PDF995 is a freeware that can create pdf files from any file that can be printed. It gets installed as a printer driver in your system. To create a pdf, just print the file using PDF995 printer driver by pressing “ctrl P” and choosing PDF995 from the drop-down list.
Ever wanted to merge two pdf files into one without paying a dollar !! Pdftk is a free command based toolkit that can do that and much more with pdf files. Pdftk allows you to manipulate PDF easily and freely. It does not require Acrobat, and it runs on Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD and Solaris. It can Merge, Split, Decrypt, Encrypt, Apply a Background Watermark, Update PDF Metadata, Burst a PDF Document into Single Pages and much more.
Utilities
I often make video clips with my Canon S2 IS. The quality is awesome but at the same time the size of the video file created is enormous. These videos were eating up all my hard disk space until I found these tools to compress those files. I won’t say that there is no loss in quality at all but I played with the settings to achieve the best possible results which I am sharing with you here.
The best video compressing software that I came across till date is Super. It is a Freeware that gives you complete control over the conversion process. I played with the settings and the following screenshot shows the settings that worked best for me.
My clips were shot at 30 fps so I selected that. Choose the same frame rate and the resolution as that of the original clip.
Stoik Video Converter is another free video conversion tool that is pretty simple to use with very decent output. There are few options when you convert the video but the output format “WMV for LAN (1 Mbps)” works best for me considering the quality vs size ratio.
Multimedia, Utilities
Digital cameras brought a revolution in Photography. I don’t think about the processing cost of a photo anymore so there is no stopping when I start clicking. But it is a pain when I have to share hundreds of photos with my friends online because of the huge size of the JPG files.
I experimented with a few JPG compression softwares and found Visualizer Photo Resize to work the best. It can handle JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP, TGA, TIFF, PSD and PSP files. You can specify the resolution you want and it can process a complete folder at a time.
Visualizer Photo Resize
Another good image resizer is FastStone Photo Resizer. It is an image converter/resizer intended to enable users to convert, rename, resize, crop, rotate, change color depth, add text and watermarks to images in a quick and easy batch mode. It supports JPEG, BMP, GIF, PNG, TIFF and JPEG2000 file formats.
FastStone Photo Resizer
These will help you save a lot of space with very little or no loss of image quality.
Multimedia, Utilities
HTML is used to design a website but what if you want to display a sample HTML code in a website?? The browser will consider your sample code just as the rest of the HTML code and parse it in a similar way, removing all the tags before it displays the content on the website.
To display some HTML code, you need to use escape characters for all the special characters defined in HTML. The following link has a HTML Encoder/Decoder which can generate the code that should be inserted to achieve the desired HTML code form as output.
HTML Encoder
Just input the code you desire to display and copy paste the encoded code in your HTML file.
Enjoy !!
Internet, Programming
I came across a few instances where people complained that they were unable to access Internet any more. There can be many reasons for that varying from hardware failure to some problem in settings.
One of the very common reason that I have seen in recent times is if you are using some Security program like Norton Internet Security that has some firewall which prevents a program from accessing the internet. Following are the steps for Norton Internet Security:
Start Norton Internet Security.
- In the main window, click Norton Internet Security tab.
- Click Settings.
- Under Web Browsing, click Personal Firewall and then click Configure.
- In the left side of Norton Internet Security Options window, click Personal Firewall and then click Program Control.
- In the Program Column, select the specific program (Internet Explorer or any other browser that you use).
- Change the Access from Block or Custom to Allow.
- Click OK.
This should enable the internet access for you. For other programs, visit the following website to learn more:
Firewall Blocking Internet
Internet
