PDFJoint

 PDFJoint

I am glad to share with you a quick app I assembled from older efforts and with drag&drop interface, to join two or more PDF files together, for a particular environment where other free/open/commercial solutions are prohibited (btw I use Ghostscript under AGPL for the joining job).

Also PDFJoint is able to extract pages from a PDF.

Just put it on your desktop

Download it clickin' on the icon:

Download!

Map Flooder

I was searching for a way to highlight zones (regions, provinces, counties, etc) on a map, and I don't need super precise maps so I wrote this AutoIT script, based on picking up black and white maps (2 colors BW .png or .gif tested) and filling them with colors, writing down a sqlite database to associate zones with names (and possibly other data as well), and reuse the map and the DB to display data, in my example reading a simple .txt file.

So you can forget about multi gigabytes frameworks, with complex web based environments to be patched every 15 minutes and prone to vulnerabilities 😉, I love having an easy stand alone map showing tool in one (1 boys...) megabyte and without dependencies 😁.

Let's have a look at this 2 minutes video:

So I have two modes:

1. The Map "creation mode" : you provide a map image and you start to pick up colors, set "upper level" region/state, and by clicking on a region you fill it and you name it, and all the data are saved on a sqlite DB (auto-created by the script).
2. when you have the map image and a DB with the correct associations, you can switch the "mode" to "show" (as by .ini file) and the script tries to read a "datafile" showing the zone names listed in datafile.

And feel free to evolve, calling the executable passing the data to show, maybe assigning weighted colors based on values for zones.


The code is here (link)

But you can start to play immediately with this second link, there is the already compiled executable and some files to try:

Link to all the demo files

Computer Plucker

Computer Plucker is an utility for retrieving a lot of info about your windows pc and your win OS installation, plus it has a lot of shortcuts to various system tools, and to some useful sites.

It's intended for PC technicians and for every geek guy.

It can be used as a standalone program, launched by the user, or it can act as a simple PC inventory solution, sending data to an online DB or via text files, ready to be collected. 

Setup:

It's a standalone executable, very small (< 6 Megabytes) so you have only to

Now you have the file, you can launch it, it will install itself in "c:\autoit\computerplucker\" and it will put a shortcut on your desktop.

The windows registry is untouched, no mess no tricks, only some files copied, and in 'Tools' menu you have also the "uninstall" option.

Use:

Launch the shortcut and  explore the GUI, the icons in the leftside vertical band will show you various data about your system.

Also you have some drop down menus, with various utilities.

Use as a remote inventory system:

The idea is to export the essential data of the machine, and to collect them.

You can do it manually "one shot" producing a text data file to manage yourself, (copying or sending via mail wherever you want), or writing a data record to an online DB, to be recovered at a later time.

From the "Tools"dropdown menu you can:

• write ".INI" text data file: a file in "ini" format with 30 fields is written in the install folder of Computer Plucker, my choice is the INI format because is very human readable but also easily to parse with an automated system; Here you can download an example text file.
• Send a crypted or non crypted data record to an online DB
• Schedule a task to periodically create the .ini data file
• Schedule a task to periodically send a crypted record to the online DB.

The "online DB" is a free MySql instance , this DB is not intended as the main repository for the data, but is only a sort of data cache to later retrieve and organize the data of the various machines.

As today the account of this DB is embedded and encrypted in code.

The version you are downloading from here is using these parameters:

    Local $mysqlhost = "sql11.freemysqlhosting.net"

    Local $mysqlport = "3306"

    Local $mysqldb = "sql11403701"

    Local $mysqluser = "sql11403701"

    Local $mysqlpsw = "QtL7T9U5GV"

You can browse it here: 

http://www.phpmyadmin.co

The DB is one table of 30 mysql tinytext fields... very simple indeed... ; you can find crypted and decrypted data.

You can try to upload data to this DB and access (phpmyadmin or a random mysql browser app) to see the results.

PRIVACY warning: you are uploading data of your PC account and PC data, test as your risk !

Or you can use my companion app ComputerPluckerDBbrowser (see link at the end of this post) an app to manage (basically collect and view) the data, but adaptable for exporting and managing data in production.

A schema of the possibilities:

So the left part is managed by ComputerPlucker.exe, and all the activities on the right side can be done with ComputerPluckerDBbrowser.exe.

The version you can download here is very simple (browsing the online MySQL db):

But is available a more advanced version capable to manage all the possibilities from the previous schema, contact me for this version:

This is only a working proof of concept, in production I connect the system to other apps.

You can consider to modify and adapt this system to your needs, feel free to contact me for the source code, advices and tips.

ComputerPlucker.EXE is downloadable >HERE<

ComputerPluckerDBbrowser.EXE is downloadable >HERE<