Tuesday, January 29, 2008

DeltaCopy - Rsync for Windows

"In general terms, DeltaCopy is an open source, fast incremental backup program. Let's say you have to backup one file that is 500 MB every night. A normal file copy would copy the entire file even if a few bytes have changed. DeltaCopy, on the other hand, would only copy the part of file that has actually been modified. This reduces the data transfer to just a small fraction of 500 MB saving time and network bandwidth.

In technical terms, DeltaCopy is a "Windows Friendly" wrapper around the Rsync program, currently maintained by Wayne Davison. "rsync" is primarily designed for Unix/Linux/BSD systems. Although ports are available for Windows, they typically require downloading Cygwin libraries and manual configuration."

http://www.aboutmyip.com/AboutMyXApp/DeltaCopy.jsp

I initially found this program while reading an article on using FreeNAS to back up windows machines: http://www.dailycupoftech.com/windows-backup-with-rsync-and-freenas/

Wednesday, January 23, 2008

PDF-T-Maker

"You create documents in Microsoft Word, spare no effort to produce proper headings, lists of contents, links and cross references, an index, and want to pass on the document as PDF file? You want to produce rich PDF files which contain all meta information from your Word document as bookmarks, hyperlinks, comments etc.? You look for a solution that costs little or even nothing?

Your solution could be PDF-T-Maker: PDF-T-Maker is an add-in to Word. Similar to almost any PDF converter, as first step PDF-T-Maker converts your Word document into a PostScript file. You can send this PostScript file through a distiller, that generates the PDF file from it. As distiller you may use stand-alone solutions such as Adobe Distiller or GhostScript as well as pre-configured, highly automated solutions such as FreePDF XP, qvPDF, PDFCreator etc. This way, with a minimum of effort you can configure a one-click solution that does not cost a penny."

Works with PDFCreator, apparently. I found the following comment in the release notes for PDFCreator v 0.9.5:

"No hyperlinks possible (Hyperlinks for MS Word are possible with the combination of PDF-T-Maker and PDFCreator."

wxCommunicator

"wxCommunicator is a cross platform open source SIP softphone enabling users to make multiple calls, use several accounts, chat and create conferences. It is very configurable and should work with any VoIP provider. It is based on customized sipXtapi client library and wxWidgets 2.8.x GUI library and distributed under GNU GPL version 2 license."

Sunday, December 30, 2007

OpenVPN

OpenVPN - An Open Source SSL VPN Solution by James Yonan

"OpenVPN is a full-featured SSL VPN solution which can accomodate a wide range of configurations, including remote access, site-to-site VPNs, WiFi security, and enterprise-scale remote access solutions with load balancing, failover, and fine-grained access-controls"

Speedtest.net - Bandwidth Speed Testing

Speedtest.net - A free bandwidth speed testing site with a very slick interface.

"Speedtest.net is a broadband connection analysis tool with a huge selection of geographically dispersed testing servers."

Wednesday, October 24, 2007

Free WinUnRAR

"Free WinUnRAR is a little and easy to use utility. If you have it installed, you are able to decompress '.RAR' files in a fast and simple way (shell context menu - right click on file)."

Works great. A nice alternative to commercial products such as WinRAR when all you need to do is decompress the occasional RAR compressed file.

Monday, October 15, 2007

ICSWEEP – Free Command-Line Tool to Clear the Temporary Internet Files Cache of ALL User Profiles

"ICSWEEP is a command-line utility to clear the Temporary Internet Files cache of ALL user profiles that are NOT in use when this command is executed.

This utility was written for the purpose of allowing a SINGLE command to identify and clear Temporary Internet Files cache of ALL user profiles currently NOT in use. This tool could be simply run from the command line at any time, or added as a SCHEDULED TASK for regular cleaning of user profiles, reducing the overall size of a profile and saving disk space for locally based profiles."

Wednesday, October 03, 2007

Inkscape

Inkscape is "An Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, or Xara X, using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format.

Inkscape supports many advanced SVG features (markers, clones, alpha blending, etc.) and great care is taken in designing a streamlined interface. It is very easy to edit nodes, perform complex path operations, trace bitmaps and much more."

"Aiming for capabilities similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, Visio, etc."

Monday, September 17, 2007

Miro

Miro - free, open source internet tv and video player.
"Play virtually any type of video file."

Sunday, September 16, 2007

ImgBurn

"ImgBurn is a lightweight CD / DVD / HD DVD / Blu-ray burning application that everyone should have in their toolkit!
It has several 'Modes', each one for performing a different task:
Read - Read a disc to an image file
Build - Create an image file (ISO) from files on your computer or network - or you can write the files directly to a disc
Write - Write an image file (ISO) to a disc
Verify - Check a disc is 100% readable. Optionally, you can also have ImgBurn compare it against a given image file to ensure the actual data is correct
Discovery - Put your drive / media to the test! Used in combination with DVDInfoPro, you can check the quality of the burns your drive is producing."