iCopy is a free and open source software that lets you combine your scanner and printer into a powerful, yet easy to use photocopier by only pressing a button. It let you tweak scanner and printer options (eg. brightness, contrast, number of copies) in a simple interface in just a couple of seconds in a small and no-installation-required application.

Features

System requirements

Download from here.

I lots of files in my hard drive and i burn out gigabytes of data every month to keep my already overcapacitied hard disk from blowing. This translates into hundreds of CDs/DVDs. One thing I’ve noticed is that there is only so much space on the disk label to write down what files are contained within and I hate searching through CDs/DVDs and popping each one in to search for a particular file (despite my best efforts of labelling).

If you are having the same difficulties to locate a file in a CD/DVD and placing then removing a CD/DVD from your CD/DVD Drive a couple of time before you finally found what you’re looking for then Visual CD is the fast and easy way to help you out. What Visual CD does is to help you manage your CD/DVD collection by indexing/cataloguing your CDs/DVDs. You can also catalogue floppy disk (if you happen to still use them), hard disks (thought I think Google desktop should be your default search tool). You can then either search or explore the disk catalogs, searching for files and folders without actually having the physical disks in the drive. It has an intiutive explorer-like interface.

Visual CD is freeware. Download from here

First off all, download the plugin from here and extract the content to your root of your UltraVNC folder (defaulted to “C:\Program Files\UltraVNC”). Note: extract to the root of the folder and not the plugin folder (that’s just a container).

Server Configuration
Now on your UltraVNC Server and you should see MSRC4Plugin in the DSM DSM plugin drop down box.

Check Use and hit the Config button.A MSRC4 Plugin Configuration window will pop up.

You will notice that there aren’t any encryption plugin keys present(naturally since we haven’t created any) so make your first key. Select the default 128 bit hit Gen Key.The configuration tool will close after generating the key and this key will be used from now on on every client computer to allow you to view your server running on that specific key-based encryption. You will notice a new file in your UltraVNC installation folder called rc4.key.

Important: Make sure you bring along this key file (rc4.key) along with your UltraVNC or the client will not be able to interact or see the server.

Client Configuration
Copy this rc4.key to your UltraVNC client’s root directory as with the steps in the Server. When you launch your UltraVNC client, check the box called “Use DSMPlugin” and enter your server’s IP address. Click on connect, enter your password.Done!

Part One
By now you should have VNC installed and you’d be able to connect via LAN. Make sure you register the VNC Server as a system service if you want it to run automatically on Windows start-up.

Now lets expand this control over the Internet. To control your PC over Internet you’ll have to;

1) Know your IP address. If you’re on a static IP then all’s well, if you’re given a dynamic IP by your ISP then you will need;
a) take note of your IP whenever you leave home.
b) register with any of the numerous free dynamic DNS services. What this service does is offer a service to keep a domain name linked to a changing IP address on those who are on dynamic IPs via a dynamic update client that runs on your local computer and updates the dynamic DNS service site. Logging into the site will give you your ip.

2) Permit traffic on the SSH port 22 on the server (the pc you want to control) and if you’re on a router you need to port forward the VNC traffic to your server in which VNC Server is listening. How this is done depends on which firewall and/or router you are using. eg. in Windows XP SP2’s Firewall, go to Start | Control Panel | Windows Firewall | Exceptions tab | Add port | port name SSH, port 22, TCP.

If you’re behind a router or your bridge-modem is in router mode, you’ll need to forward TCP port 22 to the server. This means that any traffic coming in through port 22 (the SSH port) will be passed through the router and directed to the server. Here’s a useful site detailing on how to port forward on popular routers.

This is what port forwarding looks like on my Linksys AM300 modem/router.

Part Two
Because access to a VNC Server allows access to your whole computer, security is of upmost important. VNC is inherently unsecure, thus the need to encrypt the traffic moving between both machines (client and server) as encryption in VNC is only used when the initial connection (when you login). Once connected, all VNC data is unencrypted, and a malicious user could snoop your VNC session with a number of scanning programs available that will scan a subnet looking for PCs listening on any ports which VNC uses.

The purpose of VNC + SSH is to remove this security risk. SSH, or the Secure Shell, allows secure (encrypted and authenticated) connections between any two machines running SSH. The wide variaty of connections supported by SSH include file transfer protocols, TCP/IP port forwarding, terminal sessions et cetera. SSH is capable of using a number of encryption algorithms like AES-256, TripleDES, and-so-forth (I think that’s enuff tech jargons to throw around). By tunnelling VNC over a SSH connection, you will be able to acces the host and have all traffic strongly encrypted.

Getting & Installing OpenSSH
There’s two ways to go about this. You can either get the standalone installation file of OpenSSH here or download Cygwin and grab the relevant OpenSSH packages. Cygwin is a powerful *nix API emulator which has many uses that can replace the usual cmd.exe of our windows. What this means is it allows *nix programs/binaries (or bin) to be run in Windows. Maybe a tutorial for this will be up next on the power of Cygwin.

After downloading Cygwin, hit the Set-up exe file. Cygwin is actually an installation and update utility that retrieves the bin packages from the Internet. As you can guess, the package we’re interested in is called OpenSSH and can be found in the Net category. After Installation is complete you need to add Cygwin environmental variables to your server to add the OpenSSH service and point to the bin file. Do this by right clicking on My Computer | Selecting Properties | going to the Advanced tab and hitting the | Environment Variables button and;

1. Add the variable CYGWIN and ntsec tty by using the Add button.

2. Add C:\cygwin\bin (or whatever your installation directory is, for me it was C:\Program Files\Cygwin\bin) to the at the end of the existing line of the PATH environment variable by using the Edit button. (Warn: Don’t remove the existing lines, just append this line to the end of the line or you’ll screw your paths)

3. Configure OpenSSH on Cygwin by typing ssh-host-config at the prompt with the following answers;


“Privilege Separation?” Yes
“Create local user SSHd?” Yes
“Install SSHd as a service?” Yes
“CYGWIN = ” enter ntsec


4. We can now start the SSH daemon (thats service to you Windows folks) by either typing net start sshd within Cygwin, typing cygrunsrv.exe -S sshd or simply rebooting the machine. You can check if SSH is runningby by typing netstat -a in the command prompt and look for the line with ssh. To stop the SSH service type net stop sshd

Connecting to VNC thru SSH
Adjust the VNC server settings.

1. Select allow loopback connections on the VNC server.

2. Create a local forwarded tunnel using the command ssh -p 5900 admin @60.49.120.110 -L 5900:127.0.0.1:5900 command to forward port 5900 (the default VNC port if you haven’t changed it to another, if so replace this with your specified value instead) on the client where the public IP of your router is 60.49.120.110. The loopback interface address (that’s 127.0.0.1 to you) must be used.

Connect to the VNC server over the SSH tunnel
To complete the procedure, start the VNC viewer on the and point to the server at 127.0.0.1:0:5900. At this point, the connection is forwarded from the client machine to the VNC server over SSH and you should receive the VNC authentication prompt. All network traffic is transparently encrypted by the SSH tunnel.

Troubleshooting Checklist
Since this involves multiple setups and an unususally long guide, here is a brief troubleshooting checklist should you run into problems.

1) If you can SSH from the server to the server (SSH locally) = SSH server is functioning.
2) If you can SSH from a computer over LAN to the SSH server = IP and LAN connection is functioning.
3) If you can SSH from a computer over WAN (i.e. on the other side of the NAT router) to your SSH server, then you know that the router’s port-forwarding is working.

The same rules apply to VNC.

Securing UltraVNC is much easier but that’s for another article. :)

The general availability (GA) of Windows Vista is just around the corner, reviews/articles/rumors/screenshots have been posted in a lot of tech-oriented sites, developers are getting themselves ready, and some Microsoft fanboys just can’t wait for this first major OS release since the good-ol Windows XP.

However, Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, doesn’t look particularly impressed (rather predictable) and refers Windows Vista to as “Over-hyped”. “I don’t actually think that something like Vista will change how people work that much,” Torvalds told Computerworld. “I think it, to some degree, has been over-hyped as being something completely new and I don’t actually think it is.”

In Sydney for this year’s linux.conf.au Linux and open source conference, Torvalds said the Vista interfaces may look different but it doesn’t really change fundamentals of the operating system “in many ways”. Read the full story HERE

In my humble opinion, it is hard to judge whether it is a case of sour grapes, but I do somehow agree with Linus that undue hype has been given to Vista, probably because of its relatively long development period.

But still, no one can deny that Microsoft is a good marketing company. Remember how Microsoft advertised its IE7’s Tabbed-browsing and RSS support as if those technologies have never existed before? :P

This would be a good setup for those who are working with sensitive data and don’t want to wait for a zero-fill reformat to destroy those sensitive data files. Save a batch file on your desktop right next to your recycling bin, so you can now just drag and drop sensitive files onto the batch file icon to shred them digitally. Use the normal Recycle Bin for file you don’t wanna shred. For those with paws instead of hands I advise caution.

Download, extract and save SDelete.exe to your c:\windows\system32

Open a new notepad and key in the following…

@echo off
echo . --- W A R N I N G ---
echo .
echo .the file(s)/folders(s) will be shredded! Are you sure?
echo .
echo . use CTRL-C to abort or...
echo .
pause
sdelete -p 4 -s %1
pause

and save it as a *.bat file on your desktop. As mentioned earlier, you can now just drag and drop sensitive files onto the batch file icon to shred them digitally.

Please note that shredding digital files, like it’s real world equivalent isn’t a 100% process. As in the real world where people can use a sellotape to paste back the shredded strings and reconstruction the original documents, completely removing traces of the file in all operating systems is similarly unlikely. In NTFS, it is extremely likely that copies of the target file will be made elsewhere in the volume. Also, if there is anything in the I/O stack performing write coalescing, then the file you’re trying to securely erase may only be overwritten on the physical disk once and not x number of times as suppose to be done by the shredding application.

Navigation
Nothing fancy. There’s the typical Back, Forward, Stop and Reload buttons you’d find in most browsers. In addition though, there’s a Rewind and Next button which is where Opera tries to make an educated guess on how far Backward or Forward you want to go in when browsing. I reckon it goes back to the first page of any website domain which is good if you’re multiple links down for sites like Wikipedia or news sites. Another feature is the Mouse Gesture feature, which I will explain much later.

Tabs
Tab Browsing has become de facto standard in most browser. In tab browsing, Opera gives you a quick snapshot of a page in the tab, if you hover over it. Useful if you have many tabs open and can’t see the title of the site (or recognize the site’s iconized logo) and need to find the right tab. Right click on a tab gives whole bunch of options – Lock tab, duplicate tab, tile them differently – you name it. Dragging tabs around is also no problemo. If there was only one reason to love Opera, persistent Tab browsing would be it (at least for me). Persistent tab browsing in the sense that Opera caches all the tabs you open, and even after you close it, it gives you the same open tabs when you re-launch opera. Because of this, I find that I often times, don’t need to bookmark pages. Great but sometimes I find that it make it too easy to open up too many pages and I find my self overwhelmed with stuff that I want to read. Well at least I don’t kick myself in the behind when I accidentally close a browser window and lose all my open tabs (though some browsers like Firefox do give you a warning when trying to close multiple tabs).

Zooming In and Out
Different font sizes for different sites (some too big, some too small?) no problem. Opera allows you to zoom in and out and even lets you set different zoom levels per tab and therefore per site/page. If you aren’t bothered then just hold down the control key and use the mouse wheel to zoom in and out. You can also zoom in on pictures without the need for an image editor.

Notes
I use the notes feature a lot to jot down ideas, pre-write online forum debate replies and also to pre-write blog post. Notes is something similar to what you find in Outlook. I also use it to store info I copy off the web before I close the page tab. Copying texts to Notes is made even easier by the right click context menu which gives you the option of “copy to notes (ctrl+shift+c)” when you highlight texts in any web pages.

The right click context menu on highlighted texts also gives you several neat options like perform a search through Google or translate the highlighted text via Bablefish as Opera has all these sites intergrated into it’s search.

Mouse Gestures
This allows you to navigate by using the mouse pointers and a sequence of movements in place of the normal back/forward/stop surfing buttons. To use a mouse gesture you simply hold the right button and drag the mouse in a certain direction. I use it a lot for back, forward and opening new tabs.

RSS Feeds
RSS in Opera uses Opera Mail and it’s a simple 2-click affair. The feed will show up under News feeds and are presented and handled in the same manner as e-mail messages and Usenet news articles. This makes it easy to forward a news feed item by e-mail to a friend, access stored items using the search and “Quick find features”, label particular items for follow-up et cetera.

IRC
Upon starting the built-in IRC, Opera prompts you with initial info to create an account in which you need to enter such as nickname, email address, etc. The IRC client fells very natural. It supports XDCC and other IRC function and I use it mail to replace MiRC for my XDCC anime downloads from fansub group channels. XDCC downloads also use the download manager’s UI and XDCC resume is supported :).

Dictionary
Highlighting text also gives you the option of Spell-checking With Opera and on Windows, Linux, and UNIX, it uses GNU Aspell which has to be installed independently along with at least one Aspell dictionary. The dictionary is also used in the Opera Mail and Notes for spell checking.

Bit Torrenting
With the built-in Bit Torrent, by simple clicking a torrent file, you will be presented with a window asking for a save location. Digging around the Bit Torrent preferences and you’d get the standard upload, download, and port options settings. The Bit Torrent function uses the same UI of the download manager with the status bar at the bottom indicating your torrent(s) vital stats. Just make sure it is configured properly for your environment (router, bridge, etc) as with all Bit Torrent clients.

The Wand – password manager
The Wand is basically a password manager with a auto-login feature. The first time you visit a website that requires you to logon with a username and password, the Wand will ask if you wish to save this information. Clicking yes, tells Wand saves this data for this specific website and when you come back the fields will be highlighted in yellow. By just clicking these highlighted boxes again Opera will sign you in and you are good to go. Doesn’t work for all but it works for most.

Widgets
Similar to Yahoo widgets which are small applications that sit on the desktop and provides easy access to frequently used functions or provides some visual information such as news aggregators, clocks, calculators, calendars and weather forecasts. Widgets are also a feature on Opera. Widgets for Opera must be approved by Opera and and to install them simply go to Widgets | Add Widgets and a new tap with a bunch that are available to you. These widgets are a very cool feature but they come at a cost of processing/RAM and despite their usefulness they actually clutter up your taskbar instead of appearing in tabs.

With all these goodies what’s not to like about Opera? :)

Download from here.

But don’t worry, there’s always freeware alternative for you (err…at least for non-commercial use). I’m going to list out several categories here, and in each category I’ll list out its potential freeware replacement(s) with some quality. The list is NOT intended to list out ALL the alternatives but merely my personal pick.

• Antivirus – I’ve to agree that Kaspersky Antivirus and Nod32 are great antivirus, but there are a few decent FREE alternatives of Antivirus for non-commercial use for you to pick – namely AOL AVS (which I’m using now, it’s running on Kaspersky engine), Avira Antivir Personal Edition, Free Avast and Grisoft AVG Free Edition

• Spyware scanner - Microsoft AntiSpyware is my favourite (of course you need a genuine copy of WinXP), but Bazooka, Ad-aware and Spybot S&D are not too bad for free anti-spyware tool.

• Compression tool - WinRAR is admittedly a very good compression tool with complete functionality, but in case you are not ready to pay for a compression tool, 7-zip does equally well (although it doesn’t look as good, 7z has a much better compression rate compare to the rar format)

• Audio tool - Adobe Premiere and and Sound Forge are the de facto standard for audio-editing software, they are definitely NOT cheap. If you’re only looking for a simpler audio editing tool, the open source Audacity is good enough for you.

• CD/DVD Burning software – Nero Burning ROM is the most popular burning software but if you’re looking for something free CDBurnerXP Pro is not THAT bad.

• Office Suite – It’s indeed hard to find replacement for Microsoft Office (mainly because of the compatibility issue), but if the high license fee is a concern for you, you can give Open Office a try.

• PDF Utilities – if you want to convert DOC file to PDF, you don’t need Adobe Acrobat Professional. Instead you can try PDF Creator. They are also alternatives like PDF995, Primo PDF but they are ad-supported.

• Graphic editing tool – Adobe Photoshop is so popular that it has become a verb already (OMG I photoshopped the pic!), but it’s not something that normal home users can afford. The nearest free alternative to Photoshop is GIMPShop (which is based on GIMP). If you are looking for enhanced version of Microsoft Paint, Paint.NET is not a bad choice.

That’s all for now. Feel free to add in anything here, and if you’re looking for a full list, I’d suggest you to visit the below sites:

• Neowin’s Freeware Alternative List
• LYN Common Software Links (freeware unless stated otherwise)

Fortunately, it’s a rather easy to get around this, which is just to select and install the appropriate dictionary from here. Once that’s done, just right-click on any text box/field/form and you should be able to select the dictionary you want to use (screenshot below):

Once that’s done, you’re all set! :)

IMO, Firefox is on the right track. I’d anytime prefer a web browser that is originally simple but can be shaped/tweaked/configured to the way I like. In contrast, I don’t need a bloated browser that has tons of functions but end up utilizing maybe only 30% of them.

However, not all extensions are perfectly developed. Some of them come with spyware/malware, some of them aren’t actually practical to use, while some of them are just too bloated for minimalists. Thus, I’m here to share all my favorite extensions that are proven to be trustworthy and I personally find them useful:

• Adblock Plus
• Are you one of the web surfers who’s annoyed with web banners and irritating flash animation? Adblock Plus is very efficient extension that allows you to block unwanted content to make your web surfing experience better. Comes with Filterset.G, it has actually blocked 95% of the ads without having you to do anything. For the rest of the 5%, just block it manually! (for example, Right Click and click “Adblock Image” in the menu)
• All-in-one gestures
• It allows you to send specific commands to the browser by combining mouse movements (for example, holding the right mouse button, pushing it up, and release the button will open a new tab for you). It’s one of my favorite extension in Firefox, and its convenience cannot be just described in words! I can even add new gesture whenever it’s needed!
• BBCodeXtra
• As a LYN regular, I use BBCode very often to add formatting to my posts. With this extension, it can be done easily without having to type all the tedious [b][/b], [img=XXX][/img] or [url=xxx][/url] tags.
• DownloadThemAll
• You can call it an extension, but I’d call it a fully functional download manager that’s integrated into my Firefox. With DownloadThemAll, I don’t have to install external download manager and install Flashgot to get them integrated together. Other than that, I’m also very impressed with its download speed.
• Fasterfox
• A zero-configuration extension that significantly increases the speed of your net surfing, also comes with a pop-up blocker. However, choosing “Turbo Charged” preset is not recommended as it exceeds the RFC spec and increases the server load.
  
• ImageShack Toolbar
• Imageshack is one of the most popular yet reliable free image hosting sites. If you upload images to the web frequently, this is a useful extension as you can just do it with two clicks instead of going to the homepage. However, because it’s a toolbar by itself – it does actually occupy some space of the browser.
• Tab Mix Plus
• An excellent extension that greatly enhances Firefox Tab-browsing capabilities. For example, you can force all the links to be opened in existing tab instead of a new tab, you can choose whether or not to have ‘X’ button in every tab, just to name a few. On top of that, it also comes with a built-in session manager.
• Video Downloader
• I’m a frequent visitor of YouTube and Google Video. With the pathetic speed of my “broadband”, it’s almost impossible to view the videos smoothly, moreover, some of the good videos are meant to be collected :) Video Downloader is a simple add-on that adds a small icon on the status bar, allowing you to click on it and get the direct download link of the video.

Of course, the above are just the extensions I’m using. I’m sure they are more FF extensions that you might like. Just visit the add-on homepage to discover it by yourself!

[ Original thread in LYN ]