arturmarques.com iLog

I was looking to check for visible sky events from my current location, so I tried to install a relatively old piece of software – “Starry Night” http://www.starrynight.com/ – still the very best I ever used, and also ASCOM platform compatible http://ascom-standards.org/. Unfortunately, the installer is not totally compatible with Windows 7 x64: it reports [...]

I was looking for a tool to do bulk images conversion, e.g. many .PNG files to .JPG. I considered http://www.command-line-imageconverterplus.com/ but it is NOT free. Then I found http://sourceforge.net/projects/imgbconvert/. Super simple and elegant. It just does the job, for free. Great!

I use ZScreen for regular desktop snapshots, but it also works fine for in-game captures on some games, Crysis 2 included. But not rFactor. http://code.google.com/p/zscreen/

Previously I was under the opinion that Image Grabber II (IG2) was the top tool for the job of extracting video thumbnails into a single file: http://arturmarques.com/wordpress/index.php/2011/02/01/creating-a-single-jpg-with-many-snapshots-from-a-video/ Indeed, it was the only program to handle my Canon’s 1080p video files. But I was surprised to find that IG2 fails with my MPEG2 satellite recordings, so [...]

Right now, I am far from being a fan of the relatively new .application installer system. Some applications now distribute their installers not in the usual .exe or .msi formats, but as .application archives that are usually much less configurable and extremely opaque, hiding not only the files that will be sourced for the installation, [...]

I would love to be as superior as Bernie Ecclestone was after being mugged, selling is battered face for a fortune and showing the abusers how to brilliantly volte-face a situation, but of course I am just a nobody and the best turnaround I can ambition is to help at least one person with some [...]

I just love YawCam because it features everything that is usally missing from webcam device makers software: – proper time lapsed capture, and – highly configurable, CPU light, motion capture options. This wonderful free software is available from http://www.yawcam.com/download.php The only features I miss are: – support for more than one camera, using a single [...]

If you use Windows Vista and 7 gadgets, you might have noticed that after closing a gadget you’ll lose any personalized settings you might have set for that gadget. I found one way to make preferred settings persist, which is something that is surprisingly NOT supported at all – and this the sole reason the [...]

In Windows XP, the dead (and very much missed) Encarta 2009 encyclopedia stored its updates (no longer downloadable from https://encartaupdate.msn.com/) at: C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Microsoft\Encarta Reference Library\2009\A\Updates but that location, as mentioned in the previous post is not really available in Windows 7… For Encarta 2009, the updates folder in Windows 7, Windows Server [...]

In Windows XP many apps stored their settings in the “Documents and Settings” folder. This folder *seems* available in Windows 7, but it is just a junction. When you try to browse it, even as an administrator, you’ll be denied which is, in my view, a plain wrong Windows Explorer behavior, which should haved shortcut’ed [...]