All Narfed Up photography and words by Bryan Villarin

At work, one of the attorneys had a humongous PDF document she needed to email a lot of other attorneys outside the office. I tried extracting pages with an old version of Adobe Acrobat (v5), but the original file still kept the same size (despite having deleted the pages).

With open source (free) software, I split the document into two separate files in a couple minutes.

Required: PDFCreator

Once you install that, open your PDF document (original_superlongdocument.pdf) in your preferred reader. Now, go to File > Print. Change your printer to PDFCreator, then change your page range so you’re only “printing” half the document. If you have a 1,000 page document, set it to 1-500.

Follow the prompts and save that new PDF file — just not over your original. (superlongdocument_a.pdf)

Now, repeat for pages 501-1000 and save that one with a different filename. (superlongdocument_b.pdf)

After eight months, I’ve finally updated my recommended software list. It’s bumped up to 33 applications, tools, and programs. All of ‘em are still for Windows XP.

This is an update to the How-to article, “How to speed up podcasts for free with Audacity.”

In Audacity 1.3.2 (Beta), configuring the batch script is easier. The developers moved the location, though, so you might be lost if you recently updated to this version.

First, setup the chain: File > Edit Chains

In the left pane of the window that pops up, you’ll need to add a new chain. Title it “Speedup,” or whatever you like. With it selected, the right pane should have only one parameter: END.

Select that command, then at the bottom of the window, click Insert. Another window will pop up, and you’ll want to choose Change Tempo. Change the parameter to 25.000000, then click OK. (Later, you can increase the tempo if you’re comfortable.) Again, click Insert, select the ExportMP3 command, then click OK. Finally, OK out of the Edit Chains window.

Then, if you want to run the script, go to File > Apply Chain. Select the chain you just created, click Apply to Files, then browse to the folder where the podcasts are stored. Like I mentioned in the previous How-to, I copy the MP3s to the root podcast folder, so I’m not limited to one show (folder) at a time.

Conclusion

This’ll empower you to listen to podcasts, or any other supported audio files in a shorter amount of time, and you can convert multiple files at once. In addition to podcasts, I also speed up class lectures. 80-minute classes reduced to 64 minutes — awesome!

I’m using Thunderbird instead of Gmail right now. (More about this later.) For now, I just had to write this out. Quick File is an awesome extension that I wish I would’ve seen before I purged and sorted 73MB-worth of emails (with lots of attachments). I’m not seeing much documentation, so basically, press Alt+Q, type the first couple letters of the folder you want to move the email message(s) to, choose it with your arrows, then press Enter. No need to use a mouse for this one - awesome.

Folder Size for Windows adds a new column to the Details view in Windows Explorer. The new column shows not only the size of files, but also the size of folders. It keeps track of which folders you view, and scans them in the background so you can see complete size of all files within the folder.

I don’t think I have to use TreeSize anymore - yay!

(Golf clap: Lifehacker)

I read George Ou’s “Performance analysis of OpenOffice and MS Office“. In a nutshell, OpenOffice is bloated and Microsoft Office isn’t. You get what you pay for.

Being a student, I don’t work on huge spreadsheets and documents. It’s working for me perfectly fine. (I’m running Windows XP SP2, AMD Athlon XP 1600+, 512MB SDRAM.) Try it out, and if it doesn’t suit your needs, then Microsoft Office probably should.

I can’t replicate the tests George made, so I won’t make any rebuttles - that’d be stupid. I don’t even have Microsoft Office 2003. I do know that I hate it when someone goes out of their way to make me look like an idiot.

Now to be fair, OpenOffice.org is free and is cross platform, but does this really matter to the 90% of the users in the world who only use Windows? Does this change the fact that OpenOffice.org is a CPU and Memory hog? Microsoft Office Professional on the other hand costs about $240 when bundled with hardware or if you look for OEM pricing. I’ll leave it up to you the reader to determine if your money is worth more than your time.

Um, is he putting me down?

What I learned from my supervisor is that you don’t talk down to your clients - for me, my clients are the internal staff members’ computers that I support at work. They may be totally wrong, but I need to make sure that I don’t humiliate them.

Then again, what do I know? I barely have experience, compared to George. I definitely didn’t read all the talkbacks he received, either - there’s a lot of flak in there.

I’ve been using OpenOffice 1.1.5 since it’s been out, and I’m glad to see OpenOffice.org 2.0 is out.

Problem: People won’t adopt using it because they’ve been so used to Microsoft Office. I know, I’ve given it to people who don’t have MS Office, and they still wanted it anyway (read: they were going to go out and buy it). I do know that Publisher isn’t support in OpenOffice.

My take on the situation: If someone you know 1) needs an office suite, 2) won’t do anything outside Word or Excel, and 3) definitely doesn’t need publisher, then recommend them to OpenOffice. If they’re used to Microsoft’s office suite, let them know that they’d be saving over $100 on a small learning curve.

I’m definitely open for some ideas on how to help people be more open minded, especially if people are running anything older than Office 2000.

For additional reading, see the review “OpenOffice 2.0 Kicks MS Office Around the Block”

(Golf clap: Slashdot)

By default, documents in OpenOffice are saved automatically as SXW files, not DOC files. To change this, open Text Document and go to Tools > Options. Expand Load/Save, go to General, and under “Standard file format“, change the “Always Save As” dropdown box to one of the Microsoft Word formats (whichever one would be the earliest version you work with). It stinks that Microsoft Word doesn’t read SXW files, because DOC files are larger than SXW files.

A friend just asked told me that a document she sent to herself wouldn’t open on another computer for this reason, so I’ll have to change that setting for her. Apparently, she’s not liking OpenOffice that much. On the other hand, I’m doing just fine with it. I actually used the Drawing program to create a offense template for coaching, so that was actually really cool.

novaPDF came up in my news reader. It’s free, but there’s a notice at the bottom. Please don’t pay $19.95 before you try PDFCreator: it’s truly free and open source. It’s been great!

The “complete freeware collection” is a collection of hand-chosen free and open source applications, which when combined, make the complete freeware package. In other words, all you need is the operating system and you won’t have to spend one cent on software. Nothing in this software bundle contains spyware or adware.

There’s a few programs that I do use that aren’t mentioned, but a lot of programs I haven’t heard of before, so I’ll be checking those out in my next Windows clean install which I need to do very soon. (Golf clap: Forever Geek)