The Download Munkey : Download This, Download That :)

The Windows-based RSS reader FeedDemon has recently released as freeware. Abilon by now defunct SisyphSoft was originally my favourite RSS reader until two weeks back after I decided to give FeedDemon 2.6 a test drive

While Abilion’s clean and sleek two-panel interface was a big plus, it was sometimes quite a memory hog and updating all feeds often consumed an incredible amount of bandwidth which significantly affected browsing and download speeds. Feeds with embedded media like Youtube videos also had display issues.

I like FeedDemon because it’s very fast in updating feeds unlike web-based readers like Google Reader which sometimes takes an eternity to update my 130+ feeds Plus it doesn’t have the memory and embedded media problems of Abilon so that’s always a Very Good Thing™.

As stated earlier, I love Abilon for its minimal interface and thankfully, FeedDemon allows you to configure it that way.

In fact, FeedDemon allows you to heavily customize the application to your liking but I found that changing the following options mimics the familiar Abilon feel the most.

Switch to Full Posts instead of the default Summaries view.

Check Mark feed read when feed changes and Mark the current newspaper page read when I change pages under Tools > Options > Reading.

I have also set FeedDemon to minimize to the system tray when clicking the X button and turned off the Desktop Alert under Tools > Options > Desktop Alert as I find it too disruptive but I guess that’s just my personal preference

I didn’t like FeedDemon’s way of breaking up feed items into pages but it was probably a compromise to load and display items in the feed more quickly. Besides you can always change the number of feed items per page under Tools > Options > Reading > Newspapers > # items to display per page.

While DownloadSquad and PC Magazine have already declared FeedDemon the best Windows-based RSS reader out there, it’s still subjective thing IMHO since I believe most users define “best” as the one with the most comfortable and familiar interface rather the one with the largest number or most powerful features available. That said, FeedDemon is still a very fast,very easy-to-use and more importantly, highly customizable, application that’s worth a try for anyone who does a lot of RSS reading.

As an added bonus, registering a free Newsgator account allows FeedDemon to remember when your feeds were last updated, enabling you to always catch up with your favourite feeds whether you’re in office or at home. I was also relieved to find that I didn’t miss a single feed item when I launched FeedDemon after a week of Internet-less holidays

Download FeedDemon 2.6.

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She was asking me to help merge a collection of single page PDFs into a single PDF. I found pdftk, a set of commandline utilities to manipulate PDFs like joining, splitting or even watermarking PDFs.

Being the lazy monkey that I am, I went to look for a frontend for pdftk so that she could merge the PDFs on her own.

I downloaded PDFTKBuilder, an GPL graphical interface for pdftk which also comes with the current version of pdftk (version 1.41) in a single installer. Installation is a snap and using it is equally simple.

Just choose the files to merge, change the merge order using the Move Up and Move Down buttons, click Save As and all selected PDFs are then combined into a single document.

Here I’m combining Mongoose Publishing’s Battlefield Evolution unit cards into a single PDF.

NOTE: The pages textbox allows you to specify which pages of a PDF to ignore when processing a particular PDF for merging. Handy for those ebooks which comprise several PDFs with an additional cover page for each PDF.

Splitting a PDF with PDFTKBuilder will create a set of single page PDFs using pdftk’s “burst” command so if you’re looking to extract selected pages from a PDF, you might want to use another tool instead.

As a side note, reverse engineers might recognize that Angus Johnson, the creator of PDFTKBuilder, happens to be the guy who programmed the freeware resource editor Resource Hacker

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A brand new series of technical tips over here @ The Download Munkey, based on her requests

She asked for a favicon for her blog hosted on Blogger so here’s the steps if you’re interested in doing the same for your site.

Although the favicon can be of ICO, GIF or PNG format, Internet Explorer 7.0 seems to occassionally have some issues with formats other than ICO so we’ll use ICOs here.

Create a 16×16 ICO file from your image by going to FavIcon from Pics or using your favourite image editor.

Choose an image from your computer and click Generate Favicon.ico to preview and save your favicon.

After previewing, click Download Favicon to get a zip containing your favicon.

Extract the zip file and upload your Favicon.ico to somewhere like Google Pages since Blogger doesn’t allow uploading of ICO files. Remember to rename your file to something like Favicon1.ico or else you’ll end up displaying Google Pages’s favicon instead

Now you’ll need to login to Blogger and edit the Blogger XHTML template under Template > Edit Html. Remember to backup and save your template via Download my Template first!

Search for the <head> tag in your template and insert the following line after it:

<link rel=’shortcut icon’ href=’XXX‘ type=’image/x-icon’ />

where XXX will be the URL of your favicon. The edited template should look something like the screenshot below.

Save the template and it’s done! Internet Explorer users might need to clear their cache and/or restart Internet Explorer first.

Hooray!

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Sandboxie, as its name implies, acts as a sandbox or virtual container in which your Windows application can be run without it writing directly to your registry or hard disk, thereby minimizing the risk of virus or malware infection. Developed by Ronen Tzur, Sandboxie is shareware but has no time limitation.

The usual uses of Sandboxie are to surf the .NET or check your email in a sandbox for added security since any malware and trojans encountered will be trapped inside the sandbox. For me, I mainly use it to run trial applications and games that I download from the .NET, not so much for security purposes but more to minimize the chance of improperly written installers cluttering up the computer.

© Ronen Tzur

Without Sandboxie

© Ronen Tzur

With Sandboxie

From the above diagram, you can see that when your application is run under Sandboxie, all files and registry data which is usually written straight to the hard disk are redirected to a temporary storage area (sandbox). The data in the sandbox remains there until you manually clear it. This redirection of data is totally transparent to the end user so it’s really very easy to use.

After installing Sandboxie, it adds a Run Sandboxed item to your context menu. Simply right-click the application you want to run in a sandbox and click Run Sandboxed and you’re done!

Run an application under Sandboxie is as simple as right-clicking and selecting Run Sandboxed.

Child processes created by the application inside the Sandboxie sandbox are also isolated in the sandbox.

The window titles of all applications running inside a sandbox are surrounded by [#] for easy identification.

After using your application, exit it normally and then right-click the diamond-shaped Sandboxie Control icon in your system tray. Go to Contents of Sandbox and from there you can explore the contents of the sandbox, i.e the files which were orginally supposed to be written to the hard disk, or delete the contents of the sandbox to restore the state of your hard disk and registry back to the original state before you ran the application.

I recommend configuring Sandboxie under Configuration > Global Settings > Set File Copy Options and change Don’t Copy files into the sandbox if they are larger than xxx kilobytes to a larger value if you intend to use Sandboxie to run applications or installers that work with large files.

Read the FAQ, tutorial or download Sandboxie at the official site.

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YouTube is a pretty nice site to find and listen to songs that you can’t buy from shops like the excellent Canon Rock arranged by Jerry C and performed by Jeong-Hyun Lim aka funtwo a couple of years back. Being the usual slowcoach, I only discovered it a few weeks ago

It’s all fine when you have internet access to listen to songs like these, but what if you want to listen to them on an MP3 player on the way to work?

Convert them to MP3s of course Here’s how:

1. In YouTube, copy the URL link on the video page.

   

2. Go to www.videodl.org, paste the link we copied in step 1 and click Get It!

   

3. Wait for a while and a Download Link will appear. If the page does not display the Download Link, refresh the page and click on the Get It! link again.

   

4. Right click and choose Save Target As … to save the file somewhere you can remember because this YouTube file contains the MP3 that we want. Remember to rename it as xxx.flv.
5. Download eRightSoft’s Super transcoder (Windows only). Look for a link labelled Download and Use and scroll all the way to the bottom on the next page to download the 25+ MB installer.
6. After installing Super, start it and you should see a screen like the one below.

   

7. The settings should be as follows:
   • Select MP3 from the dropdown list for the Output Container
   • * VERY IMPORTANT * - ensure that DirectShow Encode is NOT checked. Flash video which is the format that YouTube uses to store video, cannot be decoded by DirectShow, that’s why this has to be off.
   • At the blue Audio section, the default settings are set to 44100 Khz, 128 kbps, Stereo ala CD quality audio. You can change these settings but remember that the output quality is dependent on the original audio source in the YouTube video.

8. Right click anywhere in Super to display the menu and click on Output File Saving Management to select the output directory for your brand new MP3.

   

9. To extract the audio in our YouTube video to MP3s, right click again to display the menu, click on Add Multimedia Files and select the YouTube video we saved in step 4.
10. Click on Encode (Active Files) at the bottom and enjoy!

BTW, correct me if I’m wrong but ripping copyrighted songs from YouTube is considered illegal in most places. Use the above info at your own discretion

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