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Windows Live Writer settings transfer/backup – blog profiles, draft and recent posts

Microsoft’s Windows Live Writer is considered to be the most feature rich blog authoring tool. Available for free in Windows (sorry Mac/Linux folks) is known for comprehensive text editing, image management, and link management tool for bloggers.

This Christmas, I got a awesome present, a brand new laptop. It is great working in the new machine. But, I wasn’t easy updating all of my blog addresses in the new Live Writer. So, I went searching for a tool that can backup and transfer blog profiles.

A free tool, Windows Live Writer Backup, available in CodePlex, proved to be the perfect tool to make the task easy. Even if you don’t need to transfer profiles or settings, this is a perfect tool for keeping the backups of your blog profiles.

Downloading, installing and creating the backup is pretty easy. Clicking on the "Backup" button creates a bakcup file containing settings, posts and plugins. If you want more flexibility on what to backup and what not, you can optionally select or deselect features in Settings / Posts and Plugins. Clicking on the text ‘Settings’ lets you deselect ‘blogs’, ‘blog templates’, and "link glossary". By default, recent posts are not saved. But, you can also select it by clicking on the text ‘Post’ (as shown in figure below).

wl_writer-backup_2

blog_backup

After backing up the backup file (name.wlwbackup) is copied in the new machine. After installing the software in the new machine, Restore button is used to restore the profile in the new Windows Live installation.

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Free screen recording software CamStudio

If you want to tell others how to do something in computer, the best way is to record what you do it yourself. For that, you can record a video of the computer screen by a camcorder. But, that is a very inefficient and costly procedure. There is much simpler method — just record what you see in the screen without having any additional devices like camcorder.

There are many software to scree-record – and the best ones are free. The one I like most is CamStudio:

CamStudio can record all screen and audio activities in your computer and create AVI video files. It also has a built-in SWF Producer to convert AVIs into Streaming Flash videos (SWFs) too.

Download from SourceForge.

Double click the file to install CamStudio

After installing you can open the program to see the screen like:

The first red circle starts recording. Before you press the record button you have to customize the software so that you know what area of the screen you want to record and where you would like to save the output AVI file.

To select the screen region click “Region” on menu and select “Fixed Region”. Click on “select” button to select the screen area. The cursor changes until you select a rectangular are a in screen.

Now, you are ready to press the red circle, the record button.

See the preview of the the video I created by CamStudio while I was writing this post:
Read the rest of this entry »

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Free video converter – Format Factory

Software - Format Factory

Price – Freeware (ad-supported)

Cons – Tries to promote products by ads (an eBay shortcut during installation)

There are a lot of free video editors and converters and others cost money to buy. The one I liked most is Format Factory. This free video converter available for free at formatoz.com.

With decent conversion speed and good overall quality this tool it seems better than some paid software.

One application that I like is JPEG to ICO conversion. It’s not easy to to get a 24 bit image look good in 16×16 pixels, but FormatFactory does the job well.

Converts videos to MP4/3GP/MPG/AVI/WMV/FLV/SWF.
Audio and videos to MP3/WMA/AMR/OGG/AAC/WAV.
Any images to JPG/BMP/PNG/TIF/ICO/GIF/TGA
Can rip DVD to video file , rip Music CD to audio file.
MP4 files also support iPod/iPhone/PSP/BlackBerry format.
It also supports RMVB,Watermark, AV Mux.
Supports 56 languages

If you want to see the comparison of different free video convertor software please visit – wikipedia.

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Photo Filtre – free image retouching program

Q. Which is the best image retouching program. I know Photoshop is the best. But, it has way too much options and is suitable for professional, not like me. I want a simple, and casual (and may be free) tool.

A. There are a lot of tools! Some are good in one aspect and may not be good in others. A free photo editor equivalent to Photoshop is Gimp. But, it is not that simple. A few simple and small tool I prefer are – IrfanView, and PhotoFiltre. I used to use Paint (yes, it is Window’s own Paint) a lot previously. But, when I started using PhotoFiltre I don’t need Paint anymore. So, I would suggest PhotoFiltre to suit your neet.

Answer in details – more details on PhotoFiltre:

PhotoFiltre is the best image retouching program available for free. It features simple to advanced image adjustment tools and vast amount of filters to go with it. Best part of using PhotoFiltre is the easy learning curve.

If you don’t want to install one more program, there is a portable version (download the ‘zip’ format). The software is ready to use after unzipping.

photofiltre

Download PhotoFiltre from its website.

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Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail – Attachment Size Limit

Email permit sending files and documents in the form of attachment. Some even use such facility as a free online storage. Emails however have a cap in how big an attachment be.

Here are the limits of attachment sizes in big players in email sector: Hotmail, Yahoo and Gmail :

Hotmail : 10GB (since August 3, 2010, in SkyDrive) – Unlimited storage
Yahoo : 25 MB attachment limit – Unlimited storage(since May 2007)
Gmail : 25MB (since June 2009) – 7GB storage

There are other email service providers but, none is near the three market leaders.

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Online Photo Galleries downloader – Picasa Downloader

picasa-logo_1 Are you fed up of ‘Right Click’ –> ‘Save Image As …’ ?

I have already posted about the software for Facebook photo mass downloader FacePad and Flickr Downloader. Now, it is time for Picasa.

I wish there were a single tool to to automatically download all the photos in a Picasa, Flickr, Facebook and any other online albums — for free of course.

Picasa Downloader is a tool to download Picasa photo albums. If you don’t want to install the program, there is a portable version of the software too.

In this tool you can provide the username and it lists all the albums of the user and you can download selected albums or all the albums at once. Just make sure that there are not many photos in the albums. Some albums may contain 1000s of photos and will take forever to download them.

It doesn’t show the number of photos in the album before it starts downloading. I wish there were a cancel and a pause button too.

Anyways, it is a great tool to download photos.

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Free Facebook Photo Album Downloader

If you have some friends whose Facebook albums you want to download or you want to download your own photos at a click of the mouse; this might be one more reason for you to go for Firefox.

FacePAD, also known as the Facebook Photo Album Downloader allows you to download your friends’ Facebook albums on a click of the mouse.

Requirements:

1. Firefox browser on any OS platforms (Windows, Mac OS, Linux)

2. A Facebook account with at least a friend with photo album … Actually, there is no no. 2 requirement.

All you need to do is download FacePAD Addon and install on the Firefox browser. Restart the browser and you are good to go photo hunting.

Navigate to your friend’s album and right-click on the album you are interested on. You will get a menu with “Download Album with FacePAD” on it. Click on it and everything is done automatically. The screenshot below is self-explanatory.

The photos will be saved on the default Firefox download folder.

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Mass Flickr download freeware

I don’t know if it is against Flickr copyright policy or not but there is a freeware available which allows you to download all the photos from a Flickr account.

According to the site, the software can automatically download the best available quality for a picture (like – original, large, medium). It also claims to download “protected” images that are placed below the transparent “spaceball” area.

You can download the installer here.

Please install the software at your own risk and I am in no way associated with the developer. I found the program in the internet while surfing and sharing it in the blog for the people who might want to use it. I haven’t tried it myself, please comment if any of you tried it.

Windows Live Writer settings transfer/backup – blog profiles, draft and recent posts

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Free screen recording software CamStudio

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Free video converter – Format Factory

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Photo Filtre – free image retouching program

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Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail – Attachment Size Limit

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Online Photo Galleries downloader – Picasa Downloader

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Free Facebook Photo Album Downloader

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Mass Flickr download freeware

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