Monday, June 29, 2009

PDF to Word Converters

Had a pdf that needed converting to doc. Found two options

1. Free Standalone converter that can be downloaded to your PC (http://www.hellopdf.com/download.php ) and

2. A Web based converter ( http://www.pdftoword.com/  )

Of the two the web converter (#2) did the best (though not perfect) job though I'm always suspicious about web converters when they ask to send things to my email address that they are not collecting them. Will be  monitoring my email for new spam.

Monday, June 22, 2009

Internet Explorer 8 - html editing (view source)

Probably the dumbist thing I have seen in a while is the cobbling of IE 8s view source. IE8 has an amazing developer tools feature (press F12 in the browser or Tools > Developer Tools), however with all its magic it is unable to do a simple edit. 

However all is not lost, to change the View Source from the Default viewer, to either notepad or some other editor (I like pspad (http://www.pspad.com/en/) as its as quick as notepad but has better context editing).

  1. Open the Developer Tools (press F12 in the browser or Tools > Developer Tools)

  2. Select File > Customise IE View Source

  3. either select notepad or browse to where your editor exe file is stored (my pspad was in C:\Program Files\PSPad editor\PSPad.exe)


Makes you wonder why you get a glitzy viewer but no way to do simple editing. Would it be so hard to have a check box in the developer options to "enable web page editing" if they are worried about people accidentaly changing pages?? (And yes I know chrome suffers the same fate - but I am sure there would be a plugin for editing like in Firefox!!)

Thanks to Ramesh Srinivasan (2009) from Winhelponline for pointing me in the right direction.

Srinivasan, R. (2009)"The default View Source Editor has changed in Internet Explorer 8 - The Winhelponline Blog" Retrieved June 22, 2009 from http://www.winhelponline.com/blog/default-view-source-editor-changed-in-ie8/

Friday, June 19, 2009

Freeware (donationware) Video Converter

JJ has found a video converter

Huang, S. (2009) MediaCoder - more than a universal audio/video transcoder. Retrieved June 17, 2009 from http://mediacoder.sourceforge.net/

Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Interactive map of GNU/Linux OS and FOSS

A bit geeky but for those who enjoy alternative Operating Systems

Interactive map of GNU/Linux OS and FOSS (n.d.) Retrieved June 16, 2009 from http://www.makelinux.net/system/