Some Notes on the Machines

dd for Windows, including support for /dev/zero and /dev/random, is available here:

http://www.chrysocome.net/dd

This is NOT the dd which comes with Cygwin.

This tool:

http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/

runs on Windows, Linux, and Mac, and it will prepare a USB stick to boot and run several different distributions of Linux.

To convert many formats to MP3, and to extract audio from many video formats to MP3 files, one may use FFMPEG:

ffmpeg -i sourcefile.xyz outputfile.mp3

A bash script to create an mp3 from every file in a folder, is thus:

#!/bin/bash
for sourcefile in *; do 
	ffmpeg -i "${sourcefile}" -ab 192k "${sourcefile}".mp3
done

Notice the “-ab 192k”. By default, ffmpeg seems to transcode to MP3 at 64k, regardless of input; this is not very high quality, whereas 192k does well for general use.

A very good IP scanner:

http://www.angryip.org/w/Home

This tool will determine a large number of different things about any device set up on a TCP/IP network, including DNS, NetBIOS, ports open, ports closed, and a lot more.

Just found this:

http://www.roadkil.net/downloads.php

Many excellent utilities there.

For some reason, the last time I googled for this it was three pages deep.  Here are the rktools :

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=9d467a69-57ff-4ae7-96ee-b18c4790cffd&DisplayLang=en

There are lots of things which can be done to speed up Windows 7.  These are just about essential on netbooks.

http://www.computingunleashed.com/speed-up-windows-7-ultimate-guide-to.html

To compare very big files, one of the best ways is to compute ‘hash codes’ for them. ISO download sites use these all the time, but there are many other uses too. The most common hash code in use now is md5, but there are recent reports that it has problems; md6 is highly recommended. The tool at the following site does a large number of different ones, in a convenient GUI manner.

http://hashcodes.com

A great tool:

http://www.ntwind.com/software/utilities/hstart.html

Defrags the page file, the virtual memory disk file or files, at boot:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897426.aspx