Open Source | Technology Blog

Remap Keyboard

January 2nd, 2009

No comments

If you look at your computer’s keyboard you see keys that you use a lot, keys that you use seldom and keys that you have not used once in your life. Unless pressing the key accidentally would count. Keys that fall in the last category are the Shift-Lock key and probably keys like Sleep, Scroll Lock or End. It is safe to say that many users do not even have a clue about the function of these keys.

Remapping keys on the computer keyboard describes the process of changing the behavior of a key permanently. Sharp Keys is a light weight portable software that writes the remapped keys to the Windows Registry which essentially means that the changes are active after the next reboot or log out.

Sharp Keys supports 104 keys that can be remapped on the computer keyboard. This includes all the lesser used keys like the ones mentioned above but also all general keys like the letters and digits. The software was able to identify several of the multimedia keys on a Logitech keyboard as well.

Avi Fixer

December 31st, 2008

No comments

It happens from time to time that avi video files are corrupted. This is usually noticed during playback. Some problems that can occur are freezing or distorted images which is usually caused by bad frames. Another problem that can occur is that it is not possible to play the movie from any position because of a bad index file. This could have happened during the creation of the video which usually means that the problem cannot be fixed by downloading the file anew.

DivFix++ is a portable Open Source avi fixer for Windows, Linux and Macintosh computers. It comes with a graphical user interface and a command line version. The graphical user interface is probably the most comfortable. Videos can be dragged and dropped into the interface or added by using the file browser. A click on the check errors button will scan the video files in the queue and display information if errors have been encountered.

Mount Iso Images

December 30th, 2008

No comments

Virtual CD drives offer the function to mount Iso and other image formats in the operating system. This can be advantageous in several aspects. A disk image can be used instantly without having to be burned first. Another benefit is that you do not have to carry CDs or DVDs with you on the road because they are available as mounted images on the computer’s hard drive.

WinCDEmu is an Open Source software program that can mount iso images but also cue, bin, raw, img and smb network shares. It is probably the easiest to use of all the different virtual CD applications. All that the user needs to be doing after installation is to double-click a supported disk image to mount it. The mounted disk image will be available seconds later as a virtual CD drive.

WinCDEmu will however not make itself the default application for those disk image file extensions which means that the double-click will not work if the file formats are already assigned to another application on the computer. It is possible to change the behavior of the file extension so that WinCDEmu becomes the default application.

Swf To Mp3

December 23rd, 2008

No comments

Here is a quick tip for those of you who encounter swf files regularly on the web and like some contents that much that they want to extract them. The most thought after objects are mp3 files which can be easily extracted from swf to mp3.

Some webmasters suggest a workaround using an audio recorder like Audacity for that purpose and while that is one possibility it is not the most comfortable one.

SWF Rip is an Open Source software program that serves the purpose of extracting objects of swf files to the computer. The software has not been updated for some years but it still works surprisingly well on most swf files. There might be some that it is not working with though.

Install phpmyadmin for easy MySQL administration

December 20th, 2008

No comments

I have been working with LAMP (Linux Apache, MySQL, PHP) servers for a long time. But not matter how much experience I have with them one of the first things I, do after the LAMP installation, is to install phpMyAdmin. This tool makes database administration so much easier than the command line. And when your job is rolling out sites that depend upon MySQL databases, you know how quickly MySQL can fubar a quick deployment.

In this article you will learn how to install and configure the phpMyAdmin MySQL tool.

Install Linux on a USB drive with UNetbootin

December 16th, 2008

No comments

There are so many reasons why having a Linux distribution on a usb drive can come in handy. Fram having a “rescue” OS on your keyring to being able to install a new distribution on your EeePC, a “thumb drive” Linux has many uses. But getting Linux onto a usb drive can’t be simple. Right? Wrong. There is a tool, UNetbootin, that makes installing Linux on a usb drive simple.

UNetbootin can be used on either Linux or Windows. In this article, we’ll be illustrating the Linux side of things (naturally).