If you take a look at the online tutorials on DVD ripping you find some that require five or six different tools to rip a single DVD. Thankfully though it is possible to rip DVDs to the computer with just one or two free applications these days. Handbrake for instance which offers several presets that rip the DVD to various formats including iPod, PSP and other handhelds. Bitripper takes DVD ripping to the next level though, at least when it comes to the amount of work before the ripping process starts.

Bitripper [via Freeware Genius] scans the DVD drive of the computer and immediately detects a video DVD that is inserted into the drive. A click on Start Ripping would initialize the ripping process and that’s it. No technical questions about bitrates, formats or resolutions, just plain and simple DVD ripping. The software offers settings naturally, the video can be saved as mpg or avi on the hard drive of the computer.

The settings button leads to a configuration window that allows the selection of the video and audio codec as well as the aspect radio, resolution and language track. Ripping a DVD with a playtime of 1:38 hours took roughly 1:20 hours on my old fashioned AMD Athlon 3000+.

continue reading "One Click DVD Ripping"

Foxit Reader 2.3 supports tabs, that was the headline on many blogs that I read regularly, for instance at Cybernet News and Download Squad. My first thought was that surely no one but die hard pdf users would need tabs in a pdf reader. I don’t need tabs, I need a fast tool that displays the pdf document correctly. I rarely open more than one pdf document in a day, maybe that’s why it is so hard for me to find this new feature useful.

But tabs are fortunately not the only new feature that has been introduced in Foxit Reader 2.3. The list of new functions in comparison to older versions of Foxit Reader is indeed impressive. The good news first, Foxit Reader is still starting blazingly fast. I was a bit worried about the multimedia player that was integrated in the pdf reader, this could be the first step to a bloated player. As of know this fear is not justified.

Among the new features are a magnifier, rulers & guides, automatic scrolling, font information, select all behavior with CTRL + A, a commenting text tool, bookmark design, callout and textbox tool and the option to print only portion of a page. The search can be moved into a separate window that floats above the contents. This is extremely nice if you need more screen space for the pdf document.

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A new version of Wordpress was released today that includes over 70 fixes including several important security fixes. The security fixes affect the files wp-includes/pluggable.php, wp-admin/includes/media.php, and wp-admin/media.php which can be downloaded separately if the full Wordpress update is not desired yet. Webmasters who ran into problems with the new way of uploading media files will be reluctant to note that this issue has been fixed in Wordpress 2.5.1.

Included in the seventy fixes are several performance improvements for blogs with many categories and in the admin interface of Wordpress especially on the Dashboard, Write Post, and Edit Comments pages. I’m currently in the process of updating all my blogs and have not run into any problems yet. I usually do overwrite all files without disabling all plugins prior to this and I seldom encounter problems when updating Wordpress this way.

Most of the time it’s plugin related though. One note for all webmasters who are running Wordpress for some time now. Wordpress have added a new variable in the wp-config file called Secret Key. That variable introduces a little permanent randomness into the cryptographic functions used for cookies in WordPress. I suggest to update the Wordpress blogs as soon as possible, at least by uploading the files that are security related.

continue reading "Wordpress 2.5.1 released"

Oh not, not another process manager. I hear you, really. But Bill2’s Process Manager is something special, at least I think it is. It is optimized for multi core systems and compatible to Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows Vista. The first thing that you should do after installing the application is to switch the language in the options from French to English. That is, unless you are French of course. The English translation is well done, there is however no help file available in English and the homepage of the developer is completely in French, too.

The process manager displays a list of processes currently running on the system. By default hidden processes are hidden but they can easily be revealed in the interface. A right-click provides several possibilities to interact with the process. It is possible to open the program directory, perform a Google search, to set the priority of the process, look at its properties and create a rule for it.

The rules are basically permanent changes to the process. Everyone can set a process priority in the task manager but those priorities are reset when the process is killed. With rules users can make those changes permanent as long as the process manager is running in the background.

continue reading "Bill2’s Process Manager"

Tobey send me an email just a few minutes ago telling me about an interesting free offer at the Giveaway of the Day website. The website is offering a free download of a commercial software each day and you can sometimes get great applications for free this way. Today’s offer is Returnil Virtual System Premium Edition which is a virtualization suite that normally sells for $24.95.

Returnil basically clones the system partition of the computer and boots the computer using the clone instead of the real system partition. The effect is of course that changes made to the clone can be reverted easily by rebooting the PC. Folders can be specified that retain the data that was saved into them, if you would not do that the saved files would be gone after a reboot.

I wrote a review about the free version of Returnil a few months ago. The premium edition of Returnil has some advantages over the free edition. It comes with a Session Saver and File Manager that the free version lacks. It’s also possible to choose the caching method and it does add several other features that are missing in the free version.

continue reading "Free Returnil Virtual System Premium Edition"