Cool tools Posts

On the left is a 2D floor plan of a house.

From the floor plan we can easily spot the living room, the dining room, the dry and wet kitchen, a bedroom, a bathroom, a utility room and a washing area.

Most housing developers would create a plastic model of the house for buyers to look at from an aerial view.

Another advanced method would be to create a 3D model which allows the buyer to look into the house from a first person perspective.

This sort of view is as close as being in an actual show house without physically being there.

A friend once asked if I know of any free software which could help him convert a 2D floor plan into a 3D walk through model.

He basically wanted the ability to plan and furnish his new home via the software.

Since the house will be empty to begin with, the software will help by allowing him to place the furnitures according to the actual layout of his home.

I tried to search for such a tool and found this one called Sweet Home 3D – a free interior design tool which helps you place furniture on a 2D house floor plan, with a 3D preview.

I gave the application a try according the the floor plan above, and this is the outcome of it. Continue Reading »
How to convert a 2D floor plan to a 3D walk through model

Recently a friend who’s in charged of IT asked if I know of a way to prevent his office workers / Internet users from watching TV online. photo credit: dutchlad

I told him to just block the site from being accessed via the office Internet.

Then I asked him the name of the site which allows people to watch TV online.

He mentioned it’s TVGorge.com.

I gave the link a try and was quite impressed with the various tv shows that are available for people to watch online.

What’s really cool is that people who aren’t staying in the US can now watch US based TV shows from the comfort of their homes or just about anywhere with an Internet access.

Initially I thought that I’ll need to download the file before I can watch the shows. Apparently it works like YouTube where you just need to click on the play button and watch it directly without having to wait / download anything. Continue Reading »
How to prevent office workers from watching TV online

Sometimes your colleagues come to you and ask for a favor to simplify their tasks by offering new tools. photo credit: Micky.!

Recently, I had a request to find a solution to copy a series of report files from a web server to another FTP server located in another company without any human intervention.

The very first thing that came to my mind was synchronization and related tools.

Synchronizing files among several destinations is one of the tasks that almost every computer engineer have to do these days.

Although a simple copy/paste operation may be a working solution but increased number of files and their growing size has made it the worst option.

Nowadays, software tools like Microsoft’s SyncToy brought a simple synchronization framework to the previous copy/paste old habit with more efficiency. Although SyncToy is free to use but it only supports Windows OS and works on its respective file system.

For what I was asked to do, I need a tool that could be scheduled for file transfer between Windows directories and FTP servers. There are lots of tools on the Internet that can do such a task using an internal scheduling engine with suitable GUI but they are not free and you have to pay for them. Continue Reading »
A free way to synchronize two ftp sites or local directories

Recently I downloaded the source codes for this website. photo credit: babasteve

To my surprise, the downloaded source codes were about 150 MB in size. What could be taking up so much space? A typical Wordpress site takes less than 30MB. There must be some extra files sitting in there.

On my Windows Vista, I opened up the folder and attempted to find out which folder is taking up so much space.

As you can see from the screenshot above, the Windows Explorer does not show the size of each folder. If you want to know the size of a folder, you’ll need to put your mouse over the folder to see its size, just like below. Continue Reading »
Software to show the size of folders and its subfolders