Bimil 1.10

Although I kept Bimil, my password manager, without a version for more than five years, version 1.10 comes right on heels of the 1.00.

Most noticeable change is adding the Start window. While not offering anything that isn’t possible in rest of the program, it does help speed-up opening of recently used files. Opening files in read-only mode also becomes possible and I’m sure this will be handy feature to many.

Fields have been refactored a bit; two-factor authentication and CVV buttons are hidden by default and former has gotten an option to show code instead of just copy.

Alongside a few minor fixes, feedback form has been moved to https. It just felt wrong to have password manager send messages via unencrypted channels. :)

As always, upgrade is available directly from program or these pages while source can be found on GitHub.

Bimil and Summae

After using it myself for last five years, I finally decided to give my password manager a version 1.00 designator.

It is a simple password manager using Password Safe database format. Unlike Password Safe, it allows for storage of credit cards and two-factor authentication keys. Give it a try and see whether you like it.

Other application that got slight version bump is Summae. It now supports per user context menu settings. On other hand, you cannot install it on Windows Vista and below. If you are using Windows 7 you are good. If not, upgrade. :)

Update All the Same

Some might have noticed that pretty much all my current programs got an update. More observant among you might have noticed that update bears the same major and minor version. For example, QText was bumped from 4.10 to 4.10. Why is that?

Reason lies in the need to resign my executables as my current certificate expires on March 1st and after that date you wouldn’t get nice install prompt but ugly red one. Programs would work all the same but, based on what happened two years ago, I would be swamped with e-mails. To avoid any misunderstanding, I simply recompiled application with the new certificate. All functionality remains unchanged, it is just certificate that is new.

Developers among you might ask why I am not timestamping my signature so they are still valid after certificate expires. I am doing that but devil is in the details.

My previous certificate (bought from StartSSL), had lifetime signing “feature” (WTD_LIFETIME_SIGNING_FLAG). Somewhat unexpectedly this means not that your signature is valid forever, but that it expires together with certificates, regardless of timestamping. Go figure…

In any case, SSLStart gave me non-“lifetime” certificate this year so timestamping should work in the future beyond their expiry. If not, I will repeat this post in two years. :)

QText 4.10

On the last day of 2015, a new version of QText saw the light of day. It is just a minor version bump but with a few interesting twists.

First of all is the final solution for the bug annoying all Asian users for years - QText simply could not properly handle that character set thanks to restrictions of the underlying RichText control. While issue is still there, a simple workaround made it irrelevant for character entry.

Windows 10 functionality was improved by adding basic support for tablet mode and long awaited spell-checker. Spell-checker uses system service so it is not available on anything lower than Windows 8 but hopefully most users are either on Windows 10 or on the way toward them.

Couple other changes can all be bundled into a general improvement category so I’m not going to go over each one. If you are curious, source is always available.

Either upgrade from the application or get the new version here.

VHD Attach 4.10

This is pretty much just a maintenance release of VHD Attach. No new features are present but some old bugs have been squashed. One that plenty people might have found annoying is erroneous removal of the ReFS integrity stream on NTFS drives. This makes sense when you try to create virtual disk on ReFS but has no place when dealing with NTFS.

Also registration to handle both .vhd and .vhdx is added. As this is option not turned on by default on Windows 10, not many people actually noticed it missing, but a few did. And finally there is a fix for the dreaded NullReferenceException when OpenWithProgids is not present. Neither of these really affect many systems, but it did affect some.

This is most probably the last release without the auto-upgrade functionality. I have always been proponent of software not phoning home and not making the internet connection whenever it pleases; it just seemed rude to me. However, it seems that normal people generally don’t mind, assuming it is done discretely, and it does solve my e-mail nightmare. Probably 95% percent e-mail error reports I get are due to the use of the old versions and users simply not being aware of the fix.

I am still thinking how exactly to do it and how to impact users as little as possible, considering both startup time and privacy as concerns, but do it I will. :)

As always, download is available on the program page.

Ham Check 1.00

This program is just one of many programs helping prepare for the amateur radio exams. What differs it from the other similar programs is the support for keyboard-only operation, ability to zoom into the text, and showing the image next to text. While these might seem basic options, not many other exam applications support them.

The whole idea is to have a simple program allowing for quick learning and easy presenting the exam content to others.

Download is available on the program’s page.

QText 4.00

For its 4.00 version QText has received major refactoring with almost 100 changes separating it from the previous release.

Visually it is easy to see where some time went as there is new application icon together with new high-resolution toolbar icons. Yes, QText had high-DPI support for some time now but that always meant dealing with blurry toolbar buttons. With new graphics you should be greeted with crisp graphics no matter which resolution you’re using. It was a long overdue improvement.

Due to its internal structure, detecting external changes in files was not always straightforward as it should have been. Due to this experience with DropBox or similar file syncing software was not ideal. Long hours have been put into this version to recognize many external changes. Whether it is simple file edit in another editor or folder rename, QText will have you covered.

Lastly there was a push to cleanup some of the old and annoying bugs. All these changes should make QText more comfortable to use.

As always, you can download new version directly or use built-in upgrade menu.

PS: Order of your tabs will be reset to alphabetic with this version. This is a one-time change. QText will continue remembering tab order once you (re)order them again.

MagiWOL 3.41

It was a long overdue task to release new MagiWOL. Changes have been small but noticeable.

Finally there is a high-DPI support with multiple icon sizes to make application presentable on all these new displays out there. If you use classic display only difference will be in what icons you see. But if you are using anything that makes Windows want to scale icons, you should be able to enjoy extra crispy icons.

Those using import functionality will be happy that, beside ranges, now you can defined network subnet size. Not a big change but it will make life easier for some.

Other changes are pretty much just bug-fixes and cleanup of my development environment.

As always, download is available on these pages or from within application.

Seobiseu 1.20

Seobiseu hasn’t been updated for a long time. It worked good enough and I simply don’t have enough time to add every little thing I might want.

But one thing started bothering me - its looks on the high-DPI screens. Single purpose of this update is to bring it to the high resolution world.

Download newest version here.

VHD Attach 4.00

After a really long hiatus, there is an update for VHD Attach.

First change that everybody will notice are new icons. Due to their monochrome nature it will probably be a love-hate relationship but they do come in multiple sizes as a saving grace. While VHD Attach has supported high-DPI scaling for a while now, it always did that with the cost of blurry toolbar icons. With all sizes I have these icons in, blurriness won’t be a problem for a while.

Another big news is improved support for VHD on ReFS formatted drives. Main driver here was issue that Microsoft API does not support virtual disk file with ReFS integrity streams and there is no practical way around it. However, you can use API to remove integrity stream on per-file basis. When VHD Attach opens virtual disk it will offer to automatically remove integrity stream and allow you to attach it. Yes, you could have done this yourself but this is a time saver.

Other changes include few bugfixes that will help GUI not to crash as much. Quite a few of them are long overdue.

As usual you can upgrade from within application itself or grab a setup from these pages.

Enjoy.

[2015-04-09: Of course, there was a bug in high-DPI code. Version 4.01 is out.]