Winston was asking me if I would know a way to merge one or more pdf files so that the contents of all the files would appear in one pdf file at the end. A quick research revealed a software pdftk - pdf toolkit -which can be used to merge and split pdf files. Many shareware softwares exist that do the same thing but pdftk seems to be one of the few that can merge pdf files for free.

Pdftk runs from the command line which means you should unpack the software into a directory that you can access easily. I put the file into c: for testing purposes along with two pdfs called 123.pdf and 456.pdf.

If you run pdftk without parameters you get a quick output that details the most important parameters. Lets take a look at the possible operations:

continue reading "Merge PDF Files"

You might remember the technology demonstration a few weeks ago that introduced a new way of intelligently resizing images by automatically defining important and lesser important parts of the image. The results looked way better than the traditional approach which did not care about importance but reduced every aspect with the same ratio.

Liquid Rescale is a plugin for Gimp which adds this functionality to Gimp. I was a little bit surprised that it took just a few weeks to create the plugin which currently does everything shown in the tech demo except real-time resizing.

The Liquid Rescale plugin requires Gimp 2.1.1.3 or newer and can be found in the Layer menu after installation. Take a look at the technology demonstration below in case you missed it. The plugin itself is available for Linux and Windows.

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Germans rejoice. The Internet TV client Zattoo can now be downloaded by German users to watch 21 TV stations using their computer. There are no information about payment at this moment and it is possible to download and run the client without reading anything about costs and payment. So, you can download and run it for free at the moment.

The following channels are currently available: Comedy Central, Das Vierte, DMAX, DSF, Entertainment Channel, Giga, MTV, Nick, Tier TV, TV Gusto, Viva, Al Jazeera English, Canal 24, CNN International, France 24 English, Luxe, SF, Sumo, Telezüri, The Poker Channel and TVE. A few channels are not available although they have been available during the private beta. Channels like ARD, ZDF or BBC would be a welcome addition but there are currently no information if they will be made available at a later date.

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While the official release date for Open Office 2.3 is still September 17th it can already be downloaded using various official Open Office mirror sites. It seems that the releases get spread throughout the mirror sites first to be ready when the announcement is made on the official Open Office website.

There have been so many changes to the new Open Office 2.3 version that it is impossible to list them all. Be assured that the new release contains hundreds of bugfixes and enhancements. I added the link to the release notes at the end of this article if you want to take a look at all the changes which is probably only interesting if you experienced a bug and want to know if it has been fixed.

Open Office 2.3 downloads are not yet available for all supported operating systems and languages. A working download is for instance the Windows en-US download. I suppose many others will be added in the coming hours and probably days to be ready to serve them all on September 17th.

continue reading "Download Open Office 2.3 early"

Retroshare is a secure Instant Messenger with File Sharing options. It uses a 2048-bit RSA encryption keys in combination with trust style authentication to ensure maximum security. Connections are only established to friends who received your Retroshare certificate which is of course a little bit more complicated but it is well worth it.

Once the certificate has been added your friend is verified and it’s possible to chat, group chat and share files with them. Everything is encrypted using 2048-bit RSA keys which means that it is not possible for your Internet Provider or someone else to snoop on the data that is send and received.

Turtle Hopping, also known as Turtle F2F, is being used to download files from users that are not in your friends list. This is done by creating a link between your computer, one of your friends, one of this friends and so on until the computer is reached that is offering the file.

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