Category: Compgeeky

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One to Add to a List of “Decent Freebie Windows Apps”

OK, so Windows Media Center wtv files are huge. One hour? About 3GB. Didn’t take long for recordings of my Wonder Woman’s shows (well, and Chuck for me–nerd fantasies, ya know *heh*) to get above 200GB, so I needed a good way to archive ’em, and no, eating up storage on my external drives was not the answer.

Sure, it’s convenient for my Wonder Woman to be able to click a link I put on her desktop and simply open the files from my computer, but… that’s a lot of space to sit there just being used to store TV shows.

So, enter Free Studio Manager 4.3.5.73 (yes, it’s that particular iteration *heh*).

Now, I’ve tried a fair bunch of video conversion/DVD writer apps and all of them have their shortcomings. Free Studio Manager is no exception. It’s slow. OTOH, it’s free and it also has a ton of features. A ton. Converts nearly any video format to be burned to a playable DVD. Video to flash. Video to mp3, jpg, iPod, PSP, iPhone. Video dubbing, flip and roate and a few more lil features.

But wait, there’s more. 🙂 Youtube uploads/downloads. Converts many audio formats and burns music and data CDs DVDs. A real workhorse of a media suite. Free.

Now, I’ve multi-scanned the thing both before and after installation and nothing I’ve sicced on it has found any malware or other weird behavior from it, so my only (minor, petty, nit-picking) gripe is that video conversion is sooooo sloooooowww. Oh, and it throws “Disk Burning” errors if I allow it to convert a video and burn it to disk immediately, but since it’s not yet made a coaster with one of those errors, I’m not fashed by that. And, it’s not really a lot slower than others I’ve tried, well, except for Format Factory, which is pretty darned fast but just screws up too often for my taste–still worth every penny of its price (it’s free) but not for me.

So, reclaiming some hard drive storage and burning through a few DVDRs. Fine, as long as she can pop ’em in her DVD drive and watch ’em that way.

ADDENDUM: Oh, yeh, have to remember two things.

1. The weird WMC “wtv” file format. *sheesh!* MUST right-click on any recordings and choose “convert to dvr-ms” in Windows Explorer before using ANY free video conversion/DVD writing tool I’ve found. and
2. Some shows have expiration dates on them noted in DRM files that WMC builds when recording. Unless you store them in a different format that loses the WMC DRM info, they’ll not play. So, it behooves any of us using WMC to convert early and often… Just archiving the wtv files is NOT good enough!

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Twitter: for Twits; “Buzz” for…

…spamming buzzards.

Twitter has always seemed like (and grown more and more to seem like) the ultimate dumbing down of already PDD (pretty darned dumb) social networking services, but it’s been surpassed in asininity by Google Buzz in Buzz’s first outing! Dennis Howlett’s take in a recent ZDNet post pretty much firmed up my own reservations:

Despite the claim to help me: ‘to start conversations about the things you find interesting,’ it does nothing of the sort. Instead, it adds in any ’stuff’ that people it has decided I am following put into their Buzz (a bit like Twitter) along with any other accounts that Google has linked via their profiles such as Flickr, Twitter, Google Reader, assorted blogs….the list goes on. In other words it is aggregating a pile of stuff and lobbing it over the wall into my GMail.

A MUCH worse tale of woe is here. A good cautionary tale affirming my decision to board the Buzz train only after (and only IF) it proved itself.

Now, I’d already been annoyed enough at GMail’s activation of a chat “feature” that resulted in spam chat being flung my way (until I found the link at the very bottom of a GMail page that let me turn chat OFF), so I wasn’t looking forward to being spammed by Buzz in a similar–or worse!–manner. First time GMail had a notice about Buzz, I hit the bottom of the page looking for an OFF switch. *phew!* There it was.

All better now.

*heh*

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A Few Reasons Why I Don’t Like Chrome

…the browser, that is. In no particular order of importance. And just a few. Making an exhaustive list would simply ruin my day.

–Google’s invasive tracking, etc. But, I’ve tried Iron–Chrome absent Google’s privacy invasion crap–and it is no better in all other aspects of browser use

–The overly-dumbed-down interface. Really. Where are all the power features?

  • Zooming is awful
  • No “fit to page”
  • “extensions” required for essential features like mouse gestures. Stupid.
  • no easy way to “granularize” (organize in depth) bookmarks–have to use the stupid Tools>Bookmark Manager or know the CTRL+SHIFT+B keystroke combo and that’s after using CTRL+D to make the bookmark first! Dumb.

Lotsa other gripes, but all along usability and customizability lines. Sure, it’s pretty fast on page loads, but having to waste a bunch of time just getting things to load almost right for viewing almost the way I prefer is enough to garner it a big thumbs down for me. It’s fine, I suppose, for Great Aunt Sadie who’s just going to click links and has no idea things could be markedly better, but I really can’t stand the piece of crap.

YMMV.

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Shields Up!

Steve Gibson has some good resources available for the average user at his webs site. (For those of y’all who may not be familiar with the name, Gibson’s the guy who developed the venerable–and still useful, especially in its newest iteration–SpinRite.) One of the useful lil tools he offers at his site is Shields Up! While the tool only tests the first 1056 ports on your computer, it’s nevertheless a useful measure of your firewalling.

Between my ISP’s watchful eye, my “hardware” SPI firewall in my router and Windows 7’s built in firewall, that installation on this computer results in a very respectable showing on Gibson’s tool.

Not surprisingly, the results are the same when browsing in a Linux Mint or Puppy Linux or PCBSD session hosted on the same machine–as long as I remember to configure Puppy’s firewall (the others are configured and turned on by default in modes that effect the same results on this test as Win7’s firewall; Puppy’s firewall must be turned on–once; after that it “remembers” its settings like the rest).

Other security scans can be found at Audit My PC and PCFlank, among a wide range of places. Each scanner has its own set of strengths and weaknesses, so multiple scans with different tools would probably yield a “best mix” of information.

DO check links to scanner tools out with something like AVG’s Linkscanner or McAffee’s less trusted (by me) Site Advisor, especially if your browser of choice doesn’t have a reliable tool to warn you about suspicious sites.

NOTE: None of the port scanning tools I know of will definitively demonstrate that you are really secure, but they can give you a good idea of common areas of weakness. If you then also have well-rated (by reliable, known sources such as WestCoast Labs), up-to-date anti-malware software, and keep it up to date and turned on, AND you practice usual and customary safe computing, you should be fairly safe.

But note well: break any link in the chain, and you WILL become infected with malware. The weakest link? Simple, safe computing practices, like being careful where you travel on the web, NEVER installing software you’ve not “manually” scanned with a reliable, up-to-date anti-malware, avoiding CLICKing on links in emails and NEVER opening attachments unless you

1. Know absolutely, exactly, beyond any shadow of doubt what it is you are opening and
2. Have nevertheless manually scanned it with a reliable, up-to-date anti-malware BEFORE even considering opening the thing

Seriously. I don’t care if Great Aunt Sadie would never send you a virus, trojan or worm. DO NOT OPEN THAT ATTACHMENT FROM HER! Especially not from her. *heh*

Continue reading “Shields Up!”

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More on Virtualbox

With all there is to really like about Virtualbox’s approach to VMs, one thing really stands out as a sore thumb: VMs sharing resources with the host machine. As in, “sharing” is not the word for some resources.

USB-attached devices? Well, using them in the VM (via VBox Guest Additions) means hogging them in the VM. No access via the host machine while the VM is making use of those resources–printer, external drives, etc. Ditto for optical drives. Designating ones physical DVDRW or CD or whatever as usable by the VM “uninstalls” it from the host machine.

Not really cool.

Well, at least resources can be shared in that limited sense, but it really sucks dead bunnies through a straw.

OK, so “plugging in” and “unplugging” does allow sharing back and forth in a klunky kind of way. But man, it’s cumbersome. It’s probably the only thing I liked better about M$’s Virtual XP: sharing resources was less kludgy.

And yeh, I wrote this while in a rare instance of XP running in a VB VM. Why so rare? Well, I never really warmed to XP to begin with and only invoke it now whenever I need to check some XP-specific procedure. Otherwise, Puppy or Mint or an occasional PCBSD (I really, really like PCBSD, but for some reason only rarely use it; I need to examine that) are just fine for me. Running on a Win7 host.

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“Consider the Threat Level”

From the otherwise excellent and usually reliable Windows Secrets newsletter comes this guffaw from the usually serious Fred Langa responding to a reader’s question about outdated browsers (with massive security holes) being required by the “feddle gummint’s” FAFSA web site:

First of all, it appears the site has been updated since your phone call. The FAFSA help page lists all the supported browsers, which now include IE 8 and Mozilla Firefox 3.5.4.

Second, consider the threat level: most browser security features exist to protect you against hostile sites that might try to stuff malware into your system or steal information from you. Why would the government need to attack your browser? If the government wants your personal information, it can get it quite openly through legal channels.

Oh. Wait. He was serious. “Why would the government need to attack your browser?” It’s not “need” that drives a “feddle gummint” bureaucrap to do anything, Fred. They pretty much do as they want, because they can. Government of the government, by the government and, especially, for the government shall not perish from the Earth, Fred… *sigh*

Frankly, I consider “feddle gummint” websites to BE malware, unless proven differently.

Continue reading ““Consider the Threat Level””

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I Do These Stupid Things…

…so you don’t have to. That’s my excuse, and I’m sticking with it.

Calibrating the Clear Type tuning on a Windows system with an LCD screen that’s displaying text just fine? Stupid. So, what did I do? You guessed it. The Clear Type calibration tool uses a series of displayed text images for the user to subjectively choose between in order to tune the Clear Type display. What I got recently out of playing with that was a lesson in “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

At 100% in my browser (pick any of four), here’s an example of what “tuning” Clear Type using the M$ utility resulted in:

Ugly, eh? Makes me want to poke my eyes out. At 120% or higher magnification, the effect disappears, though. Still, now I have to reverse the “tuning” or automatically CTRL+Scrollwheel to a different magnification when such artifacts appear. *sigh* Just a warning to Windows users, once again: if it ain’t broke…

Fortunately, I can always browse just as well in another OS in a VM. 🙂

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Quirky Day

As a result of beating back some locusts (and getting my lunch eaten by others *heh*), this turned out to be a mostly good, productive but kinda quirky day.

Man! Was I ever a chatty cathy during the time working on the tail end of flooring and other projects Down South. Motormouth city, fer shure. (And yeh, I coulda had a classic SM-58 in my hand doing a monologue, for all the running off… gottachucleatmyself… )

Learned something freaky deaky about OS X. Installing a new hard drive (in a Macbook) and using an OS X install CD apparently does NOT automagically bring up a prompt to initialize the new disk. Have to open Utilities… Disk Utility in the boot menu to force recognition and installation of the drive. Strange. I’ve not run into that in other OSes hardly at all in the last 10 years. I guess Apple only wants geeks to install new drives in their systems. Can’t give an average user any obvious help. *heh* That Apple: always looking out for the users to keep ’em from doing normal stuff. *LOL*

Anyway, boy did I feel like an idiot when I looked over instructions someone had printed out for transferring all his data and software from one Macbook drive to a new one. I never even thought the system wouldn’t tell him he needed to initialize the drive. Silly me. I acted like he was doing the install on a Windows, Linux or BSD system. Live and learn.

Man, sometimes getting old sucks swamp gas. (Yeh, the gas can be a problem too.) Now, my good knee and good hip (on opposite sides, no less… of course) are the ones talking to me. Figures. Just when I get used to the pain in the others… 🙂

My Wonder Woman just got another rave review from her work for another course in her grad classes. Natch. She’s such a wiz! But heck, with a 3,000 word paper for her first month’s class and a ten page paper for this class, at this rate she should just have shot for a PhD, complete with thesis. *heh* Her EdLaw class has at least been pretty interesting. But it’ll be over by the end of this month, I think, and her next class doesn’t begin until April. Means she’ll have some “time out” (from course work, not from teaching) before Lovely Daughter’s wedding March 27. Nice.

Lovely Daughter home early tonight–by 8:00 or so. I guess she has a big day tomorrow between church and some sort of social activity tomorrow evening. Something about gathering to worship some really amazing pottery? I think she called it a “super bowl” or some such. I don’t get it. Seems like idolatry to me, but then I’m just an Olde Pharte.

Oh, well, I don’t suppose it’s much more idolatrous than what goes on in most churches on Sunday mornings.

Just hit my own personal wall. Going to hit the sheets before my head falls off my shoulders.

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Anti-Malware Warning

Microsoft Security Essentials popped up a warning a couple of days ago about an attachment to an email (see “Gullibility: Bad; Skepticism: Good”–yes it was that email–I received it multiple times). I decided to see how it handled it and told it to simply delete it.

It did. It also deleted ALL the emails in my inbox. Not to worry. First, most of my email is filtered into subordinate boxes and none of that email was touched. Second, I concatenate all my email accounts using GMail to collected from three different email servers, then I download everything from the GMail collection. So, all my email is already “backed up” there. Third, I use Thunderbird Portable and can (and do) back up my email again, weekly, by simply copying the Mail folder from the Thunderbird Portable folder to a more durable medium than the flash drive Thunderbird Portable runs from.

So, no mail was lost.

But, if you don’t have multiple backups and do run into a similar situation, don’t say you weren’t warned. 🙂