Faculty of Arts & Philosophy

Alternative for Dropbox: IDriveSync

gbonamie — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 09:53:10 +0000

If you are not yet using dropbox, then maybe you should start considering it -it’s a fantastic tool for synchronizing your important files across multiple computers.
If you are already a dropbox fan, then you might be interested in IDriveSync, which does essentially the same thing but with a few more options. Check out this review on downloadsquad for more details: http://ping.fm/Fq855

Ping.fm Come together!

gbonamie — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 14:23:34 +0000

In his blog post “Social media and trying to drink from a firehose” (http://ping.fm/S7WZN) Jason Renshaw comes up with a few interesting observations -seasoned Twitter & facebook users will undoubtedly recognize that sometimes it really can get too much, and that you can indeed spend hours trying to keep up with things. Luckily enough, there are also a couple of applications that allow users to keep all their social accounts manageable. Tweetdeck is one application you can use to post messages to your various -Ping.fm is another. While the first is definitely very user friendly and easily allows for posting to various twitter accounts, it only supports one facebook-account. Ping.fm on the other hand is much more flexible, giving you the possibility to, for instance, post one message to several social accounts such as Twitter & Facebook, as well as blogs -at the same time. Setting up your own Ping.fm account only takes a few minutes, and once you’re ready you only have to feed all your accounts in the system -et walla, you can start mass-posting What I find particularly interesting is the ability to create custom groups: I have created a group “Blogs” for instance, which comprises a blog of our own (blog.letslearnit.org) as well as a WordPress hosted blog (flwiblogt.wordpress.com). Posting to both blogs simultaneously is now soooo easy! Downside is that the posts have no editor whatsoever -inserting images, or even simple links is not possible. Nevertheless, if you’re using multiple social accounts, then I do think Ping.fm is worthwhile exploring, as I will do now -I’ll probably come back to this in the upcoming days. Stay tuned!

Endnote: Import references from Google Scholar

gbonamie — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 15:31:07 +0000

Endnote itself offers a huge collection of databases & catalogues, but should you still be looking for more sources, then maybe you can check out Google Scholar.

In order te import references from Google Scholar into Endnote, you need to tweak the Scholar settings a little. Here’s how:

First, navigate to http://scholar.google.com en enter a search string.
On top of your screen, click on Scholar Preferences.

Pas eerste de scholar settings aan

In the Bibliography manager section (right at the bottom of the list) select Endnote in the pulldown menu. Don’t forget to click on . Selecteer daar in het uitklapmenu Endnote en klik rechts onderaan vervolgens op save preferences.

Selecteer Endnote in het uitklapmenu

Each search result can now be imported into Endnote X (and higher)!

en je bent klaar om te importeren

Downloading from Youtube with Free Download Manager

gbonamie — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 11:45:34 +0000

Downloading films from Youtube or other flashbased sites used to be rather cumbersome, but recently a whole lot of web services came to the surface that not only download youtube films for you, but also convert them -in this blog post you can find more information on Zamzar & youconvertit. This time I want to point your attention to Free Download Manager, a nice piece of open source software which is at the same time also quite user friendly.

Free Download Manager

Start up the programme and a wizard walks you through everything: entering your network settings, determining downloadspeed and the likes. Once all that’s finished, it suffices to enter the URL of the Youtubefilm you want to download and FDM takes care of the rest. Nuff said -or wait: maybe it’s interesting to know that you can download 20 files simultaneously. There’s also an auto resume in FDM, which -what’s in a name- nicely resumes downloads as soon as you’re connected to the Web.

Should you want to do so, then you can also activate community options, which boils down to FDM checking if your download is considered dangerous by the community or not. I haven’t had one of them dangerous downloads yet, but that’s of course because I am such a good person

FDM allows you not only to download flash videofiles but also to convert them to any file format of your liking. WHat’s more, you can even adjust the resolution or the bitrate if you want. You won’t find exotic file formats among the compatible extensions, but the most popular ones are there: avi, wmv, mpeg, mp3, mp4, but rather surprising, no quicktime, which may be a disappointment for many.

Those among you who want to start downloading entire websites will be interested in the HTML Spintool, which also allows you to determine how deep you want to go (link depth). You’ll find more candy here, such as a download manager which allows you to share your downloads immediately with the community.

Is all pixel perfect here then? Well, not quite: torrent downloads are somewhat problematic, as FDM will keep on uploading, even if there are no active downloads, which isn’t such good news in terms of your bandwith. Speaking about which, you can only choose between three built-in settings: light, medium & heavy, but nowhere can you actually enter numeric values for up- or download traffic. In spite of these shortcomings, I still do think FDM is worthwhile checking out.

Outlook at hand with Google Calendar Sync

gbonamie — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 13:55:25 +0000

Ok, I confess, I use Outlook -not because I’m a great fan of Microsof, but because it’s the one piece of software I have found that makes no mess of synchronizing with my pda. There may be other tools out there, but time is a luxury I don’t often have. However, there is one thing which I have always thought was a big downside of Outlook, and that is that it’s not a web-based application like the Google apps, especially because I really like them. Much to my surprise I found a tool which I can’t & shouldn’t keep to myself, as it’s just too perfect for me! Meet Google Calendar Sync.

Adjust the settings

Google Calendar Sync does exactly what it says: it synchronizes Outlook with your Google Calendar -admit it: this is so cool that you’re probably already downloading it. Even if you don’t actively use Google Calendar, this software is still useful, even if only for these reasons:

It’s a free online Outlook backup!
From the moment you’re online, you have your calendar at hand, even if you’re working on a public computer in, say, the city library.

Google Calendar Sync runs in your system tray and synchronizes every 120 minutesn although you can change this in 15 min. should you want to do so. You can tweak it so that the synchronisation only goes one way (only from Outlook to Google, for instance) or both ways. This is a no-brainer. Go & download it. Now.

Download from Youtube & conversion tools

gbonamie — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 15:50:06 +0000

There are quite a few among you looking for ways to download films from Youtube and other flash based video sites. Well, there are a couple of ways you can try.

Before you get started it may be interesting to know that Youtube works with Flash video (extension .flv). This does not necessarily make it harder to download or so, but if you plan to edit the video yourself, then flash video files present you with more problems than you probably want. Therefore, you’ll find in this blog not only ways to download flash films, but also to convert them to more easy file formats, such as quicktime, avi, mpeg, and the likes.

If you have a lot of time, then maybe you can give some of the many plugins for Firefox a try: DownloadthemAll or Downloadhelper are only a few random suggestions. If your only objective is to get the videofilms to your hard drive so that you can watch them any time, then these plugins may already suffice for you: they give you what you want, i.e. the video flash files in flv-format. You can watch these files with this excellent FLV-player. Although this is is maybe already what you were looking for in the first place, fact is and remains that flv-files are not all that practical -not every pc has its native flv-player, for instance. Quicktime or avi is in that context a much more workable and popular format. But how on earth do you convert an flv-file to a Quicktime, avi or mpeg? Well, the good news is: even if you don’t know anything about bitrates, resolution, or pixel aspect ratio’s, even then it is fairly easy to convert flv to avi: the web is there to help you. There are a couple of online resources that can not only download films from youtube but convert them at the same time for you -how handy is that! We’ll have a quick glance at MediaConvert, youconvertit and zamzar

MediaConvert is a free webservice that converts not only audio & video, but also textfiles to other file formats. The only thing you need is a browser -no extra software is required, you don’t even have to register on their site. MediaConvert is fairly simple and easy: navigate to a file on your harddrive or enter the internet location of the doc you want to convert, select the in- and output format and click on submit. When the conversion is ready, you’ll get a mail in your mailbox containing a download link. And that’s it!

MediaConvert can handle files up to 150 Mb, and that is probably the only limit. This service can handle practically any file format, going from popular video file formats (3G2, 3GP, AMV, ASF, AVI, DPG, DV, FLI, FLV, GIF, GVI, MKV, MOV, MP4, MPG, NSV, OGM, RM, SWF, VOB, WMV), audio formats (WAV, WMA, 3GP, MP3, OGG, AAC, AMR, FLAC, MPC, MMF, AU, AIFF, QCP), more than 60 graphical file formats, compression formats (7Z, BZ2, BZA, CAB, GZ, LHA, LZH, RAR, TAR, TGZ, YZ1, ZIP) and documents from such suites as Office, OpenOffice, Lotus 123, html, qhtml and what have you. Do you want to convert pdf to swf? No problem. An Access database to an Excel sheet? Piece of cake man!

YouConvertIt and Zamzar are very similar one stop-services where you upload a document (or enter its URL), choose the desired file format and where you receive a downloadlink in your mailbox. Both services are completely free and do a good job in converting the most popular file formats. Let’s start with Youconvertit.

Youconvertit.com can tackle audio, video, pictures or other file formats. The procedure is extremely simple: select the file on your pc, choose a file format, and click the button “convert it”. Once everything’s ready, you’ll receive a mail with a download link that will last for about 7 days. Youconvertit can work with 8 audio formats (AAC, MP3, WAV,..) 72 image formats (JPG, GIF, PNG, …), 13 video formats (AVI, WMV, 3GP, MP4, …) and 46 other file formats (DOC, PDF, …). You can convert up to 5 files simultaneously. What sets Youconvertit.com apart from MediaConvert or Zamzar is that here, there’s no ceiling to the file size. If you want to download films from Youtube, Metacafe or Google, click on “Convert online video” at the top of your screen, enter the URL of the film and choose the target file format.

Just like the others, Zamzar is a free conversion service that can convert video, audio, pictures or other documents to other file formats. Here too, you can convert up to 5 files simultaneously. The procedure is identical to the others, except for the fact that Zamzar only keeps the converted file 24 hours on their hard drive, so you’ll have to be quick! Another disadvantage, if you ask me, is Zamzar cannot handle files larger than 100 Mb. If you register, however, you can upload files up to 1 Gb -and that’s a lot of bandwith if you ask me, but still, it is possible. Zamzar too can handle the most frequently used file formats. If you want to convert films from Youtube, then, in “Step 1″, you’ll first have to click on URL and paste the URL of the youtube film. Steps 2, 3 & 4 are foolproof.

If you want to download Youtubefilms, or if you have a quicktime movie that you’ll have to convert to mp4, then these web services are perfect for you. Forget the Firefox plugins -these conversion services are not only much faster and easier, they also offer qualitative output. If you ask me, MediaConvert gets bronze; Zamzar & Youconvertit have much more eye candy and are a close match. Because they keep the converted files a bit longer, and because there’s not limit to the file size, my personal gold medal goes to Youconvertit. But let’s face it, Zamzar, how cool a name is that!

Audacity & Vista: stereo-mix gone?

gbonamie — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 10:44:14 +0000

If you are one of the many fans of Audacity, the much praised open source audio software, and you happen to have made the switch-voluntarily or not- to Vista, then maybe you have experienced some problems. Is audio recording in Audacity under XP fairly simple & straightforward a matter of selecting wave-out, stereo-mix, mono-mix or a similar recording device, in Vista this is unfortunately no longer the case, as you probably have experienced -otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this blog post now, would you? Don’t blame Audacity, however: Microsoft’s DRM (Digital Rights Management) is the leading villain character in this play. It all boils down to the fact that you can no longer simply record anything of your liking: wave-out doesn’t even appear among your recording devices. Is there really no work-around? Well, there is, but it’s perhaps best not to cry victory yet.

The silly thing is that, in spite of it not being visible, quite often wave-out is still a functional recording device; it is Vista that arrogantly hides it from its recording device panel. Now, to change its status so that stereo-mix does appear in that list, here’s what you can try. By the way, screenshots are from a Dutch Vista system -sorry for that, but I’m sure you’ll get the idea.

Go to Sound in the Control Panel’s classic view and select the Recording tab.
Click somewhere in the empty space in the central list pane (where the other recording devices appear) or right-click any of the devices listed. Make sure that “Show Disabled Devices” and “Show Disconnected Devices” are checked. Stereo Mix should show up (or mono-mix, whatuhear, or something similar).

Lift the veil!

If you’re lucky, this may already do it for you. Right-click on stereo-mix and set it as default.

audacity_opnameapparaten02

Open an Audacity project. The dropdown menu with recording devices will still be grayed out, but via Edit > Preferences you can select stereo-mix. Sweet.

Audacity settings

If you’re not so lucky (owners of a Sigmatel audiocard know what I’m talking about), then here’s something else you can try.

Go and find the XP-drivers for your audiocard. But I don’t have XP, I’m using Vista! Yes, I know, but just follow along. If you don’t know which audiocard you have in your system, then open up the control panel and choose System > Hardware > Device manager. You’ll find what you need under Audio, video & game settings. Google the name of your audiocard, and combine your search with download XP drivers or something similar and no doubt you’ll quickly find what you need.
Now here’s the trick: install the drivers in compatibility mode. This is how you proceed: open up an explorer (not Internet Explorer!), navigate to the drivers you just downloaded, right-click on them and choose Properties.
In the compatibility tab, choose Windows XP-SP2 in the pulldown. Confirm via Ok.

Change the compatibility mode for the drivers

In explorer double-click the drivers to start installing them -reboot if necessary. Cross your fingers a go and check your audio devices.

I hope this helps for you. Good luck…