conversions
Work
Lingoes Defines And Translates Text, Converts Numbers, And More
3:00AM Jason Fitzpatrick | Windows only: If you need frequent access to word definitions and text translation, Lingoes is a portable application that does everything from dictionary word look-ups to translation of over 80 languages. More »
Work
UTube Ripper Saves And Converts YouTube Videos
4:00AM The How-To Geek | Linux only: Video downloading utility UTube Ripper saves a copy of your favourite YouTube videos for your offline viewing pleasure, even converting them into a non-flash format. More »
Work
Zilla PDF To TXT Converter Bulk Converts Your PDF Files
3:00AM Jason Fitzpatrick | Windows only: We’ve covered a variety of tools for converting PDF files, but if you need to bulk convert a pile of them Zilla PDF to TXT Converter gets the job done quickly. More »
Work
iPodME Converts Your Video To iPod Friendly Format
7:00AM Jason Fitzpatrick | Windows only: If you’re looking for a fire-and-forget video converter to help stock your iPod, iPodME is a dead simple and lightweight tool for bulk converting your video files. iPodME is a completely portable standalone application—a GUI wrapper of the venerable ffmpeg for the curious among you. Operation is as simple as running the application, dragging and dropping a list of video files you want to convert onto it, and adjusting the basic video settings. You can select the video dimensions and the quality using the plain English metric provided–slow, quality or turbo, size for instance—to determine the conversion speed. If you dig into the options menu you can also tweak the process priority. The default for the application is to take advantage of idle cycles and back off when you’re actually attempting to do work. Using the fast, quality setting and leaving it on the default of idle, it took approximately one hour to convert 20 episodes of Fraggle Rock into iPod-compatible MP4 files. An unexpected bonus in such a small package is support for SRT subtitle files, if you have them for your favourite foreign media you can embed them as you convert. If you’d like more fine tuned control over your video conversions, check out the candidates in the Hive Five Best Media Converters and the Top 10 Free Video Rippers, Encoders, and Converters to fulfil your tweaking needs. iPodME [via Freeware Genius] More »
Fix
Bulk Convert Old Documents to Office 2007 Format
4:00AM Lifehacker US Edition | If you have a bunch of older Office documents to convert to the Office 2007 format and you want to do it quickly, tech blog Digital Inspiration offers an excellent tutorial on getting it done. No need to open and convert each individual file—instead, you can convert entire directories in bulk. More »
Organise
Xrecode Converts Audio, Automatically Splits Long Files
6:00AM Adam Pash | Windows only: Free application Xrecode converts your audio files from popular formats to any of the same formats. While it may not have the complexity and advanced features of previously mentioned MediaEncoder Audio Edition, it’s also less complicated to use—just drag files you want to convert into Xrecode, choose the output format, and get started. Xrecode also sets itself apart with smart options for splitting audio by CUE files or by silence—perfect for quickly splitting large audio files, like your vinyl-to-MP3 conversion. Xrecode is freeware, Windows only. Xrecode [via FreewareGenius] More »
Pull and Format Text from PDFs with PDFTextOnline
1:00AM Kevin Purdy | We’ve previously pointed out ways to grab just the text from a PDF by emailing Adobe and using desktop apps, but having a web-based solution bookmarked could be pretty helpful as well. PDFTextOnline is a free, no-registration web app that quickly accepts files and pushes them to plain text, available for copying or saving as a .txt file. The added bonus is being able to change both the font and layout style of the exported text, along with access the bookmarks and properties from the original PDF. The web app claims to handle a number of foreign languages and fonts, so it might make for a good go-to-go solution if your PDF just won’t open anywhere else. PDFTextOnline [via MakeUseOf.com] More »
Convert Pictures to Text Images with ASCGEN
1:00AM Kevin Purdy | Windows only: Free application ASCGEN, or Ascii Generator dotNET, takes in standard pictures and puts out images generated entirely from simple computer text. While free web apps like ASCII-O-Matic do a decent job with small face portraits, ASCGEN can handle larger files and offers the same kind of brightness, contrast and level modifications as standard image editors—it just changes letters instead of pixels. Once you’re done tweaking, you can output to picture, text or HTML files. ASCGEN is a free download for Windows systems only. Ascii Generator dotNET [via Digital Inspiration] More »
