A Word On Free Software...

Well there are a lot of free stuff available on the internet that allow you to work wonderfully well. So why go for more sophisticated stuff which come with a price? And the best thing is that they are available on the website of the company so that you do not need to go to some other download sites (which are blocked at many places and institutes...alas!) For example there is this wonderful software company that I have found: NCH. Well make a Google search and you will find it. The company specializes in making software related to audio and telephony but they have a host of other software as well. I found a few of their software especially useful. One is Switch. It allows you to convert audio files from one format to another and what's more is that it can convert video to audio as well....comes quite handful. Easy to start and no messy clicks. One simple click on the convert button and it will do the job for you. Another one is Wavepad. Its, as the name suggests, a wave editing tool and for those of you who are wondering what it is...it basically makes the wave pattern of the audio file you want and then allows you to edit it...I found it to be especially useful in case when you want to mix files (say for example you got to make a mix of tracks for a dance performance). It has a wonderful tool for noise suppression. I used it to make a movie. It was simply superb. Give the software a small noise sample and it will edit the entire audio clip and suppress noise...a job made easier for you! Apart from this it also has some other useful tools. Their other software like VideoPad and Prism are also worth trying they being for video editing and video conversion respectively.

So long so good. But the best thing about NCH is that their software are really really compact. I mean the setup files are hardly a few hundred kilobytes (max to max would be close to 400KB I guess). Easy to download even in the worst speed. I mean one can easily download them even using a Dial Up Connection (I bet most of you would have even forgotten what it is by now).

NCH allows you to download these setup with just a click and no questions asked. Well a drawback that a user might face is that the software are trial versions that work only for 15 days. No worries! The best thing is that they are fully functional trial versions. So you can enjoy full functionality in the 15 days that you use it. And once the trial is over you can uninstall it and then reinstall it. No problems. Use it again for another 15 days! And you can keep doing it for years...I have been....for over 2 years now...hehe....

Knowing the IP of an Email sender

OK guys....so what if somebody someday hacks open your account and sends mails to all your friends? However you somehow manage to regain control of your account and now you wish to know who did this thing to you? Well one way to give you a clue is to get to know the person's IP address from which he accessed your account. This can be easily done if he has sent mails to somebody you know. In the following few lines I will describe the method of finding the IP of that person. I am assuming that you use either Gmail or Yahoo. If you use any other mail account then the same thing can be done but with slightly different clicks which hopefully you will be able to figure out for yourself.

Ask that somebody who has received the mail to open the mail. If you are using Gmail then:

-Click on the small inverted triangle next to the reply button (see the reply button? It's just next to the show details which is again next to the from line)

-Once you do that you get a drop down menu having options like Reply to all and filter messages blah blah blah. In that small list you have an option of "show original"

-Click on show original and a whole lot of details suddenly pop up in a new tab (if you using Mozilla Firefox. If you are not then too it pops up. No worries)

-Somewhere in the initial lines there will be a line Received from followed by some info and the IP address of the sender in the square brackets. There you go!

If the receiver is a Yahoo user:

-Open the mail

-Scroll down to the bottom of the page (not the mail but the page).

-There is an option of selecting the message encoding. We are not concerned with that. There is an option of Full Headers just next to this message encoding thingy. Click on it

-Whole lots of details pop up (in the same tab even if you are using Mozilla Firefox...duh!)

-In the tangled mess of all those details there is a line that gives you the IP of the receiver (Received from line).


However one of the drawbacks in this entire procedure is that if the mail has been sent using a Gmail account it is not possible to know the IP by this procedure because Gmail does not send this information in its headers. (Header is basically the whole lot of information that pops up apart from the mail content). But the procedure works wonderfully well if the sender is not a Gmail user.