It’s very straightforward and the quality is much better than various online tools

• Install first InkScape and next ConversionSVG.
• Run ConversionSVG,
• Select the output “Format”  = .PNG,
• Select the “Exportation Zone” = Dessin
• Set the desired “Size” for the output images.
• Select the “Folder” containing the svg images to be converted
• Select bellow the target folder to store the converted images.
• Click “Convert“

Et voilà

Basic usage is very simple to create a panorama, with a set of pictures taken in a raw:

• Press CTRL-N to create a new Panorama
• Open the folder containing the pictures to be used, press CTRL-A to pick them all and press ENTER to continue
• There a 4 steps: Import, Stitch, Crop and Export. For simple panorama, go directly to step 3.
• Click on “Auto Complete” (top-right of the screen) or on “Auto Crop”. The result with “Auto Complete” is amazing.
• Click on step 4, Export, to save the result.

Et voilà

Download: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/projects/ice/

From a feature perspective, I was simply looking for something similar to the Google Chrome Remote Desktop or the Microsoft Remote Desktop but, if possible, without the need to install anything on the PC; i.e.: a purely web client mirroring an Android screen .

I did test first AirDroid which is great, advanced, quite complete from a feature perspective. But first, it’s a bit too complex to “simply” remote access Android and next requires to install.

I tried next Mobizen. This one is not as complete as AirDroid which comes with its own interface to access SMS, calls, files, photos, videos, contact, …, without the need to use the full remote access (mirroring the screen). But some of the missing features in Mobizen are already available in Beta.

Here is what the remote access to my Galaxy S7, from Chrome, looks like.

It requires an App on the Mobile: Mobizen mirroring. Nb.:A dedicated version exist for Samsung.

Next to that, I am also using TeamViewer, which is great as the same product can be used in both direction. I.e.: with the TeamViewer “host” App for Android, PC’s can remotely access mobiles and tablets. And with the TeamViewer “for remote control” App for Android, mobiles and tablet can remotely access PC’s.

On my Windows 8, it reduced the content of C:\Windows\Installer from 24Gb to 8.2Gb !

It’s IMO enough to illustrate its interest

NB.: DO NOT USE Windows UnUsed Files Cleanup Tool… It does not detect correctly unused installer as illustrated on the screenshot here bellow

Download: http://www.homedev.com.au/free/patchcleaner

PS.: to clean WinSxS, also look at http://www.thewindowsclub.com/winsxs-folder-cleanup-windows-8-1

My favorite paid tool to do this is “Visual Similarity Duplicate Image Finder”. But although “Awesome Duplicate Photo Finder”‘s interface is less complete, it’s really excellent too.

Pro’s:

• It has an extremely simple user interface,clean and nice, as I like them.
• It finds similar images or only exact duplicate photos if you tick the option “Search Only 100% Identical Pictures” in the menu Settings.
• It searches through the various image types: JPG, BMP, GIF, PNG, TIFF
• It is able to compare pictures that was resized or with corrected colours (black and white photos for example).
• You can search inside multiple folders or drives.
  • Better than “Visual Similarity Duplicate Image Finder”, you can simply drag and drop the folders into the interface.
  • It works with network drives and removable devices (USB etc.).
  • I prefer the folder browser of this tool as it’s faster than “Visual Similarity Duplicate Image Finder”, especially for network folders. Anyway, the easiest way to add network folders is also by drag and dropping them into the interface.
• You can move or delete duplicate photos (or the originals) as well as open a File Explorer to browse the location of those duplicate photos (or the originals).
  • Deleted photos can b e moved into the recycle bin (this is an option).
  • Another option is to not be prompted to confirm the deletion.
• You can sort the duplicate photos based on their location or on the location of the originals as well as on the rate of Similarity.
• There is a standalone version.

Con’s:

• One cannot specify the minimal rate of Silimarity as one can do with “Visual Similarity Duplicate Image Finder”.
• It’s not slow, but not IMO pushing the limits of the machine. On a Quad Core i7-3820 HyperThread 3.6GHz scanning 37.500 photos on a local drive, it took 85 minutes using less than 15% CPU and not saturating at all the IO (NB.: more pictures there are, slower it is!).
• The setup version is reported by Avast as being infected by OpenCandy-D. This is just an adware but still, who wants that :/

Download: http://www.duplicate-finder.com/photo.html

AirAudio is a really powerful audio streamer for Android than can steam all audio from any App to every receiver. Just like TuneBlade for PC, it redirect the sound to be played by the local speaker to a remote receiver… AirPlay, AllPlay, DLNA, Fite TV, GoogleCast, Roku and Sonos are all supported !!!

Once started, one can chose multiple target remote players:

And as soon as you start to play sound on the mobile, you have an icon appearing in the menu bar to start casting.

Selecting that icon, you can to start to preconfigured set of devices. As you can see bellow, I am streaming simultaneously to two AirPlay Devices.

You will easily discover the other features

Now, especially for YouTube’s video, you may want to hide the App playing the video/music. Unfortunately, especially for video, like the YouTube player, the App usually pauses if the it goes in the background. To solve that, you need an App able to play in the background. The best and easiest one I found is AudioPocket.

You can run AudioPocket and paste into it any valid url to star playing your YouTube video. But the easiest is to start YouTube, search for video and use the “Share…” menu to play the video with AudioPocket.

Notice: so far, it does not work with YouTube’s playlists (to be investigated as playlists are claimed to be supported)… It’s easy to know that you have selected a playlist as the “Share…” menu appears alone (no “Add to xxx” menu next to it):

That being said, each video shared with AudioPocket is queued.

Once shared with AudioPocket, the video is played quite immediately and you can pause/stop it with AudioPocket’s menu appearing in the App bar:

Et voilà!

A lot of details and info can be found here : http://tuneblade.com/blog/

I like it because:

• It’s very simply to use
  • No need to change the current playback device of Windows.Simply press play on the AirPlay Devices detected by TuneBlade
• It’s cheap (less than 9€)
• It’s able to send the music synchronously on various distinct devices (Just like Synology’s AudioStation)

Website: http://tuneblade.com/

As I am lazy and don’t want to turn off the monitors manually using their power button, I looked for a solution to put the screens to sleep immediately – without waiting for the screen saver to turn off the display as configured in the Control Panel > Power Options > Plan Settings… – using a keyboard shortcut.

I found a a first solution based on “NirCmd“: Download it and create a desktop shortcut (assigned with a keyboard shortcut) to: nircmd.exe cmdwait 1000 monitor off

That solution didn’t work fine for me. Indeed, after a few minutes, the screens were always turning back on magically… I didn’t find for sure the reason why, but it could be that my wireless mouse (Logitech) is not 100% quite although untouched…

So, I looked for an alternative and found “Wizmo“. Download it and use it in a desktop shortcut (also assigned with a keyboard shortcut) to: wizmo.exe monoff shake=99

This will eliminate the minor mouse “shake” that a wireless mouse seems to have and which is turning the monitor back on, while allowing you to still wiggle the mouse a bit to turn your monitor back on. (Notice: Wizmo won’t run if you copy it into %WinDir%\System32 !)

In the past, I was a great fan of Media Browser 2.x. I was using MetaVideoEditor to download the metadata for my movies. When MetaVideoEditor ended to work (not updated anymore to download the metadata from the providers), I looked for alternatives. Alternatives to MetaVideoEditor but also possibly to Media Browser. I found Plex, coming with a media server for Synology, a media player for HTPC or Samsung TV, and its own metadata downloader. I found Plex much more mature than Media Browser 3.x and I loved that Plex Server was running on my NAS. Plex was based on XBMC but much simpler to configure and much more user friendly, especially for kids. And its metadata downloader was perfect. There was however one difference with MetaVideoEditor: it was not renaming the media file with their title, episode number, etc…

But that’s not an issue as I found Filebot, a TV and Movies renamer much better than any other similar software! It’s really amazing! It renames not only movies and episodes but also subtitles, audio files, poster (jpg, …), metadata file (xml, nfo) and checksum files (SFV, MD5, SHA-1, ED2K).

Filebot can query various providers to fetch the rename of your files: TheTVDB, AniDB, TVRAge, Serienjunkies, TheMovieDB, IMBd, OpenSubtitles. And icing on the cake, it can rename those files using your own format. I.e. you can define which information must be used to rename the files including media info extracted from the files thanks to the well know library mediaInfo. You can also call functions to transform this information like removing or replacing blanks and special characters, etc…

Ex.: if you use a format like this one to rename a file “The.Man.from.earth.Ripped.by.MySelf.from.BlueRay.XYZ“: {n} ({y}) {vf} {af}, the nale will become “The Man from Earth (2007) 720p 6ch” because “n” is a tag replaced by the name of the movie fetched from one of the provider mentionned above. “y” is the movie year. “vf” is the standard video format. “af” is the audio channels. See more tags here.

Notice that you MUST install Java x64 on your machine if you have Windows x64. Otherwise, filebot will fail to load mediainfo’s libraries. You will see the following error when trying to use custom pattern to rename the files: “BindingException: “vf”: Could not initialize class net.filebot.mediainfo.MediaInfoLibrary.“

Also, asking filebot for information, in a command prompt run in C:\Program Files\FileBot, you will clearly see that there is an issue. It thinks you are on a Windows x86:

Go to the manual download page of Java to get the x64. Otherwise, using a x86 browser, you would get the x86 version of java by default.

1. Once filebot installed, run it and select the “Rename” tab.
2. Drag and drop the media files to be renamed in the “Original Files” tab. If you want to renamed series, drag & drop the root folder (For Plex, this folder has the name of the serie and contains one subfolder “Season xx” per season.). Notice that it will take time to load all the files but you won’t see any progress bar or spinning hourglass. Be patient!!!
3. Once the files loaded, you will see an icon next to each one (on the right) mentioning the type of file (jpg, mkv, nfo, xml, …). Each of those files will be renamed. This will therefore maintain the “link” between the existing metadata and the media itself, for players like XBMC, etc…
4. Right click on the “Match” button to select “Preference”. There, select the language of your media. “Titles” will be fetched from the providers in that language.
5. Right click on the “Match” button to select “Edit Format” (if you want to customize it). It opens a “Format” window
6. At the bottom of that window, click on the button “Switch to …” to select the type of media you are going to rename: Movie, Music or Episode.This is important as all tags don’t works for all type of media. Ex.: the tab {e}, “Episode Numbers”, does not exist for movies or music. The type of media you have selected is display in the title bar of the window.
7. Bellow the format, click on “(x)=” to select one sample of media. It will show you the media information retrieved with the mediainfo library. This preview can help you to find the Tag you need for you custom format.
8. Now, type you own format. Various samples can be found here. For my series and my movies, I am using respectively:

   {n.replaceAll(/[!?.]+$/).replaceAll(/[`´‘’ʻ]/, "'").replaceAll(/[:;]/, "-")} - {s00e00} - {episode.title.replaceAll(/[!?.]+$/).replaceAll(/[`´‘’ʻ]/, "'").replaceAll(/[:;]/, "-")} [{vf}.{vc}.{ac}]

   {n.replaceAll(/[!?.]+$/).replaceAll(/[`´‘’ʻ]/, "'").replaceAll(/[:;]/, "-")} ({y}) [{fn.match(/3D/)+"."}{fn.matchAll(/H-OU|H-TAB|HSBS|H-SBS|Half-SBS|Full-SBS|F-SBS|SBS/).join('.').replace('Half-','H-').replace('Full-','F-').replace('TAB','OU').replace('HSBS','H-SBS')+"."}{vf}.{vc}.{ac}] {" CD$pi"}

9. Once the expression to format completed, click on Use Format. This will close the window.
10. Right click on Match and select the provider to be used (depending on the type of media to be renamed). Filebot will immediately start to fetch the meta data from that provider and display a preview of the New Names. You will see a spinning icon in the upper right corner indicating that the operation is in progress.
11. Once completed, you can check that everything is fine in the preview before clicking on “Rename” to execute the actual renaming.

Filebot can not only rename the files but also move them if you include a path in the format. Ex. to move Avatar.mkv into a folder like X:/Movies/Avatar Collection/Avatar (2009) /Avatar (2009).mkv, use a format like: X:/Movies/{n} ({y}).

I use the following expression to renamed the folders of my movies:

../{n.replaceAll(/[:;]/, "-")} ({y})/{n.replaceAll(/[!?.]+$/).replaceAll(/[`´‘’ʻ]/, "'").replaceAll(/[:;]/, "-")} ({y}) [{fn.match(/3D/)+"."}{fn.matchAll(/H-OU|H-TAB|HSBS|H-SBS|Half-SBS|Full-SBS|F-SBS|SBS/).join('.').replace('Half-','H-').replace('Full-','F-').replace('TAB','OU').replace('HSBS','H-SBS')+"."}{vf}.{vc}.{ac}] {" CD$pi"}

Actually the folder is not renamed, but the file is moved into a new folder instead. So, there are plenty of empty folders remaining on the system (or folder that contain only files not renamed with the movies…). To delete them run the following “groovy script” provided by filebot (in a cmd prompt run as administrator):

c:\Program Files\FileBot>filebot.exe -script fn:cleaner "\Path\To\Your\Movies" 2> filebot-error.log 1> filebot.log

If you don’t want to cleanup the empty folders without checking what will be deleted, run the same script in ‘test’ mode first and look at the log file…

c:\Program Files\FileBot>filebot.exe -script fn:cleaner "\Path\To\Your\Movies" --action test 2> filebot-error.log 1> filebot.log

Notice, “Advanced Renamer” can also do it but it’s not as easy. One has indeed to use javascript within “Advanced Renamer” to get access to the complete exif information. it means that a Filebot’s tag as simple as {vf} becomes in Advanced Renamed:

if (w == 0) {
format = ”;
} else if (w < 1280) {
if (h < 576) {
format = ‘SD NTSC’;
} else {
format = ‘SD PAL-SECAM’;
}
} else if (w < 1920) {
format = ‘HD 720p’;
}
else if (w < 3840) {
format = ‘HD 1080p’;
}
else if (w < 7680) {
format = ‘UHD 4K’;
}
else {
format = ‘UHD 8K’;
}

return item.newBasename + ‘(‘ + format + ‘)’;

Download: http://www.filebot.net/

The free version does not monitor your PC to capture actions made by installer… So, it does not make your PC slower.

Usually, I know the name of the application I want to uninstall, so I use the Search Box to find it instead of scrolling among 100th of Icons. That feature was the main reason why I started to use Revo with previous versions of Windows, in addition to the fact that the information displayed was more complete than within Windows’ native uninstaller.

I use Revo only to uninstall apps… But the free version does a bit more:

• With the Hunter mode, you can drag the Hunter window over desktop icons, quick launch toolbar, system tray icons, or program’s window to get access to menus to uninstall, kill, locate, … the focused application. This is unfortunately not working fine on my PC. For some reason, the Hunter window is unable to identify the focused applications…
• It also comes with an AutoRun Manager to disable/re-enable startup applications, run them, kill, them, etc… However, I am still used to CodeStuff Starter and Procexp for such tasks.

I admit also that with Windows 8.1, the native “Uninstall a Program” is now as user friendly as Revo. In addition, I noticed that Revo doesn’t display all the installed software anymore, at least on Windows 8.1

The only reason why I am still using Revo is because Windows is missing the advanced “Cleanup” feature that removes orphan files and registry entries.

Download: http://www.revouninstaller.com/revo_uninstaller_free_download.html