Those of you that use OVH services, might find these domain names helpful.
DNS
cdns.ovh.net / 213.186.33.99
NTP
ntp0.ovh.net / 213.251.128.249
Expire history by days add-on for Pale Moon
For those who miss an option in Pale Moon to delete older history I have prepared an official add-on for Pale Moon based on legacy version of the same name add-on for Firefox.
You can download it right from Pale Moon’s website.
The source code is available on GitHub.
NordVPN CyberSec
When you are connected to a NordVPN server you can get use of their CyberSec DNS server, which blocks malware and ads. Their IP addresses are:
- 103.86.99.99
- 103.86.96.96
Windows Vista hangs on “Checking for updates”
Process svchost.exe is taking up the CPU and it looks like it will run forever (in days).
In my case I had a fresh install of Vista SP2. I was able to get rid of this by manually installing some of the updates.
First of all disable Windows Update and restart PC, so that the svchost.exe was in sleep state (no CPU usage).
After that it is required to manually install the following Windows updates:
- KB3205638: http://www.catalog.update.microsoft.com/Search.aspx?q=KB3205638 Vista
- KB4012583: http://www.catalog.update.microsoft.com/Search.aspx?q=KB4012583 Vista
- KB4015195: http://www.catalog.update.microsoft.com/Search.aspx?q=KB4015195 Vista
- KB4015380: http://www.catalog.update.microsoft.com/Search.aspx?q=KB4015380 Vista
As soon as the updates are installed and the PC is restarted, you should be able to check and install all updates as usual.
Error 1603 while trying to install Skype on Windows 10
I have been using Skype on Windows 10 for a while, but after some updates has been installed Skype disappeared from my PC. I tried to install it again with the latest version, but I got error 1603.
To resolve this I downloaded MSI version from http://www.skype.com/go/getskype-msi. This file installed Skype without problems.
Test SMTP server on Windows using PowerShell
Quick test to find out whether you setup the SMTP server correctly.
Send-MailMessage -SMTPServer localhost -To [email protected] -From [email protected] -Subject "Test" -Body "Test"
Converting video to MP4 for web using FFMPEG
Here is a sample command line to be used with ffmpeg which is based on whats doing HTML5 Video Maker on the background.
ffmpeg -y -i "input_video.avi" -f mp4 -strict experimental -vcodec libx264 -crf 22 -profile:v high422 -level 4.0 -pix_fmt yuv420p -movflags +faststart -acodec aac -ac 2 -ab 128k -ar 44.1k "output_video.mp4"
Easy migrate your current Windows OS to SSD
If you plan to migrate your current OS to SSD you will need a tool which will help you move the system to the new the disk. In most cases SSD will be smaller then your current disk, so the tool should be able to shrink partitions during the operation.
There is a lot of tools available, but most of them are not free. I have used EaseUS Todo Backup Free which includes this functionality. In my case the disk had 5 partitions, but the OS partition was the third one, but even that was not problem for the EaseUS Todo Backup. It automatically shrunk the third partition, great job!
After you install the software, just click Clone button on the top and start migration in a few seconds.
Extract audio from video with FFmpeg into MP3
This script will convert the audio in the best available quality (aq paramter) into MP3. The quality can be changed from 0 to 9. 0 is the best and 9 is the worst quality.
ffmpeg -i video.mp4 -vn -acodec libmp3lame -aq 0 audio.mp3
Optimize images in CRON job
Google PageSpeed Insights may complain about images being not compressed enough. There are techniques which ensure lossless compression. When using JPG images you may compress them using jpegoptim, which may be run from the command line.
jpegoptim -s /var/www/html/images/*.jpg
The command will go through all jpg images in that folder and will perform lossless compression. The -s parameter will also ensure that all markers (eg. comments and EXIF data) will be removed.