Now, one of my providers had some problems lately and I guess that’s just because of the rough winter which does not seem to end. I am using this provider as the main link on the desktop computer, directly plugged in, the other one being used for the wireless network (iPhone, notebook, fridge etc). Since the connection is getting bad from time to time, I need to switch from one network adapter to another that has just lan connectivity but it is connected to the wireless router. This means I just need to add the router IP address as the gateway and DNS on the secondary adapter. Doing this with clicks on the adapter settings takes time and when you have to train other people that use the same computer to do this it gets rough.

So I made this two batch scripts that add or remove the DNS/gateway IPs from the secondary adapter, so whenever I need to switch from one adapter to another I click on the corresponding bat files.

To get Internet connectivity on the secondary adapter:

netsh interface ip set address name=”your_network_adapter_name” source=static addr=10.0.0.xxx mask=255.255.255.yyy gateway=10.0.0.zzz
netsh int ipv4 set dnsservers “your_network_adapter_name” static 10.0.0.zzz primary

(where 10.0.0.zzz is the wireless router IP address)

To remove Internet connectivity on the secondary adapter:

netsh interface ip set address name=”your_network_adapter_name” source=static addr=10.0.0.xxx mask=255.255.255.yyy
netsh int ipv4 delete dnsservers “your_network_adapter_name” 10.0.0.zzz

These two scripts must be run with elevated privileges in Windows 7 (right click on the script -> Run as Administrator). As this might not be the most elegant way to switch the Internet connection and might need improvement to completely disable the first adapter, it works for me as it is.

- the way to install it through Click-to-Run streaming technology, that is you just download 2 MB and start using it right away, the programs will get downloaded in background but you’re able to use most of the interface functionality
- the “quick steps” section in Outlook where various multi-step actions can be added and customized (like moving the email to a specified folder)
- a better way to organize conversations (Seamonkey has it for years now)

But when I tried to make a phone call on my iPhone, I noticed a lot of strange contacts (like hundreds of them) that I didn’t had before in my address book (I sync my phone Contacts list with the office Exchange server). All of them organized in a folder Suggested Contacts. I linked this event with the Office installation and there it was: a nice folder with various contacts Outlook extracted from all my emails. But since I don’t receive one or two emails per day, but thousands, I just needed to disable the collection or at least the syncronization of this folder with the iPhone. I don’t know a way not to sync a certain address book folder, but I found out how to disable collecting such data:

Access the File tab and then the Options on the left …

… then the Contacts group and uncheck the “Automatically create Outlook contacts for recipients that do not belong to an Outlook Address Book”. After that, just delete all the harvested contacts in the Suggested Contacts folder and your iPhone will automatically update with just the contacts you’ve added.

The task is simple: you just need to make a link to an exe file with some parameters. The parameters are required, otherwise the download would not work.

Here is a link: http://download.microsoft.com/download/C/C/0/CC0BD555-33DD-411E-936B-73AC6F95AE11/IE8-WindowsXP-x86-ENU.exe?param=black

I’m just trying to pass the parameter param with the value black to the .exe link. The result (click on the above link in your already installed Internet Explorer browser):

Magically, the extension is gone. Why is that? Because there’s no such extension as .exe?param=black. This is invalid, right? Or Microsoft thinks that.

Let’s try another one, with just a slight change:

http://download.microsoft.com/download/C/C/0/CC0BD555-33DD-411E-936B-73AC6F95AE11/IE8-WindowsXP-x86-ENU.exe?param=.rar

The result is breathtaking , I’m able to download the file with a different extension than the one served by the server:

Is this a bird? Is this a plane? No, it’s the newly improved Internet Explorer 8. Now with tabs and new security holes. No more comments.

AVIcodec shows the information below:

- video: MJPG = Motion JPEG
- audio: PCM, mono

For conversion I’m using the tools below. I am listing also my version since some problems may occur with a different configuration (for instance I was using lame ACM mp3 codec version 3.98 alpha 11 and I was receiving some debugging information when trying to change/encode the audio)

- VirtualDUB 1.7.0
- Xvid video codec
- lame ACM MP3 codec

Open your file to transcode in VirtualDUB. Make sure Video -> Full Processing Mode is selected then go to Video -> Compression and select XviD MPEG-4 Codec. If you click on Configure you can select the encoding quality. Here are my settings:

The go to Audio and make sure Full Processing Mode is selected. Go to Audio -> Conversion and change from 8 bit to 16 bit in the Precision box. Then go to Audio -> Compression and select whatever quality you’d like for audio. Here are my settings:

You’re almost done. Now go to File -> Save as AVI and save your final file. You’ll just have to wait for the encoding to happen, but in the end the final file size will be less than 10x the original file.

I had a simple task: to join several mpeg 2 files that were taken by a video camera into a single one and add my own mp3 file as audio for the final file. I had 43 files from our team building 2 weeks ago that needed to be compiled in a nice old style mute movie.

In AVIcodec the files looked like this (video is MPEG2 SVCD/DVD, audio doesn’t matter because I’m not using it):

I tried several applications but some of them just crashed (I’m using Vista), some of them recompiled the frames, making a different quality, others just didn’t work. The one that worked for me flowlessly is called Avidemux.

What I like at this application:

- it worked for me (didn’t crashed like others)
- merges the mpeg files, but also you can add your own custom mp3 sound
- has a auto configuration option that configures your output video and audio based on the loaded files