Merge, extract, split, or rearrange your PDF files for FREE!

I love free software that is useful, and today I found PDFsam (PDF split and merge). It's an open-source program available direct from PDFsam.org, or through Sourceforge, that allows you to perform various actions such as merging and rearranging on PDF files. Normally this would require Adobe Acrobat Pro, which is pretty expensive. Instead you could use PDFsam and accomplish most of the common things a person normally buys Acrobat Pro to do. It does require Java, but you can download and install that for free from http://java.com, so that shouldn't be an issue. There are also installers for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, so it's pretty widely available.

The program might not be as pretty as Acrobat, but it seems to still work pretty well and isn't hard to figure out if you click around a little. I tried a couple of test runs with the merge and did have an issue with one, but the other worked just fine to create a new document. This makes me think PDFsam still has a few bugs, but it's still worth having in your arsenal.

If you're just looking to create PDF files from existing documents, check out my other post about DoPDF.

Viewing Illustrator files on a Windows PC for free

Using free, open-source software, you can view Adobe Illustrator .ai files and .eps files on your Windows PC. It's pretty simple too. If you're looking to modify the files this isn't going to help, but as long as you need read-only access this is a great way to avoid paying for the expensive Adobe Creative Suites package.

1. You need to download three packages: Irfanview, the Irfanview plugins, and Ghostscript. You can get Irfanview and the plugins from http://www.irfanview.com/, and Ghostscript through http://sourceforge.net/projects/ghostscript/

2. Install the three programs in the order above. First Irfanview, then the plugins, then Ghostscript. The default settings are fine, but keep an eye out for checkboxes trying to install other software that you don't need, such as toolbars

3. Once the programs are installed you're ready to open your file. Right-click the .ai or .eps file and choose "Open With". From there select Irfanview from the list. If it's not there choose Browse (or "Choose default program..." first, then Browse if on Windows 7), then locate the i_view32.exe (Irfanview program executable) file. It should be located in C:\Program Files\Irfanview\i_view32.exe. Click Ok. If you have a 64-bit version of Windows, the Irfanview executable is likely in the C:\Program Files (x86)\Irfanview folder instead

4. If you want to set this as the default program for all .ai or .eps files (you'll have to do each separately), check the box labeled "Always used the selected program to open this kind of file", then click OK

You should now be able to view .ai and .eps files for free on your Windows PC. This may not work for every file as the postscript decoding isn't perfect, but I don't complain when it's free.

How to change the Microsoft Word 2007 default format

If you want to change your Microsoft Word 2007 default format, it's pretty simple. In my situation, it was defaulting to extra line spacing that I didn't want. Instead I wanted all new documents to default to single spacing by default. In this example I'll show you how to setup single spacing, but this also shows you where to set any of the other default options too.

1. Open Microsoft Word 2007, then on the Home tab, look for Styles. Right-click on the Normal style, then choose Modify

2. At the bottom click the Format button, then select Paragraph

3. Change the Line Spacing dropdown to Single, and also change the After spacing to 0 pt. Then click OK

4. Change the selection at the bottom to "New documents based on this template", then click OK

Of course you can make any modifications you want to through this process, and as long as you select the "New documents based on this template" option before you click OK, your new documents will be based on those settings.

Deploy Firefox using an .msi file and group policy

If you're looking for a Firefox.msi file in order to deploy Firefox using group policy, you don't have to look any further. Ok, I lied a little bit. You're going to have to visit FrontMotion to download one, but then that will be it. You can get the .msi file from http://www.frontmotion.com/Firefox/download_firefox.htm. Currently they're up to date with version 3.6.13. If you're looking to deploy Google Chrome too, check out my other article.

One thing I found though is that the .msi that FrontMotion provides also forces Firefox to be your default browser without prompting you. Maybe that'll work for you if you want to for it to be the default browser, but I only wanted to publish Firefox as an optional browser for users to install from the network. If you're looking to do the same as me, luckily you can create a transform file pretty easily that will fix this for you if you have Orca installed. If not, you can download the Microsoft SDK from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=c17ba869-9671-4330-a63e-1fd44e0e2505&displaylang=en and that includes Orca.

Once you have Orca installed, use it to open the firefox.msi file you downloaded from FrontMotion.com. Then go to Transform->New Transform

Now you can make the changes to the .msi settings. There are three things to change, that I originally found here:

1. In the "Feature" table, find "F_SetDefaultBrowser" and change the level to 6
2. In the "Property" table, find "INSTALLLEVEL" and change the value to 3
3. In the "Registry" table, find "RegKey045" and right-click and choose "Drop Row"

Once you've made those three changes you can create the transform. To do that, go to Transform->Generate Transform...

This will prompt you to name and save your .mst file somewhere. Now you have the .msi and the .mst transform file and you're all set to deploy.

Just like any other GPO software deployment, make sure that you use the network path to your .msi file rather than browsing out to the location. Also, make sure to select Advanced after selecting the .msi file so you can include the .mst file you created under the Modifications tab. I'm assuming that you're familiar with group policy software deployment if you're reading this so I'm not going into those details, but if for some reason you're not leave a comment and I'll try to help. If you're interested in setting policies for Firefox through group policy, download the firefox.adm file from here. Good luck!

Rotating iPhone or Droid video that always shows sideways (aka landscape) in Windows

We have a few iPhone 4s floating around in our environment, and I have one too. The video is nice, but whenever you try to view it on the computer it shows up in landscape, regardless of how you held the phone while taking the video. I did some research and this seems to be "normal", at least on Windows computers. If you're a Mac user, please leave a comment if this affects you as well. There are two ways to fix this, one that will allow you to open and another that actually converts the video, but neither of the methods are that great in my opinion. Regardless, at least there's a workaround. I just ran into this with someone who has one of the Droids too, and this worked for them as well.

If you only want to be able to view them on your computer


Open the video in Quicktime. I'm going to assume you have iTunes installed since you have an iPhone, and with that you also get Quicktime. I'll also assume that Quicktime is not your default video player or else you wouldn't have needed to look up this article.

You can right-click your video file, then go to Open With... This should give you some options, one of which may be Quicktime. If it is, select it and your video should open in the proper orientation.

If Quicktime isn't an option, select Browse or Choose Default Program (will depend on which version of Windows you're using). There you should be able to find Quicktime and select it to open your video file.

If you want to change Quicktime to always open your iPhone videos, go to Open With..., then click on "Choose default program" or "Select program". From there select Quicktime Player, then make sure the check box is checked that says "Always use the selected program to open this kind of file". That will make Quicktime your default program for .mov files.

If you want the video viewable correctly from any computer


For this you will need to rotate the video. Windows Live Movie Maker can do this for you, but it will also require you convert the video to a .wmv format in order to save the rotated video. You can get it for free direct from Microsoft (http://explore.live.com/windows-live-movie-maker?os=other), or it's part of the Windows Live Essential package that you can download through Microsoft Update.

To rotate the video, open Windows Live Movie Maker and click on "Add videos and photos"

Browse to your video file, select it, then click Open

Now you'll see buttons on the top for rotating 90 degrees in either direction. Use those buttons to rotate your video to the orientation of your liking.

Go to File->Save Movie->High Definition (1080p). Name the new video file and choose where to save it, then click Save.

Movie Maker will go through the conversion process to save your moving in the new format with the proper orientation

Once the conversion is complete, you'll get a message letting you know. Then you can play your new .wmv formatted movie and the orientation will be that which you set a few steps ago.

How to flush the DNS cache in Windows and OS X

If you're having problems with DNS, try flushing the local DNS cache. If you don't know what DNS is, this is the service that handles translating domain names, such as google.com, into IP addresses. This allows you to remember the domain name, but then allows the computer to use the IP address to communicate with it. Sometimes DNS settings get changed, but those changes can take a little while to propagate through to everyone system. To speed the propagation along, you can flush your DNS cache manually and force it to reload the most recent settings. To do that in Windows or Mac OS X:

Windows
Open a command prompt (Start->Run->cmd, then OK). Then type ipconfig /flushdns and press Enter

OS X
Open Terminal (Applications->Utilities->Terminal) and type dscacheutil -flushcache then pressing Enter

You should note that this only flushes the DNS cache on your local machine. DNS is a hierarchical system that relies on many different levels of connections, each of which have their own DNS cache. If you manage your own DNS server that would be the next step to diagnosing a problem if flushing the client machine's cache doesn't work. However, that's another topic entirely and this is only meant to give you the quick way to manually flush the DNS cache. If you want to learn more about how DNS works, check out the Wikipedia article, or search online because you'll find plenty of resources.

How to clear your Windows offline files cache

If you are having problems with offline synchronization in Windows and can't seem to get it figured out, you may need to clear your offline file cache.  I've also run into problems where there is no other way to stop your offline files from synchronizing, even if you've done what you can to shut it off. I recently had this issue and found the solution at http://offlinefiles.blogspot.com/2010/09/delete-offline-files-cache-windows-xp.html. There are three different way to clear the cache, but the article in the link outlines them all in a very clear way. In my situation I had to use one of the registry hacks because I had a GPO preventing changes to offline files through the menu.

What's taking up your free space? Easily find out using these free tools

Have you ever wondered what is taking up space on your hard drive? If you have, you'll be happy to know that free programs exist which will traverse all your files and folders and give you a hierarchical and graphical view of where your space is being taken up. I recently had a user with 2GB of free space left on an 80GB hard drive, but I could only find 27GB in use. Using one of these programs I found that almost 40GB was showing up as unknown space. That led to some more research to find that IBM's Rescue and Recovery can cause this, and that was exactly the problem. I uninstalled Rescue and Recovery (there was no need for it on the machine anyway) and that made all the unknown space usable space again.

There are many different programs that will give you a graphical representation of file space on your drive(s), but the two I'd suggest are WinDirStat and SpaceSniffer, both of which are free. I prefer the look of SpaceSniffer, and it also comes as an executable so you don't have to install it. Below you'll see a screenshot of SpaceSniffer so you can better understand what I mean when I say it gives you a graphical representation of your hard drive space. If you're wondering just what is taking up space on a drive, give one of these two tools a try and save yourself the time of manually tracking down the culprit.

How to change a Windows user's password from the command prompt

1. Open a command prompt window. If you're running Vista or 7 you may have to open the command prompt as an administrator.
2. Enter the command net user username * /domainname or just net user username * if you're not changing a domain user, then press enter. Make sure you substitute your own entries for username and domainname
2a. You could also use net user username newPassword /domainname or net user username newPassword. This will change the password to the newPassword value without prompting you again
3. Enter the new password, then confirm
4. The user should now have the new password set for them

You can find the original article that I used at http://www.petri.co.il, which includes some screen grabs of the command prompt text.

Extract Java .msi installer for software deployment

If you want to deploy Java software in an Active Directory environment, you can easily use Group Policy to install it on multiple machines. Here's how to get the msi installer file you'll need for the deployment:

1. Download the Java Offline installer from here for the browser you're using. If you don't know whether you're using a 32 or 64 bit browser, go with 32 bit. Not everything runs in a 64 bit browser (yet), so even the Windows 7 64 bit OS still defaults to the 32 bit version of Internet Explorer.

2. Start the Java Offline installer, but don't proceed with the actual install. Starting the installer creates the files you need in a temporary location.

3. Go to your Application Data folder. For each version of Windows it can be a bit different, and it is also a hidden folder

Windows Vista/7: C:\Users\username\AppData\LocalLow\Sun\Java\

Windows XP: C:\Documents and Settings\username\Local Settings\Application Data\Sun\Java\

4. In the Java folder you will find folders for each version of Java you have installed on that machine. Open the one named for the version of Java you want to extract the .msi file from

5. Here you'll find the .msi installer, along with its supporting files. Copy the contents of the folder to a network share and from there you can deploy that version of Java using Group Policy software installation.

You can find the official Sun/Oracle document here.