Free MAC Address Changer

There are rare occasions when even an average user needs to change their MAC address, otherwise known the physical network card address (on Windows you can check it by typing ipconfig -all in command console). One of the most common reasons is MAC filtering by internet providers. In my case, I needed to be able to use my company laptop for strictly job-related purposes from home. The problem was that my internet provider only allows one computer to be connected to the internet; more than one computer sharing the connection means that monthly fee goes double. I am not kidding here – welcome to Poland.

Were I to use more computers in the home network, I would probably just sit down and tinker a bit, the result being a post on routers with MAC cloning (this may happen one day), but as someone who normally abides the rules, I didn’t want to go down this road. After all I only use my company laptop on rare occasions, so I just needed to change the MAC address of its network card.

While searching for a tool that would allow me to do that, I realised that there is a is a crapload of programs out there that I would have to pay to use. It seemed to me that changing MAC address is such a simple thing that a free program should be able to do it. I was right – there are free programs that will change your MAC address, they are just buried in Google underneath steaming piles of crappy software the creators of which are greedy.

The most comfortable solution I have found was Technetium MAC Address Changer v5 (the name is pretty much self-explanatory). It’s user friendly, simple to use, does not include fancy-schmancy overblown visual interface, gets the job done and rus on almost every Windows system out there (not sure about Windows 7 though). A great simple tool for a particular purpose is what it is.

Oh, and to anyone that would like to go on about how displaying ones MAC address on the internet can be potentially harmful – did you read the title?

PSP-Disp

I don’t remember when was the last time I was as excited by a homebrew utility (emulators don’t count) as it in case of PSP-Disp. At the first glance, it is merely a deceptively simple application that allows user to use their PSP as external monitor for a PC. The author describes it as follows:

…it basically gives you an additional monitor with a 960×544 resolution (four times the area of the PSP display). There are four components working together, on Windows a display driver, an usb driver and the interface application which captures the screen, compresses it and sends it over USB to the PSP. On the PSP side there is an application that decompresses the frames and displays them. All settings are adjustable from the Windows side, the PSP really only acts as a passive display…

Pretty cool, but why all the fuss? Because when we scratch the surface, there is so much more to it – I think that the power of this homebrew lies A) in the fact that it just works, which s not always the case for every home-made application out there, and B) in its wide range of configuration options. Not only can PSP be connected via USB or through WLAN, but also display can be tweaked to fit user’s preferences and thanks to control mapping options, PSP can act as a joypad too. Now that’s really neat!

Speaking of tweaking display modes – you can configure PSP-Disp to have the PSP screen follow the mouse, thus acting like a zoom on the cursor (useful in some graphic programs), or you can have it show a defined fragment of your PC monitor, so it becomes a zoomed scope of your rifle.

You can use it as a separate screen, so that your Winamp controls are always visible (lame, depicted above) or to have communicator window open in order not to interrupt your Half Life 2 session (l33t, depicted below).

You can use it to mirror your PC screen, so you can play a PC game on your PSP, using controls mapping, which essentially makes your PSP a joystick with a cool monitor (see the video). Also, it opens door to so many pranks on YouTube (Windows Vista on PSP! Linux on PSP! Linux on Virtual Machine on Windows on PSP!…) that I don’t even know which one to start with.

I am very pleased with this application and find it useful, pretty (PSP as sleek additional monitor looks really great) and a breeze to use. I congratulate its author and am keeping my eye on the project updates. I will also donate through PayPal, once I setup my account there. Feel free to give the application a try and download i from PSPUpdates or from program homepage.

You can observe PSP-Disp in action on this YouTube video, with the coolest part near the end, namely Resident Evil 4 being played via PSP (link for the impatient):

Ending this note, I would also like to remind everyone that there exists anoption to have it the other way round, meaning PSP screen displayed on your PC. You can see it in action here and if you would like to set it up yourself, check this great video tutorial. What makes it even cooler is that you don’t need TV-Out, meaning PSP-1000 (Phat) can be used as well.

Liquid scaling in Gimp

This is not exactly fresh news per se, but an interesting information nonetheless. What triggered my long overdue post was the information about certain feature coming to Photoshop CS4, the feature in question being content-aware scaling or, more precisely, seam carving.

First of all, have a look at the movie below explaining what this term even means:

Okay, with that out of the way let us continue.

Now, the normal course of action in the software world is that commercial programs (especially famous juggernauts, such as aforementioned Photoshop) introduce new cool features that free software clumsily tries to catch up with. When it finally does, the commercial software puts the pedal to the metal, accelarates and introduces new, more advanced features. Free software then tries to follow, rinse and repeat. That’s what happens, right?

Wrong. This is not always the case.

Check this post on Seam Carving being introduced in Photoshop CS4 (you can find more details in this article), then have a look at this article on PolishLinux.org – don’t worry, the article is in English. It is quite cool that free Gimp has the same feature available, even though it is not built-in, but requires a plugin. Also, it’s free (contrary to Photoshop), but what makes it really uber-cool is that Gimp has had this feature for almost a year now – just compare the dates. A-ha!

Liquid Rescale plugin in action (taken from Focused on Light weblog)

I am not a drooling Free Software or Open Source fanboy, I do realise that it has its fair share disadvantages (and one huge advantage – meaning he price or rather the lack of thereof) and limitations, but as someone coming from a country where for a long time commercial software would cost half of ones salary, I do have a soft spot for free software in general.

I also know that the comparison of two implementations of seam carving algorithm would be necessary to really judge how well they can compete against each other, but I can’t help but feel a little spark of mischevous joy seeing Open Source software sometimes leading one step before the commercial software, hence this post.

You can download Liquid Rescale plugin here and see some interesting examples here and in Flickr gallery. Good job, guys!

Foxmarks

Other than writing about games, I had the idea to suggest readers of this blog some interesting utilities that can be used for fun or making our digital life a little easier. Foxmarks falls into the latter category.

How many times have you bookmarked something at work or on your girlfriend’s computer, only to realise you don’t have that webpage in your bookmarks when you got back to your PC? It has occurred many times to me – I would bookmark some NSFW page on my company laptop and forget to send myself a link, or I would like to check this new blog about games I’ve found at work, only to realise I have the bookmark on my tablet PC. At some point I got fed up with it, googled a bit and came up with the solution to my problem – Foxmarks.

Foxmarks is a Firefox extension that synchronises your bookmarks across different instances of Firefox you use. I am using it for about half a year now and it has been updated with numerous fxes, so while initially it was a little rough around the edges, it definitely is usable and user-friendly now. Thanks to Foxmarks, I have my ever-growing collection of interesting blogs, tutorials, APIs, news and other websites accessible from every PC that I use. This certainly makes my life easier.

Download Foxmarks plugin here and visit project’s webpage here. I highly recommend it to anyone that is surfing internet a lot.

Little programs to help you with Japanese

This post is going to be a little less entertainment-centred than the majority of recent posts, instead of games I will describe a couple of really useful utilities related to Japanese.

I myself am studying Japanese., but I am not very proficient with it yet. I do realise that it is a difficult task, yet my ever-growing infatuation with Japan has driven me to make a significant effort and force my grey cells to memorise convoluted structures, forms and writing of Nihon-go.

Having said that, it is not easy. Especially writing is something that is overwhelming at first. In the beginning katakana, hiragana and kanji seem to be impossible to ever memorise, especially the latter. I already know kana, but I still am struggling with kanji. I think that to master more than a couple hundreds one has to spend some time living in Japan, otherwise it is too hard – but maybe I am just looking for excuses to my own inability to properly memorise kanji.

Being a computer geek (to some extent at least), I couldn’t overlook the occasion of boosting my learning process with any digital crutch I could use. The following programs and utilities are the result of my searches – I have found them to be useful and thought I would share the compilation, so that you don’t have to look for them yourself.

DreamKana

DreamKana is one of the simplest programs to study kana. But its simplicity is its main advantage, right next to being free of charge (don’t we all love free software?). Basically it just displays kana characters and asks user to type in their romaji reading. Simple and effective, I know quite a lot of students that used this while preparing for JLPT Level 4. Also, it doesn’t require installation, which together with its small size makes it a perfect candidate for portable tool on your USB pendrive.

LearnKana

This program is very similar to DreamKana, but it is more configurable. Its main advantage is the possibility to choose a specific group of kana that user would like to practice. It also shows the hit/miss ratio (good answers vs bad answers), which gives some idea about how well user has already mastered the material. Nice and simple utility. Apparently there are some new versions that have appeared, but I didn’t really have the time to check them.

PSPKanji

I wouldn’t be myself if I didn’t put some PSP homebrew in here. Essentially, PSPKanji (which I have already described here) allows user to work with kanji flashcards. It also has kana tables available at the press of the button and quiz options for revising purposes. Recent version has some slight graphical glitches, but nevertheless it is a very useful little program (plus it has very nice visual style). Kudos to Sammy who created it!

Wakan

This is a very powerful tool – basically a kanji dictionary with lots of configuration options and customised searches, such as based on radicals. Essential program for everybody seriously studying Japanese (or Chinese, too), especially for JLPT, since Wakan has lists of JLPT kanji for each level. Works well under Linux through Wine – tested it under Ubuntu.

Rikaichan – Firefox plugin

This excellent plugin shows pop-up window with the dictionary definition of given kanji that has been highlighted in the browser window. This greatly simplifies finding the meaning of that kanji, which would otherwise take significantly longer. The description is short, but this is a very powerful tool. Its main problem is that it is dependent on the quality of dictionaries used and Japanese-French dictionary seems to be more accurate than Japanese-English one.

Japanese Katakana Hiragana scroller – Yahoo Widget

Despite its name, this widget only displays hiragana with their romaji readings (well, actually it does English-Portugese/German/French pairs too), and I haven’t found a way to force it to display katakana (if you know how to, let me know through comments). User can select refresh intervals, thus being able to have his memory tickled all the time by changing hiragana characters. Personally, I found it very useful while learning kana.

Jenerator – Yahoo Widget

This little widget displays random Japanese words and expressions, many of them taken from common everyday situations. It is not very helpful when revising some particular material, but nevertheless by constant bombarding with kanji allows user to retain some of them. For consideration.

Katakana Stroke Order – Yahoo Widget

This widget presents the correct stroke order for katakana characters. There also exists a very similar widget for hiragana stroke order. Useful when beginning learning kana, but also when user needs to refresh the correct stroke order later on. A very nice little tool.

Little programs to help you with Japanese

This post is going to be a little less entertainment-centred than the majority of recent posts, instead of games I will describe a couple of really useful utilities related to Japanese.

I myself am studying Japanese., but I am not very proficient with it yet. I do realise that it is a difficult task, yet my ever-growing infatuation with Japan has driven me to make a significant effort and force my grey cells to memorise convoluted structures, forms and writing of Nihon-go.

Having said that, it is not easy. Especially writing is something that is overwhelming at first. In the beginning katakana, hiragana and kanji seem to be impossible to ever memorise, especially the latter. I already know kana, but I still am struggling with kanji. I think that to master more than a couple hundreds one has to spend some time living in Japan, otherwise it is too hard – but maybe I am just looking for excuses to my own inability to properly memorise kanji.

Being a computer geek (to some extent at least), I couldn’t overlook the occasion of boosting my learning process with any digital crutch I could use. The following programs and utilities are the result of my searches – I have found them to be useful and thought I would share the compilation, so that you don’t have to look for them yourself.

DreamKana

DreamKana is one of the simplest programs to study kana. But its simplicity is its main advantage, right next to being free of charge (don’t we all love free software?). Basically it just displays kana characters and asks user to type in their romaji reading. Simple and effective, I know quite a lot of students that used this while preparing for JLPT Level 4. Also, it doesn’t require installation, which together with its small size makes it a perfect candidate for portable tool on your USB pendrive.

LearnKana

This program is very similar to DreamKana, but it is more configurable. Its main advantage is the possibility to choose a specific group of kana that user would like to practice. It also shows the hit/miss ratio (good answers vs bad answers), which gives some idea about how well user has already mastered the material. Nice and simple utility. Apparently there are some new versions that have appeared, but I didn’t really have the time to check them.

PSPKanji

I wouldn’t be myself if I didn’t put some PSP homebrew in here. Essentially, PSPKanji (which I have already described here) allows user to work with kanji flashcards. It also has kana tables available at the press of the button and quiz options for revising purposes. Recent version has some slight graphical glitches, but nevertheless it is a very useful little program (plus it has very nice visual style). Kudos to Sammy who created it!

Wakan

This is a very powerful tool – basically a kanji dictionary with lots of configuration options and customised searches, such as based on radicals. Essential program for everybody seriously studying Japanese (or Chinese, too), especially for JLPT, since Wakan has lists of JLPT kanji for each level. Works well under Linux through Wine – tested it under Ubuntu.

Rikaichan – Firefox plugin

This excellent plugin shows pop-up window with the dictionary definition of given kanji that has been highlighted in the browser window. This greatly simplifies finding the meaning of that kanji, which would otherwise take significantly longer. The description is short, but this is a very powerful tool. Its main problem is that it is dependent on the quality of dictionaries used and Japanese-French dictionary seems to be more accurate than Japanese-English one.

Japanese Katakana Hiragana scroller – Yahoo Widget

Despite its name, this widget only displays hiragana with their romaji readings (well, actually it does English-Portugese/German/French pairs too), and I haven’t found a way to force it to display katakana (if you know how to, let me know through comments). User can select refresh intervals, thus being able to have his memory tickled all the time by changing hiragana characters. Personally, I found it very useful while learning kana.

Jenerator – Yahoo Widget

This little widget displays random Japanese words and expressions, many of them taken from common everyday situations. It is not very helpful when revising some particular material, but nevertheless by constant bombarding with kanji allows user to retain some of them. For consideration.

Katakana Stroke Order – Yahoo Widget

This widget presents the correct stroke order for katakana characters. There also exists a very similar widget for hiragana stroke order. Useful when beginning learning kana, but also when user needs to refresh the correct stroke order later on. A very nice little tool.

Screen

I work a lot on remote Linux servers, deploying and testing my code. One of the most useful tools I use all the time is screen. Basically, it allows user to have multiple sessions in one console window and it supports resuming these sessions when connection is interrupted. Where it not for screen, I would waste hours of my life setting up things after getting disconnected. Also, if you don’t have Midnight Commander, the ability to have more than one session is also very handy. You can read more about screen here and about handy shortcuts here.

Screen screenshot

One little disadvantage of screen is that if the server is reset, then the user loses all their session information. Nevertheless, there is a trick to speed up a lot setting up new screen session and it’s not something very well documented, so I describe it here.

Basically user needs to edit (or create, if it is not there) the file .screenrc in their home directory so that it contains the commands to be executed in its respective screens (aka sessions). Below you can see my example :

info xterm ti@:te@
shell bash
chdir /somewhere/src/
screen -t XXX_source 0
shell bash
chdir /somewhere/some_server/
screen -t XXX_server_1 1
shell bash
chdir /somewhere/some_other_server/
screen -t XXX_server_2 2
shell bash
chdir /somewhere/vobs/
screen -t XXX_vob 3

What it does is basically create four screens in one screen session – think of them as four tabbed browsing windows. Each of them will be using bash shell (just because I like it) and start in appropriate directory (source dir, where I make my builds, two server paths and one vob directory for version control related stuff). Each XXX_something part is the name of the respective session window (displayed on top of Putty terminal, for example). Simple, neat, and very helpful. Also, the structure of the file is pretty much self-explanatory.

I know it is not a very complicated thing, but it saves a lot of time and therefore I thought I’d bring it to your attention. As always, I look forward to your comments.

Screen

I work a lot on remote Linux servers, deploying and testing my code. One of the most useful tools I use all the time is screen. Basically, it allows user to have multiple sessions in one console window and it supports resuming these sessions when connection is interrupted. Where it not for screen, I would waste hours of my life setting up things after getting disconnected. Also, if you don’t have Midnight Commander, the ability to have more than one session is also very handy. You can read more about screen here and about handy shortcuts here.

Screen screenshot

One little disadvantage of screen is that if the server is reset, then the user loses all their session information. Nevertheless, there is a trick to speed up a lot setting up new screen session and it’s not something very well documented, so I describe it here.

Basically user needs to edit (or create, if it is not there) the file .screenrc in their home directory so that it contains the commands to be executed in its respective screens (aka sessions). Below you can see my example :

info xterm ti@:te@
shell bash
chdir /somewhere/src/
screen -t XXX_source 0
shell bash
chdir /somewhere/some_server/
screen -t XXX_server_1 1
shell bash
chdir /somewhere/some_other_server/
screen -t XXX_server_2 2
shell bash
chdir /somewhere/vobs/
screen -t XXX_vob 3

What it does is basically create four screens in one screen session – think of them as four tabbed browsing windows. Each of them will be using bash shell (just because I like it) and start in appropriate directory (source dir, where I make my builds, two server paths and one vob directory for version control related stuff). Each XXX_something part is the name of the respective session window (displayed on top of Putty terminal, for example). Simple, neat, and very helpful. Also, the structure of the file is pretty much self-explanatory.

I know it is not a very complicated thing, but it saves a lot of time and therefore I thought I’d bring it to your attention. As always, I look forward to your comments.