We already covered how you can transform the looks and some features of the Windows 7 to Mac OS X Lion look as well as how to transform the looks to the upcoming Windows 8. So, now it is time to move to the Linux front! We have a new software available with the name of Ubuntu Skin Pack that can transform the looks of the Windows 7 OS to the latest Ubuntu 11 Natty Narwhal! It comes with the associated wallpapers, screensaver and also patches the related Windows files to get the same look & feel of the Ubuntu 11 Natty Narwhal. Users can also selectively enable/disable the items that they don’t need in the installer when installing it. You can download it for free from here.

Transform Your Windows 7 to Ubuntu 11 Natty Narwhal Using Ubuntu Skin Pack

A tool called XBoxBurner can greatly simplify this process as it is designed specifically for the purpose of burning Xbox and Xbox 360 game images to the DVD. Tool is very simple to use it has a very straight forward interface as you can see above. A user just need to select the image file to burn, set the burning speed, set the layer break option and finally hit the Start to initiate the burning process. After the completion don’t forget to look at the Log tab to see if there were any problems during the burning process, or it was burned successfully.

Features:
- Burns XBox and XBox360 game images
- Infos for burner and media
- Maximum media compatibility with DVD-ROM
- Progress bar for burning and buffers
- Log for info and error analysis

XBoxBurner is available for Windows, Linux and Mac.

A Simple Way to Burn Xbox And Xbox 360 Game ISO Images

Dia is a freeware alternative to the Visio that has many of the capabilities of the MS Visio and can be used to achieve the same results as MS Visio if used creatively for creating network diagrams, flowcharts and many other kind of network diagrams. It supports many popular formats for diagrams import and export such as EPS, PNG, WMF and SVG formats. New shapes can be added by writing XML files. Main GUI and workflow for creating new diagrams is not that much different from the Visio. Other notable features include multipage printing of the diagrams. Versions of the Dia are available for the MS Windows, Mac OSX and Linux. There is a large variety of use cases for the Dia including creating flowcharts for a computer program to show the control flow, creating network topology diagrams, UML diagram, creating electrical circuit diagrams and hierarchical organization charts etc.

Latest Windows version of the Dia can be downloaded from here. A portable version of the software is also available here.

Dia – A Freeware Alternative to MS Visio to Create Network Diagrams, Flowcharts etc.

Actually there are many ways you can ensure the privacy of your data in the cloud. One that I am going to recommend is based on the use of excellent free and open source encryption software TrueCrypt. TrueCrypt is a security and privacy software that enforces your data privacy using on-the-fly transparent disk encryption(OTFE). What OTFE means is that, it supports the creation of virtual containers that stores all the files/data that you want to secure and are encrypted with strong encryption algorithms. Data stored in the containers can easily be accessed (Read/Write) by mounting the desired container as a local disk. It appears as any other normal disk drive in your My Computer and all the data written to that disk is automatically encrypted and data read from the virtual disk is automatically de-encrypted on the fly in RAM. I have already written about it in detail and still to this day it has no real competitor in terms of powerful features, customizability and speed.

Real trick lies in creating a secure container for all of your data in the Dropbox folder and then putting your data in that container. Lets take a simple example! First estimate the total size of sensitive data that you want to put in Dropbox (and probably synchronize with the other computers). Say you estimated a size of 400MB then I would recommend to create a container using the TrueCrypt software in the Dropbox folder of at least 500 MB. As a slightly larger size will allow you to put more data in future (just in case a need arises). After creating this container (in the Dropbox folder) mount it. After mounting the container that you just created it will appear in My Computer as any other local drive. Now put all your data that you want to secure in this drive. After you are done just dismount this drive from the TrueCrypt interface. As soon as you dismount it Dropbox client will start to synchronize the contents of this TrueCrypt container with the cloud. For the first time synchronization it may take a bit more time but for the later synchronizations it should be faster because Dropbox uses Delta synchronization technique which ensures than only the modified parts of a file are transferred to the cloud which makes it very fast. Now, whenever you want to update your data (or access it later on) that you just secured, you will mount the TrueCrypt container and it then access it as a local drive in My Computer. Make sure that whenever you are done to dismount the container otherwise Dropbox will not be able to sync the content to your online storage account!

Of course this trick will work not only for Dropbox but for any other cloud storage based data backup/synchronization service as well such as SugerSync. If you want to see a comparison of the Dropbox with the SugarSync take a look here.

How to Secure Your Extremely Sensitive Data in Dropbox or Some Other Cloud Storage Service ?

I have used Dropbox for many many months and should I mention that very extensively to synchronize important data between my work PC and a laptop at home. But not only that as I also use it optionally to transfer some pdf documents to my IPhone so that I can read them on the go. One of the primary strengths of the Dropbox is that it is very fast on the syncing operation. Even if you have a large number of small files it completes the syncing operation pretty fast where many other services struggle. Another neat feature built into the newer versions is the LAN Syncing feature that allows to perform a vey high speed syncing operation between two computers that are located in the same LAN network. Its main strength lies in its simplicity – you just install the client, link your account to it and from then on it just works! It is not intrusive at all as everything you put in the Dropbox magically appears on every other machine that also has Dropbox installed and linked to the same account. But this is also from where primary criticism stems. As it is very simple it do not allows to synchronize any arbitrary folders from the computer to be synchronized. Everything that you want to synchronize must be placed in the Dropbox folder. This is one of major weaknesses of the Dropbox. Apart from this limitation there are many notable features which are not so obvious at first sight such as unlimited versioning for the files placed in Dropbox, delta transfers technology for files (where only parts of the file which have changed are transferred) to significantly speedup the process, support for Windows, Mac and Linux client. For a free account you get 2GB of free space but apart from space limitation there are not any other limitations on the free account i.e. you can sync as many computers as you want with a single account. Furthermore no limitations on the upload/download speed in the free account. However, if you want to upgrade then you will have to consider their paid plans and they only have two options currently one is Pro 50 a 50 GB storage plan with a monthly fee of 10 USD and Pro 100 with a monthly fee of 20 USD. These plans are bit more expansive when compared to some other competitors.

I don’t have a large experience with the SugarSync but from my  brief experience what I learned is that user interface for their desktop client is not as simple as Dropbox for new users. In particular there are many options that you can adjust which on the other hand provides a lot of flexibility. Particularly it eliminates one of the biggest problems that people have with Dropbox namely selective syncing so in SugarSync you can selectively choose which folders to synchronize with their online cloud storage service (they can be any folders in your system). Another advantage is that they have recently increased the storage size from 2GB to 5GB for free accounts to up the ant (listen Dropbox people)! Once setup – SugarSync experience is similarly seamless to the Dropbox. Here, I come to one of weakest points of the SugarSync and that is syncing speed of the service, in particular upload speed are painfully slow for some reason. I have heard that it is because  I am using their free plan. But then how can I be assured that their premium paid plans will not be slow as well? Compared to the Dropbox syncing speed is substantially slow on my test machine (also consider the fact that for the Dropbox I am also using a free account). This is something that SugarSync should have mentioned on their website that speed in the free accounts is crippled! Another problem here with the free account is that you can sync NO more than two devices with the same account (this limitation also applies to mobile device such as IPhone etc.). Furthermore, as I know free accounts of SugarSync don’t support unlimited versioning of files. Another negative is that there is no support for a Linux client so far. On the positive side pricing plans are much cheaper than Dropbox.

So here we are – I put important facts in front of you about both of these services so that you can make informed decision on which of these services to use. I you ask me I will stick to my Dropbox account as they do not cripple the free version. We can get a massive 5GB of storage with the SugarSync but what good it is if we cannot use it because of poor syncing speeds! In case SugarSync developers improve the syncing speed in free version then I will favor it over Dropbox. Unfortunately for now due to some serious performance issues I am hesitant to migrate to their service (at least if you are not willing to be a paid subscriber).

***Note: BTW if you do decide to use Dropbox based on my arguments use the this link to signup for a free Dropbox account that will give you an additional 250 – 500 MB of free space!

Dropbox vs. SugarSync–A Battle of Online Synchronization Service Titans

PDFTK Builder is freeware utility that allows to perform a number of useful operations on PDF files including the one’s that I mentioned above. Actually by itself this is just a front-end to another very nice freeware utility PDFTK(command-line driven) and allows all the features of the PDFTK to be accessed from a nice graphics interface.

A more complete list of the supported operations that it can perform on the PDF files is listed below:

• Collate allows to rearrange (reorder, delete, & duplicate) pages in a single document and/or combine pages from multiple PDF documents. Multiple documents will be collated in the order they are listed in the ‘Source Documents’ window.
• Split will separate each page of a PDF file into a separate PDF document.
• ‘Background’ enables you to add a background to each page in a document or just the first page. The ‘background’ (e.g. a company logo, or a ‘draft’ watermark) must be another PDF document (the first page of that document if it has more than one page). ‘Stamp’ is very similar to ‘ background’ except that the ‘stamp’ is placed on top of the source document.
• ‘Rotate’ enables you to rotate a range of pages in a document.
• The new document can be password protected (encrypted) by providing ‘owner’ and ‘user’ passwords. The ‘owner’ password does not stop users from reading the document, but it does restrict the actions that users can perform on that document – printing, copying, decrypting etc. Specifying a ‘user’ password will stop anyone without either ‘user’ or ‘owner’ passwords from opening and reading the document.

This software is available for MAC OS X and many Linux distributions apart from Microsoft Windows. Also note that not all features of the PDFTK are supported by the PDFTK Builder but at-least it provides a nice GUI for most of features of the PDFTK. You can get it here(PDFTK is also included in the package).

How to Merge, Split, Stamp and Password Protect PDF Documents Easily ?

Not everyone likes the window’s built-in lean and mean image file viewing/previewing feature like me. It may serve the purpose if you are viewing only a few graphics files and not need much control over the viewing aspects or the details of the graphics files. But what if you want to view a large number of files, manage them, perform some image enhancement operations or simply want to view some exotic formats such as eps, pic, pix,psd etc. ?

To have all the above mentioned features and many others you will need a third-party graphics viewer/converter. Probably the most famous shareware application in this category is ACDSee Photo Manager which supports amazing amount of features but the newer versions have a feature bloat particularly after the version 6.0 (in my opinion). There are a number of really good freeware image viewers available including the IrfanView , FSViewer and Shock Viewer that more or less offers the same functionality as ACDSee Photo Manager. All of these have strengths and weaknesses and require a detailed comparison. But generally speaking IrfanView has probably the most number of followers out of all the free image viewing applications followed by FSViewer.

I have used the IrfanView for sometime but was never comfortable with it’s interface after moving from ACDSee, so after I discovered FSViewer a year back, I immediately switched to it. I really liked the fancy interface and rich functionality and particularly the similarly in many aspects to the ACDSee viewer. In many ways you can compare it to the older versions of ACDSee (3.0) in interface, image editing, file operations and speedy operation etc. Of course features in newer versions of FSViewer are much more polished as compared to the older versions of ACDSee. I was under the impression for a long time that this is the best image viewer available for MS Windows period. But guess what another free image viewing application that I discovered in last couple of months proved me wrong(although I still think that GUI and the placement of the different options/features in FSViewer is still the best of all the freeware image viewing application out there).

“XnView is a utility for viewing and converting graphic files.” This is what official homepage says about it. This the most concise explanation you can give for such an incredibly powerful image viewer as it’s feature go far beyond mere image viewing . Some of the features are outlined below:  

• Import about 400 graphic file formats
• Export about 50 graphic file formats
• Multipage TIFF, Animated GIF, Animated ICO support
• Image IPTC, EXIF metadata support
• EXIF auto rotation support
• IPTC editing
• Resize, rotate, crop support
• Lossless rotate & crop (jpeg) support
• Adjust brightness, contrast…
• Auto levels, contrast
• Modify number of colors
• Apply filters (blur, average, emboss, …)
• Apply effects (lens, wave, …)
• Fullscreen mode
• Slide show with effects
• Batch convert, batch rename
• Create WEB page easily
• Screen capture
• Create contact Sheet
• Create or edit Multi-page file (TIFF, DCX, LDF)
• TWAIN & WIA support (Windows only)
• Print support (Windows only)
• Drag & Drop support (Windows only)
• Compare image side by side
• Filmstrip layout
• 44 languages support (Windows only)
• And many many other things…

It will be useful to mention some of the advantages that it has over the FSViewer – my second best choice as an image viewing application now.

1. Supports preview/playback of video formats avi,mpg,flv,asf, wmv etc.
2. You can perform a search on a number of criteria’s such as file name, date, size, exif/IPTC information etc.
3. It can find graphics files based on the file contents, rather than just the filename as most other image viewers do including FS Viewer(an options needs to be set in the preferences for this to work). To observe the working of this feature navigate to the cache folder of your Firefox profile from XnView and you will be able to view the images that are present in the cache folder although they have not the proper extension(jpg,gif,png etc)!
4. Includes a shell extension that will allow to see a preview of the current image file from the windows file explorer, set the image as the wallpaper or convert it to another format, all from the file context menu!!
5. Extensive plugin support including support for many Photoshop filters.
6. Almost every aspect of the interface or the functionality can be customized from the preferences
7. Also available for Linux, Mac OS X and many other platforms.
8. These are just the noticeable advantages that I found during my interaction with the XnView as there may be many others yet to be explored!

However, one area that I think FSViewer still holds supremacy is it’s highly polished visual interface and placement of the features at the right places where you expect them to be. Besides providing rich feature-set XnView do not compromise in speed as loading speed of the application is pretty fast.I also like the fact that it can be used in portable mode if a user wants.

Try XnView and I am sure that you will really like it. You can download the latest version from the official homepage here.

XnView – The Best Graphics/Image Viewer you will Find on any Platform