A tibbets swiss army knife

 Have you ever seen those posts that go something like 10 software things 2022. Either genuine lists by reputable companies or badly written by Indians.

It's not remotely the same, but, here is Kingtibbets swiss army knife of software for doing stuff. 

I have a few provisos here for it. 

No online only shite,

FOSS if applicable freeware closed source if not.

No gay ass trialware, or subscriptions.

One of these I have actually paid for as the alternatives are too grim to mention.

The List

Office Suite. Libre Office

Do you want to know what all the Hardy boys PDFs are edited down from, they're cracked out to a format I can use in Calibre and exported here, 12pt Candara font. So know you know. It's a good free alternative to using old MS Office, Its also cross platform with Mac and Linux versions.

Audio Player. Foobar 2000

I hate playlists in audio players, gimme something that will import a bunch of mp3 from a source and play them or alternatively play a CD from your drive without much fuss. Can be skinned and if you have Discogs lets you download an addon to make tagging easier. Along with plugins for every format under the sun.

Scan. NAPS

If you have linux there is simple scan to let you do what this does but for windows users this is fine. Lets you scan stuff and export it with minimal fuss. Minimal editing allowed but that's what XNview is for.

Audio bothering. Goldwave.

This is the pay stuff, full disclosure here, I got a lifetime licence a good ten years back, that is how long I've used it. The main free version people keep bringing up is Audacity, which does one thing for me, rip Vinyl and export it to Goldwave. As the UI and everything else is a major brainfuck for me. There is no free ware version of Audition and all the DAWs I've tried I can't get on with

System monitoring and various exes of that sort.

Geek Uninstaller / BCuninstaller. For uninstalling.

Cpuid. For general CPU info.

Crystal Disk Info. Hard disk info thing.

Rufus. For creating bootable OS Images.

Process Xplorer Nice task manager replacement.

Teracopy. For copying

Rainmeter. Onscreen info thing.

Testdisk. For looking at old disks and recovery

Sumatra PDF. For PDF viewing 

Freac, Exact Audio Copy. For renaming and stripping CD stuff.

Deluge. For torrenting things. Barely upadated on windows though much more on Linux.

Whatever Happened to Byuu

 Whatever happened to me. That is for those not interested in old television, a link to the theme tune to the Likely Lads. 

Apart from being the correct way to spell Byuu, it has no bearing on this post, except to pose the question, what ever happened to Byuu?.

My second or so post on here was about the MSU1 unit for the SNES, at the time, ten years or so ago a way in the emulator BSNES to simulate the failed CDROM add on that Sony was developing in the mid 90's for the SNES.  

The author Byuu, was someone I've been following or so for years on forums, a mercurial chap best known for his work on the Emulators BSNES and its all dancing follow up Higan. The former a cycle accurate SNES emulator and the latter a expanded out into a multitude of systems taking in N64 during lockdown and when I last saw on the twatter, preliminary PS1 emulation (only Ridge Racer played if I recall correctly.)

Then, nothing, a few name changes from Byuu, to Near and Higan got rebranded as Ares, then bang, he deleted the whole thing. His site remain up although relevant emulation parts are archived,

 Seems like he moved to Japan and retired from the scene, I knew of the first as he regularly posted food and stuff on his twatter from Tokyo and places, but until looking into this never knew he'd retired from the scene. 

As someone who cannot program in any capacity I do kinda think he was cool even though I never got half the things he put up. but that whole scan and document every US / Euro SNES game to check for inconsistencies are what got me into doing the UK Hardy boys scanning project. Something barely documented and with a few inconsistent PDFs lying around the net. I could do better and this was the inspiration needed.

Whatever you do, big guy, I hope you have fun, and enjoy your retirement.

Edit: Seem s like he showed up on the twatter again, pushing a new re translation of Bahamut Lagoon for the SNES, ironically one of the first fan translations I ever downloaded back in dial up era. 

He's still retired from the scene, and it seems Higan has gotten a ZX Spectrum core to it now, which is cool. My words still stand though, nice retirement dude, keep safe.

Double Edit: Terrible news, seems that Near has passed on due to pressure from Kiwifarms of all places. Seems like there was a suicide attempt and no one can get in touch with him. I hope for his sake that he is OK and that he just wants time away from twitter, and it's not real. 

But if it's true then. Fuck....

Free Video Editors a top something or other

Been on the look out for some free video editors and stuff and thought I would give you a heads up on some things I've found. Everything is fucking shit and I'll explain.

I use quite a bit of free software to replace useless or inadequate stuff Windows does.   We use Recuva to snaffle pictures from old SD cards and Audacity and GIMP (not an actual gimp) for audio work and picture editing as well as a bought life subscription to Goldwave (they're Canadian, its cheap).  So would like to think they would have a nice free video botherer for YTP and the like something to rival Vegas for ease of use and integration.  What I've found is far, far worse.

Lightworks  

This could easily be from some cartoon tie in on the GBA

This is probably the best of the bunch as its remotely accessible to any newbies but still does things weirdly.  Overall it looks like it should be an old XP program from 2005 such is its design, you import stuff from a folder and arrange things in bins and then click on a bank of panels at the side to create you own timeline.  Even installing you'll need to register even for a free version, and the upshot is this unless you have a Vimeo or Youtube account you can't export it to popular formats such as WMV or AVI. Its a bastard headache to use and the shark logo kept reminding me of an old GBA game. 

It does have a great video tutorial that is narrated by a Brooklyn gangster.  Also if you are running linux, then versions are available for that as well, they'll still be opaque and obtuse though.

Blender.

Strictly speaking not a video editor as its a 3D renderer with some video editing added in, its on a par with Lightworks for complexity though, relying on drop down menus for everything.  You'll see when you start it up, you'll need to use a drop down menu to even reach the editor and then faff around with a few more menus to add a video clip, which needs a few unexplained keyboard short cuts to cut.  If you put in the hours you'll be able to do some great things with this, I am sure of this, its just like hitting a brick wall at 400mph and expecting to survive.

One really good thing is that it has the best tutorial videos ever with it, a seminar going through main functions and stuff split into a variety of videos.   On the strength of these vids, I've not uninstalled Blender yet, that's how good they are. If they simplified the video interface or split it off into a standalone product it would be genius.

Tencoder.

This isn't really an editor as such but a video converter and a decentish Youtube downloader. 
Its junk free unlike Freemake and you can update it painlessly in App to the current version.  Its not that hard to do just choose your output files from the drop down menu and it'll convert it.  A few caveats though some stuff will not get downloaded from Youtube, I've used this for a while now and it won't grab everything especially vevo stuff. 

You can use Keepvid or another site to download them for keeps, or if you want a program to do it then AVC Ultimate is pretty good, just keep ignoring the register nag box and it should download with no worries.

Honourable mentions go to WinFF which I've used in the past and Handbrake which I've never gotten on with.

Adobe Premiere CS2.

I haven't even tested this yet on PC, and its really old now so not sure if it'll work on Win 10 but this part of the discontinued Adobe creative suite.  Reading up on the comments, I see there are some formats it doesn't load but you can use Tencoder to switch them into something it recognises.

I've used and disliked Audition and a Legit version of Photoshop which I had to crack on an old PC to make it work.  I may actually download this if all else fails and use it on my old desktop (CS188 poops were done in Premiere and after effects) so I know its a good pedigree.

Shotcut.

I haven't talked about Windows Movie Maker here which isn't available for Windows 10, it doesn't matter as this is the nearest equivalent out there.  It didn't run in Vista when I tried but when I opened it in Win 10 bingo it loaded.  It feels like movie maker although its a bit of  a bastard about cutting stuff saying I should install Virtual Dub to do this which only imports AVI files. 

I like WMV as a video format and this was a deal breaker for me, if they add a way to cut and past in shotcut then I'm sold as Movie maker is a terrible program. I may give it a second chance if its rectified in the future but so far then its a no from me.

Conclusion.  They are either complex or missing features and stuff if you can live with this then good luck, blender seems the most capable but I would say learn 3D stuff rather then video editing.

Also Blackmagic Davinci, looks great but needs more HD space and RAM than God to get working, so its an automatic no from me.