Simple Informations

Most of us browse through numerous web pages and save them if we find them interesting. When I am downloading the entire site I will use Winhttrack a very useful web archiving utility. But the problem with html pages is that the have an associated folder, even the mht files are not much of use also if you need to read the page later as an e-book. So what if we could save the web page as pdf

Thats exactly what PDFOnline offers. It has a plethora of options to choose from. they provide online conversion of doc, jpg, htm and many more files to pdf. But you need to signup inorder to put there convert to pdf widget on your blog, which enables a visitor to save your page as pdf to their system. Users are able to convert pages to pdf just by clicking a button as the one shown here.

If you need the page exactly as you saw it on the net than you may try saving the file in Microsoft Web Archive format.

**Tips :Although this is nice and convenient I am sad to say that the formatting is pretty much ugly. What you’ll get is almost a screen shot and then also some image including backgrounds are missing. So for now save the page as .mht **

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These are some of the most popular services on the net that allows you to shorten long URLs.

Here is the test URL I used and the shortened URL by each service is given on the side

http://www.mapquest.com/maps/map.adp?ovi=1&mqma
p.x=300&mqmap.y=75&mapdata=%252bKZmeiIh6N%252bI
gpXRP3bylMaN0O4z8OOUkZWYe7NRH6ldDN96YFTIUmSH3Q6
OzE5XVqcuc5zb%252fY5wy1MZwTnT2pu%252bNMjOjsHjvN
lygTRMzqazPStrN%252f1YzA0oWEWLwkHdhVHeG9sG6cMrf
XNJKHY6fML4o6Nb0SeQm75ET9jAjKelrmqBCNta%252bsKC
9n8jslz%252fo188N4g3BvAJYuzx8J8r%252f1fPFWkPYg%
252bT9Su5KoQ9YpNSj%252bmo0h0aEK%252bofj3f6vCP

TinyURL http://tinyurl.com/24f65
NotLong http://ballistic.notlong.com (custom URL)
URLCutter http://urlcutter.net/ballistic (custom url)

For Not Long a password and Username is provided so that you can edit the URL in future. All of these sevices have easy to remember names and most have a custom URL maker.

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Universal Viewer an open source project is one among many tools from Alexey Torgashin. AT Viewer (or Universal Viewer) is just like a Media Center but for the whole lot of files that are available on your system.

Put simply it is one single software center from which you can view almost any kind of file be it an office document, an Adobe Photoshop Image, an MP3 file or a PDF document. In a MediaCenter you can just click next and the next file in the folder will be played, likewise when you click on the Next button in AT viewer the next file in the folder will be shown be it any type of file.

The image shows Universal viewer showing a PSD image.

So how does it show all the files with such a small installer. Plug-ins are what Universal Viewer is on. All files are managed by plugins. So if a file can’t be read just download the plugin and it will do the job.

Main Features :

* Text, Binary, Hex, Unicode: any files, of unlimited size (even 4Gb+ sizes   are allowed)
* RTF, UTF-8: RTF and UTF-8 encoded texts
* Image: all general graphics formats: BMP JPG GIF PNG TGA TIFF… plus all   formats supported by IrfanView/XnView external viewers
* # Multimedia: all formats supported by MS Windows Media Player: AVI   MPG WMV MP3…
* # Internet: all formats supported by MS Internet Explorer: HTML XML   DOC XLS…
* Plugins: all formats supported by Total Commander Lister plugins

Pros :

Free of cost, light installation (2.2 Mb now), you don’t need to take care of which program opens which file and extension, supports many more plugins, ease of use

Cons :

No file editing, needs other program engines some times, some features are only available in Pro version

Specifications :

Latest Release : 3.0.0.0 Jan 25 2008 (Portable and Installer)
Installation : 1.2 Mb
Memory Usage : 1560Kb Physical 34768Kb Virtual (no file)
Movie AVI 700Mb 640 x 304 : 25308Kb Physical 220928Kb Virtual

Price : Free

Pro Version

There is also a pro version available there are very little differences between the two
# Universal Viewer (ATViewer) Pro:

* License is shareware. You can use the application during a test period of 15 days. Following this period, if you wish to continue to use application, you must register.
* Contains several additional functions:
Function “Navigation panel” and better support for folder plugins (such as VisualDirSize)
Search with regular expressions
Option “Show hidden files”
Option “Resolve .lnk files targets”
Command “File — Rename”
Command “File — Copy to folder”
Command “File — Move to folder”
Command “View — Multimedia — Fit window to image”

The Viewer is available in both Installer and Portable Versions and can be downloaded here.

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FileZilla is an open source project to create an ftp client and server systems. FileZilla Client is a fast and reliable cross-platform FTP, FTPS and SFTP client with lots of useful features and an intuitive interface.

FileZilla supports drag and drop like any other commercial FTP client. It is also light on system and shows you the transfers that were successful, that were failed and those that are being processed. If you are overwriting a file, the same action (rename, overwrite, skip) can be applied to - all of that file type, to the current queue or just the file being processed. Shows Linux style user permissions for Files and Folders

Main features :

* Easy to use
* Supports FTP, FTP over SSL/TLS (FTPS) and SSH File Transfer Protocol (SFTP)
* Cross-platform. Runs on Windows, Linux, *BSD, OSX and more
* Available in many languages
* Supports resume and transfer of large files >4GB
* Powerful Site Manager and transfer queue
* Drag & drop support
* Configurable Speed limits
* Filename filters
* Network configuration wizard

Pros :

Avilable for almost all platforms, free of cost, extremely user friendly, allows customization to a large extend which includes support for left to right languages like Arabic, the installation file is light and you can select either the default Windows installer or an extractable ZIP archive, users forum provides a large database of how to, support drag and drop, shows ftp commands, website profiles can be created, restoration of transfers.

Cons :

File browser in the user interface could have included a BACK,FORWARD and UP button, does not have a drop down address bar,

Specifications :

Latest release : 3.0.1 release 11|1|2008
Installation : 2.87 Mb
Memory usage : 7116Kb Physical and 72676Kb Virtual

You can find installation files of FileZilla for all the platforms at the FileZilla Download page.

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Fasticons.com is a one stop shop for pretty and cool icons on the web. The icons can be purchased in bulk. There is also a collection of good free icons which can be used as ico icons or as icons for a web template

• Download free icons from FastIcon.com!

  FastIcon.com sells professional Royalty-free Stock Icon collections to developers and designers, but also provide many icon sets for free download.

  The FastIcon’s Free Icons are available for download as standard Mac or Windows icons as well as a handy PNG files for Linux, web or blogs.

The free icons can be downloaded in zip packages. I am using their icons now for designing a new theme for this blog.

The picture shows the screen shot of a Christmas special feed icon from fast icons. I couldn’t work directly on the icon because GIMP didn’t allow me to open it (I am on Linux - Debian right now). You can also get PSD files for some icons and later work on them using photoshop or GIMP. (Learn how to create free icons using Photoshop , GIMP or third party free ware)

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Serial Watcher is a small piece of program from PCRemote Control that can watch the data flow through any of your serial ports live and save the flowing data. It’s main use is during the testing of serial data receiver devices. I found this program while I was making a remote control for my PC.

Serial Watcher is an installation free, light at 150Kb zip package and can open/ monitor up-to 9 serial ports. The serial port watcher sadly cannot work as a sniffer which can show you all the data flowing through a serial port. It is not capable of opening ports that are already in use.

Features :

Parity bit, data width, no of stop bits, Hardware and Software handshakes all are changeable to all possible values, works with Windows 95/98/ME/NT4/2000/XP, saves data as text files, timestamp option available, data can be viewed in HexaDecial, Decimal or Binary

Pros :

Easy to use, highly customisable and adaptive to incoming data protocol, istallation not required,light and free

Cons :

only available for Windows, can’t act as a Sniffer

Specifications :

Memory usage    : 3.1Mb
Virtual Memory  : 28.3Mb
Port Open          : 30.1Mb
Processor           : Negligible

Price : Free

Direct download link : Serial Watcher (150Kb)

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