Add Subtitles To Movies
You find several large subtitle databases on the Internet and it is normally only a matter of time until you find the subtitle that you are looking for. Instead of searching for subtitles manually you could also try the software Sublight which can search for and add subtitles in an easy to use interface.
Sublight is directly connected to the Subtitles On Net community which maintains a large database of subtitles. The program provides an easy to use search for subtitles and an option to pick a local video file and search for its subtitle. This has the additional benefit that both can be played in your favorite media player right away without having to move the subtitle into the right directory on your pc.
The subtitle search works flawlessly and it’s possible to change a few settings to decrease the time it takes to find the right subtitle to add. You can filter for languages for instance which obviously makes sense. It is furthermore possible to set a year, episode or season if that is known.
Last week I posted an article discussing some of the issues with messaging application Digsby, and why for now I chose to instead use Pidgin.
My conclusion was that although Digsby is a fantastic messaging client with good design and features, the 70mb+ RAM usage became just too much to put up with.
Only a few days ago however I was excited to see that the Digsby team has released a new alpha build for testing purposes. Apparently the developers have spent the last few months completely rewriting the underlying architecture of Digsby in order to bring RAM usage down to an acceptable level.
“We completely reworked the architecture to use less memory and also improved the memory management by releasing objects when they are no longer needed. We also hunted down and eliminated numerous memory leaks. All in all, these changes lower Digsby’s RAM usage by over 50%. It should now hover in the 20MB - 50MB range depending on how many accounts you have and what you are doing at the moment.”
That’s not all, the Digsby blog post also describes these other changes:
Greasemonkey in Opera
Did you know that you can easily load Greasemonkey scripts into Opera? While Firefox users need an extension for that Opera users can simply import them into Opera. Well, some manual work is required but nothing to serious. Takes probably half a minute to import it.
First you need to download the Greasemonkey script that you would like to use in Opera. You may need to rename that script so that the file ends with user.js if that is not already the case.
Now open Opera and go to Tools > Preferences > Advanced > Content and click on the JavaScript Options button.
There is a form at the end called User Javascript Files that points to the directory that contains all the custom Javascript files. If you got more than one put them all in that directory. I suggest you create a new folder in the Opera directory and name it Javascripts or something like that.
Web Updates Check with Fireclip
Fireclip is a pretty interesting Firefox add-on. It allows you to select and save part of a website, say a weather report, a web comic or anything else that you can think of, and load the saved part later to see if there have been any updates to it.
This means you can check for web updates without having to visit the actual website. It’s a bit like RSS News Feeds but more flexible since you can select any element on the website and monitor that one.
The add-on adds a sidebar to Firefox which displays all the currently saved elements and provides buttons to add new clips. Adding a new clip is simple. Click on the Select Clip button, you will notice that the add-on automatically marks elements on the website when you move the cursor around.
Outwit Hub Firefox Web Collection Tool
Outwit Hub is an interesting Firefox add-on. It serves two purposes at the moment, information gathering and organizing. This is done by separating each website into different parts, like images, links, text and email addresses and providing different tabs for each one of them.
That provides quick access to information that the user is after by virtually removing the other parts of the website. Each item discovered can be put in the so called basket which remembers the website the item was found on and if available the direct link to the item itself.
One interesting feature is the data grabber. If you ever wanted to copy and paste tables or lists you might have encountered formatting problems in the destination application. Outwit Hub seems to be pretty solid in keeping the original structure of the data intact.
Tablet Enhancements 3 for Outlook
Tablet Enhancements 3 has recently been changed for a commercial application to a free for all software program that adds much needed tablet PC support to Microsoft Outlook 2003 or Microsoft Outlook 2007. It runs on a wide variety of hardware including Tablet PCs, UMPCs (Ultra Mobile PCs) or an Origami device running Windows XP Tablet PC Edition or Windows Vista.
Tablet Enhancements 3 for Outlook adds the TEO mode to Outlook which is basically a full conversion of Outlook forms into ink-enabled forms. It is possible to switch between modes on the fly and convert handwritten notes into characters without difficulties.
The notes can also be kept in handwriting if that is preferred which is a nice feature. The software program does add rich note taking to Microsoft Outlook which accepts both text and handwritten content as well as images and other media files.
DVD Smith Movie Backup
A good DVD backup application lets you pop in a DVD, press a button and lets you sit back to watch the copying process. DVD Smith Movie Backup is one of those. The free software program can copy entire DVDs or the main movie to the local hard drive.
It can deal with all kind of DVD protections that have been added to make the life of the DVD purchasers miserable while movie pirates enjoy their DVDs without those protections. The process is really that simply as described. Put a DVD into the DVD drive, make up your mind if you want the full DVD or only the main movie and hit the Start button.
Movie Backup deals with and removes DVD protections (CSS, RC, RCE, APS, UOPs and Sony ARccOS) and is compatible with PAL and NTSC DVD-5 and DVD-9 disks.
Create Free Ringtones In iTunes
The Apple blog published a nice article explaining how to create free ringtones using only the Apple iTunes software. The only restriction of that method is that the song needs to reside on the hard drive of the user so that a ringtone can be created from it.
The method is pretty straightforward but requires a bit of manual work. Start by right-clicking the song in iTunes that you want to create a ringtone from and select Get Info from the context menu. Click on the Options tab in the new window and pick a start and stop time for the ringer. It has to be exactly 30 seconds or less so consider this. Click Ok when you are done.
Now right-click the song and select Convert Selection to AAC from the menu. Now open your iTunes music library and drag and drop the newly created song to another location on the hard drive and delete the song in the iTunes library.
Disk Copy Software PC Network Clone
If you got a new hard disk or new computer you might want to copy the contents of the old hard drive to the new one to continue working with all of your files, operating system and settings. PC Network Clone is a disk copy software that can copy the contents of a hard drive to one or multiple other drives that are connected to each other over a network.
The Home Edition can copy the contents of a hard disk to up to three client computers with a maximum speed of up to 9 Gigabytes per minute which should be more than enough for home usage. It does have some other limitations in place: Only IDE and SATA hard disks are supported but files can be copied from all filesystems.
The professional disk copy version has a wider range of supported hardware (Firewire, USB..), an almost 7 times higher transfer rate maximum and a maximum client limit of 20.
