Mega Manager

MegaManager is kinda cool

Distributed by Mega-upload, its kinda like their download manager. Its pretty neat and gives you two automatic downloads every day – no waiting and CAPTCHA. Also, if you register for free on their site, you get to wait 20s lesser

Also the MegaManager has resume capabilities

External HDD

I learnt today that Western Digital HDDs cost lesser than Segate HDDs – both external.

Also the ones which dont need a separate power connection cost even more.
One more thing is that the Segate HDD is formatted with an NTFS file-system – and here I thought only FAT32 was used for external plug and play things – an assumption that had its roots in the fact that USB drives were FAT32… oh well learnt something new

College Website Design

Here is my stint with CSS Style Sheets

I got bored once, and decided I should do something creative. I like to play with colours and design stuff (already designed two logos – one still in use and the other bathed in controversy). I also had Dreamweaver, so I though why not try it out.

I leeched the site using HTTrack. But it turns out that since a CMS (content management system) is in use, only HTML files that are generated are copied – although I did get two CSS sheets. I sat and edited these things, and it turned out quite neat. A mail to the Systems Manager and a reply

I went to him and got the XHTML template. ModX uses this as the basic template. The CSS things are addons.

I edited most of the CSS again – using the one I already had. The trick was to be able to get sub-menus while retaining the highlight on the main menu. I googled a lot and got this 
li:hover>a
That does the trick

Video Cropping

So, I have a few files which have letterboxes above and below – this is the term used for the black border above and below the actual video content. I obviously want to remove these for some strange reason (probably thinking that the video may get skewed when played back on some other device – which I dont have as yet).

I usually use this freeware called Virtualdub and this other one called VirtualDubMod. You can google and get a link for it. So this one website says I HAVE TO RE-ENCODE videos and cannot just crop it. I tried out a few softwares – one solely for MPEG1 files – which didnt work on my MPEG4 files. Finally I go back to my old ways and re-encode the whole video

So, just in case I forget, here’s how to do it
Open the video in VirtualDub. (or VirtualDubMod)Audio>Direct Stream Copy (only in VirtualDub, not needed in Mod)
Video>Full Processing Mode
Video>Filters
Add Null transform
Cropping
Click and Drag the edges (you dont need to change the numbers in the X and Y fields)
Save
Open the file in GSpot Codec Information (packaged with KLITE MEGA CODEC PACK)
See the bit-rate for video
In VirtualDub Select Video>Compression>Xvid MPEG4
Set bitrate = what is from Gspot (this may be wrong – I am removing data, so bitrate should be lower)
Then just save, save save, and save

The Dawn of a new era

Final year brings with it many advantages. One of them being that I can finally watch movies all day long and not regret it later on… Although I am relatively busy now-a-days with a lot of other activities, keeping in line with the main aim of the blog – to not reveal anything – I plan to use this to document what I do everyday – mostly related to computers. So, here we go