Archive for the ‘Computers’ Category

I’ve been wanting to learn my scales for a long time and I found 2 free applications and 1 website that do a good job of helping you learn them.

• Fretboard Warrior - Plays the sound of a note and shows it on the guitar and you pick which note it is. Requires no install as its a Flash Projector file.
• Advanced Fretpro - Its like Fretboard Warrior, exept it doesn’t play any sound. However you can tell it what strings and frets to omit, so you can practice on the areas you don’t have mastered yet. It also has a built in chord patterns and scales.
• Guitar Chords - Tons of web based tools to find chord names, chord progressions, scales and more. Some of the tools are done in flash, which makes it easier to use, since you don’t have to submit a form.

Seems the last version of Paint.NET for Windows 2000 is 2.72. Requires .NET Framework 2.

Here are two sites that have that last version for Win2000.
filehippo.com
oldversion.com

On2 (the people behind Flash 8’s FLV Video Encoder, On2 VP6) make a rather inexpensive video exporter for Flash called Flix Standard. They also seem to have other more expensive products but if you pre-edit the video before it ever needs to be made into a FLV this should work pretty good. I learned that Adobe will not let you install the Flash Video Encoder by itself without another license. So if you have several people that need to convert videos for Flash, but will never even use Flash itself, you don’t want to shell out several hundred dollars to do so.

The most affordable, entry level desktop encoding application for FLV video for Adobe® Flash® Player 8 and 9.
Put your video on the web in three clicks. Flix Standard encodes virtually every type of video, audio and image file into Flash, the most popular media format on the Internet. An amazing value, Flix Standard is the perfect entry-level video encoding solution.

I ran into this program today, while I was searching for something to create video based slideshows, DVD Slideshow GUI. I tried out the Video and FLV export and it turned out pretty nice. The UI isn’t that great but it’s pretty good. Of course you could also use Windows Movie Maker for videos, but again the UI isn’t great for that either.

Note: DVD slideshow GUI is a user interface for great free tools like Avisynth, Dvdauthor, HCenc, Media Player Classic, FFmpeg, Flvtool2, Mplex, Demux, mkisofs ect. and is coded in wxBasic. It comes as an installer with all the nessesary files included.

I figured I’d share how I do my Hard Disk Drive Images. I use Norton Ghost 2003 because it doesn’t require an install, if you boot with the CD and it works with Win 98, NT, 2000, XP and Linux.
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