Ever needed to ‘debug’ or examine a particular JPEG image’s quantization tables, chroma subsampling, quality factor and stuff? Try JPEGsnoop. Pretty nifty tool.
Category: software
Gaim 2.0
Gaim 2.0 is _finally_ there! Sorry, I should say Pidgin by now, but who knows? 😉 I think the Pidgin thing is, apart from its spelling (I always make mistakes causing me to fail finding the homepage ;)), actually a good thing:
Overall, I believe this is an excellent release (understatement). The only thing I found better in the latest beta I tried, was the available icon in the systray. It used to be just a green circle. Now, they added a speech balloon to it (please make that optional ;)). The user interface/usability has improved tons, so I might become tempted to drop Psi. Won’t happen any time soon though. 😉
Note: you might have problems accessing the Pidgin website. It seems the release is not officially announced yet and they are probably migrating the old site first before doing so. First post, LOL!
Opera 9.20
Finally thumbnails in the windows panel! 🙂
Other changes I like:
- Added support for automatic search from address bar when entering more than one word.
More than once I forgot type g first 😉 - When specifying address:port without specifying the protocol, “http://” is once again inferred.
Also tend to forget this one
The dev tools are of course also nice to have 🙂
Fixing picasa database
Ever since I upgraded picasa, there had been problems of photos displayed with the wrong transformations applied, albums messed up etc. I had been fumbling around with the picasa.ini files sometimes, so I wasn’t entirely surprised. 😉 So today, I did once more a fast google search, hoping I was feeling lucky ( 😉 ). So I was 🙂
There was this guy who wrote a perl script for fixing his picasa.ini. It seemed it wasn’t exactly what I was looking for. Until he said like, btw, remember to clear your database by holding ctrl+alt+shift while starting picasa. Guess what, it worked excellent for me! 🙂 No more troubles.
Virtual dub screen capturing
Maybe not very stable yet, but quite fun to experiment with. 🙂 Though I did manage to make some real-time encoded captures without dropped frames.
Read its special features here.
Detecting linux rootkits
Opera9 file access bugfix
With the release of Opera 9.10 , they finally fixed the file-monitoring ‘bug’!!
Gimp brushes
Ever needed some extra Gimp brushes? They are are abundantly available over at DeviantArt! I was stunned to discover this, since I know both Gimp and DeviantArt for a long time, and didn’t know that DA was a great gimp resource.. 🙂
SMS alternatives?
At work, Microsoft’s Systems Management Server (SMS) is used to distribute new software version, take over remote screens, make catalogs of all software running on each pc, etc… Somehow, I have always found SMS to be one of the most crappy MS products I have ever seen. SMS has its deficiencies but its competitors also have some others. So there is no motive for innovation. It just sells because it is Microsoft’s.
What bothers me about such a product is not as much that it has bugs — every product has — but more that you can’t do anything about it because it’s fully closed source. I thought no OSS alternatives existed in this area, so I had given up on any improvement until recently.. I stumbled across an open source alternative, OCS inventory NG. 🙂 OSS is everywhere 😉