Searching a useful video converter for mpg to divx conversion …

Over the weekend I tried several video converter alternatives to convert videos in mpg format as recorded with my TerraTec Home Cinema ( allowing me to receive DVB-T TV on my PC )  to a divx format my Panasonic DVD and Harddrive Recorder DMR-EX79 is able to read. So far I have evaluated the following alternatives:

Software	Worked ?	Comments	Prize
OJOsoft Total Video Converter	Yes	Very easy to use !	$ 26.95
Hamster Free Video Converter	No	Output was not readable by my Panasonic DMR-EX79, nor Windows Media Player	free
DivX Plus for Windows	No	Conversion hung up at 54 %, no further progress. Besides this tool comes with too many other features I probably never need.	€ 19.03
Dr. DivX 2.1 Beta 4		That’s basically DivX Plus under a different cover.
Advanced X Video Converter	No	Quality too poor when checking it out with VLC Media Player. Windows Media Player only played sound.	€ 22.92
Any Video Converter	No	Didn’t really seem to support DivX format.	free
4Free Video Converter	No	Doesn’t run properly under Windows Vista ( reports crashes during startup ). Allows to create AVI DivX file but it is not readable by my Panasonic DMR-EX79	free
Format Factory	Yes	Quiet easy to use. Produced good quality AVI DivX File ( 43 min yield 0.9 GByte in 11 minutes ). Plays fine with Windows Media Player and my Panasonic DMR-EX79. On the latter sometimes jerky, but this probably is a problem either with the player or my USB stick ( too slow ? ).	free

My favorites for week 17, 2011

Something to laugh: my favorite comic strip of the week – about redundancy

One road to simplification leads through reducing redundancy. Redundant solutions or processes lead to confusion, expensive overhead and loss of productivity. Thus, it is important to not introduce more redundancy in the attempt to reduce it or to “simplify”. Simplification  should mean throwing things away instead of adding more. Nicely illustrated in this Dilbert comic strip !

Something to watch: my favorite video clip of the week – about the smallest computer in the world

How small can you make a computer ? Well, this version, nicely presented by John, has a keyboard with just one key. John show us how to use it in this funny video “THE FUTURE TECHNOLOGY!”.

Something to enjoy: my favorite photo  on flickr under a Common Creative license – about Egypt

"Egypt" by NASA Goddard Photo and Video. This impressive photo from NASA shows Egypt in spring, where you can see the green Nile delta and vegetation zone following the river throughout the desert.  The photo was taken by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer aboard the Terra satellite on April 11th. Where the Nile begins to broaden and form the delta, the city of Cairo can be seen as a gray oval smudge.

Something to discover: my favorite bookmark of the week – about a nice little time saver for Lotus Notes

“Tired of typing the same thing again and again ? “ has been a question I recently asked in my blog when I introduced a little gadget I developed using AutoIt: TypeBot, a little tool letting you define phrases to be typed into windows with a particular title through a simple single click on that phrase. Meanwhile version 2 became available allowing you to add, change and delete your own phrases through the GUI, allowing to handle multiple INI-files and also coming with an executable so that you can use the tool without having to install AutoIt. Alan Lepofsky must have had a similar thought when he developed the Paste Information Application,  a little Lotus Notes database and tool to avoid re-typing the same things again and again, allowing you to paste pre-defined bits of information that you reuse often into Lotus Notes documents and mails with two simple clicks ( one to select that bit from a listbox, one to click OK ). In his blog he nicely describes the application and how to install it, and provides links to download the needed Lotus Notes database. I installed it on my Lotus Notes 8.5.1 client and it works like a charm.

Tired of typing the same thing again and again ?

Me too. If you find yourself re-typing the same thing again and again you are either doing something wrong or you are victim of a dump process, system or user interface. Part of working smarter to me is less typing.

I have been looking for a solution to auto-type particular strings for me I again and again need to input into some applications. Since a while I am using a tumblr blog to quickly collect photos, quotes, videos and links. Their gadget ( bookmarklet ) to post from a firefox or chrome browser works nicely more or less but requires me to type in my tags, and I found myself using always similar lengthy combination of tags, like e.g. “flickr, photo, bird, animal”.

My search for a solution was not successful, since I have very special requirements. I wanted it to work on any window on my Windows desktop and not only in a particular browser ( I tried some browser autotype gadget but it for instance ran into the problem to properly access the special type of dialog opened by this tumblr bookmarklet I am using ). I didn’t want a tool to replace short acronyms with longer strings like many do it  since I am too lazy to remember all those acronyms. I wanted the typing to be initiated with a single click and I wanted to organize to-be-typed items by categories, so that I quickly can find them in a GUI.

I thought AutoIt must be the perfect solution to implement this, a free gadget to automate tasks on a Windows desktop which however requires programming skill to make real use of it. It is very powerful, allows to develop GUIs and has a rich set of functions to handle arrays, ini-files, SQLite databases, Excel spreadsheets and you name it.

Thus I came up with a little tool I called TypeBot, which can be downloaded from here. The package contains the script code which can be run when having AutoIt installed, and an executable which should work without having AutoIt installed,

To-be-auto-typed entries can be specified in an ini-file for now ( TypeBot.ini ), see my example here, also caontained in that package:

   1: [Mail]

   2:     Count=2

   3:     WinTitle=New Message - IBM Lotus Notes

   4:     Phrase1=With best regards ...

   5:     Phrase2=Mit freundlichen Grüssen ... 

   6: [Tumblr]

   7:     WinTitle=Auf Tumblr posten

   8:     Count=3

   9:     Phrase1=flickr, photo, bird, animal            

  10:     Phrase2=flickr, photo, animal

  11:     Phrase3=flickr, photo, insect

Sections are defined through words in square brackets, for each section a proper count of entries has to be specified, entries for auto-typing are defined by using keywords “Phrase1”, “Phrase2” and so on. In addition a “WinTitle” has to be defined describing the window on your Windows desktop to which the auto-typing will be sent. Specifying a sub-string of the window title is sufficient. In this example here for instance the program checks for a window with title “Auf Tumblr posten” ( “Post on Tumblr” in German ) before typing in one of the strings below when clicked on in the GUI.

Here is how the program looks like when launched:

In order to auto-type an item simply click it. The program will find the desired target window and type in the text. If that window does not exist nothing happens.

A text editor can be used to create and update that ini-file, but meanwhile ( with version 2 of this tool ) it is also possible through the GUI to add, change or delete sections and phrases, also to clone an entire section, to save and open INI-files.

Cloning of phrases is planned as another new feature for version 2.1 coming soon.

So you wanna print out your blog ?

Or you need a table of contents ? Or just part of your blog  or a table of contents for some posts in your blog for a particular series of blog posts you have been writing ? And you want that table of contents or printout sorted by date ascending ( oldest entry first ) instead of descending which is the default for all blog engines ?

Blog engines like Blogger or WordPress make it very convenient to blog and provide lots of useful functions, but when it comes to create a printout of your blog – or let’s say a pdf file – or present blog articles in a chronological order instead of reverse chronological as it is the default with all blog engines ( latest entry on top ) then you have to use some workarounds or manual work to achieve this. Printing usually gets messy due to the frame work the blog provider has put around your content,  the left and right side bars appear somewhere in your printout and get in your way.

This tool is also available now on my Frihost site !

Click here to launch it !

I have developed a tool currently hosted on Hostcell allowing to import a blog export file from either your WordPress or Blogger blog to easily get a table of contents or blog printout or pdf file.

In my wordpress blog here I have a series of blog posts about my trip through the Northwest of the USA in 2006. Creating a chronological table of contents or pdf version of all these articles now is a piece of cake with the help of my tool “Axel’s Blogs Export XML Parser”. Here it is.

How to use it ?

First of all an export file has to be created from a WordPress or Blogger blog. In WordPress this can be done by going to the dashboard, then selecting Tools – Export. A XML file will be produced and stored on your computer.

Now head to my tool and first click on “Browse…” to specify the location of this XML file on your computer, then click on “Process” to upload the file. The file will be kept only temporarily on my server, after 24 hours latest it will be deleted. A list of all blog entry titles will be shown in the sequence as they appear in your blog.

Now you can re-sort or filter as you wish:

• Check on “Sort by date ?” to sort blog articles by date.
• Check on “Sort by title ?” to sort blog articles by title.
• Check on “Sort descending ?” to do any of  both sorts descending.
• Specify a search term in “Search Title:” to filter your blog posts by post title.
• Alternatively or in addition select one or more tags in the listbox below. Use the radio button “any” or “all” to decide whether any of the tags selected or all need to be assigned to the blog posts you want to filter out.
• Once you have made your choices click on “Process” again.

If you are satisfied with your selection you now have a list of titles with underlying links to these blog posts in front of you in the right frame of the tool. If you view the source code of this frame ( In Friefox do a right-click, then select This Frame –> View Frame Source ) you get the HTML code for your table of contents.

To produce the full output including all the posts content check on the “Full Content ?” check box and click “Process” again. A full print out of your blog posts will appear in the right frame. You can now either print it or use a tool like FreePDF to create your pdf file of these articles.

Astronomy software gadgets

NGC 1333

Those of you who like astronomy might be happy to read about two nice offerings I bumped into last week:

• Google Sky – a web based offering from Google obviously, allowing you to explore the sky. It works similar to Google Maps: you can zoom in and out, move around, view the sky with different filters like infrared or microwave, and you can actually share URLs, like this one here of NGC 1333, a reflection nebula in the constellation “Perseus”, a chaotic star birth area 1.000 light-years away from earth, with a very young ( only 10.000 years old ) star, IRAS 4B, where with the help of the Spitzer Space Telescope a lot of water has been discovered, according also to an article in the latest issue of “bild der wissenschaft” I have been reading recently.
• Microsoft WorldWide Telescope, a nice looking virtual telescope on your desktop after you have downloaded and installed  it ( after you have checked the pre-requisites ! ). This allows very smooth navigation through the sky, searching for objects and retrieving additional information, discovering constellations and then traveling into the deep space to lots of objects of interest ( NGC 1333 is in there as well ). You can also view our planets, zoom closer, turn them and you even can zoom down to our blue planet and discover it like you can do with Google Earth by using different types of maps ( streets, hybrid etc … ).

Windows Live Writer Plug-ins

Windows Live Writer (WLW), the first external blog editor supporting the Atom Publishing Protocol (APP), now is out of beta and available for download as version 2008 since a couple of weeks already. I grabed it right away and can tell you: I am impressed.  It comes with an excellent user interface and like most other Microsoft products is a solid peace of very useful software.

I have been very impressed how easy and convenient it is to tag blog postings, to edit them once they are out on a blog and to maintain multiple blogs.

My satisfaction definitely has been increased by discovering the fact that WLW can be further extended through plug-ins and that actually 70 plug-ins – some of them very useful – are already available !

To find and install a plug-in simply click on the “Add a Plug-in…” link. As you see in the screen shot below I already installed a few plug-ins which turned out to be real useful.

• The “Insert Space Emoticon” plug-in allows you to easily enrich your blog posts with some emoticons from Windows Live Spaces.
• “Insert Quote Of The Day” allows you to pick a quote from a list of recent quotes and insert it into your blog posting as a quote for the day: Quote of the day:
  When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not. – Mark Twain
• “Insert Amazon Link” lets you create a nice reference to a book from Amazon in your blog posting. In order to do this you first need to find your book in Amazon of course, then invoke that plug-in. Grab the first number appearing in the URL to that book in Amazon and fill it in as “Affiliate Id” and “ASIN”, then also specify the country extension of your Amazon site ( like DE for Germany ) – and you get something inserted into your blog posting as seen below.  Yesterday night I finsihed reading this book:

  Amazon.de: Luther. Buch zum Film. ISBN: 3746620007 ISBN-13: 9783746620008

• “Insert Acronyms” is another very useful plug-in. It allows you to find the meaning of acronyms and actually make those descriptions appear in your blog post. You have several options how and with what HTML tags this will be done. See the abbreviation I used in the first paragraph of this blog article ? Just hover over this one with the mouse and you’ll learn what APP means. ( This one actually was not resolved by the acronym search, but fortunately the plug-in allowed me to type in my own description )
• Like to reference to a particular posting in any RSS feed ? Use the “Insert Form Feed” plug-in to insert a link to that article including the first so many words ( configurable). Let’s see what I have been blogging about last time here in my blog:
  From San Francisco to Seattle in 30 days – Day 19+20
  

  September 22nd (Day 19): Skyline Trail Marmot at Nisqually Glacier at Mt. Rainier, getting ready for the winter The nicest birthday present I could possibly get for today was this gorgeous weather with blue skies and sunshine. After a hearty breakfast at Copper Creek Restaurant we again drove through the park and then we saw the mighty [...]

•  
  
  How to use the Template plug-in…

  Invoke menu options Insert -> Template…, define a new template or re-use a template you already defined before.

• “Templates Plugin” is a powerful tool to manage your favorite HTML code snippets to enrich your blog postings even further. For instance if you have a code snippet to create a text box on the right you can store and re-use it easily through this plug in. It becomes available through the menu item Insert -> Template …
• Inserting code snippets into blog postings on BlogCentral always has been a pain. Let’s see what the “Insert Code Snippet” plug-in can do for us:

     1: <br>

     2: <div style="width: 30%; float: right; margin-left: 10px; background-color: rgb(238, 238, 221); font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 10px;">

     3: <div style="background-color: rgb(51, 102, 119); color: rgb(255, 255, 255); font-size: 10px; font-weight: bold; padding-bottom: 2px; padding-left: 5px; padding-top: 2px;">

     4: How to use the Template plug-in...

     5: </div> 

     6: Invoke menu options Insert -> Template..., define a new template or re-use a template you already defined before.

     7: </div>

     8: <br>

  Note the syntax highlighting and line numbering ? How cool is that ! Here you see the HTML code I have used for this template mentioned above.

• Inserting images you host on flickr or picasa becomes easy now with the help of the “Insert Flickr Image” and “Picasa Link” plug-ins.

  

    

This is excellent stuff, isn’t it ?! There are more plug-ins out there to explore and I have the strong feeling that blogging in the near future becomes twice as much fun as it always has been already.