Computers

Software Copy Protection Scanner Burnout

Copy protections are often used on CDs, DVDs and Blu-Ray disks so that it becomes more difficulty to copy the contents of the media. Up until now no copy protection was ever used that has not been cracked or bypassed eventually and it is likely that this will hold true in the future. It is on the other hand important to know the type of copy protection used to protect a disk to be able to copy it as different copy protection schemes might need different copying techniques.

Burnout is a tiny software copy protection scanner for the Windows operating system that can identify more than 50 different copy protection schemes on disks.

The 50K application displays a basic interface that can be used to select a disk that is currently in one of the disk drives of the computer system. A click on the Scan button will scan the disk for copy protections and display the findings in the end. The language of the program can be changed in the interface to German, English, French or Italian. The options can also be used to add a Windows Explorer context menu entry so that it becomes easier to scan a disk, enable advanced scans of media and to scan files that are bigger than 15 Megabytes.

The copy protection scanner does not provide information about the protection it has found on the disk. It is up to the user to research it to find out if and how the disk can be copied.

Burnout requires the Microsoft .net Framework 2.0. The application can be downloaded from the project website over at Sourceforge.

Gmail Netbook Mode

Netbooks usually run at limited screen resolutions which often fail to display websites and services properly. And those that are displayed properly still need to be scrolled so that all of the content of the website can be accessed on the netbook.

Netbook users who access Gmail on the web face the same problem. Many of the elements on the Gmail website take up valuable space that should be reserved for more important elements like the emails and messages that the Gmail users wants to read.

The Greasemonkey userscript Better Gmail: Mini Wide adds a special netbook mode to Google’s mail service that removes a lot of clutter from the service on demand. The w key has been assigned by the developer to optimize the display of Gmail for netbook users. It removes the Gmail sidebar and header area so that only the main message area remains.

The search form, all navigational elements, ads, sidebar links and widgets are removed from the display upon pressing the w key after installing the Greasemonkey script which basically makes the message area use the whole width of the computer screen. Another key press displays all the elements again which makes the script a comfortable option on netbooks.

Better Gmail: Mini Wide can be installed directly from the Userscripts website. It worked fine in the latest version of Firefox and might also work in other browsers that support userscripts. Firefox users need to install the Greasemonkey add-on before they can install the userscript.

What is it with the “dist-upgrade” option of apt-get?

There has always been a bit of confusion when people learn they can do a full upgrade of their distribution from the command line. Most people don’t brave such a feat. Some because they don’t use the command line, and others because they are afraid an attempt to upgrade from the command line will wind up fubaring their system. And new users aren’t quite sure what the difference between apt-get upgrade and apt-get dist-upgrade is.

In this Ghacks Linux entry, I am going t dispel the myths and fear of the dist-upgrade command. Of course, as with everything PC-related, you know their are always risks when you do a major upgrade. With that warning out in the open, let’s set out to curb a little fear.

Differences

First I want to compare the two apt-get options: upgrade and dist-upgrade. The difference between these two is very simple. The upgrade option is used only to install all of the newest versions of the packages already installed on your machine. This is what happens when you see the upgrade upgrade packages through the Update Manager (You know, when you are made aware of notification in your panel and then Update Manager opens to show you which updates are available for your system.)

The dist-upgrade option is quite different from upgrade. But just what does dist-upgrade do? Simple. The dist-upgrade option not only will upgrade all of the currently installed packages on your system it will also handle the dependency changes with new versions of packages. In other words, dist-upgrade will remove obsolete packages from your system, whereas upgrade will not. This function is out of necessity for upgrading from one distribution release to another.

But doesn’t it upgrade my distro?

Not necessarily. Although, by itself, dist-upgrade, will prepare your system for a distribution upgrade, the only way it will actually perform the upgrade to a new release is if you have changed your /etc/apt/sources.list file to reflect the change. In other words, you have to add the repositories for the new distribution in the sources.list file before this can happen.

Well that sounds simple. Yes it is. But it is not the recommended plan of attack for upgrading to a new distribution. Although it will work, there is a better way…by command. The command do-release-upgrade was created specifically for upgrading the operating system to the latest release via the command line. Of course, before you issue this command you will want to check to see if an upgrade is available with the command sudo do-release-upgrade -d. When you do this you you be informed if a new release is available. If there is a new release available issue the command sudo do-release-upgrade and the upgrade process will begin. Of course this is a rather lengthy process and there are risks involved.You could lose packages you have manually installed (that are not supported by the new release) or (worst case scenario) your system could become unstable.

Distribution upgrades are always tricky. I have had them go exceedingly well and I have had them go very awry. It’s a gamble. But now you know exactly how to manage the task from the command line. You are now, officially, dangerous. ;-)

PDF OCR Turns PDF Documents Into Text

It sometimes happens that text in a pdf document cannot be selected in a pdf reader like Adobe Reader or Foxit Reader. This is usually the case with scanned documents that have been embedded into the pdf file. One of the options to work with the text in those pdf documents is to use OCR technology.

OCR means optical character recognition which basically makes use of an algorithm to identify the characters displayed in the pdf file.

PDF OCR is a free software program for the Windows operating system that can turn pdf documents into editable text.

The interface is divided into two areas that are independent from each other. The first window loads the pdf document and displays its contents in its interface. All pages are displayed on the left and it is possible to read the pdf right on the screen.

The Start OCR button displays a configuration window for the OCR process. It is possible to OCR all pages, a selection of pages or only the current page.

The progress and status is displayed right in the window and all processed pages are displayed in the second window afterwards.

The PDF OCR Editor is a basic text editor that can theoretically be used to edit the text right away. The OCR process naturally misinterprets some of the characters which have to be edited afterwards.

The text editor can export the converted text as a text or doc document which indicates the second possibility of editing the text.

It usually makes sense to save the processed pdf as a doc and load it into a text processing application like Microsoft Word which offers spell and grammar checking.

PDF OCR is a convenient program that offers its users a fast and easy way of turning pdf documents into text. The program supports ten different languages and is compatible with all 32-bit and 64-bit editions of the Microsoft Windows operating system.

A alternative is Free OCR Scanning which is an online service that can process pdf files among others.

Thunderbird 3.1 Beta Desktop Email Client Released

An update to the desktop email client Thunderbird was released by the Mozilla Messaging developers. Thunderbird 3.1 Beta has been released replacing the previously available alpha version of the email software.

Thunderbird 3.1 Beta is a preview release that fixes a total of 96 different bugs including crash, performance and security fixes.

One of the problems that we have experiencing lately for instance was the inability to save messages after they have been sent. This issue has been fixed in the new beta release of the email client.

The release notes point out that the following notable changes have been made to Thunderbird 3.1 Beta:

Several fixes to improve upgrading from Thunderbird 2.
Several fixes for auto complete, tabs, and activity manager.
Several design improvements and corrections to the interface.
Stability and memory improvements.

The full list of bug fixes and changes is available at Bugzilla which lists a total of 119 bugs of which 10 have been classified as critical and five as major. The majority of critical bugs are related to application crashes with the exception of the DNS prefetch security issue, a startup issue and one upgrade issue.

Thunderbird 3.1 Beta is available for all supported languages and operating systems. It is still a development release and should not be run in a work environment unless a proper disaster recovery option is available.

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