SWF to PNG freeware

Wrestling to view and export Creative Commons .SWF files, without an Adobe Flash installation? The wholly freeware Windows Free Flash Decompiler can open even early-version Flash .SWF files and save to .PNG images with scaling. ffdec_11.1.0_setup.exe is the installer Windows users need.

Useful where games have been made public domain and their art assets released under CC0, such as the Glitch game. Glitch was made and output in Flash 5, which is very old now, but Free Flash Decompiler had no problem with its assets.

Free Flash Decompiler was the only genuine freeware found, after an hour of searching, which could open such Flash 5 .SWFs. It only lacks a batch processing feature.

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JURN and GRAFT on Itty.bitty

Introducing… JURN and GRAFT ‘in a link’. I’ve been experimenting with the Itty.bitty service, and am pleased to learn that Google CSEs can work with it.

The Itty.bitty link is the web-page, contained inside the URL itself. Here are working links…

JURN

GRAFT

You can of course drag these to your Bookmarks bar in your Web browser, if you wish.

Open Semantic Desktop Search – free desktop search for Windows

Open Semantic Desktop Search an “open source desktop search engine for full text search in documents”, that runs in SOLR on the Windows desktop through Oracle’s free VM VirtualBox. It’s been around since late 2015, and is actively being developed, but they obviously don’t employ a publicist to promote it.

It has a clean Web-like interface, supports the indexing of a great many file-types including .ePUB and .PDF files, even if they’re inside .ZIP files. Though it can’t yet index the Kindle’s .MOBI ebook files, so you’d need to do an overnight mass-conversion to .ePUB or .PDF using the free Calibre software, and your purchased encrypted Kindle files will still need to be searched using Amazon.

Despite being run in a VM (often slow in older Windows PCs), Open Semantic Desktop Search can work on…

“old standard hardware” and “The search engine works even offline or unhosted on a single laptop without need of a intranet or internet connection or a server.”

Though online comments suggest you’ll do best with a modern PC, and those with an over-stuffed hard-drive will need to clear 50Gb of disk-space to accommodate both the software and its resulting index. The disk-space needed may be less if you’re only indexing the folder containing the .PDFs and .ePUBs needed for your PhD or book research.

I haven’t installed and tested it yet, but it’s free and looks good. Apparently it can also auto-OCR inside PDFs that don’t have OCR text, a new feature added in a December 2017 update.

The search-engine software comes packaged in a 2.8Gb .OVA file that you download. This .OVA is a plugin module for the free VM VirtualBox (a 110Mb .EXE download), and the team’s Desktop Search page has instructions on how to plug your .OVA into the installed VM. It seems fairly simple to get it up and running.

How to replace Instapaper or Pocket on a Windows desktop

How to replace Instapaper or Pocket on a Windows desktop, with no Cloud service required:

1. Install the Web browser addon Save as eBook from the Chrome store. This adds a neutral little button icon next to your Downloads icon.

2. When you visit an article in a magazine or newspaper, place your cursor at the top or bottom of the article and then drag to manually select the headline and text. Using the new addon, then “Add selection as eBook chapter”. The selected article is saved locally in the addon. It can handle scholarly-sized articles, and didn’t balk at a 14,000 word essay.

3. When you have enough articles saved in that way (10, 15, 20, a week’s worth, whatever suits you), open the Chapter Editor via the addon. You can reorder the saved articles as you see fit, and then you press “Generate eBook”. Only .ePub output is supported, and each article is saved as a chapter. Having chapters is vital on a device like the Kindle 3 ereader, as it’s then easy to skip back and forth between articles rather than laboriously paging through.

You can also title the eBook with a date.

4. Those using the older dedicated Kindle e-ink ereaders (rather than newer all-purpose Kindle tablets), and who want a Kindle .MOBI with chapters intact, can convert using the Calibre software. Chapter sections should be retained in the conversion. (If not, look at Settings in Calibre). Assuming you want a weekly batch of articles in a single file, then the Calibre .ePub > .Mobi conversion shouldn’t be too tedious to do.

5. Then either do… i) a manual USB transfer, ii) a local Wi-Fi transfer, or iii) an online “Send to Kindle…” operation from Windows.

6. When you’re ready to start saving another batch of articles, first delete the old ones from the addon.

There are a few drawbacks…

* There’s no automatic ‘readability’ detection of the body text, with stripping of page-fluff, ads, pictures etc. To do that you have to do a single sweep down the page to manually select the headline, byline and body of the article.

* Even then, it’s not possible to omit images from your selection. For instance by turning off image loading in your browser. The addon is obviously copying the underlying HTML code of the selection, not simply the visible text. That’s why it doesn’t work alongside ‘readibility’ or ‘read view’ addons. It’s calling the images from the HTML when it makes the eBook. The addon maker might usefully add a “Never save images” toggle, in future. And enable multi-part selections so as to skip mid-article text ads, or just select ‘headline/byline + several parts of the article’.

* You don’t make a ‘record’ of all the articles you’ve saved over time, other than in the form of the eBook output itself. There’s no .CSV list to download, with headline title, URL and suchlike, as there was with Instapaper. But if you archive the .ePub files, that serves as a full-text searchable archive.

* Nor is there any means of pushing your saved and linked article list to RSS for public consumption. But there are better link saving-and-sharing tools available for doing that.

How to block eBay sellers from appearing in search-results

Some picture researchers will be tracking certain place-based keywords in eBay, looking for new public-domain pictures of historical locations, old folk-costume and similar. You don’t necessarily want to limit your search to just “postcards”, as that will omit much. So you do a search with a wider range. But then how do you filter unwanted users who regularly clutter your location-based search results with unwanted items such as key-fobs, fridge-magnets, stock or reseller aerial-photography images, and heavily watermarked images?

There’s a handy Web browser script for that problem. EBay: Custom Page Controls And Seller Block List, a UserScript for blocking users who regularly clutter your search results with unwanted items. Like all UserScripts, the script can only work inside a handler add-on TamperMonkey UserScript handler.

I should point out that EBay does provide the ability to block natively, but only per search, and not as a perma-block.

Usage of the script is fairly straightforward.

1). First, we need to enable usernames in search results. Do any eBay search. In the right-hand corner, above the results, there’s a “View” drop-down. In this you’ll find “Customise”. Put a check-mark in “Seller information” and click “Apply changes”. This is a one-time action and it ensures that the seller name turns up in results listings in future. And that means that the UserScript can hook onto the names of unwanted sellers and remove them from the results.

2). Now install the script. If you’ve hidden eBay’s useless “Browse Related” taste-matching sidebar, unhide it (for instance, by temporarily turning off your uBlock Origin ad-blocker). That’s because the Block List control panel shows up at the top of that sidebar.

3). Put a check-mark in “Prune Results” (see above screenshot), then add a few user-names of unwanted sellers. It’s just a question of copying the username, pasting it in the Seller Block List, and pressing “Enter”.

4). Once you’ve done a few test searches and are happy you’ve barred all the unwanted sellers, you can turn uBlock Origin (or any similar ad-blocker) back on, and thus once again hide the useless “Browse Related” and other unwanted page sections. This means you’ll no longer see the Block List’s control panel in the sidebar, but the script still go on working to block the unwanted users.

How to stop YouTube’s new animated ‘thumbnail previews’

How to block YouTube’s annoying and pointless new animated ‘thumbnail previews’ of videos in the search-results.

1. Open your uBlock Origin browser ad-blocking addon.

2. Go to uBlock’s “My Filters” tab.

3. Add …

i.ytimg.com/an_webp

…to any blank line, either at the top or start of your Blocklist, as you prefer. This leaves preview thumbnails intact, while stopping the ‘animated GIF-like’ previews that play when you mouseover the search result.

A similar rule should work in other ad-blockers.

Using Winrar to fix “the file name is too long” problem

How to delete a Windows file when you have the “the file name is too long” problem”, and everything on your system is refusing to even allow a re-name of the file.

On desktop PCs the common WinRar .rar file-compression software can handle such extra-extra-long names, and can re-name them in its file-system viewer. Simply use WinRar as if it were a Windows file explorer, find the file, and rename to something shorter. Then delete it using your usual Windows File Explorer etc. WinRar is free for a 40-day trial.

‘Sort by date’ for Bookmarks in Opera

An excellent Recent Bookmarks Chrome addon, which shows your last 15 bookmarked sites in date-order and date-stamped, when you click on a toolbar icon. Very useful if your Web browser has the usual lacklustre Bookmarks system (hello, Firefox and Opera), but you don’t want to install a massive replacement just to get a simple “sort by date” function.

How to get a raw .XML display via the Opera Web browser (and very possibly other Web browsers too).

One of the very few things I miss about the Firefox browser, having recently swopped to Opera, is the elegant and fast display of XML inside the browser as if it were a Web page.

Until a few weeks ago Opera was able to display XML as a formatted page, albeit in a very slow and unsatisfactory manner (i.e.: with no .MP3 links showing up). But now even that the feature seems to have expired altogether, after the new Opera update. An .XML page now never loads, even when my various addons are disabled. There’s no option to ‘View Source’ either, as the page hasn’t even loaded.

Of course, you can plug the .XML URL into a dedicated desktop feedreader, such as FeedDemon, but often you don’t want to go to the trouble of doing/loading that just to check a feed. Or you may have missed the feed’s update amidst the swirl of 10,000+ other feeds in FeedDemon, and the consequent need to regularly expire older posts and de-fragment the database.

So, in this use-case you’re casually using your browser’s bookmarks system, or else have just encountered a new .XML feed. And you just want a quick peek inside that XML link to see if there’s something new there, such as a new .MP3 podcast link. You may also want the find the actual direct .MP3 download file link, rather than some stream.

In which case, here’s a very simple way to get an .XML display via Opera, for a feed/page such as longnow.org/projects/seminars/SALT.xml

---

1. Install the Force Download extension in Opera. It’s really simple. Anything you paste in its URL bar gets downloaded rather than displayed/played in the browser.

2. Visit your .XML link with the Opera browser. Opera totally fails to render it as a page, or fails to render fully (e.g. not showing the raw .MP3 links). In that case, click the new ‘Force Download’ icon on your toolbar. The .XML page’s URL is auto-filled in Force Download, so there’s no need to copy-paste the URL. Click OK and the .XML file is then downloaded.

3. Still within the browser, you can now double-click on the completed download, and the .XML will be opened with whatever desktop software you normally use to view XML files. A 64-bit install of Notepad++ is going to be your quickest-loading option for viewing the .XML code.

As you can see below, at the top of the .XML there’s the latest enclosure, and if you’re not scared by looking at code then it’s easy to spot and copy the direct download link. Copy it back into ‘Force Download’ in your browser, and the .MP3 downloads directly.

If you can’t see the direct link because of the line-wrapping of the XML, click the “Word wrap” button in Notepad++ to fix that…

Once you have it set up, display of raw editable .XML should never be less than a second away from your browser. You can of course also use the same workflow for other file types.

I should also mention that there are two XML display addons for Opera, via the Chrome store. I tried XML Tree but it failed to work. XML Viewer stated that the API was not fully supported in Opera and anyway had such horrendous use terms (“Modify all data you copy and paste”) that I didn’t want to risk installing it in my browser.

Current awareness search: last month on WordPress.com

How to use DuckDuckGo to do a basic ‘what’s new in the last month’ search of all posts at WordPress.com blogs…

site:wordpress.com/2018/06 “sir gawain”

All posts have the same date-based URL structure, so that’s why it works. Also works with Google, though you may get an annoying “are you a robot?” captcha.

You can do the same for Blogger-based blogs:

site:blogspot.com/2018/06/ “sir gawain”

Though with far less success, in terms of relevance and spam. No wonder Google dislikes blogs and thinks them ‘spammy’, if it judges them by its own blogging service.

As for timing, you have to assume that indexing may be delayed by up to two weeks for sporadic blogs, so a regular middle-of-the-month search across the previous month is probably the best option.

WordPress does have its own search-engine, which claims to run across all its blogs, but in comparison with Google it doesn’t seem very comprehensive.