Tag Archives: opensource

Batch Download All TED Videos With A Single Click via TED Downloader

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TED (Technology Entertainment & Design) is a global set of conferences devoted to spreading ideas that address a wide range of topics. Various influential personalities have addressed the conference from time to time including Bill Gates, Bill Clinton, Salman Khan, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, just to name a few. Due to this, the conference has attracted a large set of fandom and followers. Last year, we covered TED Grabber, an open source application that generates links for every TED video that can then be downloaded with any download manager, and supports downloading of subtitles in any language. If you found the download procedure a bit complicated and were looking for rather an easier solution then give TED Downloader a shot. It is another open source application aimed at simplifying the process of downloading videos from TED. Instead of grabbing each video individually, the application enables you to batch download all videos available on the TED website at once, in Low, Regular or High quality. Check out how TED Downloader works after the jump. Read More

Receive Periodic Screenshots Of A Remote System With Network Spy

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Network Spy is an open source application that provides the option to remotely monitor a system by receiving periodic screenshots of the desktop. This application can be used by both novice and advanced users for various reasons. The screenshots from a remote PC can be used for parental monitoring, to keep an eye on employees in a company, and to monitor a server. For example, if you are running updates on a server, you might be interested in periodically checking the progress of the updates. This can help system administrators avoid continually logging into a server via remote desktop to view server status. Likewise, you can also learn if a server is encountering errors by receiving screenshots. Read More

Automatically Organize Your Documents After Scanning With FlashJetScan

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FlashJetScan is a a utility to scan and automatically organize documents in selected source directories according to pre-defined name and date stamps. It automatically detects all connected scanning devices, and manages documents in a logical order to help users easily find them afterwards. You can create multiple categories and label them to automatically sort and save scanned documents. For example, a category by the name of 'bills' can be created, and all scanned bills can be saved using this category to automatically save them to the "Bills" folder. Read More

Vista Services Optimizer: Manage Windows Services To Speed Up PC

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When optimizing Windows to acquire smooth performance, it is necessary to configure Windows services in order to manage the execution of backend services according to user requirement. Vista Services Optimizer is an open source Windows services’ optimization utility for Windows Vista and Windows 7, which enables you to adjust and tweak your Windows services within an easy-to-use GUI. This application provides a comprehensive set of options to automate the execution and halt of Windows services, thus better suiting the needs of all kinds of users, including generic users, gamers, network administrators and others of the like. Read More

GO Contact Sync Mod: Fully Synchronize Google Contacts With MS Outlook

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Last year, we covered Go Contact Sync, which is an open source application for synchronizing Google Contacts with MS Outlook, and vice versa. Since our review, this application has been updated with a few more options that allow more robust synchronization of contacts. These include synchronization of contacts (and not just deleted contacts as was the case in the older version) along with synchronization of notes and proxy setting configuration. Read More

Gnote Is A Lightweight Tomboy Alternative With Similar Functionality

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In a previous post, we reviewed Tomboy, which is an open source note taking application that comes pre-installed with Linux distributions like Ubuntu. This time we have Gnote, a lightweight C++ clone of Tomboy, which is free from mono runtime dependency. It is a part of the GNOME desktop with features like full-text search, inter-note linking, font styling (bold, italic, strikeout, highlight) , bulleted lists and undo/redo options. Read More

Synchronize Client Computers With Time Clock Servers Using NetTime

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The Windows clock is normally kept in sync by using online resources provided by default (within the Windows operating system). Another method can be to deploy a script via the Active Directory in order to apply a specific time across several client computers. Many businesses are heavily dependent upon time management across multiple time zones. This is particularly the case for companies which run call centers and business process outsourcing services, as they often require catering for customers across multiple regions. In such a case, it becomes necessary to shift the clock settings of client computers according to the kind of customers that the agents are catering for, so that they can mange their tasks according to the time zone of clients. Furthermore, any delays in changing the time clock by the network administrator can result in coordination issues for employees and can even lead to revenue loss. This is because the time clock not only provides employees with knowledge of the current time in a specific region, but may also be used by applications for performing scheduled tasks. Read More

FocusWriter Provides A Distraction Free Environment For Writers

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Writing is a task best accomplished when there is nothing to distract you from the project at hand. Whether you're a story writer working on your novel, a student who needs to meet the dead line of his assignment, or a journalist who must jot down the news broke out early morning. Sometimes, it so happens that even the interface of an application can start to distract you from the article or novel you are working on, causing you to lose focus. FocusWriter Portable is, as the name suggests, is a portable application that is designed to offer a minimalist interface, providing you with a distraction free environment, in order to keep you focused on what you are writing. The full screen mode of the application offers only a blank page with a cursor, leaving you and your mind with a cluttered free environment. It does not mean that FocusWriter portable is void of text editing features; it offers you all the basic text editing options such as Bold, Italic, Underline, Align Text etc. You can also change background themes of the application and set daily goals for writing a minimum number of words per day. Read More

Automatically Upload Screenshots To DropBox With CloudShot

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Screenshots, or even simple images, add flavor to whatever you are writing in an article. Images are used whenever you want to make the article more interesting to the reader, while screenshots are useful in situations when you are explaining something important to the reader and you feel that words alone will not be enough to get the meaning across. We have previously reviewed a lot of screenshot taking tools like GreenShot that lets you capture screenshots of a particular region, a window and whole screen, and Shotty, for taking high quality delayed screenshots of complete windows with the Aero Glass effect included. The screenshot tool offered today is rather similar in functionality, but with one added twist. In this post, we are bringing to you CloudShot, an open source application that allows integration of your DropBox account. It lets you take screenshots of any selected region or complete windows, and directly puts them in your DropBox account, enabling you to accesses your screenshots from multiple access points. It can save screenshots in JPG and PNG format, and keeps a history of 10 recent screenshots. Read on to find out more. Read More

Backup, Restore And Verify Disk Images With ODIN

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ODIN is a freeware utility to backup and restore hard drive volumes, and even complete hard drives for Windows-based operating systems. ODIN can be run in two modes i.e. with a GUI or from a the command line. You can create or restore an entire disk image of used clusters, and run snapshots from command line or with the GUI (Graphical user Interface). The command line mode can be useful for automating tasks running from scripts. Odin also provides the utility to verify backup image to check for damaged disk image files. The created backup files can be split into different chunks and burned on a CD/DVD or saved on the local drive. Read More

gfxCardStatus: Switch Between MacBook Pro Graphic Cards Based On Power Source

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If your Mac has both internal GPU and external graphic card installed on expansion slot, then you often have to check that which GPU is in use. Since it’s quite tiring to keep track of which graphic card your Mac is using, you may need an application that can show the currently used GPU. gfxCardStatus is an application for MacBook Pro, which not only shows the current graphic card, but also lets you switch between internal and discrete graphic cards with a click. The utility operates from system menu bar, and keeps a check on available graphic units. The 'i' icon in menu bar signifies that Intel graphic cars is being used, whereas the 'n' represents NVIDIA GeForce GPU. Read More

Shoozla: Download & Embed Album Art Covers Into Songs With A Click

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Gone are the days when you'd go to your local music store and buy a couple new CDs containing your favorite songs. Time has changed now as you can grab en entire album off the internet. Just like the cover arts of a physical album, its good to have an album art on your computer as well, both for aesthetics and ergonomics factors. If you are quite fond of album covers then you must know that there are a lot of application out there like Creevity and Cover Retriever that download album art for songs, but the problem is that they don’t embed the album art into the ID3v2 metadata container of music files. A an extremely handsome solution for this matter i came across is Shoozla, which is an open source music tag editing application that facilitates you to embed album covers in your music’s metadata. The application can download album art from Last.fm and Play.me, and embed it to your music files in one single process. You can view the music files with or without album art, in separate tabs. Keep reading for more details on Shoozla. Read More

PictureSorter: Organize Camera Pictures & Videos Into Make-Model-Date Folders

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Organizing photos is as important as organizing your wardrobe. Keep piling them up randomly and soon you will be in a tedious situation to manage them. For instance, snaps you took last summer doesn't have any place in your friend's wedding folder. Likewise, your last trip to Berlin was not in India. Some people give exceptional attention to detail in organizing their pictures, however, if you don't get the time to organize the massive archive of camera photos and videos into folders, PictureSorter may help you out. It's an open source application that sorts your images and videos by make and model of the camera, and the date they were taken on, the latter of which is quite helpful to create a Timeline. The application has the ability to search directories recursively, and read EXIF data from JPEG images and THM (movies) files. Based on metadata, PictureSorter automatically organizes images and videos into a hierarchy of camera make & model, followed by date-wise created folders. More details up ahead. Read More

Simple Comic For Mac: Open Multiple Comics & Export Pages As JPG

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Simple Comic is an intuitive comic reader for Mac OS X that will enhance your comic reading experience by letting you control the way you want comics to appear. Not only does it allow you to change the page layout, it also lets you change the page order from left to right and vice versa and scale pages to 3 sizes including original size, window fit and horizontal fit.  While it has the ability to open multiple comic archives at the same time, it supports CBZ, CBR, ZIP, RST, TAR, 7Z, LHA and many other types of digital comic formats. Apart from pre-defined page scaling modes, you can zoom in on defined area and use page rotation options to change the orientation of comics. Furthermore, it enables you to extract individual pages from the comics archive; just use command-c hotkey combination and select the page you want to extract to local location as image. Read More

Flickr Photo Downloader: Download Flickr Images From Public Profiles

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We have previously reviewed a number of Flickr image editing and batch downloading applications, like Flickr Edit and Bulkr. However, such applications are either restricted to downloading images from personal accounts or have convoluted settings and are often resource hogs. Recently, we came across a light weight Flickr batch download application known as Flickr Photo Downloader. Despite being a Java-based program, it has a memory stamp of just 12 MB (approximately), and provides simplified options for downloading images from any Flickr profile that has made images public. Read More

Easily Recover Permanently Deleted Files With Kickass Undelete

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We have all come across situations where we felt the need to restore a file that was deleted even from the Recycle Bin. Well it sure seems to be a headache, as losing important file, especially by mistake, is nothing short of a severe accident. But one thing you should know is that data recovery is possible even when the files have been deleted from the hard disk, as only the reference to their location in directory structure is removed, and the space they occupy becomes available to write more data. In short, the files are not actually deleted but are overwritten by other files. So, its quite plausible to retrieve the original file before any data is overwritten on that space. There are various file recovery tools that need no introduction, they aid you in recovering the lost files to some extent. Such file recovery solution we found is Kickass Undelete. It is a portable recovery tool for Windows which can recover all the deleted files on your hard drive or removable flash drive. It's quite easy to use which both advance and novice users would give a warm welcome. Lets find out how it works. Read More

Translate Notepad++ Plugin Translates Text Between Multiple Languages

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Different text editors provide you with various options that allow you to makes changes to your documents, and other text related files. Some text editors are aimed at making basic editing functions easier, while others are created in order to make the complex functions, such as writing programming languages in their proper syntax, easier for the developers. Choosing a proper text editor before you start coding is a must in order for you to be productive. Notepad++ is a feature-rich alternative to the native Windows Notepad with a lot more flexibility and usability. While most good software are full of features, what makes it a better Notepad application is all the plugins that can be installed to increase its range of usability. Translate is a plugin for Notepad++, which lets you translate text from one language to another without leaving the application. You can set Translate to auto detect the source language, or define custom source and destination languages. It also lets you translate to and from the source language just with the click of a button. More on Translate after the break. Read More

Calculate And Check Integrity Of Files & Registry With Object Monitor

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Checking the integrity of files lets you know if the file that you just downloaded is corrupt or not. Hackers can get on to a website and, either change, or modify the file available for download. This allows them to install their own code on your computer that helps then in performing malicious activity on, or through your computer. Object Monitor is an open source application which allows you to check the integrity of your files and registry keys. The application will let you use different algorithms for checking integrity such as CRC16, MD5, SHA1 and Size. You can add files and registries individually or select a parent folder to create a list. Once a list is created, Object Monitor allows you to save the list, enabling you to easily access it the next time. Reports of the list can be generated in HTML and Rich text format and a log file is created for every performed action to save the data for future use. Read More

Speak Up Lets You Read, Translate And Record Text With Ease

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Why read the text on your computer when you can just listen to it? Text to speech applications come in handy in situations where you want to read large amounts of text. For instance, if you download an e-book, you might want to listen to text. Staring at the screen for long hours can also put stress on your eyes. However, you need a good text to speech tool to properly enjoy this feature. If you are in search of a text-to-speech application that can do more than just read text, give Speak Up a try. Speak Up is an open source, text-to-speech application that reads text, records speech, translates text using Google translator, allows you to toggle Windows Speech Recognition and record audio. Moreover, it lets you change the volume, rate of speech and add different male and female voices to listen to text. Speak Up can read a whole document, or you can paste some part of the text into the application. More on this after the break. Read More

Retriev.er Is An Easy To Use GUI For rsync

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We have previously reviewed a number of rsync GUI applications that enable synchronization of your local and offsite files with powerful backend agent of rysnc. Retriev.er is a portable application which uses rsync as the backend agent to perform synchronization between source and target locations. Unlike previously reviewed rsync-based Grsync and Qtd Sync tools, it has a more simplified interface, and doesn't require configuring any type of settings.  For those who aren't familiar with rsync, it is a Command Line tool for Windows & UNIX to synchronize files and directories. What makes rsync quite handy is the ability to support a wide range of features and options that help users customize the synchronization jobs as per requirements. Read More