Geeky Ninja » Useful Utilities

Access and use ISO images as normal drives using ISODisk

Sharninder — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 15:30:30 +0000

The ISO file format is the most format for sharing CD/DVD images on the Internet. A lot of software and most (all) Linux distributions are shared using this format. The advantages are that it’s a universal format and portable across operating systems. By portable, I mean that all operating systems have utilities to burn ISO images to media.

Have you ever had to burn a CD/DVD just because you wanted to check out a file that was distributed inside the ISO image ?

The problem with ISO files is that you have to actually burn the files to the disk to see the contents of the image. Sure, Linux purists can do a loop mount, but what about Windows users ?

ISODisk is the magic software that’s going to solve this problem once and for all.

ISODisk is a nice little utility that lets you “mount” ISO images to your Windows system and lets you access the contents using a regular drive. So, for example you could mount an Ubuntu ISO to drive e: and access it’s contents from there. Or, take the ISO of some software that you downloaded from the Internet, hook it up with a drive letter using ISODisk and install the software using that, instead of burning the image to a CD/DVD first.

Using ISODisk couldn’t have been made any simpler. Download and install it and after a quick reboot, ISODisk will be ready to start serving you.

The interface also couldn’t have been simpler. To mount an ISO disk, select the image file using the file select button and the image that you select will be mounted to the drive corresponding to the button you pressed.

Not, only does ISODisk mount ISO images, it can also create ISO images. So, for example, if you have a CD/DVD that you want to make a copy of, just put it in the drive and select the Create ISO Image from CD-ROM tab in ISODisk.

Select the drive which has the CD you want to make an image out of, and press the Save icon.

Do you use any other utilities on windows to mount and view ISO images ? Can those tools create ISO images too ?

Track the time you spend on your computer with ManicTime

Sharninder — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 16:15:18 +0000

I spend a lot of time online. Really, I do. A lot more than I’d like to admit.

And while I haven’t really missed a deadline for any of my projects till now, I often, at the end of the day, end up asking myself, “Where the hell did the time go ?”. And I know that I’m the only one who thinks 24 hours is too less of a time to do anything productive.

If you like me, at the end of the day, often wonder, where did you spend your time, I’ve found the perfect utility to give you the answer to that question – ManicTime.

ManicTime is a small program that sits in the system tray and collects data on your computer usage. It notes all the applications that you use, how much time you spend browsing, away from the computer or actually doing some real work.

All that the user has to do is install the application, run it, minimize it and continue working as usual on the computer. Open ManicTime at the end of the day and watch in nice cool colors what you did the whole day.

Not only does ManicTime help you keep track of time spent using each application and you can even tag certain periods of time to remind you what exactly were you doing at that particular time.

For example, I’d wouldn’t even want to admit but I used Internet Explorer the most during the short time that I recorded this data, but here it is, in gray and black. To make myself feel less guilty, I could tag that period of time as, say, “bank website”, implying that I was using my bank’s website which doesn’t work properly with Firefox.

If you want to stop ManicTime from recording for a certain period of time, just right click on the system tray icon and select “Go off the record”.

Isn’t this a really cool and useful application ? How do you guys keep track of your time ?

How to remove DRM from iTunes

Sharninder — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 13:30:19 +0000

DRM, Digital rights management, is the process by which music companies license the music and enforce restrictions on what you can do with the digital music files. If you’ve ever downloaded any Audio from the iTunes store in the past, chances are you’ve been served DRM infested files. What that means is that while you’ll be able to play those files just fine on your iPod/iPhone, if in the future you purchase, say, a Creative MP3 player, your music will not be playable on those.

Innovative and determined hackers have found a number of ways to strip DRM from iTunes’ audio, but they’re always playing catch up with Apple as the company keeps changing and improving their DRM scheme.

In this post today, we’ll talk about a method to not only circumvent DRM, we’ll convert the audio files into the .ogg format, which is an open source format for Audio. Once you have the music in the ogg format, it is quite easy to convert it to MP3/AAC/WAV or any other format you want.

First of all, download and install DVDnextCopy on your windows PC. DVDnext is a utitlity which creates a virtual CD writer on your system. What this means is that any application will be able to write files to this virtual drive as if it’s a real CD burner, even if your machine doesn’t have a physical CD burner.

Once you have DVDnext installed, fire up iTunes and create a new playlist (ctrl+N) and add all the songs that you want to strip DRM off, to this playlist.

Right click the playlist name and select the Burn playlist to Disc option.

Now, in the dialogue box that pops up, make sure that you select the iTurns drive that DVDnext created.

Click on Burn and iTunes will start burning all the files in the playlist to the virtual CD writer.

In the taskbar, you should see a popup indicating that DVDnext has started it’s work.

The conversion will take a while and you’ll be informed when it has finished.

Double click the DVDnext icon in the taskbar and you will see the list of all the songs in the playlist converted to the OGG format.

Tell me that wasn’t easier than you thought ?

How to create a secure and private network

Sharninder — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 06:18:57 +0000

Picture this – You’re out on the road for work or pleasure and have this sudden urge to listen to that one song from your collection which is stored on your desktop back at home. Or you’re a freelancer and need access the draft proposal you made for a client which is again on your desktop sitting in your home office.

You can’t keep your desktop or other machines at home exposed to the outside world over the Internet, because, franklt speaking, it’s a dangerous world out there. But you still need safe and easy (and secure) access to all your data. How do you do that ? Did someone say – “Create a VPN!”

Enter Hamachi.

What is Hamachi ?

Hamachi is a piece of software that lets you create a private, secure network of your own. It is what people in the industry call an instant zero configuration software VPN – virtual private network. With a Hamachi created network, you can continue using your machines from thousands of miles away, as if they were in the next room. Anything that works over a local network, should work using Hamachi and you will not even notice the difference.

Hamachi works on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X and in this post today, we’ll be using it to network a Windows and a Linux (Ubuntu) machine.

Installing Hamachi on Windows

Download the windiows based installer for Hamachi and install it like any other Windows application. Hamachi is free for non-commercial use, so if that is your use-case, you can select that option while installation.

Once Hamachi is installed, it’ll take you through a small tutorial which you should read to get familiar with Hamachi. At the end of the tutorial, you’ll be asked to click on the power on button. Hamachi is now ready to be used.

Create a Network

Now comes the fun part. Click on the network button and chose “Create a New network” from the menu. Give your network a name and a password. Remember this password as it will be required to connect any other machine to this network.

Your Hamachi setup on the windows side is done.

Installing Hamachi on Linux

Installing and running Hamachi on windows is a little bit more involved because there is no fancy graphical installation to do the heavy lifting for us.

Download Hamachi for Linux from the same location as before. The Linux version comes as a .tar.gz archive. Extract the file, open the terminal and browse to the directory where you kept the extracted files. Give the following command as the ‘root’ user.

make install; tuncfg

You don’t need to be running as the root user to run the rest of the commands. The next command is used to create a cypto identity for your machine.

hamachi init

Now, give the following commands in sequence to start the hamachi daemon, login to hamachi, join a network (requires the password that you set earlier), and go online in the network.

hamachi start hamachi login hamachi join hamachi go-online

If, at this time, you look at the hamachi GUI in the windows machine, you should be able to see the Linux machine logged in to the network you created earlier.

That’s it. Now that both the machines are in the same network and you can use them as if they were sitting right next to each other, even if you’re physically sitting miles away.

Hamachi is the easiest zero configuration VPN solution that I’ve seen and I’m sure you all will find a use for it at one time or another.

Are there any other VPN solutions that you guys use ? Let us know in the comments.

View PDF and HTML files on your Kindle

Sharninder — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 14:12:19 +0000

The Amazon Kindle is an extremely capable and versatile e-book reader. It has been a runaway success from the time it was released about an year back.

Last month Amazon released version 2.0 of the Kindle and that has also been recieved very well.

The only problem with the Kindle is that it doesn’t display PDF and HTML files and so you will not be able to view a lot of ebooks that you might have collected over the years, will not be viewable on the device.

The Kindle uses the .mobi format for displaying files and if you’re looking for a utility to convert PDF and HTML files to the .mobi format, you should give Auto Kindle a try.

It is a very simple tool which just does one job and does it well.

Control firefox with the keyboard using ubiquity

Sharninder — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 13:00:38 +0000

Well, actually, Ubiquity can do a lot more.

Ubiquity is a firefox extesion that is can really only be described as a launcher for the Internet, integrated with the web browser, which in this case is Firefox. Confused ?

Well, Let me explain. Ubiquity allows you to use your keyboard to give commands to the browser that’ll let you do anything that you would otherwise use the mouse for. So, for example, if you want to search for something using google. You can Just use the keyboard to instruct ubiquity to do that for you. If you want to search amazon for the latest gadgets, Ubiquity can do that too.

Ubiquity is like Quicksilver (or GNOME Do, if you’re so inclined) for the Internet browser.

To get started with Ubiquity, Install it from this location.

When Ubiquity is finished installing, you’ll see a page which among other things tell you the shortcut key that you can use to invoke Ubiquity, and lets you change that key to any key combination that you chose.

This is how Ubiquity looks like when you invoke it using the key combination that you chose.

Now, for something interesting. I’ll Start typing something in the Ubiquity window, say for example Google. As soon as I type G, ubiquity presents me with a list of options, The first one of which is Google, the second gcalculate, the third a command called get-email-address and so on.

If I want, I can, at this point just press G and space and start typing a search string. Ubiquity will automatically present me the search results in its window. If I press the down arrow key, the focus will shift to the gcalculator option and now if I type 3+3, ubiquity will tell me the value of the expression 3+3.

You can even manage your calender using Ubiquity. Ubiquity comes with built-in support for Google Calender only, so make sure you are logged into your Google Calender and then issue the add-calender command.

Actually, just start type Add and you’ll see that add-calender is the first option. Start typing the event just after the add. So, the full command will look something like this – add Send birthday cake to John. That’s all !

As you can see Ubiquity can be a very cool and useful extension. It can help you save lots of time, definitely raise your productivity level a few notches up and make you popular with the girls … Well, maybe not the last one, but the rest it can definitely manage.

Play around with Ubiquity and let us know in the comments how you like it.

Convert videos for your iPhone with free tools

Sharninder — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 18:00:05 +0000

The iPhone is a wonderful device to watch videos thanks to it’s big and bright screen. The only problem I have with it is the limited number of video formats that it supports.

Most videos that I download from the net are in formats that the iPhone refuses to understand and play. I’ve tried searching online for utilities to convert videos for the iPhone, but it looks like almost all software available for this purpose online is either free or doesn’t do a good job. While freeware is almost non-existant (or of bad quality), a lot of shareware that is available insist on acting nasty and adding watermarks and other DRM to my videos.

I find this unacceptable and started looking online for some open source tools for this job and came across ffmpeg, which promises to solve all my problems.

FFmpeg is a complete solution to record, convert and stream audio and video. It supports more video and audio formats than most of us would care to remember.

The best part is that ffmpeg is cross platform and runs on almost all Unix like platforms (including Mac OS X) and Windows. It is bundled with almost all Linux distributions and for Mac OS X can be downloaded using the fink package manager and for windows is available from this link.

One problem with having such vast support for formats is the complexity it brings about. FFmpeg has hundreds of options to control almost every aspect of video and audio creation. And it’ll take a newbie ages to be able to read and even more time to understand those options.

After a lot of trial and errors, I think I’ve found the options that work for me and I’m sharing these in the hope that you guys will also find them useful.

ffmpeg -i INPUT_FILE -acodec libfaac -ab 128kb -vcodec mpeg4 -b 1200kb -mbd 2 -aic 2 -cmp 2 -subcmp 2 -s 320×180 -title “Some Title” OUTPUT_FILE.mp4

The input file can be in any of the formats that ffmpeg supports, which probably is more than you require. If in doubt, use ffmpeg is all that I can say.

The output file can be directly copied to the iPhone using itunes and should play on the device. The -s options specifies the dimensions of the file and the 320×240 means that the file will be optimized for display on the iPhone screen.

Create PDF files from any windows application for free

Sharninder — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 18:00:00 +0000

PDF is a file format created by Adobe for exchanging documents. The good thing about PDF is that the files retain the formatting and fonts even when viewed on a system different than the one they’ve been created on. That is the reason, PDF has become the de-facto format for sharing documents over the Internet.

For a long time, however, the only way to create PDF files was to buy and install Adobe’s Acrobat suite. The Acrobat suite, while very functional and nice, costs money and is expensive.

Since, Adobe has made the PDF standard open, a lot of third party tools have come which claim to be able to create and manipulate PDF files. CutePDF is one such tool.

Operating systems like Linux and OS X already come with built in tools or virtual printers which can create PDF files but nothing like this comes budled with Windows. CutePDF was written to solve that very problem.

Download the freeware version of CutePDF writer and install it on your Windows system. CutePDF needs another tool called ps2pdf to work and the installer will download it automatically from the CutePDF website.

After the installation has completed, you will see a new printer named CutePDF Writer in the printers list.
To convert any document to PDF, just use this printer that you just created for printing the file, instead of your regular physical printer.

That was simple, wasn’t it ? What tools do you guys use for working with PDF files ?

Geeky Ninja » Useful Utilities

Access and use ISO images as normal drives using ISODisk

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Track the time you spend on your computer with ManicTime

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How to remove DRM from iTunes

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How to create a secure and private network

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View PDF and HTML files on your Kindle

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Control firefox with the keyboard using ubiquity

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Convert videos for your iPhone with free tools

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Create PDF files from any windows application for free

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