psMonitor: Make PDFs without Adobe Acrobat
At every IT job I’ve worked, I’ve noticed that the ability to create PDF files in business today is nothing less than an absolute necessity. Even with the pricing of Adobe Acrobat skyrocketing (about $250 per seat), and PDF becoming an open standard, it’s still difficult to find a reliable, totally free method for creating PDF documents.
My father’s company, like most, ran into this issue a couple of years ago. So my brother, who was doing the network management at the time, developed a PostScript monitoring service to convert PostScript files to PDFs; a program he called psMonitor. After some coding and setup, anyone in the office could print to a PostScript file in a specific directory and have it automatically spit out a PDF file. Saved the company nearly $3,000 instantly. The savings in a larger firm could be even more astounding. The full version of Acrobat is still crucial for proper PDF editing and markup, but most of us don’t need that. We just need a simple way to convert files.
What follows here is my guide on how to set up your own psMonitor service so that you too may disown Acrobat!
How to properly import Audiobooks into iTunes
It took me a couple of days to get all of these steps figured out, but I’ve finally figured out how to take any audio files and create a “chapterized” single file that will even put itself in the “Audiobooks” section of your iPod or iTunes (with version 7+). It involves several steps (all of which are free), but once you get the workflow down you’ll be able to make yourself a nice “audible library” for your computer. Hit the jump for the full, professional Audiobook rundown.
Setting Up a Jabber Server
At our office we’re in the process of a migration to Exchange Server, which meant the decommissioning of our old mail server running MDaemon. Unfortunately, this meat that I had to come up with a new method for instant messaging, because Exchange no longer provides a way to set up an IM server short of their full Live Communications Server product. As I started searching for alternatives, both proprietary and open-source, I realized my main feature concerns for a new product were low cost, manageability, and server-side controls over the whole system. With Jabber open format, I found exactly what I was looking for.
Guide to Hamachi
I’ve recently started using Hamachi (as in, 3 days ago), and I’m now addicted. I haven’t seen such a useful app in years. Hamachi is essentially a personal VPN solution for putting any computers on a sort of VLAN configuration across the internet. You would install Hamachi on any computers you want to have access to one another, create a network with a password, and join the computers to that network. The magic of Hamachi really comes from the fact that it’s a UDP-based peer-to-peer system in which the connections are secured via the main Hamachi server(s). However, the third-party server is only used to secure the connection; no data passes through the Hamachi servers. Dead simple.
Here’s a complete guide on the basics of Hamachi.
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