Submagic is a computer software program for the Windows operating system that can be used to edit subtitles. Edit this regard means to create, edit, convert, synchronize or translate subtitles. The only feature missing to make this the perfect solution would be a subtitle downloader. The tabbed interface provides the means to access the various functions of the software program starting with the file operations tab append, split or convert subtitles easily. Subtitles can be imported in various formats including the popular srt and sub.

There is also an option to analyze existing subtitles for problems like lines with to many characters, empty lines or overlapping times. But analyzing is not the only automatic option that Submagic offers. There is also a very extensive error fixing feature that can fix more than 20 common problems and errors of subtitles including the correction of ocr errors, removal of line separators or the fixing of quotes. Several fixes contain multiple choices that the user can chose from.

The Edit tab can be used to search subtitles, find and replace text and to insert, add, delete or split them. The final tab in the editing process is the synchronize tab which can be just to finetune the display of the lines in the movie.

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Tags: submagic, subtitle, subtitles, suptitle downloader, suptitle editor, translations, video software, windows software
Categories: Windows, software

If you’re like me you like to have as much information as you can about whatever it is you are doing. Wireless access is no exception. When using wireless so many things can go wrong. You can have a weak signal, too much noise, strange frequency variations, and many other issues. Without the tools to find these issues you may never know what is keeping you from getting the speeds you should be getting.

The wavemon tool is a very handy tool to have in your arsenal that will help you gather information you might not otherwise have. With wavemon you can see Signal levels, Noise levels, Signal to noise ratios, frequencies, TX power, sensitivity (if available), bitrate, and so much more.

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Tags: Linux, monitor, ncurses, network monitor, Network Monitoring, network scanning, wireless-network
Categories: Advice, Linux, Networks, Open Source, Security, Tutorials Basic, software

Ted Talks are a collection of talks by some of the worlds leading thinkers and doers on Technology, Entertainment and Design (hence the name TED). Many of the talks are inspiring and try to convey ideas on all sorts of subjects in those three categories. Many of the talks are available on the Ted website in various formats. They can even be downloaded to the local computer system.

Someone made an effort to put all of the published Ted Talks in a list with direct onsite links to the videos, the name of the talker, the title, a description, the date, running time and event it was held. This is an incredible useful spreadsheet for anyone interested in at least one of the focus areas of TED.

Below are three embedded Ted Talk videos. The first is by Evan Williams, a founder of Twitter who is talking about how Twitter’s growth was driven by unexpected uses, the second showing Dan Ariely talking about why people are thinking that stealing and cheating is ok (sometimes) and the last by Tim Berners-Lee who is talking about the next web of open, linked data.

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Tags: Dan Ariely, Evan Williams, ted, ted talks, ted talks videos, Tim Berners-Lee, twitter
Categories: The Web

We’ve been learning a lot about you guys in the past weeks, and I think this will be one of my favorite questions, since productive emailing can reward you with a huge time advantage, perhaps you guys have some secret email management skills out there!

Basically what I am asking this time, is do you use POP3, IMAP, or webmail, or maybe even something else? POP is the “oldschool” way of doing thigs. You download the messages from the server, but you are essentially making a copy of your real inbox on the server, the message structure, messages, etc are not changed on the server, no matter what you do in your email client (Outlook, Thunderbird, etc).

IMAP is the method of directly accessing your server real-time from a different application. If you delete an email from your client (Outlook, Thunderbird supports IMAP as well) you selete it from your server too, and vice-versa. Webmail is of course directly accessing your server on a nice graphical interface, like Gmail, Yahoo Mail and all the others.

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Tags: Email, imap, pop3, webmail
Categories: Email, ask the readers

If you are a user of the popular data compression software 7-Zip you might like the newly released 7-Zip Theme Manager which replaces the default interface of the software program with user created themes. The theme manager is a portable software program for the Windows operating system. It will automatically scan the system for an installed version of 7-Zip and display a prompt afterwards waiting for confirmation if the discovered directory is the right one.

The 7-Zip Theme Manager can then be used to change the interface of the program itself as well as the icons in Windows Explorer. Each 7-Zip theme comes with a preview image of how the interface would look like if it would be applied to 7-Zip. Between 30-40 different themes are available ranging from graphically stunning themes like Vista Inspirat to playful themes like Star Wars or Futurama.

A click on the Activate Theme button will activate that theme. It is important that 7-Zip is closed during the procedure to avoid complications. 7-Zip will automatically use the activated theme from then on. More than 10 different filetype icons are available as well in the theme manager that can replace the original 7-Zip icons in Windows Explorer. The name of the theme or icon, the creator, license and website are listed below the theme preview window.

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Tags: 7-zip, 7-zip theme manager, 7-zip themes, data compression, portable software, theme manager, windows software, zip
Categories: Windows, software

By now you might have heard about the latest worm that is plaguing Internet users world wide. It goes by the name of Conficker (or Downadup)and comes in the variants A,B and C with c being the most evolved variant. To put it simple: Conficker uses a Windows vulnerability that was discovered in September 2008 and a patch was released by Microsoft that fixed it. The first worm that used the vulnerability was discovered in November 2008.

Conficker C will initiate a number of processes on infected host systems including opening a random port which is being used in the distribution process of the worm. The worm will then patch the security hole on the computer system that allowed it to attack the system in first place. This prevents other viruses from exploiting the vulnerability while keeping a backdoor open for newer variants of the Conficker worm. The worm will block certain strings from being accessed on the Internet. Domain names making use of those strings cannot be accessed unless the IP is used to do so. Among the strings are various security companies like microsoft, panda or symantec but also generic strings like defender, conficker or anti-. This is to prevent users from accessing websites that contain information and removal instructions about the worm.

While this is surely a nuisance for the user it does mean that the worm itself is not harming the user system in any way other than the methods described above. The real danger comes from the updating mechanism of Conficker C. The worm will try to retrieve new instructions on April 1, 2009. A very sophisticated updating mechanism has been implemented by the author. The worm will generate a list of 50K domain names and append a list of 116 top level domains to them. It will then select 500 randomly from the list and try to connect to them. If new instructions are found on one of the urls it will download them and execute them on the computer system. This process will be repeated every 24 hours.

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Tags: conficker, conficker c, conficker removal, conficker worm, downadup, windows security, windows software, worm, worm cleaner
Categories: Security, Windows

SSL connections which you can identify by the HTTPS protocol in the address bar of the web browser provide additional security in comparison to the HTTP protocol. This is why many companies use SSL on security sensitive pages of their website which usually involve financial transactions or personal information. To put it bluntly: A bank not using SSL on their website cannot be trusted. HTTPS connections are encrypted which means the traffic is being protected from local network sniffers. There are however still attack points like keyloggers or viruses on the user’s system.

There is one additional problem concerning websites that do offer HTTPS connections on most of their network but not everywhere. Mouser over at Donation Coder mentioned a hidden setting in the NoScript (check my Firefox security profile for additional information) add-on of the Firefox web browser allowing to force HTTPS connections for listed websites. This is helpful in a few cases. Some websites offer both HTTP and HTTPS connections to their servers. Another possibility are websites that make use of HTTPS connections but not on all pages.

Users with the excellent No Script add-on installed can configure sites to always use a secure https connection when they are visited. This option can be accessed by right-clicking the NoScript icon in the Firefox status bar, selecting Options from the context menu, clicking on the Advanced tab in the configuration and there on the HTTPS tab.

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Tags: firefox, firefox security, https, https connections, noscript, ssl, ssl https, web browser
Categories: Browsing, Security, firefox