A.P.P.L.E

It has become a trend for people to share videos in places such as YouTube, Google Videos, etc. With flexible Firefox browser, you can have add-ons such as DownloadHelper, UnPlug, VideoDownloader and many more to name, for downloading the videos and save it in “FLV” format which can be played back in an FLV player. However, the quality of an FLV video is not as good as those such as .avi, .mpeg, etc… So, there’s a very handy website called vixy.net, which enable us to directly coverts flash videos to the desired format, but it only supports video from YouTube.

So, other than YouTube, we probably have no choice but to only get the .flv version of any videos from site such as Google videos. Still, we prefer higher quality videos, don’t we? And we try to search for “flv to ‘other-you-name-it format’ converter”. Yes, there are lots of such software available, but most of them are sharewares or with watermark in it. This is really a turn off~

Worry not! Some wise heads have developed a 100% FREE video converter which can converts video from one format to the other. And guess what? It can covert FLV to any other desired format too! It’s called SUPER ©.

Although it might not have fancy or very attractive interface, it has powerful features. You can read more about this free software from their website. In short, this is what it is:

• A freeware
• 100% free to download & to use
• Plays & converts very fast full length movies to ANY other format without any time or function limitation

Download it now, and you can converter your favorite videos to any format you desire. Remember, now you can convert any FLV videos without any problem, and it’s FREE.

It’s nice to watch DVDs from your DVD players. But sometimes, we would like to have the same DVD movies or whatever you name, in a different formats. Then you will need something called the DVD ripper or DVD converter. Most of these software are not free and even if you download a free trial from the Internet, you might get your movies watermarked or having the time limitation.

HandBrake is an open-source, GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded DVD to MPEG-4 converter, available for MacOS X, Linux and Windows.

Worry not! HandBrake is now available for downloads and you can get your favorite DVDs ripped just in time! When you see the terms open-source and GPL-licensed, you get the idea of FREE usage. I’ve tried this software before, just need to play around with it a little while then you will get use to the interface - an Easy-to-use software. However, for Windows user, you are required to have .NET Framework version 2.0 installed in your machine, before you can actually install HandBrake.

HandBrake Website: http://handbrake.m0k.org/

Virus has revisited MSN or Windows Live Messenger. Watch out, all MSN or Windows Live Messenger users!! This morning right after I read a new blog entry “Live Messenger Virus: look at my summer pictures” in LiewCF.com, I received similar suspicious files from one of my friends in my contact list. This time, it was not sent together with any messages, just a file waiting for me to receive. It’s a zip file named picture041.zip. Few minutes later, another file was automatically sent to me by the name of images031.zip. Of course, I just declined it and asked my friend about it. She said she got this virus and didn’t know how to solve it. So I suggested a link which was posted in Liew’s blog. Hope she can follow the instructions and solve this virus problem. (Yea, for more details and removal instructions, please refer to LiewCF’s post.)

Here’s a quote from Liew’s blog:

About “summer2008.zip” virusAfter digging the Internet, I found a detail information page about the summer2008.zip worm or known as IRC-Worm.Win32.Agent.a (Backdoor.Win32.IRCBot.acd) by Kaspersky Anti Virus. The virus send random messages in different languages such as English and Chinese.

Upon execution of the worm (.scr file), it drops random file name in your Windows folder:

images0XX.zip
photos0XX.zip
albumXX.zip
photoXX.zip
pictures0XX.zip
pictureXX.zip
(XX is random digitals, such as album39.zip, images091.zip.)

So, please be alerted and DO NOT ACCEPT any suspicious files.

Lastly, another short note quoted from Liew:

Never open a downloaded file before scan for virus.

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I’m a fan of LiewCF.

Laptop is no longer a new thing. Ever heard of TableTop? It’s a new technology from Microsoft. Wow! This is so high tech and I think it has the Minority Report concept, where Tom Cruise move his hands around in the air to control to visual thingy. Yes, this thing has come to live! Can you believe it? The following video is a review of the Microsoft TableTop Technology and it is said that it should be seen in bars and restaurants in November. Well, of course it’s in the United States.. no way here in Malaysia. When can we get such technology here? It sure cost a lot too! Well, this is not meant for me anyway. I can never afford such an expensive high tech thing. But look at its functions in the video, doesn’t it look cool and great?! What do you think?

Microsoft TableTop Technology

This morning, my colleague brought her laptop to me and asked me to help install Microsoft Excel. Okay, as promised previously, I helped her. When I unzipped the laptop bag, I go wow!? or WTF? an emotion which almost like like this –>> A FLOPPY DIRVE?! It’s an Acer TravelMate model laptop and definitely a very old one. I couldn’t remember the model, I think it’s 5**T series. With Windows XP as its operation system, it really took some time for it to login the Windows’ desktop. At the back of the laptop, I observed a Windows ME sticker, so my assumption is, it was running on Windows ME and now installed with Windows XP.

Very small and sempit (narrow) screen. It was too lag and when I got to the desktop, all I saw was only a desktop wallpaper without any desktop icons, the Start menu is not showing up either (no matter how hard you try to press the start key on your keyboard) Because the laptop was password protected, and I didn’t want to walk around to call my colleague (this is her personal stuff, not for the company sack), so I didn’t restart the laptop and continued installing MS Excel using the “New Task” browse and run method from the Task Manager. But later when I restarted the laptop (password was given to me this time), the desktop was back to normal..and I just shut down the laptop, forget to check how much RAM it has.

I wonder how can she keep her laptop in such a good condition. It still look very new, except for the Windows and Celeron stickers on the laptop. Haha, this is my first time seeing a laptop or a notebook with a floppy drive. As nowadays, floppy disk is no longer popular (but under some circumstances, it’s still useful). Everyone aims for USB drive or the so-called pen drive. Who cares about floppy disk? You can hardly find a laptop with floppy drive in the market nowadays.

This is how the laptop looks like:
 Floppy Drive Zoom In: