I didn't realise when i clicked to download the Windows version that it was coming from the Windows Store {or whatever MS calls it} and that it would be automatically installed on my computer with no options.
If it is only available from the windows Store, then I am not interested.
I suppose I am a 'control freak' in so far as I don't like being told what I can, and cannot do, on my computer.
EG I believe 'Windows S' only allows 'apps' from the Windows Store ?
If that is true, and MS offered me a free new laptop, that can only use programs (aka 'apps' AGH!) from the Windows Store, I would tell them to keep the laptop.
I consider 'Windows S' to be a crippled OS
I use a Canon InkJet Printer MX922. today the Red (MAGNETA) ink tank cannot be read by the printer. I have heard about changing the print head. Have anyone else heard of this, and how do you do this. Appreciate any help and
THANK YOU.
I've used several jpg utilities to reduce the size of these images to make them easier to include in emails but none can compare to "PhotoResize400". http://www.rw-designer.com/picture-resize. No installation required - simple save the exe file where you can drag your jpg images on top of it and let go. It saves a hugely reduced jpg image in the same folder at the original with the size that was set by renaming PhotoResize. It takes 3Mb files from my camera and turns them into 50k files that always look perfect. I've never found anything that works better.
For now, Windows S only runs apps from the Windows Store.
Depending on the specs of a laptop, you can install Windows 10. I recently did this for a friend who bought a new laptop but didn't want Windows S. It installed over Windows S with no issues.
I tried it out on a couple of JPG photos I had taken. It's the easiest to use of any program I've ever seen, and it's fast. It reduced the file size of both by a little over 40% with no noticeable loss of quality. As a bonus it even improved the color on a couple of spots that were too red! I plan to use it on all the photos I want to reduce for email and storage. Thanks Rhiannon, good find!
You're so welcome, I've been using it for a few weeks, I love it and I'll keep using it. I've tended to ping pong among services looking for an online optimizer that I liked and didn't find one that worked well for me until this one.
Menu Searx - a simple program to search the searx search engine through dmenu or rofi, sort through the results and open the selected URL in you prefered web browser:
https://github.com/MossyMossMoss/menu-searx
I tried a few media servers, running on Windows 10. I didn't test in great detail; I stopped testing each app when I found a problem that disqualified it. This is a summary of my findings.
I have two TVs
- A 2012 LG LM6700 smart TV. This uses the NetCast O/S, which is not used in post-2013 models.
- A basic Insignia TV. A connected Sony UBP-X700 Blu-Ray player (this is a current model) provides smart TV functions.
- Neither TV supports 4K.
- They use DLNA to communicate with the PC.
These are the products that I tried:
1) Kodi
I agree with the reviewer's comment "sub-optimal mouse support". This was very frustrating. I couldn't even find a way to minimize or close it! I used alt-tab to get out of it.
This problem was sufficient to eliminate it.
2) Plex
- With DLNA enabled in the media server settings, this worked with the Sony but not with the LG. This is because Plex disabled support for the obsolete NetCast O/S in 2020-09 https://forums.plex.tv/t/plex-support-is-ending-2020-09-30-on-older-smart-tv-devices/629707. I downloaded version 1.20.1 from https://www.videohelp.com/software/Plex/old-versions; this is the final version that is compatible with NetCast. It worked well.
- Alternatively, Plex uses a proprietary non-DLNA streaming service. This requires a Plex client app, which is not available for my TVs.
3) Universal Media Server
A user suggested this in an earlier comment. It has poor playback; it stutters about every 3 seconds. Avoid it.
4) Windows Media Player
- In "Network and Sharing Centre", open "Media streaming options". Allow the TV to connect.
- Problem: In the WMP options, I disabled "Add video files found in the Pictures library". This excluded the unneeded video clips in my vacation picture albums from the Video library. In WMP on the PC, these videos were no longer shown, but they were shown on the TV.
- WMP cannot run in the background, so it appears in the Windows task bar. Make sure you don't close it while it is streaming.
- Otherwise, WMP works well.
5) LG SmartShare
https://www.lg.com/ca_en/support/product-help/CT20098005-20150117958868
- This is intended for LG TVs, but it also worked on my Sony. Its licence does not restrict its use with non-LG products.
- This is simple and accomplishes what I need.
- When installing it, if your PC has a lot of media content, there will be a looooong pause with a black screen while thumbnails are generated. Be patient.
Conclusion:
- The two winners are Plex and SmartShare. Plex has more features, but SmartShare has a simpler interface.
- My preference is SmartShare.
For those that like this sort of thing, I expect this is an excellent innovation.
I am a boring old fart, uninterested in all this stuff, and words have usually served me well. What I wonder is if reducing everything to pictures actually reduces communication. "Picture worth 1k words" - but if you don't understand the picture ? cf. Ikea instructions passim.
And does it reduce the attention you pay to words ? For instance you write: "They express your views and opinions more lively and strongly than static stickers", but that should read, for instance, "than static stickers can do", otherwise the sentence is ungrammatical.
This is awesome, thank you so much for doing this! Can it be assumed that Community Highlander dependency is already covered with the beta Highlander that comes with LWOTC?
There isn't an extension. The two ways I suggest are to make changes to the Windows Registry (directions above) or download and install either of the two programs that will convert file formats in Windows Explorer (also above). Any questions, feel free to ask.
I've noticed that today too, it doesn't happen all the time, but regular enough. If I click the link again it resolves fine. I'll pass that along so it can be taken care of.
I tried Trace, but I couldn't get it to work:
- I created an image that contained 2 uploaded images. I then changed my mind and wanted to remove the 2nd image, but I couldn't see any way to do it. I dragged it out of view and added a 3rd image. I then added a background image.
- The background image was automatically zoomed, which gave the wrong appearance. I couldn't see any way to unzoom it.
- The preview showed the 1st and 3rd images on the correct background. I downloaded the composite image. The downloaded image contained the 1st and 2nd images, and the background image was replaced by a solid orange colour. There was an extra thick orange border, so the images seemed to be floating in the air.
- I tried 2 more times (without uploading the wrong image) and got similar results.
- This product seems to be an alpha version.
That sounds frustrating. Trace is version 2.0, it's not an alpha version.
You could contact Sticker Mule and let them know what you experienced, it sounds very odd to me.
This is terrific! 20 years ago I used this same Independent JPEG Group (IJG) code, an earlier version obviously, to do the same thing as this WebAssembly version does -- reduce the size of JPEG images bound for an archive. It gets its power from
1. reducing the JPEG quality parameter to eliminate hard-to-perceive details in the image, and
2. recomputing the Huffman tables used for losslessly encoding the compressed image into the file.
The second one is a big deal when dealing with raw images captured by a device like a camera. The JPEG implementations in those cameras always use the same Huffman tables, so they can't take advantage of the optimization that comes from customizing those tables for each image.
SonoBus is an easy to use application for streaming high-quality, low-latency peer-to-peer audio between devices over the internet or a local network:
https://sonobus.net/
RethinkDNS - monitor app activity, circumvent Internet censorship, block ads and trackers, and firewall apps on your Android device:
https://www.bravedns.com/
Macchina lets you view basic system information, like your hostname, your kernel version, memory usage, and much more:
https://github.com/grtcdr/macchina
When I opened this article from an email link, I got a popup telling me my updates were ready. Naturally I closed that window. I'm sure there are people out there who might not.What gives?
Good Day - I was interested in this freeware so I looked it up. I will not say whether it is good or bad, however, I will mention a couple of things that I didn't realize. First, Bitwarden is connected to MS cloud which is hosted on their Microsoft Azure servers. Next, because it is connected to MS it is part of The Five Eyes (FVEY).
The rest I leave up to you to search.
When I received the notification from LastPass, began searching alternatives and found Bitwarden, Thought I ought to check Gizmo to see what you're recommending and the first thing I saw was this article. Good work.
By the way, every time I visit your site lately, I'm BOMBARDED WITH SPAM (POSSIBLY MALWARE) POPUPS. Wonder if others are experiencing the same issue.
Same here. UBlock origin also pops up and shows possible bad site{for popups origin) and gives me the option of
permanently blocking, which I did. Hope it works.
The popups are generated by our ad server. Our control over what is presented is pretty limited but we’ve done what we can to regulate the content. Unfortunately this is a necessary part of our existence since without the income generated from the ad content we would already be offline. MC - Site Manager.
misc-updater - check if 'Manually-Installed and Source-Compiled' (MISC) packages have new releases or updates announced on their respective webpages:
https://github.com/tpapastylianou/misc-updater
Understood, if it's just advertising.
But the popups requesting signups and downloads have the characteristics of malicious stuff which might actually turn traffic away from your site.
One of those popups was especially egregious as it stated "Your adobe flash player may be out of date. Download latest version here". The other I
recall asks to download an unidentified app with no description or origin.
I was interested to read Jim Hillier's article about exportng the Lastpass vault to a .csv file to import nto Bitwarden as I needed to do this myself. However, the main problem is there is no mention this is only valid for windows based systems and is not in anyway valid for Android as after spending 2hrs online with technical support they admitted that you can not export within Android you have to scrounge access to someone else's windows PC. So a ,point I thought well worth mentioning in your article as you have about trackers
Rhiannon,
I've looked at the main site, the blog and the FAQs but I can't locate the Zip file you mentioned for offline storage. I might need someone to hold my hand and point me right at it.
This is a list of the most recently posted comments on the site sorted so that the most recent comments appear first.
You can however sort the list on Article title by clicking on the column heading. To see actual comments click the + sign.
Note that Google Analytics packages are included. Possible privacy issue?
I didn't realise when i clicked to download the Windows version that it was coming from the Windows Store {or whatever MS calls it} and that it would be automatically installed on my computer with no options.
I also did not realise that it was THAT sort of "app" - i do NOT allow Windows to install those on my computer; it has been removed.
I'll stick with Foxit.
If it is only available from the windows Store, then I am not interested.
I suppose I am a 'control freak' in so far as I don't like being told what I can, and cannot do, on my computer.
EG I believe 'Windows S' only allows 'apps' from the Windows Store ?
If that is true, and MS offered me a free new laptop, that can only use programs (aka 'apps' AGH!) from the Windows Store, I would tell them to keep the laptop.
I consider 'Windows S' to be a crippled OS
I use a Canon InkJet Printer MX922. today the Red (MAGNETA) ink tank cannot be read by the printer. I have heard about changing the print head. Have anyone else heard of this, and how do you do this. Appreciate any help and
THANK YOU.
I've used several jpg utilities to reduce the size of these images to make them easier to include in emails but none can compare to "PhotoResize400". http://www.rw-designer.com/picture-resize. No installation required - simple save the exe file where you can drag your jpg images on top of it and let go. It saves a hugely reduced jpg image in the same folder at the original with the size that was set by renaming PhotoResize. It takes 3Mb files from my camera and turns them into 50k files that always look perfect. I've never found anything that works better.
I haven't seen that one, looks interesting.
Directions for replacing the print head on the Canon InkJet Printer MX922 can be found here:
Canon Knowledge Base - Reseat or Replace the Print Head on a PIXMA MX722, MX922
For now, Windows S only runs apps from the Windows Store.
Depending on the specs of a laptop, you can install Windows 10. I recently did this for a friend who bought a new laptop but didn't want Windows S. It installed over Windows S with no issues.
Thanks rhiannon!
Great find!
Peter
You're very welcome. :)
I tried it out on a couple of JPG photos I had taken. It's the easiest to use of any program I've ever seen, and it's fast. It reduced the file size of both by a little over 40% with no noticeable loss of quality. As a bonus it even improved the color on a couple of spots that were too red! I plan to use it on all the photos I want to reduce for email and storage. Thanks Rhiannon, good find!
You're so welcome, I've been using it for a few weeks, I love it and I'll keep using it. I've tended to ping pong among services looking for an online optimizer that I liked and didn't find one that worked well for me until this one.
Incredible find. Thanks so much! I'll be using this a lot.
You're very welcome. I use it all the time. :)
As always, thanks rhiannon!
Seems a very useful find.
Peter.
You're very welcome. :)
great site love the info i can always learn from this site
One of your finest catches yet Rhiannon!
Deserves to be in a museum!
I tried a few media servers, running on Windows 10. I didn't test in great detail; I stopped testing each app when I found a problem that disqualified it. This is a summary of my findings.
I have two TVs
- A 2012 LG LM6700 smart TV. This uses the NetCast O/S, which is not used in post-2013 models.
- A basic Insignia TV. A connected Sony UBP-X700 Blu-Ray player (this is a current model) provides smart TV functions.
- Neither TV supports 4K.
- They use DLNA to communicate with the PC.
These are the products that I tried:
1) Kodi
I agree with the reviewer's comment "sub-optimal mouse support". This was very frustrating. I couldn't even find a way to minimize or close it! I used alt-tab to get out of it.
This problem was sufficient to eliminate it.
2) Plex
- With DLNA enabled in the media server settings, this worked with the Sony but not with the LG. This is because Plex disabled support for the obsolete NetCast O/S in 2020-09 https://forums.plex.tv/t/plex-support-is-ending-2020-09-30-on-older-smart-tv-devices/629707. I downloaded version 1.20.1 from https://www.videohelp.com/software/Plex/old-versions; this is the final version that is compatible with NetCast. It worked well.
- Alternatively, Plex uses a proprietary non-DLNA streaming service. This requires a Plex client app, which is not available for my TVs.
3) Universal Media Server
A user suggested this in an earlier comment. It has poor playback; it stutters about every 3 seconds. Avoid it.
4) Windows Media Player
- In "Network and Sharing Centre", open "Media streaming options". Allow the TV to connect.
- Problem: In the WMP options, I disabled "Add video files found in the Pictures library". This excluded the unneeded video clips in my vacation picture albums from the Video library. In WMP on the PC, these videos were no longer shown, but they were shown on the TV.
- WMP cannot run in the background, so it appears in the Windows task bar. Make sure you don't close it while it is streaming.
- Otherwise, WMP works well.
5) LG SmartShare
https://www.lg.com/ca_en/support/product-help/CT20098005-20150117958868
- This is intended for LG TVs, but it also worked on my Sony. Its licence does not restrict its use with non-LG products.
- This is simple and accomplishes what I need.
- When installing it, if your PC has a lot of media content, there will be a looooong pause with a black screen while thumbnails are generated. Be patient.
Conclusion:
- The two winners are Plex and SmartShare. Plex has more features, but SmartShare has a simpler interface.
- My preference is SmartShare.
I'm glad you like it. I had the forest one on my monitor a while back. I didn't remember where I found it, so I had to go looking. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
A friend of mine said it was appeasing and the rocks look like turtles!
That's an interesting take. :)
For those that like this sort of thing, I expect this is an excellent innovation.
I am a boring old fart, uninterested in all this stuff, and words have usually served me well. What I wonder is if reducing everything to pictures actually reduces communication. "Picture worth 1k words" - but if you don't understand the picture ? cf. Ikea instructions passim.
And does it reduce the attention you pay to words ? For instance you write: "They express your views and opinions more lively and strongly than static stickers", but that should read, for instance, "than static stickers can do", otherwise the sentence is ungrammatical.
This is awesome, thank you so much for doing this! Can it be assumed that Community Highlander dependency is already covered with the beta Highlander that comes with LWOTC?
Thanks For Sharing good article . You can learn java related technologies free from Java Vogue Visit Java Vogue
I had to rebuild my system and lost the download file. This product is no longer free.
There is still a free version. MC - Site Manager.
https://support.officetimeline.com/hc/en-us/articles/360042913813-Office...
Thanks for the prompt response. I see you have to scroll all the way down on their website to get to it, but it is indeed there!
i dont see extension anywhere?
There isn't an extension. The two ways I suggest are to make changes to the Windows Registry (directions above) or download and install either of the two programs that will convert file formats in Windows Explorer (also above). Any questions, feel free to ask.
From a quick test it appears that the anagram function uses database lookup instead of actually generating anagrams
Doesn't seem ro include an inflation/CPI calculator, which is why i why there in the first place.
Also, the instructions for using the focal length calculator {which i checked out as a random choice} could have been more clearly written
When i clicked the "download" link {having lost some of my wallpapers inb a disk crash}. the first thing i got was a redirect.
And when i clicked the "Add new comment" link to post this, i got another redirect.
Some of the content on that site is contributed by members so it may not be up to certain standards.
I've noticed that today too, it doesn't happen all the time, but regular enough. If I click the link again it resolves fine. I'll pass that along so it can be taken care of.
Thanks for that. I didn't test all the other sites so that's good to know.
I tried Trace, but I couldn't get it to work:
- I created an image that contained 2 uploaded images. I then changed my mind and wanted to remove the 2nd image, but I couldn't see any way to do it. I dragged it out of view and added a 3rd image. I then added a background image.
- The background image was automatically zoomed, which gave the wrong appearance. I couldn't see any way to unzoom it.
- The preview showed the 1st and 3rd images on the correct background. I downloaded the composite image. The downloaded image contained the 1st and 2nd images, and the background image was replaced by a solid orange colour. There was an extra thick orange border, so the images seemed to be floating in the air.
- I tried 2 more times (without uploading the wrong image) and got similar results.
- This product seems to be an alpha version.
That sounds frustrating. Trace is version 2.0, it's not an alpha version.
You could contact Sticker Mule and let them know what you experienced, it sounds very odd to me.
February 2021. Sadly the Free options are very limited now. You have to pay to do anything useful it seems.
This is terrific! 20 years ago I used this same Independent JPEG Group (IJG) code, an earlier version obviously, to do the same thing as this WebAssembly version does -- reduce the size of JPEG images bound for an archive. It gets its power from
1. reducing the JPEG quality parameter to eliminate hard-to-perceive details in the image, and
2. recomputing the Huffman tables used for losslessly encoding the compressed image into the file.
The second one is a big deal when dealing with raw images captured by a device like a camera. The JPEG implementations in those cameras always use the same Huffman tables, so they can't take advantage of the optimization that comes from customizing those tables for each image.
This site is awesome. Thank you!!
Another you may enjoy related to this is...
https://www.piliapp.com/
All kinds of nuggets in there!
Unfortunately, from 31st March 2021, Lastpass Free will only be available to use on one device.
If you want to continue using it on several devices then you must pay for the Premium service, which is £2.60 pcm in the UK.
I'll be looking into changing over to Bitwarden ASAP!
Ninite software updater is free for home use. No nag screens or adverts or bundled software. You can download the apps you only need to update.
For future updates to this list, please consider including whether each product generates hyperlinks in the PDF from the source documents.
Thanks.
Thanks rhiannon!. Beautiful images. like usual.
You're very welcome. :)
Such a great informative content you are sharing. If you wan to learn about birthday and birthday wishes just go below.
Birthday Wishes For All
Meh...there's much better out there!
When I opened this article from an email link, I got a popup telling me my updates were ready. Naturally I closed that window. I'm sure there are people out there who might not.What gives?
My security blocked an attempt to download the "updated" flash player. Be very careful!
Same
Good Day - I was interested in this freeware so I looked it up. I will not say whether it is good or bad, however, I will mention a couple of things that I didn't realize. First, Bitwarden is connected to MS cloud which is hosted on their Microsoft Azure servers. Next, because it is connected to MS it is part of The Five Eyes (FVEY).
The rest I leave up to you to search.
When I received the notification from LastPass, began searching alternatives and found Bitwarden, Thought I ought to check Gizmo to see what you're recommending and the first thing I saw was this article. Good work.
By the way, every time I visit your site lately, I'm BOMBARDED WITH SPAM (POSSIBLY MALWARE) POPUPS. Wonder if others are experiencing the same issue.
Do I need to uninstall Lastpass from my phone or is that done automatically??
. I want to keep using it on my PC.
Krunk:
Same here. UBlock origin also pops up and shows possible bad site{for popups origin) and gives me the option of
permanently blocking, which I did. Hope it works.
Thanks for the confirmation.
Rhiannon: Are you folks aware of this?
Understood, if it's just advertising.
But the popups requesting signups and downloads have the characteristics of malicious stuff which might actually turn traffic away from your site.
One of those popups was especially egregious as it stated "Your adobe flash player may be out of date. Download latest version here". The other I
recall asks to download an unidentified app with no description or origin.
I was interested to read Jim Hillier's article about exportng the Lastpass vault to a .csv file to import nto Bitwarden as I needed to do this myself. However, the main problem is there is no mention this is only valid for windows based systems and is not in anyway valid for Android as after spending 2hrs online with technical support they admitted that you can not export within Android you have to scrounge access to someone else's windows PC. So a ,point I thought well worth mentioning in your article as you have about trackers
Rhiannon,
I've looked at the main site, the blog and the FAQs but I can't locate the Zip file you mentioned for offline storage. I might need someone to hold my hand and point me right at it.
sorry,
michael clyde
Rhiannon,
When you submit the URL to Blacklight does it access the site through your browser or by it's own means?
thanks,
michael clyde
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