browser in a sandboxed environment, this is really cool as if will offer you a VERY high level of security when browsing – any evil stuff you stumble across during your browsing can be undone (activex components installed, Google-Yahoo-Live toolbar, trojans installed).
What are the applications of this software?
- Security for one, you can now safely run an application (suspected spyware etc) and the changes it makes are NOT permanent, you can simply empty the sandbox afterwards.
- Installation tests, say you are installing new software but need to figure out which settings etc are right, well now you can install the same software as many times as you like.
- Launch your internet browser in a sandbox, none of the trojans and evil scripts on the net can harm your windows installation – any evil stuff installed (including Google Toolbar etc) can be undone by clearing your sandbox.
A word of caution though, even though the software can NOT write to your filesystem it can still read everything on it (registry and files), thus if we are talking spyware or the likes it can still read your confidential information, also spyware/trojans installed while you browse may compromise your privacy even though they cant do permanent damage to your system.
SandboxIE is very easy to get started with, but offers very complex configuration. If you are interested in or use Virtual Machines of software virtualization you should really check this our, but also if you are concerned with security while you browse the net.
You get a free 30 day trial and then the price is 22€ (well worth its price).
Download and get all the details here; http://www.sandboxie.com/
Get a great podcast intro to SandboxIE here
So a friend of mine got infected by this Antivirus 2009 (that is irony for you, infected by an Antivirus), anyway I will be visiting him shortly to try and disinfect that darn thing.
From what I can figure out I will get the best results by using the tools from;
http://www.malwarebytes.org/
Should be safe to use acording to;
http://www.siteadvisor.com/sites/malwarebytes.org
I will update this post with the results of my efford, should you however have better tips let me know..
UPDATE JAN 7th
Malwarebytes malware scanner worked like a charm, big thumbs up.
Paragon now offers a free (only for non commercial usage) version of their Drive backup software (Drive Backup 9.0 Express) a Ghost like product, I have not tested the product myself but Paragons products are usually very high class so I would suspect it to be good.
http://www.paragon-software.com/home/db-express/features.html
Have you ever tried browsing around accidentally discovering beautiful images/backgrounds or the likes, but not thinking to save them.
Well recently I did, and damn if I could remember the site later (and MY history in IE, well lets just say its huge so that was no help). I came to think, hey someone MUST have written a utility to inspect your “Temporary Internet files” (IE Cache), you probably know you cant just ‘browse’ down there yourself and get anything meaningful, well anyway, sure enough after a bit of poking around I found a very decent tool (decent because a preview function in this util would have been to die for, but hey this is quite ok).
Get it here (its freeware, yes nice I know);
http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/ie_cache_viewer.html
He has even developed a few other utilities for this area so poke around a bit on his site. His site is even mentioned earlier in my blog as he also makes some VERY COOL security utilities, and hey it makes sense some of these “Temporary Internet Files” utilities could be used for crude security inspection.
So you did not grow up with MS-DOS 3.2 like the rest of us, and when it comes to copying files you stick to the good old Windows Explorer. Well that is all well and good, however if you suddenly need to copy a LARGE number of files or some very large files this can become an issue, the error handeling capabilities of Windows Explorer just aint that great.
You may have heard about Robocopy, a cool little – rather old by now – utility from Microsoft. Robocopy stands for Robust file copy, and it has the ability to mirror directories event down to ntfs rights, very nifty (I have used it since the good NT4 days) however it’s a good old MS-DOS commandline utility so you have to write pages with switches to tweak it just for your task.
To my amazement however I just realized that Microsoft actually released a GUI for the util back in 2006 
well well, so now there is no excuse not to use it and save yourself a lot of time and pain..
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc160891.aspx
Now Robocopy is a VERY nice utility and still the most reliable I know of, however as mentioned in an earlier post Terracopy is quite a competitor, and I would be sure not to miss giving it a go too (its somewhat easier to work with).
In this day in age everything has wizards, this also being true for creating a new scheduled job on a server.
Now I did not research this in great detail, so bare with me if I overlooked something, but I had problems omitting an account and password when creating a new scheduled job. I wanted to create a schedule witch would run under the systems account, and let me tell you it got old REALLY fast, damn wizard would not let me create the job.
So back to the good old dos AT command I think, but wait I thought was there not an old utility in NT4 that had some kind of GUI.. Google->Search->Found
ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/ResKit/nt4/x86/winat/winat.exe
So if you like me experience problems with those damn modern wizards, download this and be happy (its even a bit nostalgic to work with an NT4 util again :-))..
We all experience it, find the most interesting web-cast on the new but don’t quite have time to watch it all right now. When you visit the site a few weeks later, the web-cast is removed and your whole week is ruined 
Well maybe not, here is two media stream capture utilities someone recommended, I have not tried them yet but they both are available as trial versions so if you are in need download a trial and see if it solves your streaming nightmare
You may have heard about Microsoft’s antivirus solution (Forefront Client Security, the corporate version – there is also a home user version), well now there is an additional way of deploying it (see button link) – untested, but sounds like piece of pie 🙂
Microsoft’s Live Care (home user version);
http://onecare.live.com/standard/en-us/default.htm
Microsoft Forefront Client Security;
http://www.microsoft.com/forefront/clientsecurity/en/us/default.aspx
Corporate deployment (New method);
http://www.codeplex.com/fcscompete/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=14440
A few web-casts that may also be interesting (have not seen them myself yet);
http://whitepapers.techrepublic.com.com/abstract.aspx?docid=348503
http://whitepapers.techrepublic.com.com/abstract.aspx?docid=348463