Duplicate files cleaner

Stumbled across this pice of software “Duplicate Cleaner“, a utility to remove duplicate files on you harddisk – a growing problem with the harddisk sizes these days, I guess I alone havearound 4TB disk storage and I would be VERY surprised if there was not a duplicate file or two.  The software also supports hardlinks which sounds interesting.

I will be testing this software in the near future.

Screenshots here;
http://www.digitalvolcano.co.uk/content/duplicate-cleaner/screenshots

DVD Backup made easy (excellent for digi pictures)

Have you ever tried to burn your collection of digital photos or mp3 files to DVD?  Sure you have, how did you accomplish it?  By sorting files into groups of 4.6gb and burning one dvd at the time?  Most people do it this way, you could also use winrar or other and create compressed files with a size of 4.6gb (one per dvd) – however that is not optimal if you later wish to extract just that ONE file you deleted by accident or if one DVD gets corrupted…

What to do!?  Well I stumbled across this blog post;
http://www.jonnysblog.com/2009/04/12/how-to-split-directories-to-span-dvd%E2%80%99s/

Where several utilities are mentioned;
SizeMove (see above link for screenshot)
SizeMe

I also stumbled across;
LargeBackup2DVD (a full featured backup solution)

UPDATE;
A related product Dirsplit has come to my attention, this appear to be more related to sorting than size, but may still be interesting to you;
http://code.google.com/p/dirsplit/

Gparted partition tool – freeware

Need to repartition your harddisk?  Don’t want to pay hundreds of dollars for Partition Magic?

Well you may be in luck by visiting;
http://gparted.sourceforge.net/

Here you will find a linux iso of a utility called Gparted, maybe its worth a look before you order Partition Magic

Yubikey II – got it

So I just received my YubiKey II in the mail yesterday, it’s quite nice not as pretty as the original YubiKey but way more robust.

What is a Yubikey you ask, well that is complicated to explain, but basically it’s a token that will generate one time passwords – you can hence use it to login to websites and services (that of cause need to support the Yubikey), the cool thing here is that with “One time passwords” you do not need to fear that someone steals your password (malware, virus or keylogger) as you get a new password every time you use the key to login..

It’s way cool, and quite easy to implement on your own website or in your own software as there are numerous public API’s available..

The company behind and their description of the key
http://www.yubico.com
http://www.yubico.com/products/description/

Various videos on the Yubikey
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=yubikey&search_type=&aq=f

A technical walk through of the Yubikey
Security Now – Episode #143 – 08 May 2008 – 84 min.
http://media.grc.com/sn/sn-143-lq.mp3

Developers look here

http://www.yubico.com/developers/clients/

Update; 2010 January
Coupon/discount code available here;
http://www.ghacks.net/2010/01/12/yubico-usb-key-provides-extra-login-protection-security/

Nero 9 FREE version (not just trial)

Nero has released a FREE limited version of their popular CD/DVD burner software.

Get it here;
http://www.nero.com/eng/downloads-nero9-free.php

Screenshots here;
http://www.snapfiles.com/screenshots/nerofree.htm

Review here (does not sound too promising);
http://www.snapfiles.com/get/nerofree.html

Fastcopy a possible alternative to Robocopy

You may be using Robocopy when copying files, Robocopy is an older Microsoft command line utility (even though a GUI has later been created) that can copy files in a particular robust way (Robocopy actually stands for Robust copy), the trick is that you can specify a lot of parameters eg. copy NTFS rights, mirror a directory structure and much much more.

However I just stumbled over an interesting freeware utility, this utility seem to offer many of the same options plus a bunch of new once..  

Among the the interesting plus features is one I have often sighed ”move one at the time”, say you need to move a LARGE directory structure on a server to a new location on the same drive and as a twist you need to inharit NEW ntfs rights (the ntfs rights from the top folder in the new structure) – you could not just use the build in drag and drop move in windows as you would also move the NTFS rights (as its the same drive) (yes of cause you could afterwards change the NTFS rights but that takes a lot of time)…  but now you can set Fastcopy to just move one file at the time.  Sure there were other other ways of doing this, but this however is quite neat..

Other interesting features is speed limiting, less intensive processor usage, verify, filtering and many many more.

If you liked Robocopy and Terracopy you will likely also like Fastcopy.
http://www.ipmsg.org/tools/fastcopy.html.en

DNA Evidence Can Be Fabricated, Scientists Show

It would appear the days when DNA evidence was counted as being 99.99999999999999999%  trustworthy has encountered a problem, scientists from Israel has in a lab proven that they could falsify DNA evidence so that they would appear to come from a specific individual – all they needed was apparently a DNA profile of the person they wanted to ‘mimic’ and they could produce spit and blood with his/her DNA profile (I would suspect seamen could also be produced this way).  This way DNA evidence like eg blood could be falsified and put on a crime scene to frame someone, it is a scary thought as DNA evidence today carry very high weight in courtrooms.

All may however not be lost as the company behind this breakthrough is working on a detection model to spot these ‘fake’ DNA samples, but still the thought is scary.

http://newz.dk/dna-beviser-kan-fremstilles-i-laboratoriet

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/18/science/18dna.html?_r=1

http://www.fsigenetics.com/article/S1872-4973(09)00099-4/abstract

YouSee.dk Danish cabletv provider – to skip coding

The Danish CableTV provider YouSee.dk will as of September 2009 cease encoding their digital tv signal, thus you will no longer need a decoder card for your DVB-C enabled TV/box.  Now sadly this does not mean that you can view more channels, only that you now can watch them in digital quality something that earlier would require a separate subscription.  Indeed good and interesting news for those of us that has YouSee.dk

Source;
http://www.business.dk/article/20090819/techmobil/90819062/

PS3 slim

Sony has announced that PS3 will be released in a new slim version (33% smaller), the new version is reduced in size by using newer components that use less energy and thus enabling smaller cooling etc.

Price for the new model is suggested at; $299 with a 120gb hdd which is cheaper than the old version.

http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/blog/eyeonasia/archives/2009/08/sony_to_release.html?chan=technology_technology+index+page_top+stories

Nice, but if Microsoft did the same to their XBOX360 and added a blueray drive (why the f… have they not done this yet!!) I think that would be way cooler.  PS3 games are way too expensive..

Get a ‘date’ with Marilyn Monroe

Have you ever wanted to go on a date with Marilyn Monroe, well you are a bit late there I guess..  However luck will have it that you get a second chance, well more or less that is..

The owner of the funeral space (in a crypt) just above Marilyn Monroe’s has decided to sell to the highest bidder on Ebay Crazy stuff..

So if you act now and have a good credit in you bank you can secure the right to ‘lay on top of Marilyn Monroe’ for years to come.  Nice..  Mind you the price should allegedly have risen above 4 mill $ so better consult your bank before bidding 

Bidding ends August 24th 2009.

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=320412140795