review, utilities

AnyVideoConverter – Possibly The ONLY Video Converter You Need

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I’ve been using something that’s very simple to convert videos for quite a while now. Some readers may know I make machinimas, ie, movies using games. Sometimes, the final product after editing  is in a format that is not so desirable, especially when I intend to upload to one of the many video sharing sites like Youtube, Dailymotion, WeGame, and so on.

Before discovering AnyVideoConverter, I was manually splitting video and audio tracks, and re-merging them into an acceptable format via VirtualDub. Don’t get me wrong, VirtualDub is still very much part of my video editing arsenal. However with the addition of AnyVideoConverter, it has eliminated quite a number of steps which I needed to take previously. As the name implies, it is advertised as being able to convert from ANY video format to ANY other format. I’ve tested it with the usual .mov, mkv, avi, mp4 and so on, and it does its job wonderfully well. Being simple doesn’t mean it’s lacking in features – it packs enough features, for example, to convert a .wmv (Windows Media) to .avi (Xvid/DivX/etc), while enlarging the video (320×240 -> 740×408) and changing the framerate from 25 frames to 30 frames (PAL to NTSC). Continue reading AnyVideoConverter – Possibly The ONLY Video Converter You Need →

blogs, internet, self, Wordpress

NoSpamNX – Kicks Spam Comments In The Butt Differently!

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In the previous post here, I talked about how spam-bots were attempting to spam this blog, and what I used to stop it. All went well, until a couple of  friends reported (via Facebook and Plurk) that they got errors trying to leave a comment on that blog post. After googling a bit, I found a few articles that reported operational problems with WP-SpamFree, such as this one here. Granted, the number of operational problems compared to the benefits WP-SpamFree is small, it is still a problem, and it may already have happened here on this blog. When I read that article, I thought it sounded like what happened here.

It was because of this that I went searching for a new solution, and I think I might have found it in this plugin here – NoSpamNX.

NoSpamNX uses a different technique to catch spam-bots – the “honey pot” concept. Give the spam bots useless fields to fill in, and if these fields are filled in when the bot tries to submit the comment, the whole comment is discarded. Thus, no Javascript and no cookies are required. That means even less legitimate users are affected, and will probably even work for users on mobile devices.

Continue reading NoSpamNX – Kicks Spam Comments In The Butt Differently! →

blogs, internet, self, Wordpress

WP-SpamFree Kicks Spam In The Butt!

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Some of you may know that I switched this blog from Blogger platform over to self-hosted WordPress very recently, thanks (or no-thanks) to Blogger’s decision to cease support for FTP publishing from 26th March onwards.

My blog has always been fine and relatively spam-free for the entire duration when I was on Blogger – about 7 or so years. I get maybe 1 or 2 spam comments every couple of MONTHS. Maybe my blog was (and still is) relatively unknown and only read by my friends and perhaps a few “drive-by” bloggers visiting other sites, helped with keeping the spam count so low.

However, as soon as I switched over to WordPress, spam comments started appearing. Not too many at first, maybe 3 or 4 per day. Still manageable. However, as of last night approximately 11pm Singapore time, I started getting a spate of automated spam-bot comments. No, none of them made it into the blog, all were flagged as spam and held in the moderation queue (yay for Intense Debate‘s spam filters!). However, there were like 300 of them in the span of 10 mins or so.

Continue reading WP-SpamFree Kicks Spam In The Butt! →

Rants and Ramblings of a Typical Kiasu Singaporean