Cryptomator

Site: cryptomator.org/
Purpose. File/folder/drive/encrypter with virtual drive support.
Country: Germany (Skymatic UG (haftungsbeschränkt))
Price: Freeware
Opensource: Yes

Imagine you are working on a top secret project, and you don't want anyone to know. Or you live in a bad neighborhood and you are afraid that someone comes and steals your stuff.

Or, imagine you buy, or use, free of charge (?), cloud space on any provider, be it Google,Microsoft,Dropbox,Amazon, or any of the other "minor" space providers. But there's a catch. In the hidden/small lines, the companies you give your files to, are entitled give access to 3rd parties (or do it themselves) to search through your data, hunting for whatever they wish, for marketing purposes, to know how you live, what you listen to, where you go, what do you like most...and imagine, just imagine, you don't want that.

Or, imagine you're a bastard that downloads copyrighted data likes movies or music and want to avoid being caught by the authorities.

You're stuck, unless you encrypt your data. That's what Cryptomator is for. You create a vault on disk, and Cryptomator gives you a virtual local drive. When you copy stuff into that drive, it is encrypted, content, file name, folder name, and in the end you lock your vault. After it is locked, if you go to the original location of the data, you won't see anything but garbled stuff.

To unlock the vault, of course you need a password, it better be a good one, and that's it.

Never ever save your password online, store it in your head, or encrypt it somewhere in your home.

What's the best about cryptomator ? It's "client-side", so you never need to give your password to anyone, any site. As long as your computer is secure (no keylogging trojans), you're safe.

Being clientside is specially important when you create the vault on a "sync'ed" folder, meaning, a spot that will be sent to the cloud by your local cloud replication service.

And that's about it. Until today, it was not broken. 

Each vault has its own 256 bit encryption as well as MAC masterkey used for encryption of file specific keys and file authentication, respectively. So they say.

And the best best best of all ? It's open source (well, so they say, I must check, tbh), so you know there's no backdoor implemented.

Transparent, fast (well, slower than a normal access but still good enough), encryption. What else do you need? 

Nox

Site: www.bignox.com/
Purpose. Android emulator
Country: China ??? Ops
Price: Freeware
Opensource: No

Today I was going to talk about this nice Android emulator I use. In my case, it came with the 4.4 Kitkat OS installed. The only things I install are Google Store based apps, and although it tends to crash after some time using it with apps like Instagram and its pictures and videos, it works nice. It also has a multi-account setup, so if you want multiple accounts, you can even run them in parallel. There seems to be a VM running inside Nox, but I'm not 100% sure.

What scared me after starting to write this was that I found that this is supposedly coming from China and that there have been reports of stolen accounts, etc. Furthermore, Nox seems to "phone home" to China IP's every now and then, according to security sources, and it's encrypted. So all in all, it's not something I'd advise.

You also have Bluestacks, an USA program doing the same thing, supposedly being the source from where Nox derived. I don't remember liking particularly, everything looked less smooth, but tbh, I wouldn't like some hidden App hacking my store/google account, although it's SMS-protected and all. Tbh, I've been using Nox for 3 months without any problems. May be it has to do with the kind of apps that Nox can run. One thing I notice is that Nox keeps installing icons for Apps everytime I open one of my Apps on the emulator. May be they are enticing like a fox.

Anyway, Nox works great, and you have top control of your emulator from outside, meaning, you can share files from the Android filesystem to your OS, and reversely.
If you're playing games inside the emulator, you can take screenshots or record your gaming and you can even ODS it, it's just another Windows program.

QBittorrent

Site: www.qbittorrent.org/
Purpose. P2P, torrent downloader
Country: distributed  (author Christophe Dumez) 
Price: Freeware
Opensource: Yes

This is my torrent downloader application. I've been using P2P since the internet started. Mind you, I only download legal stuff, of course...but still, P2P evolved over the years, and torrents are the next best thing to heaven. My previous app was utorrent, (u of micro), but unfortunately, it evolved to a kind of miningware, when it started deploying a miner in the background. Furthermore, it crashed, started to access sites as adds that were "phishing", and finally it bugged for me, talking about incompatiblities between versions and torrents.

In the end, I went hunting for an open source app and I found Qbittorrent. It works the same as utorrent, but as freeware, and a clean app.

It never fails me, and seems like it's much faster when processing downloading files after a crash or so.

Want to go the torrent way ? There's Qbittorrent for you.

Media Coder

Site: MediaCoder HQ

Purpose: Transcoding

Country: USA? (author Stanley Huang)

Price. Donationware (or as some ppl call it, Nagware)

OpenSource: No

Transcoding is used when you have a video and/or audio in a format, and you want to convert it to another format. Reasons can be, because it's unplayable on your favorite device, or it takes too much space on disk, or you can just change it's resolution, etc.

Media coder does it, and more, for multiple files at once. Actually it's a GUI wrapper for encoders like FFMPEG, Mencoder.

I've used tencoder for years, and it does just fine, but it uses only versions of the encoders that are CPU based. I own a GTX 10*0 card, so I know it can transcode video using the GPU, which is much faster. It might be possible to recompile my encoders and even tencoder (it's opensource) to use GPU, but I found it faster to simply use a GUI wrapper that already does it. And that's MediaCoder.

I've been converting all my H.264 F1 videos (12GB each race) to H.265, decreasing quality to 25%, and it's amazing how good H.265 is, in its Nvidia flavour, encoded by NVENC, one of the encoders present in MediaCoder.

Of course, there are a bunch of them, CUDA encoder, the old FFMPEG, x264, x265, Intel Encoder, etc. You can also transcode audio, change the container (mp4, mkv, etc), and even more advanced stuff. There are parameters for everything, and you can save them as presets.

All in all, a very good application, and free to use.

There's only one problem. It's not freeware. It's what ppl call nagware. For multiple files, you get two annoyances. The first is that the videolist is limited to 50. It's actually a big number. That's not a problem, as long as the batch processing was fine. But that's the other problem, every now and then, depending on time/size of files/whatever, the program stops and asks you for a donation or for you to go Premium. It stops the batch processing until you answer the question. I looked for the pricing, and for GPU encoding, you cannot go with the Premium Basic, you have to go with Premium Plus, and that's 127€. That's a lot of money for mere transcode batch GUI wrapping, in what my usage is concerned.

I'd be happy to donate, but unfortunately, I don't understand how donating works, it seems that you need to donate some USD until it unblocks the app..., supposedly, for a limited time. That, I don't like.

I don't want to crack it or use a hack, it makes me feel bad, as I was owner of Adware applications in the past, and I know how it feels when someone cracks or worse, when someone publishes the crack. 
That's unethical, and I had to threat a portuguese bastard that tried to that to me, with violence.

But there are more ethical ways. I decided to script my way around the "nag" question that asks you to sum or subtract numbers every now and then, and automate it. But then I found out a few ppl that had done it, or wanted to, but somehow it didn't work for them. 

I recoded some parts and it did work for me. I'd show a bit of the coding here, for AutoIt. But I won't show it, being considerate with the author. Actually, I'd like to ask the author to get the question to be more complext, so that people don't code that easily around his request for donation.

Audacity

Site: Audacity.org
Purpose: Sound editing
Country: USA

Price: Freeware

Opensource: YES

I've been using Audacity for years for sound editing and conversion. It's free, and it's very very good. It's not for batch conversion, as it processes a single file

The best part for me is that it is also a recording studio. So for example, you're listening to an online radio, and you want to record a bit of it. Audacity does it flawlessly, from multiple sources, easily monitoring. You can adjust the recording level on the fly.

For editing sound, you can add multiple effects, check its frequency spectrum, use beat finder, cut, copy, paste, trim, normalize...

It's multiple track, of course, and finally, you can save the project in its own format (a bit cumbersome, it uses hundreds of tiny files per project) and you can easily export to MP3 or other formats, AAC, AC3, etc.

For the price of zero €, with open source to boot, you can't fail with Audacity. I never do.

Bitdefender (Antivirus Free Edition)

Site: Bitdefender
Country: Romania
Purpose: Antivirus
Price: Freeware

This is my anti-virus application. It works flawlessly. I never got corrupted since it has been running. 

It doesn't nag you with questions. It blocks virus, trojans, webthreats, namely phishing attempts from sites or applications like utrorrent that trigger site access. It scans my system. 

Most important, it's light, as light as you can get. I've used dozens of AV in the past, anti-malware, all kind of stuff. This one, it only bothers you when you're about to get attacked. And you (at least, I) don't feel like file access is anyway slowed by BitDefender. 

Actually, it has so little configuration it scares me. Besides an ON/OFF button, it lists events, quarantine items, exclusions and that's about it.

Oh, I nearly forgot, years ago, it would, every now and then, suggest I paid for it. There's a "display notifications with special offers" button for you to uncheck. But tbh, since I freshly installed my system mid 2017, it hasn't popped up once.

What else can you ask for free ?

(Cybergenic) Shade

Site: www.shadesandbox.com

Author: Eugene Balabanov

Country: Russia

Purpose: Sandbox
Price: Freeware

Today I'll talk about sandbox SW. I'll use the Sandbox definition:

"Sandbox is an alternative for antivirus and a tool for virtualization. It locally virtualizes applications (i.e. internet browsers) and locks all incoming internet files and possible viruses in its safe virtual environment - a “sandbox”, keeping them isolated from the Operating System to maintain it clean from malware."

How it works ? It creates a virtual set of drives inside a root folder, every registry change, file installation, change, it goes there. Every process runs in a protected environment.

What is it good for (me) ? Run virus/trojan infected applications. It won't infect your system, as long as you run them sandboxed.

I've used two over the years. Before Windows 10, I was using Sandboxie. It worked fine. Unfortunately, in my Windows 10 installation, it doesn't work so well, most times you get RPC service errors and processes don't start. So I went hunting for a new one.

And I found Shade. It works the same way, you get a vault you add executables to. Every executable in that vault, when executed, will have a purple border window and be shaded (for Sandboxie, the border window was yellow).

It has worked ... nearly flawlessly. Recently, I downloaded something I knew was "trojaned", confirmed by Bitdefender (my AV, topic for another day). I ran it shaded but a few secs later, it triggered a BSOD. No harm done to the system, though.

Still, sandbox tool is a mandatory piece of SW these days, because sometimes you get an application you want to run, and it is virused in a way that it can't be cleaned.

Bvckup2

Site: https://www.bvckup2.com/

Country: Switzerland.

Purpose: Backup tool
Price: Freeware for a beta 100% working version, 20USD for lifetime maintenance upgrades

I've been using backup tools since early 2000, when the amount and size of pics, videos, and overall personal data skyrocketed. Until recently, I used Karen's Replicator, a proven freeware tool that kept my backups fine. But over the years, it got kind of slow when scanning for changes in huge chunks of files and development stopped after Karen unfortunately passed away. It was a woman coder in a world of male supremacy, and she was a damn good one.

So a few months back, I went hunting for a new backup tool, and I was prepared to pay for it.

I found bvckup2, which has a free beta, and a 20 USD lifetime maintenance, and I've been using it ever since.

IT WORKS. NO FAILS. NO CRASHES. NO MISSING FILES. ALL INFO PROVIDED.

Bvckup2 is lightning FAST. It's easy to setup, and you can configure a lot of parameters, but its major advantage is how fast it is, when it is scanning, and when it is DELTA copying. Files are scanned for changes and only MODIFIED PARTS of the file are copied over, unless otherwise selected.

I've got about 1TB of backup data, it is scanned in about 30 secs, and then I watch it copy the few changes and then, a few secs later, it's all over. 1 TB of data !!!

- You can start it manually, you can monitor file changes and backup in real time, or you can schedule precise times. This real-time thing is amazing.

- You can copy everything, but exceptions, or you can start with an empty list, and fill it accordingly.

- You can detect changes the slow way, rescanning destination on every run, or use what they called "destination snapshot",

- When possible, shadow copy is used, so you can even copy files that are in use (NT files in the %USERPROFILE% folder come to mind).

- You can delete backup copies, you can archive them, or keep them, so it's a kind of incremental backup

- You can set source/destinations as network drives or cloud drives, it works flawlessly.

- The log data is quite detailed and provided on screen, so you can open more and more detail to see exactly what was done, when, how.

- Finally, the backup is readable, it's a sync, so you can use your destination files, there are no indexes, database, or hidden files with stuff on your destination. Nothing. It's a pure "copy", with the addional "undeleted" data from the destination, if you chose to keep it.

- GUI is spartan, swiss style, but I like it. no funny bunnies.

- It can't get any easier, you set set it and forget it.

So if you need a backup tool for you, for your kids computers, you want to backup your stuff to a cloud drive, or whatever, go for Bvckup2. You can't miss it.

On being toolish

Coder, gamer, tester, doing stuff with computers since 1984, sometimes in a professional way, sometimes in a ludic kind of way.
Sometimes with Software (SW), sometimes with Hardware (HW), sometimes with Firmware (FW). Sometimes legal, sometimes illegal. 

Here I'll try to pinpoint my most useful tools over the years, those that ease my burdens, when things need to be done.
Sometimes I'll just post about a game, or something else related to computers.

Why the name of the blog ? Atul is a typical indian male name, it is also the 355th name of Lord Vishnu, one the three major deities in Induism (Vishnu, Brahma, Shiva), and it means "incomparable."

India is in itself, a monster SW/tool house. I had the pleasure of getting acquainted with indian developers in 1995, when part of my job was "outsourced" to Bangalore and its local SW house. Before that, we worked together for about a year. In the end, I had to transfer my know-how and my code, something that I considered "mine, my precious". Still, I made some good friends that I kept over the years. Some of them migrated to the USA later on, a problem that continues today, a rotation of employees between companies and abroad, which causes major problems for keeping know-how within a company.

I lost track of them, but still, this blog name is a way of honoring my fond memories of them: Rekha Srinivasan, Sudarshan HV, Warrier Anju, Ramesh, Renu, and a few others.

Renu and Rekha

Ramesh and Sudarshan

They gave me the pleasure of understanding how one can be cooperative with developers from around the world, in an era where there was NO INTERNET and NO SMARTPHONES (there was Banyan Vines, shared-slooooow drives, proprietary E-mail).