Bag of Beans

This little open source application for Windows allows you to author a video DVD from nearly any video file. See the Lifehacker link below for a step-by-step guide on using the application.

Supported file container formats are, amongst others, AVI, MPG, MOV, WMV, ASF, FLV, Matroska and MP4. Supported codecs are amongst others, MPEG-1\2\4 (XVid, DivX, etc.), Windows Media Audio\Video. MP3, OGG Vorbis, H264, and On2 VP5\6. For a full list of supported container, audio and video formats, see http://ffmpeg.mplayerhq.hu/ffmpeg-doc.html#SEC20

• Link (via Lifehacker)

Use VMware Converter to create a VMware image from your physical machine. They have a free version (VMware Converter Starter) as well as a licensed version.

Use the intuitive wizard-driven interface of VMware Converter to convert your physical machines to virtual machines. VMware Converter quickly converts Microsoft Windows based physical machines and third party image formats to VMware virtual machines. It also converts virtual machines between VMware platforms. Automate and simplify physical to virtual machine conversions as well as conversions between virtual machine formats with VMware Converter.

• Link (via Digg)

Grab the latest version of the PuTTY SSH client and associated utilities.

• Link (via Digg)

This article examines some of the myths and facts surrounding coffee and your health. For example, recent studies indicate that drinking coffee may reduce your chances of developing Type 2 diabetes, and could also protect you from Parkinson’s disease.

In the interest of coffee drinkers everywhere, here are the latest thoughts from leading researchers about coffee and whether it can enhance—or not—our health. We are “spilling the beans” on who should and shouldn’t be drinking coffee, especially if you suffer from certain conditions.

• Link (via Digg)

This is quite a funny abuse of the English language.

It had been a rough day, so when I walked into the party I was very chalant, despite my efforts to appear gruntled and consolate.

I was furling my wieldy umbrella for the coat check when I saw her standing alone in a corner. She was a descript person, a woman in a state of total array. Her hair was kempt, her clothing shevelled, and she moved in a gainly way.

• Link (via reddit)

The latest update of this free paint program was just released yesterday. Check it out.

Paint.NET is free image editing and photo manipulation software designed to be used on computers that run Windows. It supports layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools.

It started development as an undergraduate college senior design project mentored by Microsoft, and is currently being maintained by some of the alumni that originally worked on it. Originally intended as a free replacement for the MS Paint software that comes with Windows, it has grown into a powerful yet simple tool for photo and image editing.

• Link
• Changes in v3.0

This article at Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories contains some interesting tidbits on cashews.

Anyway, while we eating them, we were asked if we knew why you can’t get cashews in the shell. We had no idea. Actually, we’d never thought about it. But, come to think of it, you can get almonds, walnuts, pistachios, brazil nuts, hazelnuts, peanuts, chestnuts, pine nuts, pecans, and even macadamia nuts in a shell, but not cashews.

Why? It turns out that the cashew shell is toxic. However, that raised the question of what a cashew looks like in its shell. Again, we had no idea. When we found out, we knew more people should see it. Weird looking, isn’t it? And caustic, too!

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Here’s a very funny and entertaining piece of animation.

• Link (via UNEASYsilence)

This page lists a number of free books licensed under Creative Commons.

• Link (via Digg)

Microsoft has released a small Windows Explorer add-in that allows you to view and edit the IPTC/EXIF metadata of your photos.

Note: you need to pass a Genuine Windows Validation check to access the download.

• Link (via Lifehacker)

I recently upgraded the firmware on my Linksys WRT54G router with the latest DD-WRT v23 SP2 firmware, and it works great. Among many other new features, I can now assign static DHCP leases, which I couldn’t do before with the stock Linksys firmware. The upshot is that now I don’t have to worry about updating my port forwarding setup whenever one of my machines’ wireless IP address changed.

If this sounds like something you’d like to try, check out the links below.

Warning: when flashing firmware, there is always a possibility of something going wrong during the process, which could potentially brick your router and render it inoperable. Make sure you understand what you are doing and the risks involved. It’s not my fault if you screw up your hardware!

It would also be a good idea to save all of the following pages locally to your computer so that you can still reference them if you lose your internet connection–particularly important if your wireless router is also your internet gateway.

• Lifehacker’s article “Hack Attack: Turn your $60 router into a $600 router” came in handy. They also include a step-by-step guide.
• Check if your router is supported here.
• Also be sure to read the DD-WRT installation guide.
• If you do manage to brick your router, read the page on how to recover from a bad flash. Save this page to your computer before you begin, just in case.

An interesting article on how Charles Simonyi, who designed Microsoft Office and invented Hungarian notation <shudder>, hopes to make programming easier.

Bill Gates calls Simonyi “one of the great programmers of all time.” Indeed, Simonyi is arguably the most successful coder in the world, measured in terms of financial reward and the number of people who use his creations. (Other celebrated programmer-billionaires, such as Larry Ellison and Bill Gates himself, made their money and names founding and managing technology ventures.) Simonyi could easily choose to spend the rest of his life endowing philanthropic ventures, flying planes, or cruising in his yacht. Instead, he says, he is “programming probably harder than ever before.” He is obsessed with a project that he has pursued for a decade and a half, and that four years ago carried him right out of Microsoft’s doors. He is proud of his profession. But he is also haunted by the thought of what programmers must contend with each time they sit down to code. He asks, Why is it so hard to create good software?

• Part I
• Part II
• (via reddit)

Here is an informative post on how to create “shelves” using Subversion, similar to a feature available in Visual Studio Team System.

Shelve your pending changes when you are not ready to or cannot check in a set of pending changes. There are primarily five shelve scenarios:

• Interrupt When you have pending changes that are not ready for check in but you need to work on a different task, you can shelve your pending changes to set them aside.
• Integration When you have pending changes that are not ready for check in but you need to share them with another team member, you can shelve your pending changes and ask your team member to unshelve them.
• Review When you have pending changes that are ready for check-in and have to be code-reviewed, you can shelve your changes and inform the code reviewer of the shelveset.
• Backup When you have work in progress that you want to back up, but are not ready to check in, you can shelve your changes to have them preserved on the Team Foundation server.
• Handoff When you have work in progress that is to be completed by another team member, you can shelve your changes to make a handoff easier.

The branching model in Subversion, with its use of “cheap copies” is well suited to provide similar capabilities and handle all five of these scenarios. In the rest of this article, I will detail two different ways to shelve changes using branches in Subversion.

• Link (via reddit)

This computer-controlled waterfall is simply stunning.

• Link (via Digg)

Lifehacker has a useful tip for temporarily grouping several windows on the Windows task bar so that you can tile, minimize, close, etc., all of the selected windows as a group.

Reader Andreas wrote to tell us about a neat little trick for tiling a pair of windows in Windows.

With the first window open, press and hold Ctrl, then right-click the second window’s button in the taskbar and choose Tile Horizontally or Tile Vertically in the pop-up that appears. Presto: Two-click tiling of two windows. Right-click a third button to add a third window to the mix, and so on. (Turns out you can use this grouping method to close or cascade windows as well.) This tip also works in Vista, though the language is a bit different: “Show Windows Stacked” and “Show Windows Side by Side.” What’s your favorite tiling tip? Tell us about it in the comments. — Rick Broida

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This is a very comprehensive list of Linux equivalents for Windows software.

One of the biggest difficulties in migrating from Windows to Linux is the lack of knowledge about comparable software. Newbies usually search for Linux analogs of Windows software, and advanced Linux-users cannot answer their questions since they often don’t know too much about Windows :). This list of Linux equivalents / replacements / analogs of Windows software is based on our own experience and on the information obtained from the visitors of this page (thanks!).

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William Wu has quite a large collection of tech-interview style riddles and puzzles.

This is an archive of problems I’ve been collecting since the Spring of 2002. They come from many places, including word of mouth, college courses, books, and job interviews for hi-tech positions. Many are even written by members of our own forum community. These carefully chosen puzzles will demand you to think in creative ways you perhaps normally would not. In fact, some will seem outright impossible at first … but once you crack them, the epiphany can be truly rapturous!

• Link (via Neatorama)

Check out this huge aquarium in the lobby of the Radisson SAS Hotel in Berlin.

Combined with a vast amount of sandblasted glass, the giant AquaDom gives a transparent-like feeling to the lobby. Guests and visitors are able to travel through the aquarium in a glass-enclosed elevator to reach a sightseeing point and restaurant under the glass roof. Two full-time divers are responsible for the care and feeding of the fish and maintenance of the aquarium.

• Link (via Neatorama)

Daily Cup of Tech has put together a small set of utilities that might be useful for repairing and maintaining PCs. You just throw them onto a 32MB or larger USB key and you can carry them with you wherever you go.

• Link (via Lifehacker)

• Link [xkcd.com]