Archive for the ‘tools’ Category

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Customizable Christmas Bingo Cards

Saturday, December 13th, 2008

It’s that time of year again!  Our Christmas tree is up.  Is yours?

If you’re a teacher, event host, or group organizer that is looking for a fun way to celebrate the festive season, Perceptus suggests that you visit our web based bingo card generating site, print-bingo.com and generate your free (and customizable) Christmas themed bingo cards.

Of course you’re free to create non-Christian bingo themed cards for the holidays. You can start your custom bingo cards by editing our word list for the Winter Holidays.

As always, basic use of our site is free. But you’re welcome to upgrade to a Premium access account for only $10.

Merry Christmas!

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Posted in bingo cards, holiday, marketing, print-bingo.com, tools | No Comments »

Free way to compare two folders in Windows

Friday, November 14th, 2008

Here’s my reasonably quick and free way to compare the files in a folder.  I’ve assumed a bit of computer knowledge, mostly, because I don’t have time to fill in the many little details.

Get a copy of WinMerge from Sourceforge – it’s a tool often used by programmers to see differences in text files.

Open a command window

– e.g. start –> run –> “cmd”

Create a text file with the names, sizes, and date stamps from folder “A”

– e.g. dir c:\the_documents\*.* > this_computer.txt

Do the same for folder “B”

– e.g. dir \\that_computer\c$\the_documents\*.* > that_computer.txt

Open both files in WinMerge.

– the differences in the two “dir” outputs will be higlighted for you.

Now if you’re still not sure if the files are the same or now, e.g. if the files are the same size but have different date stamps, then search for a utility called “md5sums”.  This will create md5 hashes of all files in a folder.

e.g. c:\tools\md5sums -n “\\distribution\c$\program files\cybex\*.*” > distrib2.txt

That’s it.  It’s been a couple weeks since the last blog post. We’ve been busy at Perceptus.  Our next project is going live soon – retailers with multiple locations in BC and Alberta, watch this space.  Our next product is geared for you!

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Posted in computers, tools | 3 Comments »

The easiest way to convert FLAC to MP3

Monday, October 20th, 2008

Sometimes the things that should be stupidly easy… aren’t. Converting a bunch of audio files at once, is one of those things.

My previous method of converting FLAC files (those are lossless, i.e. exactly like the CD, sound files that some people use to rip tracks from CD’s) to MP3’s (those famous files that work on your cellphone, mp3 player, dvd player, and just about everywhere else) involved Winamp, a plug-in, and a lot of file renaming.  It wasn’t a system I could recommend to others.

Today, I found the need to make a few MP3’s.  So, I searched for a “better way”.  Here’s my FLAC to MP3 recipe:

  • Install foobar2000.  It’s a free media player from foobar2000.org.  It appears to be safe to use, but YMMV.
  • To create MP3’s you will need to find a (Windows) binary copy of LAME, the open source MP3 encoder.  Google for it.
  • Load your files in foobar2000.
  • You might want to set your default file naming and file quality preferences. Or do that after the next step.
  • Right-click to bring up a context menu that brings up a “convert” option – how thoughtful.
  • Answer a couple easy questions about finding lame.exe and the destination folder.
  • And let it go.

So far so good.  This setup should be good for converting WAV and many other audio files too.

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Posted in annoying, computers, tools | 2 Comments »

Bulk-Adding “To” and “BCC” Recipients to a Thunderbird Email

Thursday, September 4th, 2008

I found a new use for our Web Tools by Perceptus website.  I was sending a bulk email to friends, family, clients, and co-workers about my team’s upcoming race in the Red Bull Soapbox Derby in Vancouver.

But the list of email addresses I selected in Outlook, my PIM, would not copy and paste into a new email in Thunderbird, my email client.*  Outlook separates recipients with semi-colons, Thunderbird… doesn’t.  It’s not immediately obvious to me what Thunderbird will accept as a separator in a single “to” line. It took several Google searches (or was it trial and error?) to figure out that Thunderbird will accept line breaks, i.e. “enter”.

Now all I needed to do was find quick way to convert the list which looks like this “<Leonard> me@perceptus.ca; <Me too> me2@perceptus.ca” from Outlook.  In this case, the extra name information that comes up in angled braces was just in the way.

Fortunately, The Email Grep Text Wizard! from our tools site, tools.perceptus.ca, handled the job well.  Just paste the list from Outlook and let our website return a clean simple list of email addresses.  One email per line.

* My PDA syncs to Outlook so it has to be the personal info manager, but I prefer the email features of Thunderbird.  Yes, it’s cumbersome, and no, I’m not entirely happy with the setup, but I haven’t found anything better, yet.

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Posted in annoying, email, tools, Uncategorized | 4 Comments »

Where are the free Windows Mobile Chinese Dictionaries?

Saturday, March 8th, 2008

So, I spent some time trying to find a free English-Chinese dictionary for Windows Mobile.  How naive was I to think that it would be easy?

In the end, I jerry-rigged one using the free CEDICT database and an ebook reader.  My compiled file and rough instructions are hosted on a page of this blog:

http://blog.perceptus.ca/windows-mobile-cedict/

It’s an ugly jerry-rigged  thing.  But it’ll have to do for now, for me at least.

P.S. Comments have just been enabled on pages on the Perceptus Back Story blog.  Please comment if the dictionary ebook is useful to you… or if you have a source for a better Mandarin Pinyin offline dictionary for WM PDAs.

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Posted in chinese, tools | 2 Comments »

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