Archive for the ‘Free Software’ Category

How to convert JPG to PDF without using external software? – Techgenyz

Whether you want to easily share images online, protect your photos with a password, create a photo album, or simply save storage space, there are many reasons why you may want to convert JPG to PDF.

In this article, well explain how to convert JPG to PDF for free without installing any software or downloading an app.

First, make sure you know what folder your images are stored in. If you are going to convert multiple JPG to PDF, it will be easier if you have all the images saved in the same folder.

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Note: You can use both .jpg and .jpeg files; these are essentially two names for the same thing.

This is the fastest and cheapest way to convert your images to PDF without using software or apps. Go to the FormatPDF tool for JPG and simply upload your files.

This should only take a few seconds, although it may take longer, depending on how many images you are working with.

Once they are uploaded, your images will be visible in the main window.

On the right-hand side, you will see some information. Lets take a closer look.

Here you will see the name of each file in yellow. You can select or deselect the box to merge all of the images into a single PDF document. Youll probably want to put everything in one document, which is why this option is already selected by default.

To finish, click the Convert to PDF button.

After a few moments, the file will download onto your device, and youll see the confirmation screen.

Youve officially converted your JPG to PDF without using external software!

You have several different options on what to do with your brand-new PDF file that contains your converted images:

How would you feel if strangers were looking at your photos? What about coworkers or your boss? Even if you know how to take flattering photos, you may not want them to be shared without your knowledge.

For peace of mind, you might want to consider password-protecting your file. This is easy enough to do; FormatPDF has another online tool to lock your PDF with a password. You can access all the tools from the homepage Formatpdf.com/en/.

Once your document is protected, you can continue to any of the other options. You can also skip this step; its optional.

If youre guilty of saving everything on your Desktop, you are not alone! Its easy to fall into this bad habit, but its best to set up a system where you can find your file easily when needed.

Possible places to save your PDF could be:

This file type is smaller than JPEG, so youve saved space by converting it first.

You should definitely make a point to save your doc somewhere memorable so you can find it again.

One of the advantages of merging multiple photos into one PDF is that it is much easier to send over email. This is because:

To attach something to an email, Compose a new message, click on the paper clip icon, and select your document.

Are you one of the 2 billion people in the world who use WhatsApp? This can be a faster way to share your document since people check their phones more often than their email.

To share your PDF on WhatsApp:

Yes, you can. FormatPDF has another tool to reverse the action.

But remember, your original images will still be saved in the original folder where you selected them before uploading them into the tool. These images are not removed from the folder during the conversion process; a copy is made during the uploading process, so your original photos dont disappear.

Yes, you can use the free online FormatPDF converter from any device with an internet connection. Just take note of where on your phone the image is stored so that you can select it and upload it into the tool.

Yes, FormatPDF also has an online tool to convert these types of images to other formats. From the homepage, select the tool that corresponds with your file type.

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How to convert JPG to PDF without using external software? - Techgenyz

The best open source software of 2022 – InfoWorld

If youre a software developer todayor a cloud engineer, or a data scientist, or anyone who works with codethen open source software is like the air that you breathe. But open source wasnt always so ubiquitous. Twenty or thirty years ago, when free software was just getting started, open source projects were unusual, and the people who created them were generally academics, researchers, or eccentrics. Yet somehow this eccentricity caught on, and today open source software is, as the saying goes, eating the world.

Open source software projects have become the engines of innovation in virtually every corner of computing. Yesterdays open source developers built the tools that built the internet, and todays open source developers build on, inventing new and better tools for front-end development, back-end development, devops, data ops, distributed data processing, data analytics, machine learning and much, much more.

We salute the years best of these cutting-edge open source projects in our 2022 Bossie Awards.

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The best open source software of 2022 - InfoWorld

Free Tools to Try Out Before Committing to Paid Versions As You Look to Maximize the Profitability and Effectiveness of Your Business -…

All businesses want to boost their profitability and the effectiveness of their processes never more so than now, in such a challenging economic climate. If youre thinking about deploying new tools to uplevel productivity and give your revenue streams a shot in the arm, then deciding on the best ones can be tricky, especially if you have a limited budget.

Below youll find some of the best free tools you can check out on a trial basis before committing to see how theyll suit your business without needing to splash out prematurely.

For businesses looking for an email solution that can be accessed from any web browser, either desktop or mobile, but arent sure which of the many options to go for, consider trying out Spike.

Spike offers a new and innovative way to manage communication, providing users with the functionality of traditional emailing and the immediacy and naturalness of instant messaging. Best of all, users can switch to video meetings or voice messaging in-app to keep the workflow moving smoothly.

While Spike offers a charged-for Pro and Business tier, why not try out its free webmail package initially to see if its a good fit for you? The Free tier will give you access to a Smart Inbox (with one associated email address), mobile, desktop, and web apps, unlimited collaborative notes and tasks, one-to-one video calls, and much more.

If youd like to save money on accountancy fees, you may be considering accountancy software to help you manage your accounts quickly and easily in-house.

If this is the case, make the most of the thirty-day free trial from Xero. As well as being a safe and secure platform that allows unlimited users, Xero offers 24/7 online support, so youll be able to get the help you need when you need it.

The software can be used to, for example, send quotes and invoices, enter bills, reconcile bank transactions, and submit returns. Xero also allows the capture of bills and receipts with Hubdoc and facilitates automatic CIS calculations and reports.

Business coaching can benefit entrepreneurs, whether their business is in the start-up stage or is a large, well-established concern. Coaching can help with everything from improving leadership strategies to implementing plans for growth to solving problems that have arisen.

If you think that coaching and mentoring services would be a great way ahead for your business, but are finding it difficult to decide which of the many coaching companies to instruct, then a free trial is the perfect solution.

SGI (Start Grow Improve) offers a range of business coaching and consulting services and gives potential new clients a seven-day trial period. During this time, youll be able to use their entire selection of coaching services: youll be set up on the Mentoring Platform, meet with a coach, and access the support desk as needed.

Grammarly is widely regarded as a best-in-class tool to ensure writing is clear, professional, and error-free.

The Business package is designed for teams and will allow you to add up to 149 members of staff, each of whom will receive real-time feedback on their writing. It comes with a style guide, brand tone tool, analytics dashboard, and more and can integrate with many existing platforms. Need more?

The Enterprise tier includes robust management tools for large teams and comes with domain authorization, advanced safety features, and a dedicated customer success manager. You can add unlimited team members to your package, too.

If youd like a glimpse of what youll get for your money, take up Grammarlys free trial offer; youll get access to the Business package for up to three team members for seven days.

This type of software can significantly boost your businesss productivity, allowing you to effectively manage all elements of a project, from conception through to analysis of the end results.

If youre toying with the idea of incorporating project management software into your processes but arent quite sure if its worth the cash, then try out the thirty-day free trial currently on offer from Smartsheet. This tool will allow you to manage your tasks, projects, programs, and processes from one intuitive, innovative platform.

As well as including dynamic portfolio management tools, Smartsheet features powerful collaborative tools to accelerate project delivery and unlock real-team visibility for every member of the team and stakeholders.

On top of the free trial, you can also access a range of demos to get an idea of the benefits this software can offer your business before committing.

The sheer volume of business tools out there can make selecting the most suitable ones overwhelming. Start by making a list of the things that would help you improve productivity and effectiveness, and then research the software and other types of tools that would plug these gaps.

Many companies offer free trials to help you understand what youd be signing up for before committing. And if they dont? Its worth getting in contact with the company to see if theyd be prepared to give you a free or discounted period as a new customer you may just be pleasantly surprised!

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Free Tools to Try Out Before Committing to Paid Versions As You Look to Maximize the Profitability and Effectiveness of Your Business -...

CISA Offers Free RedEye Analytics Tool for Red Teams – DARKReading

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has rolled out a freeopen source tool to help red teams and penetration testers more efficiently conduct their analysis, visualization, and reporting activities. The platform could help harmonize the necessary, but often boring, work of communicating results to clients and management, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agency said.

The tool, dubbed RedEye, helps visualize command-and-control activities, allowing the teams to replay assessment actions rather than manually parsing log files to recreate events. CISA, along with the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), created the tool to meet its own internal needs but decided to publish the software to help other red teams and gather feedback and feature requests from the community as a whole.

"The open source release was centered around contributing to the global information security community," a CISA spokesperson told Dark Reading. "Diversity and openness of thought makes products better for everyone, and getting community feedback and even 'pull requests' to contribute to the project make for compelling on-ramps into improvements and helping the community at large."

A number of organizations have published significant security tools as open source software in the past year. In August, NetSPI released two adversary simulation tools, PowerHuntShares and PowerHunt, to help companies detect vulnerable network shares and manage their attack surfaces. In November 2021, Google published its ClusterFuzzLite software as open source, a program that allows application security specialists to run various fuzzing capabilities against their software. The company released two related tools, OSS-Fuzz and ClusterFuzz, in 2016 and 2019, respectively.

The RedEye project could be a boon to red teams, especially those at smaller companies and agencies that do not have the support of a development team to make internals tools, says Charles Henderson, global head of IBM Security's X-Force team. By making a red team's reporting and communicating tasks more efficient, the tool can open up more time to do as much red teaming as possible, he says. Daily tasks, such as data aggregation, collating data, and working on presentation all take a lot of time time that could be better spent simulating attacks.

"We spend a lot of time in security creating tools that are really centered around the 'cool' parts of security the stuff that gets presented at conferences," Henderson says. "The truth of the matter is that wespend a lot of time in security on auxiliary functions, like reporting and the aggregation of data, which are for lack of a better term unsexy. To the degree we can start to decrease the time sink associated with those tasks, then we are going to be far better at security."

RedEye can help red team members and executives understand the attack paths by creating visualizations of the entries in log files. The tool currently supports Cobalt Strike logs, but will expand to support telemetry from other red team toolsets, CISA said. The goal is to allow red team analysts to be able to better visualize and understand attempted and successful attack paths used during penetration tests and display that information clearly.

"This tool ... allows an operator to assess and display complex data, evaluate mitigation strategies, and enable effective decision making in response to a Red Team assessment," CISA said in the project documentation. "The tool parses logs, such as those from Cobalt Strike, and presents the data in an easily digestible format. The users can then tag and add comments to activities displayed within the tool."

The tool will be useful for companies that utilize in-house red teams as well as penetration-testing services as a way to standardize reporting. IBM creates its own tools to handle such activities, but the company is a "fairly advanced shop," says IBM Security's Henderson. "You would be surprised how few tools are out there for folks that may not not have the development resources that we do."

If RedEye becomes popular, it could help to standardize reporting formats and feature sets for reporting and analysis tools. However, CISA stresses that use of the tool is not a government requirement nor is it intended to be.

"While CISA is excited for the community to get the opportunity to use this tool on their own engagements, we trust that each red team will use the tools that meet their specific use case as they deem appropriate," the agency spokesperson said."RedEye can help augment the way in which offensive reports and evidence is presented to customers/clients, but it is not intended to drive universal alignment around a common standards."

Adversary-attack simulation tools such as Cobalt Strike and Brute Ratel have grown in popularity, not only with defenders, but with attackers as well. While many tools created to help red teams and penetration testers are dual use, equally beneficial to the attacker as well as the defender, but RedEye really does not fall into that category, IBM Security's Henderson says.

"Criminals have gotten much better at eliminating the time sinks in their operations and focusing on the return on their investments, and this is the first time in a long time that a tool is coming out that is focusing on efficiency gains for the defender," he says. "I think that benefit to the stakeholders in security testing is going to be far more meaningful than any benefit that could be provided to criminals."

The CISA spokesperson saidCISA plans to add a roadmap for the tool's development to the GitHub repository in the future, and specify which adversary-simulation tools it plans to support.

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CISA Offers Free RedEye Analytics Tool for Red Teams - DARKReading

10 Software Stocks That Could Power Through These Tough Times – Barron’s

The current earnings season is very likely to be rough for software makers. But you can still help clients by directing them to the stocks of software firms with not only decent growth but also positive free cash flow, both of which have become essential to investors looking for sustainable businesses.

The third-quarter reporting season gets underway the week of Oct. 24, with some major names such as Microsoft (ticker MSFT), SAP (SAP), and ServiceNow (NOW) announcing results. The key point to observe is how much worse things have gotten since the last round of reports.

Multiple software vendors warned during their last quarterly reports, in July and August, of seeing what they call deal slippage. Thats when a customer takes longer to scrutinize a software sale, slowing the deals closing, and thereby delaying the vendors revenue in that period.

That pattern was just bubbling up but could now be coming to a full boil because fall is traditionally budget season for most enterprises. If customers are planning on reducing overall spend in 2023, you may start to see that reflected in what software makers tell the Street about their outlook, not just for a quarter ahead but for next year.

Given that risk, Barrons Advisor sorted through 147 U.S.-listed software stocks and looked for free cash flow, first and foremost, not just revenue growth. If growth starts to break down because of dwindling budgets, investors may be reassured that such companies are already able to sustain themselves profitably.

Before the IPO window collapsed this year, a lot of software companies came public with no profitand no prospect of profit for years into the future. Investors patience for that kind of behavior has vanished. They now want a plan for when software makers will make money.

We filtered those 147 names to find only those with positive projected free cash flow over the next 12months. We also sought a sizable actual dollar amount of projected free cash flow. A company that has a mere $1 million in projected free cash flow may be going in the right direction, but its ability to be profitable could also be easily reversed.

We then filtered those companies for double-digit projected revenue growth in the next 12months because growth does still matter to software investors.

The result was a short list of 10 companies with a combination of above-average projected free cash flow and decent revenue growth.

These 10 names each have meaningful projected free cash flow and a stellar average projected rate of revenue growth of 36.4% in the coming 12 months. They also have a decent free cash-flow yield of 3% on average.

The names span industries. Microsoft is well worth including because of its sheer resilience. With a projected $70 billion in free cash flow in the coming year, it is simply in a class by itself. Its revenue growth rate of 14% is among the lowest in this group, but considering Microsofts size, even that growth is rather remarkable.

Salesforce (CRM)is another name at the top of the list in terms of sizable free cash flow. Its growth rate of almost 20%, after 23 years in business, is respectable.

Intuit (INTU) seems to mint cash with its reliable sales of tax software and accounting programs. Its projected growth of 30% is also notable for such an established company.

Three security software firms are among the top picks: Fortinet (FTNT), CrowdStrike (CRWD), and Zscaler (ZS). These companies products tend to have a stickiness that helps create a nice steady stream of cash flow. They also have very healthy rates of projected revenue growth.

The Trade Desk (TTD) is a relatively younger company that is making a pile of money in the modern advertising market, including streaming video. Its revenue growth may be more resilient than that of some other firms in this category.

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Zendesk (ZEN), ZoomInfo (ZI), and Hubspot (HUBS) can all be grouped into the emerging field of experience management. This gigantic rubric used to be just about sales, marketing, and customer support, but it now has to do with every aspect of how corporations interface with the public, both prospective and existing customers. So their software sales may be able to hold onto some of next years corporate budgets.

None of these companies will be immune to belt-tightening, of course. Plus, the rising U.S. dollar will continue to dampen reported revenue.

But starting with a focus on positive free cash flow is the right way to look for good software stocks in these suddenly more treacherous times.

Tiernan Ray is a New York-based tech writer and editor of The Technology Letter, a free daily newsletter that features interviews with tech company CEOs and CFOs as well as tech stock news and analysis.

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10 Software Stocks That Could Power Through These Tough Times - Barron's