the geekery blog

dngrep

aimeewilbury — Sun, 09 Jan 2011 21:50:24 +0000

While looking for a way to search through multiple PDF files I found dngrep. You’re going to need the Net Framework (or it’ll crash), but overall it seems pretty good.

I’m still alive!

aimeewilbury — Sat, 11 Dec 2010 15:46:59 +0000

Ive just been busy at college.

Junction Link Magic

aimeewilbury — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 21:34:46 +0000

One thing that Ive been meaning to do lately is to use directory junctions to move some of my application data folders (especially some savegames) to my data partition. However I’m fairly sucky at the command line and I kept failing big-time when trying to use mklink (Vista’s command-line utility for creating junction links). Finally in a fit of mad googling I stumbled on Junction Link Magic, which does the job quite nicely from a GUI. A word of warning: Don’t touch any of the built-in OS ones or things may screw up bad.

Finding and Fixing Corrupted Images

aimeewilbury — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 22:31:42 +0000

Specifically JPEGs.

BadPeggy (the original site is down so I linked to a third-party site) can find the corrupted JPEGs. Usually, if IrfanView can open it (I haven’t had any trouble at all) you can crop out the corrupted part (on my images it tended to be near the bottom so it wasn’t like half a person’s face was cut off or something) and save it over. However if it’s badly corrupted enough (IrfanView won’t open it or there’s too much data missing) this method doesn’t work too well and you’re better off just finding the picture again.

However, good backups should prevent the whole situation from happening in the first place

AVANTI

aimeewilbury — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 18:06:02 +0000

Sorry that Ive not been posting of late Ive had a couple of problems to deal with but Im getting better.

Today Id like to recommend a freeware program called AVANTI. It is a GUI (thats a graphical user interface) for ffmpeg and Avisynth.

Ive used it recently when I got a video with a real weird audio codec it was called “ADPCM (ShockWave Variant).” I couldnt get any of my video players (not even VLC which can play nearly everything) to play the audio and when I tried to convert it I had some real strange issues. I finally figured out the codec there are several ADPCM variants if you didnt know that. So to change that into AC3 (i like that better than MP3) I had to use ffmpeg but I kept screwing up the commandline so I finally typed “ffmpeg gui” into the Google and found the program.

You need to download a Windows binary of ffmpeg to use the ffmpeg part I like this build. You either put it in the ffmpeg folder in the application folder or put it elsewhere and tell AVANTI where to point to. Although I didnt use AviSynth yet i think it will automatically point to it.
Its a real good program.

Tolon NoteKeeper

aimeewilbury — Sun, 16 May 2010 00:10:49 +0000

It has a tree format and rich text. As well, it also lets you import pictures and “binary data” (which is basically any file — however it has to be exported before using it).

Tolon NoteKeeper

AVStoDVD

aimeewilbury — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 13:52:58 +0000

Not a half-bad program, I tried it when Avi2DVD kept cutting the audio on a certain video. AVStoDVD allows you to set custom chapters, which is a huge plus for me, but I haven’t tried using the menu editor yet. The first time I tried it the video stream was all black so I changed the encoder. The second time, it worked properly.

Like Avi2DVD, this is actually a GUI for several programs. This one’s also neat because you can output the file as a DVD-folder structure (my choice), an ISO file, or use ImgBurn to put it onto a DVD right away, as well as several other options.

AVStoDVD

Google News Archive

aimeewilbury — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 23:33:58 +0000

It’s great for looking up old newspaper articles. Sometimes you have to pay for access (which sucks) but the advanced search lets you look for just articles available for free. Take a look.

Google News Archive Search

Here’s an example of what I did with the advanced search:

Articles about “Tom Petty” in the Gainesville Sun

(Yes, I am a Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers fan. No need to ask.)

The Easter Egg Archive

aimeewilbury — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 17:02:30 +0000

Easter eggs are hidden features deliberately placed into media, often as a joke. There’s a whole bunch of them at Eeggs.com. I have a couple of my own:

Look at #13 in the directions:

Flight simulator in Google Earth!

Laser-shooting spider in SimAnt!

Finally, here’s one from a Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers video collection:

(More information about this is available here.)

Has the Large Hadron Collider destroyed the world yet?

aimeewilbury — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 05:44:36 +0000

What do you think?

Page source shows two interesting things. The first one is a bit of Javascript used to determine whether the world still exists:

The second is a page comment: