Eraser - free hard drive cleaner

Do you know that even if you format your hard drive, tech-savvy individuals can still retrieve your data? So if you're selling a hard-drive or formally returning a borrowed laptop to your company, you'll need to run a "digital shredder program", which will wipe your hard drive of any trace of the data that once lived there.

Eraser, a free software program, replaces and randomizes the 1's and zero's on your hard drive, completely destroying any previous disk image so that no one can retrieve the information on your hard drive. Eraser is a tiny program. You can fit it onto a floppy--which helps when you want to create what they call a "Boot Nuke Disk". This allows you to boot from the floppy and erase all the information on a given computer. You can also use Eraser to schedule regular clean-ups of the unused space on your disk.

Download Eraser

Learn Linux Programming with Free E-Book

In Linux Kernel in a Nutshell, author Greg Kroah-Hartman shows you how to build, configure and install a custom Linux kernel. You can get the e-book version free from the author's web site.

The Linux Equivalent Project

The goal of The Linux Equivalent Project is to provide an informational and available website for all linux users. The website is currently in beta form and the database will be periodically updated with Windows software and the Linux equivalents and alternatives.

Official Site

Cord-and-Charger Organizer

Cool blog entry from someone fed up with all those chargers which come with every electronic equipment we buy. Out of a cardboard box and an off-the-shelf office computer surge-protector, she built a box that kept everything organized (no more soup of wires). Ofcourse, this is just a start, the possibilities are endless. Please customize to taste.

Here's the link:
Lisa: Supercharged

JAJUK: Advanced Jukebox

Jajuk is a Java music organizer for all platforms. The main goal of this project is to provide a fully-featured application to advanced users with large or scattered music collections.

Download Site

Open-Source I-Tunes, anyone?

Voodoo Camera Tracker

Voodoo is a non-commercial matchmoving software developed for research purposes at the Laboratorium fuer Informationstechnologie, University of Hannover.

The voodoo camera tracker works very alike to commercial available camera trackers (e.g. Science D Visions 3D Equalizer, 2d3 boujou, RealViz Matchmover,...).

Official Site

Icarus 3D Tracker: Free Matchmover

Icarus is a motion tracking application. It has been bought and improved upon by The Pixel Farm and is now available as a commercial application called "PFTrack".

However, Icarus is free for non-commercial use (okay, it's not open-source but some of you might find this useful). These links are from Colin Levy's Tutorial page on how to use Icarus for matchmoving.

Download ICARUS for MacOSX (55.6MB)
Download ICARUS for Windows (44.2MB)

Enjoy!

Capture Your Linux Desktop on Video

To those who want to capture their Linux desktops ala CAMTASIA Studio, here is an interesting article on how to use open-source software (Istanbul, xvidcap, Pyvnc2swf) available on the net.

Enjoy!

Screencasting Article

New Cinelerra CV Wiki

Heroine Virtual just released the Cinelerra CV Wiki. This wiki allows its users to improve the documentation for the open source software, and can be found here:

http://cvs.cinelerra.org/docs/wiki/doku.php

Cinelerra is a free non-linear video editing system for the GNU/Linux operating system. It is produced by Heroine Virtual, and is distributed under the GNU General Public License. Cinelerra also includes a video compositing engine, allowing the user to perform common compositing operations such as keying and mattes.

More info here:
http://cvs.cinelerra.org

CinePaint Glasgow Released!

Robin Rowe developer of Cinepaint just released an evaluation version of Cinepaint, called Glasgow. CinePaint Film Gimp is a popular deep paint program used mainly in film
industry for frame-by-frame image retouching (Cineon, DPX, OpenEXR, TIFF, JPEG, etc.).

This is a technology evaluation release for developers and others interested to see where Glasgow is at. Basically, it proves that Glasgow exists and encourages developers to participate more.

Checkout http://www.cinepaint.org

Welcome to Silent Alarm!

Finally my very own blog site. If you're like me, you may find some stuff here which maybe of interest to you, namely:

• Open Source Software for 3D/CG and Visual Effects
• Visual Effects and Computer Animation
• Mental Ray and Renderman Applications
• Just about everything else, except for country music....

Cheers!