After my last post about the powers of PuTTy in conjunction with an SSH-enabled router, I started thinking about tutorials.

I am not a big tutorial-fan, cause I always can’t quite shake the feeling that I’m doing something here I have no particular knowledge of. And depending on what I do, this bothers me. A lot. Take sewing for instance (yes, I do indeed enjoy the fun of sewing, at least as long as it is fun); in the beginning I only did pre-set tutorials. I got to see some achievements, pretty fast as well, and was happy. But the clothings didn’t fit that well, more often than not I had to make corrections to be at least a bit satisfied with my work.

By now, I do most of my sewing patterns myself by taking bits from tutorials and knowledge and putting them together, and it works just fine for me. My point is, tutorials are often brief, giving appealing results in a short time, but often lack some of the necessary theory. Ever happened to you that you did something with a tutorial that just would not work? And after going through the complete text again, looking at all pictures, you realize there’s a small mistake in it, or something you wouldn’t have thought of, which the author took as given?

continue reading "About PuTTy and Tutorials, including a PuTTy Tutorial."

If you set up some kind of SSH Connection on a windows computer over the past few years, be it to connect to the university’s network or to secure a line for an insecure FTP Transfer,you have probably encountered the program PuTTy on the way to salvation. It’s easy to use, free and OSSish powerful. What many people don’t know about PuTTy though, is what other powers aside from or better in addition to SSH slumber inside the little executable.

I was no exception to this when I decided to fool around a bit with my AVM Fritz!Box (Broadband Router quite common in Germany and Austria that runs with Linux) and installed - among other amusing things - the dropbear SSH Server on it. I was then able to connect to my home network from all around the world using just my dyndns-account and PuTTy, or better his cousin PuTTyPortable, which runs from thumb drives without leaving traces behind on the host system. Oh the joy!

After going through the massive troubles of installing and configuring dropbear via FTP and VM, I first started to think about the use I could get out of this.

continue reading "Fun Things to do with PuTTy and Linux-Routers"

I was thinking on rounding up some of the net’s best freeware apps and putting them into one easily installable pack. As these things go, it seems like some clever people have beaten me to it. While I am a bit sad, I am actually really happy to have found this, since they did a really good job and it will help me a lot.

If you re-install Windows (or OSX) a lot, you know that you need to go through the process of installing Firefox, Thunderbird, Gimp, VLC Player and a whole lot more, and at times this can get a bit tedious. With the help of WinLibre or MacLibre all you need to do is download the installer and you can choose what you need, installing it with one click.

You can either get the 150Mb standalone version that contains everything you could install, or the 0.6Mb online installer version. I recommend the later, since you will be downloading the most recent updates for the apps. When you run the installer again, you can check for the latest software, without the need to download all 150 Megs again.

continue reading "WinLibre, your open source software library"

Oxygen Office Professional was formerly known as Open Office Premium, so basically a modified version of Open Office with lots of extras that remind me of the extras that ship with Microsoft Office. The extras include more than 3400 images including clip arts and photos, more than 90 fonts, templates and sample documents, VBA support, better PDF support and lots more.

The Office suite has a size of about 200 to 250 Megabytes depending on the operating system that you have. The most important feature in my opinion is support for Microsoft’s Open XML format (docx for instance). This means documents created with Microsoft Office 2007 and saved as docx can be read by Oxygen Office Professional.

continue reading "Oxygen Office Professional"

Not many free or open source video editing software suits exist and many people rely on commercial programs like Adobe Premiere to transfer videos from a camcorder for instance and edit / convert the video. Jahshaka is a open source video editing program that offers its users a huge functionality that can almost be compared to those commercial programs.

continue reading "Open Source Video Editing with Jahshaka"