Steffen's Tech Blog

In Mac OS X you can take a screenshot of the complete screen by pressing Command-Shift-3 and a selection of the screen by pressing Command-Shift-4. This is usually sufficient enough, but if you try to use this key combination to capture a screenshot of a movie running in the Mac OS X DVD Player you will be surprised to find out that this doesn't work. The same is true for the built in Grab Application. If you still want to do capture a picture from a DVD you could use the screen-capture shell utility in the Terminal application - as described in several webpages. But if you would like something more convenient you could use an application such as Jing ( http://www.techsmith.com/jing/ ). It allows you not only to take a picture even from a movie running in the DVD Player but also to make a short videos of the your screen and provides several options to edit, save and share this pictures and videos afterwards. There is a Free version available as well as a Pro version with more f

I am a fan of the free open source format 7z (see  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7z ) for data compression and encryption. With keka ( http://www.kekaosx.com/en/ ) there is a nice, simple GUI application available for Mac OS X.

Assuming you have created a video file that you want to burn to a video DVD in Ubuntu. A nice and simple tool for this is DeVeDe  - a program to create video DVDs and CDs (VCD, sVCD or CVD), suitables for home players, from any number of video files, in any of the formats supported by  Mplayer . After you have created the .iso dvd image with DeVeDe you can easily burn it to the DVD using Brasero .

Recently I needed to combine two PDF documents that I created with the TurboScan App on my Iphone (file sizes 528.5 kByte and 421.9 kByte and was searching for free options I can use with Ubuntu Linux. I found the following options: The web service  http://www.mergepdf.net/ : Usability: Easy; excellent for merging PDF files Functionality: no other functions available File size of the merged file: 950.1 kByte The free online PDF editor PDF Hammer  http://www.nitropdf.com/free/hammer/index.htm . Usability: almost as easy as mergepdf Functionality: other functions available File size of the merged file: 949.8 kByte The Linux command line   pdftk too lkit:  http://www.accesspdf.com/pdftk/ Usability: follow examples on the webpage; easy if you are comfortable with the command line Functionality: other functions available File size of the merged file:  949.8 kByte The open source PDF editor PDFedit  http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfedit/  and  http://pdfedit.petricek.net/e