For those wishing to customise the way TCP/IP is handled on Windows XP the follow MS Knowledge Base article(s) may be of assistance…
Archive for July, 2006
There are many great applications for free video and audio functionality on the windows PC. I’ll be listing some of the ones I have come across here on this page:
Free Audio Related Software
- AUDACITY
Audacity® is free, open source software for recording and editing sounds. It is available for Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux, and other operating systems. You can use Audacity to:- Record live audio.
- Convert tapes and records into digital recordings or CDs.
- Edit Ogg Vorbis, MP3, and WAV sound files.
- Cut, copy, splice, and mix sounds together.
- Change the speed or pitch of a recording.
- And more! See the complete list of features.
- AUDIOGRABBER
Audiograbber is a beautiful piece of software that grabs digital audio from cd’s. It copies the audio digitally-not through the sound card-which enables you to make perfect copies of the originals. It can even perform a test to see that the copies really are perfect. Audiograbber can also automatically normalise the music, delete silence from the start and/or end of tracks, and send them to a variety or external MP3 encoders, such as Fraunhofers L3enc, or even use some MP3/WMA encoders internally for automatic creation of MP3’s. Audiograbber can download and upload disc info from freedb, an Internet compact disc database. You can even record your vinyl LP’s or cassette tapes with Audiograbber and make wav’s or MP3’s of them. There are a lot more functions in Audiograbber, but to put it simply: Audiograbber has the most features one can wish from such a program!
Free Video Related Software
- VLC MEDIA PLAYER
VLC (initially VideoLAN Client) is a highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, ogg, …) as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. It can also be used as a server to stream in unicast or multicast in IPv4 or IPv6 on a high-bandwidth network.
This page will continue to be updated as I come across new software that falls into the above categories
There’s a great site over at http://www.opensourcelist.org that will eventually have a database of opensource applications for Windows. It is the evolution of the site at http://www.jairlie.com/oss/suggestedapplications.html, which currently has more applications listed on it. This will be ported over to the opensourcelist.org site when the developer is finished with coding the site.
So the existing link is: http://www.jairlie.com/oss/suggestedapplications.html
The future link is: http://www.opensourcelist.org
The existing site has the following categories listed on it:
Major categories
- Internet
- Media
- Games
- Educational
- Utilities
- Advanced / IT Professional
- Misc
For those wishing to customise the way TCP/IP is handled on Windows XP the follow MS Knowledge Base article(s) may be of assistance…
Microsoft has a free tool called “Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer” or MBSA for short. If you use Windows XP then this can be a useful tool for checking up on your computer’s security status in accordance with MS security recommendations. Here’s the intro to it from Microsoft.
Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer (MBSA) is an easy-to-use tool designed for the IT professional that helps small- and medium-sized businesses determine their security state in accordance with Microsoft security recommendations and offers specific remediation guidance. Improve your security management process by using MBSA to detect common security misconfigurations and missing security updates on your computer systems.
MBSA 2.0 offers an intuitive user interface and more informative dialogs compared to previous versions. Using the new Windows Update Agent and Microsoft Update catalog, MBSA 2.0 has automatically expanding product support.
It’s home page lives here… Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer (MBSA).
VoIP stands for Voice over IP (internet protocol). It means using an internet connection for voice data, a.k.a. using the internet for making phone calls / voice communications. The much talked about Skype is one example of software based VoIP. In New Zealand Slingshot have a service called iTalk. This service costs $10 a month and provides some fantastic benefits. The main benefits I see are:
- Your phone number doesn’t need to change when you move home / office
This has always pissed me off with the way Telecom has their system set up. If I move house within Auckland (where I live) my phone number changes. The reason is that Auckland is split up into a large number of phone exchanges that provide service to the surrounding allocated area. That’s why each area has its own number format (372 xxxx is Waiheke Island, 846 xxxx is Mt Albert, 575 xxxx is St Heliers, etc.). If the area you move to in on a different exchange from where you came from your number will change. If you have business cards with this number on them, well… it can be rather annoying and expensive. - You get a full range of telco features at this low price.
Features include call-forwarding when busy, call-forwarding when no answer, call-waiting, voice-mail, do not disturb (call blocking). You also get caller ID so that you can see what number an incoming call is coming from. Adding all these features to a Telecom phone line would cast a lot. - You can make and answer calls any where in the world!
Because your calls come over the internet you can access your phone line (voice mail, incoming and outgoing calls) from anywhere that you have broadband access. If you load the free iTalk Soft-phone application onto your laptop and you have wireless, then walking into any wireless broadband hotspot will give you phone access as if you are sitting with your phone back at home. Outgoing calls will originate from your iTalk number location (Auckland originally, but now there are other options in New Zealand). That means you could be in Singapore (where the whole city has free wireless broadband) and you can call an Auckland number free. You can call a NZ mobile for 30c a minute. You can call anywhere in the world at the normal iTalk rates. People calling your NZ iTalk number will get through to your sitting there in Singapore, at no additional cost. Nice huh? - Drop Telecom out of the picture
Once the Telecom unbundling process is complete, it will be possible to have iTalk with no Telecom phone account in place. At present to get ADSL to your house / office you must have an expensive Telecom phone account / line. Soon, that will no longer be required and your phone services will cost only $10 a month, with all these features (saving you at least $60 a month). - The outgoing call rates are some of the lowest I’ve seen.
iTalk Rates are as follows:
Local Calls: FREE
National Calls: 5 cents per minute
Land to NZ Mobile Calls: 30 cents per minute
International Calls
5¢ per min 10¢ per min 15¢ per min 30¢ per min Australia Bangladesh Botswana Australia Mobile Belgium Indonesia Bulgaria Fiji Brazil Korea (Sth) Mobile Colombia Fiji Mobile China Peru Mexico India Germany Poland Namibia India Mobile Japan Portugal Panama Indonesia Mobile Korea (Sth) Russia Romania NZ Mobile National (NZ) Slovenia Swaziland Pakistan Norway South Africa Taiwan Mobile Philippines Singapore Thailand Ukraine Sri Lanka UK Thailand Mobile Uruguay Turkey USA Zimbabwe Zambia Zimbabwe Mobile If the international destination you desire is not listed above please see the full list of iTalk rates by clicking here.
Check out iTalk here: www.italk.co.nz
If you have a SonyEricsson mobile I suggest checking out the free Float Mobile Agent (FMA) from http://fma.sourceforge.net/. I understand it is not fully compatible / functional with all models of SonyEricsson phones, but it certainly adds some grunt to those it works with. I have been using FMA for nearly two years now and have always wondered why SonyEricsson have never bothered to include it as a standard part of their PC based phone software.
Check it out…
One of the major factors I’ve come across that stops small businesses from switching over to a free Linux based operating system is that most of the mainstream small business accounting packages like MYOB and Intuit Quickbooks are not natively compatible with with Linux (i.e. the won’t run on Linux easily).
There is, however, a number of open source accounting packages for the Linux platform.
Here is a list of the major ones I have come across. I’ll update this list from time-to-time.
- First up is GnuCash. Find out more from Open Source Accounting Software | GnuCash
- Next is a package called Quasar. It’s available from Linux Canada
… yes, you can set up any of these applications up to handle GST
For the last few years both Quickbooks and MYOB have been enforcing hardware dependant product activation and re-activation. They also maintain the right to cease supporting the re-activation of software versions that are not current. This could mean that in 2007 when you try to reinstall your Quickbooks 2004 software onto the new office computer you won’t be able to activate it—forcing you to dish out another lot of cash for an upgrade. Not nice.
Many people are pissed off about this situation, yet we should not forget that we do have a choice. Programs like the free accounting packages listed here are one way to side-step these draconian measures.
Please post comments to this message if you try out any of these applications and let me know what your views are.
In the post Online Malware Virus Scan we took a look at how different anti-virus products pick up on different infections, and how you can’t ultimately trust any one product when it gives you a “clean” result. So how does one determine which anti-virus product is the best and how one anti-virus product compares to another? There is a way…
Take a look at the Anti-virus Product Comparison at av-comparatives.org.
They put all the major anti-virus products through the test-mill every few months and publish the results online.
Not all malware / virus scanners are the same—that’s for sure. Each will pick up on different viruses and malware depending on a whole host of factors. So how can you be sure that your anti-virus program has given you an accurate analysis of the suspicious file you’ve just scanned and determined to be “clean”?
Here’s an example of what I mean.
I use NOD32 on my laptop. The latest definitions are installed.
Today I scanned a file I knew was infected with malware. NOD32 said it was clean. I though, “Hmmm… that’s odd”.
I took the file to an online scanner that runs it through 15 different scan systems. It came up as infected on 7 of them, and clean on the remaining 8.
The moral of the story? Each scanner is only as good as the definitions being feed into it, and different scanners are updated with new definitions at different times and rates. Therefore, if you have a file that you know may be infected (such as any executable you download from the internet from anything other than the most reputable websites) don’t rely on your malware scanner if it says “File clean”.
The best site I know of for online scanning of individual files is located at http://virusscan.jotti.org/
My results were as follows:
Online malware scan
File: earth_keygen.exe
Status: INFECTED/MALWARE (Note: this file has been scanned before. Therefore, this file’s scan results will not be stored in the database) MD5 9c7bfe25c63ddb4a2bdc61c5b8175263 Packers detected:Scanner results
AntiVir Found Trojan/Drop.Microjoin.BX
ArcaVir Found nothing
Avast Found nothing
AVG Antivirus Found Dropper.Generic.FTB
BitDefender Found nothing
ClamAV Found nothing
Dr.Web Found Trojan.Mezzia
F-Prot Antivirus Found nothing
Fortinet Found W32/Agent.APH!tr
Kaspersky Anti-Virus Found Trojan-Dropper.Win32.Microjoin.bx
NOD32 Found nothing
Norman Virus Control Found nothing
UNA Found nothing
VirusBuster Found Trojan.DR.Microjoin.BI
VBA32 Found Trojan-Dropper.Win32.Microjoin.bx
Latest Comments