Tech With Ric » tools http://techwithric.com Nothing else but tech! Thu, 02 Feb 2012 14:25:29 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 How to Play .bik files http://techwithric.com/how-to-play-bik-files http://techwithric.com/how-to-play-bik-files#comments Tue, 18 May 2010 19:09:54 +0000 Richie Sajan http://techwithric.com/?p=601 You’ve probably played games like Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones or F.E.A.R. The thing that I look out the most in the game is the in-game cut scenes. The highly entertaining and wonderfully animated videos just light me up. But how to view them when not playing the game? Well search for the files in the directory (or folder) where you have installed your game. Some of the games have such videos with the ‘.bik’ extension. So how to play them?

Well for a little bit of general knowledge, .bik files are used as intro or cutscene videos in games. Their used specially as they help reduce overall size of the video (as compared to other common formats like .avi etc.) while leaving a maximum resolution of 800×600.

So how to play them? Well just head-over to the radgametools.com website and download ‘The RAD Video Tools’, which is just a 1.2MB free download. Once downloaded and installed, just head-over to the game directory and double-click on the .bik file. You can also access this tool via the Start menu => BINK and Smacker => RAD Video Tools

RAD video tools_BINK player

RAD video tools & BINK player

The player also allows the files to be converted to other popular formats like .avi and .wmv. However while playing .bik files, you cannot view them in full-screen mode.

The RAD Video Tools:
Download: Link
Website: http://www.radgametools.com/bnkdown.htm

]]> http://techwithric.com/how-to-play-bik-files/feed 3 Create Free Awesome Tag Cloud for your Blog using Tagul http://techwithric.com/create-free-awesome-tag-cloud-for-your-blog-using-tagul http://techwithric.com/create-free-awesome-tag-cloud-for-your-blog-using-tagul#comments Wed, 13 Jan 2010 17:46:28 +0000 Richie Sajan http://techwithric.com/?p=375 The best way to increase the readership of your blog, would be to keep your reader engrossed with various links internally-linking to your blog. That’s exactly why you should include a tag cloud in your blog. Tag’s allow us to sort our posts, into groups with common characteristics. (for eg. ‘blogger-widgets’) Now how, in God’s name, do you create a tag cloud?! Well that’s why Tagul is here.

Tagul, a site that is currently in beta, is a free service (currently) that will help you to create wonderful flash-based tag clouds. After you sign up, agree to their ‘terms and conditions’, enter your blog URL or text words and click on Fetch the Tags. Thats it! Your tags will be auto-matically fetched and you could create your tag-clud in an instant. Do remember to change the tag links pattern to link the tags to your blog (for eg. http://techwithric.com/tag/$tag would link a tag ‘browser‘ to http://techwithric.com/tag/browser )

Of course that is an array of customizable options like the shape of the tag cloud:

You can also customize the colors as well as font-family of the font:

Its so simple! After you’ve created your tag-cloud you could preview it (by clicking on the Preview tab) or create it and embed it on your blog. Here’s a demo of the tag cloud created for this blog:

Currently you can create 10 clouds on one account and you can set it to auto-refresh (and include new tags automatically) for 12 or 24-hour periods. You can visit Tagul from here: Tagul

So did you like it? Do share your experiences by commenting..

]]> http://techwithric.com/create-free-awesome-tag-cloud-for-your-blog-using-tagul/feed 3 Trick to Check if Your Anti-Virus is Working or Not http://techwithric.com/trick-to-check-if-your-anti-virus-is-working-or-not http://techwithric.com/trick-to-check-if-your-anti-virus-is-working-or-not#comments Thu, 17 Dec 2009 18:49:48 +0000 Richie Sajan http://techwithric.com/?p=227 virusA simple and neat trick, that you must definitely try. There are  times when we are doubtful, as to wether the antivirus installed is working or not, especially when the computer starts to run slow. Slowing down of you PC might have a host of another reasons, like Windows Update, Nero or any other application working in the background, less RAM capacity etc. Anyways here is a trick to check whether your antivirus is working or not.

  • Open notepad and copy the code below, into it and then save it with the name ‘VIRUS.EXE’ .(Without the quotes)

X5O!P%@AP[4\PZX54(P^)7CC)7}$EICAR-STANDARD-ANTIVIRUS-TEST-FILE!$H+H*

Result

  1. If this file gets deleted immediately it means your anti-virus has recognise the file as a virus. That means your antivirus is working and updated.Note:If not immedeatly it will be removed if you run a scan. Even after that if it does not go, time to check your anti-virus.
  2. If the file is not deleted even after the scan, then its time to get a new anti-virus!

That’s it. So what was your result?

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