Free mobile video converter – XMedia Recode

last week, I was downloading and testing few best mobile video converters available on the net. After a day of testing, I found that XMedia Recode is the best video converter that can convert videos for almost all mobiles. It has a list of mobile brands and models to select and it will convert the video compatible for that model. Best of it, it is a free software.

 

Once you installed it, click open file and select the video to be converted for your mobile. Then, in “Profile,” select the brand of your mobile and in the below list, select the model of your mobile. Then, click on the “Add Job” button in toolbar. Then, the “Encode” button will active and click it to convert. It also has an option to shut down the system automatically when the conversion completes.

You can also use it for normal video conversions. Choose the profile name “Custom” and you can see more than 20 types of formats you can convert your video into.

It can convert for Acer, Apple, Archos, Asus, BlackBerry, Cowon, Creative, Elson, Epson, Garmin-Asus, Hauppauge, HTC, Hyundai, Intenso, iRiver, LG, Loewe, Motorola, Nikon, Nintendo, Nokia, O2, Palm, Phillips, Pocket PC, Samsung, SanDisk, Sony Ericsson, Sony, Sony PlayStation 3, PSP, Toshiba, T-Mobile, Vodafone, Western Digital TV Box, Xbox, Zune, and YouTube (as of version 2.2.4.2).

How It is possible to make Inkjet printing cheaper and cost-effective

Everybody knows that cartridges are very costly. Keeping that in my mind, I have started doing homework before purchasing one. Went to eBay and searched for compatible cartridge prices of different brands (they are cheaper than original cartridges). Cannon and Epson had cheap compatible cartridges.

While searching on eBay, I came across a listing of refillable cartridges for Epson. That listing instantly attracted me. It costs around Rs.600 for four cartridges (CMYK) and all comes with plastic lids, which you can open and fill the ink “n” number of times. eBay also has a listing of CISS (Continuous Ink Supply System) for various printer models of Epson, which makes printing cost dirt cheap.

Looking at these options, I settled down with Epson. I then did my research for an Epson All-in-one model, which is cheap. Epson Stylus TX121 was the cheapest and better one. Then, visited all the online e-commerce sites and found that IndiaPlaza offer is lowest. After applying a coupon code, I got it at Rs.2600 (MRP Rs.3999).
If you are using original cartridges, color print costs anywhere from 4-8 rupees for an A4 print (photo), black costs Rs.1-3 (depends on the brand). If you are using compatible cartridges, you can cut the price to half.

Refillable 73N cartridges with four color bottles of 100 mL each cost Rs.1050 on eBay. Only ink costs Rs.700, which you can use to fill all the cartridges 10 times. Assuming that one fill prints 300 prints (black and color), it will give a total of 3000 prints, which makes the cost per print 24 paise. If you are only printing black, then it becomes very, very cheap.  

You might have doubt that these inks will damage the printer head, but think, two or three sets of original cartridges cost is equivalent to your printer. I have already experimented with my printer and the quality of print is same as that of original ink. What all you need to keep in mind is to purchase products from eBay Power Sellers and seller with good feedback. They tend to sell good products to maintain their feedback.

PS: Epson Printer with Ink Tank System is available at Rs.6800 on eBay.

How to stop Telemarketing Calls

I hope you have enjoyed my previous post on funny telemarketing calls.  This post will guide you on stopping telemarketing calls.   After I got the credit card, these annoying calls have increased in number. I was aware of “National Do Not Call Registry,” but never tried it. As the calls increased to 4-5 a day, I registered for NDNC and surprisingly never received a marketing call thereafter. 

What is “National Do Not Call Registry” ?

The NDNC Registry is a database having the list of all telephone numbers of the subscribers who do not want to receive Unsolicited Commercial Communication (UCC). Telephone subscriber (Landline or mobile) who does not wish to receive UCC, can register their telephone number with their telecom service provider for inclusion in the NDNC or directly as mentioned below. Telecom Service Provider shall upload the telephone number to the NDNC within 45 days of receipt. The telemarketers will have to verify their calling telephone numbers list with the NDNC registry before making a call.

How to register for it?

 
Dial 1909 or SMS to 1909 with message ‘START DND‘ (remove quotes).

Register for it and get rid of annoying telemarketing calls.

Do Not call Registry of other countries:

Do Not Call Registry is also maintained by several other countries.  Below is a list of countries and their websites to help the international visitors/subscribes of my blog.

USA: https://www.donotcall.gov/
Australia: https://www.donotcall.gov.au/
Canada: https://www.lnnte-dncl.gc.ca/index-eng
NewZealand:http://www.nzma.simplicitycrm.com/editors/content.aspx?config=NRR_DoNotCall
UK: http://www.mpsonline.org.uk/tps/

How to know from where the junk SMS has come from..

I always wondered what those two letters added to the sender name of a bulk/junk SMS refers to, like TD-ICICIBANK, BD-FORTUNE, etc. These days, the junk SMS has become a pain and I get unsolicited spam SMSes from Vastu consultant, Astrologer, Real Estate agents, LIC agents, which I have not opted to receive. Today, an article in Times of India says that these junk SMSes have reached an astounding number of 100 million a day sent throughout the country. As the SMS cost has become so cheap, it has become a low-cost marketing trick to reach the targeted customers. 

As per TRAI, every bulk SMS must have 2 letters as initials: the 1st letter stands for the service provider sending SMS and the 2nd for location eg, TD is Tata Delhi, BD is BSNL Delhi, etc.

This is the complete chart:
 

Service Provider	Code
Aircel	D
Airtel	A
BSNL	B
BPL Mobile	L
Loop Telecom	L
Idea Cellular	I
MTNL	M
Reliance Comm	R
Reliance Telecom	E
Spice Comm	P
Tata Teleservices	T
Vodafone	V

So, now you can find out the origination of bulk SMS using the above chart. If you are getting huge number of bulk SMS daily, register for National Do Not Call Registry and see if it can be of help.

Adobe Reader direct download

I already dumped Adobe Reader for Foxit Reader as it is tiny in size, runs fast, and consumes less system resources. Today, I was checking a mutual fund consolidated statement, which was not opening in Foxit as it was intended to be opened only in Adobe Reader. So, I went to Adobe Reader website to download it. I was browsing through Firefox. It downloaded a plugin called “Adobe DLM” to download the reader. It asked me to restart the Firefox and then started downloading McAfee Scanner without my permission, installed it, and then started downloading Adobe Reader. It looked to me nonsense. Why the hell we need the plugin and a virus scanner just to install the Reader.

So, I did a search on the Internet and found the direct FTP link to it. I thought it would post this direct link for the people to download easily without going through the hassles of plugins and scanners. Here you go:

Go to ftp://ftp.adobe.com/pub/adobe/reader/

Click on your respective operating system. Hint: win for Windows. Then, select the latest version. At the time of this writing, the latest version is 9.x. Then, the latest release. Again, at the time of this writing, the latest release was 9.4.0. Click on that and then, select you language. For English, select en_US. You can download either EXE file or MSI. EXE is smaller in size, so it will be the best option.

I have Deep Freeze installed in my system, so after installing Adobe Reader and reading the Adobe-only Mutual Fund Statement, I just restarted my system and it went back to its earlier state making it Foxit Reader-Only system

free Audio File Joiner and Converter

Today, I had to join around 20 .wav audio files into one. I have downloaded few free software and tested. The best one I have chosen is All Free mp3 Joiner with lots of options. It can convert files between various formats. Even, you can merge audio files of various formats and convert them into one format at a click. It can export the files into .wav, .ogg, .mp3, .wma. You can also change channels, sample rate, and bit depth. You can drag the files up or down to rearrange the order.

Get it here: http://www.allfreevideoconverter.com/freemp3joiner/index.html

TXT to RTF and HTML Converter

Found this tiny (600KB) piece of software that can convert TXT files to RTF and HTML files. It is called Docfrac. It is an Open Source, free software. It can converter a single or a batch of files at a go. It also has the ability to converter vice versa too.
Conversion Formats

• RTF to HTML
• RTF to TEXT
• HTML to RTF
• HTML to TEXT
• TEXT to RTF
• TEXT to HTML

I came across number of bulky software costing anywhere from $30 to $150 before landing on this open source project. Thanks to the developer
Get it from the SourceFourge project page: http://sourceforge.net/projects/docfrac/ or Click Here.

Increase system volume - Free

I have been noticing that one of my systems’ volume is very low compared to the other. I have checked all the settings to increase it, but in vain. Then, done a search for the freeware tools to increase the volume and found this little software, which found that I am using only half of the volume of my system. The volume controls were showing wrongly as full.

This software is called VolumeTouch, which primarily aims at increasing and decreasing the system volume using the keyboard and mouse. You can assign a specific key combination to initiate the control and then using arrow keys or mouse scroll, you can control the system volume.

But, the interesting thing was when I double clicked the tray icon of VolumeTouch, it opened Master Volume showing the exact volume I was using.  So, if you think your system’s volume is low, you can try this software and see whether it is the maximum you can get.

Software: VolumeTouch Site URL: https://notendur.hi.is/antoni/volumetouch/ (showing “Not Found” error at the time of writing) Download: Click Here

I see a lot of newbie webmasters asking how to know whether a link is DoFollow or NoFollow in the webmaster forums.  Some people say just see the source code to see whether there is a “NoFollow” attribute to the link.  If it is not there, it is a DoFollow.  But what if you are checking a group of websites for link building.  It is tedious and time taking task, right!'

 

What is DoFollow attribute?
It is a hyperlink attribute which tells search engines not to pass any significance or value to the outbound links.  If your site has a Google Pagerank (PR) of 5 and a DoFollow link goes to another site, which has zero PR, it is going to get some PR when Google updates the Pagerank.  NoFollow also prevents spammers spamming the high PR sites with their spam links.

So, what is the easy way to check whether a site is DoFollow or NoFollow easily?  Here comes the tiny Firefox plugin, NoDoFollow, which makes it pretty easier.  Get the plugin here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5687

Once, it is installed you can see the option of “NoDoFollow” in the right click context menu.  Now launch a webpage, right click, and select the option.  That’s all, the plugin will turn all the DoFollow links to light blue and NoFollow links to light red.  It is so simple.  Isn’t it!

Saving Private Hard Disk

Today I am going to talk about something which gives us nightmares. Yes, even with the most sophisticated preparation, it is still bound to happen sooner or later - Hard Disk Failure. Let start this a few weeks back. While slipstreaming a XP Disc, I found that my hard disk was particularly slow. In fact, it even stalled at some point. I know I had a WD Green HDD which is not really state of the art in terms of speed, but I should not be expecting the HDD to stall anyway.
So, I check my SMART statistic via my Hard Disk Sentinel. While this program doesn't fix anything, it does tell you what happened on your HDD on the hardware level. In this case, I see a huge number of bad clusters detected and there had been a lot of relocation as a results. This is a good tell tale sign the HDD is going to fail or at least you will lose data if you do nothing about it.
If you are interested in getting Hard Disk Sentinel, it can be purchased here: http://www.hdsentinel.com/
Now, I am going to talk about 2 tools which I have in mind. They are :

1. Spinrite 6 ( http://www.grc.com/spinrite.htm )
2. HDD Regenerator 1.7.1 ( http://www.dposoft.net/ )

Spinrit 6 is the latest version, but for HDD Regenerator, there is a 2011 version which actually works in Windows. Since I did not have that, I have to fall back to the good old DOS version 1.7.1. The main differences for these programs are as follows:

1. Spinrite can process ONLY your data area and leave those empty spaces alone. This is good enough if you want to recover the data and go RMA / Exchange the HDD.
2. HDD Regenerator processes ALL of the HDD area including empty spaces. This is good if you plan to KEEP the HDD since checking the empty space will preempt any possible failure in the future in those area.

I prepared for the worst and go for option 2 anyway although it took much much more time. Also considering that HDD Regenerator saved my ass once in:

http://nemesisv.blogspot.com/2006/12/hd-regenerator-vs-spinrite.html

HDD Regenrator will take a considerable time, but here is where paying for a Raptor pays out. The RAW speed of your HDD is what counts here. It is also rare that HDD Regenrator cannot read out and relocated the data unless the HDD is really gone BAD in a very bad way. In which case, you should savage whatever you have and RMA the HDD. 

Needless to say, the HDD was saved, and the bad cluster counted also return to normal as checked in SMART. It could be just magnetic retention problem. But I guess I was lucky. But in this case, maybe using Spinrite would had saved me some time. 

I would know many readers will think that it is really expensive considering they cost about USD$80-100 raw. And I also know that there are many so called "cracked" editions of these software floating around. You know that I do not encourage piracy and I won't here. Think about this. It is your data which matters. Will you trust a "cracked" version of the program which may have a chance that it is damaged or even worsed trojanized. Instead of saving your data, it can corrupts it or send it out somewhere. I think I will not take the risk even if it is slim. When it comes to data, I will deem it as priceless, so USD$100 is nothing compared to it. Well, if you really want to be cheap about it, you can share it with a friend or even better, buy a different one each so that you can compare. 

These tools are life saver when shit happens. And all we can hope is that day does come (too often).