What Would You Do If I Sang Out of Tune

Another Reason To Stop Using That Terrible Browser

2010-01-19T00:02:00.006-04:00

Even the German Government thinks that you shouldn't be using Microsoft's Explorer. So Haltestelle mit dem Internet Explorer!

Mashable via Eastman's Genealogy

I wish the Skytrain Stairs Were This Much Fun

2009-10-09T18:37:00.004-03:00

How To Interpret Video File Names

2009-04-26T16:00:00.001-03:00

When you download video off the Internet the file names often contain abbreviations and jargon that are tough to decipher. New terms are constantly being invented as technology advances so it's often difficult to keep up.

Here is an typical file name with the separate parts of the name colour coded to better show the divisions:

Some.Show.S01E02.WS.PDTV.XviD-COUNCiL.avi

Note that after the show's title each section is delineated with a period.

The same file name is written below with all of it's specific data for each division's title fully written out.

Title.Season#Episode#.Quality.Video Source.Codec-Release Group.File Extension

Title:

This is usually the Show or Movie title e.g. Friends, Lord of the Rings, CSI etc. If the episode name is included it's normally after the Season and Episode numbers e.g. Some.Show.S01E02.The.One.Where.Stuff.Happens.WS.PDTV.XviD-COUNCiL.avi

Season and Episode Numbers:

Denote the season and episode number e.g S01E02 means season 1, episode 2. Alternative formats include 01x02 and 102. As most television doesn't exceed 32 episodes a season there really isn't a need for the E or x placeholder but they make the numbers more explicit.

Quality Descriptor:

This section can include the following descriptors of the quality of the video:

WS: Wide Screen, meaning that the video is in a 16:9 ratio of height to width, instead of the older 4:3
720p: A High Definition Standard, which is also wide screen these files are normally quite large

1080i: Another High Definition Standard, these files are very big

Video Source: PDTV for Pure Digital Television, HDTV for High Defintion Televison. These denote what was the quality of the orginal video source. These are picky little differences in quality that most watchers of the videos won't really care about.

Movies have many other sources including: CAM, Telesync, DVD.R5,DvDrip, and Blueray.

Cam indicates that the video was cladenstinely made in a theatre with a video camera, these videos are often of lower quality with poor definition and can include audience noise.

Telesync or TS videos are a slightly higher quality of CAM normally taken with a tripod and the audio souce being taken directly from the source which results in higher video and sound quality with no camera movement or audience noise.

DVD.R5 videos are taken from region 5 dvd releases. DVD encyrption is divided in zones where north america is zone 1, europe is zone 2 and zone 5 includes most of Africa, the Indian subcontient, and all the territories of the former USSR. In these areas the movie studios release lower quality dvds to compete with the rampant bootlegging in these areas. These videos can sometimes be just as good as regular dvd's but often are darker and missing the post processing of regular commerical dvd's.

DvDrip indicates that the source of the video is a commercial DVD where the video has been recompressed using a better codec to shrink the overall file size.

Blueray indicates that the source of the video is a commercial blueray disk where the video has been recompressed using a different better codec to shrink the overall file size. These files are often at a lower video quality then their source.

Codec: Well known codecs include: Divx, Xvid, MP4, Ogg (an open source format), MPEG-2 (the DVD codec), Quicktime, and ASF. For more explanation codec pls check out my previous article on VLC Media Player

Release Group: The name of the group that encoded the video and released the file into the net. This information is normally not very relevant.

File Exentsion: There are two major formats of video that you'll find on the net: .avi and .mkv. Which respectively stand for Audio Video Interleave and Matroska Video.

For more on the various release types see this series of Wikipedia articles. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirated_movie_release_types

Hotmail Gets Snazzy

2008-11-06T23:19:00.003-04:00

Hotmail has another new interface that they say is:

A cleaner and more customizable look
Up to 70% faster access to your e-mail
Easier access to your Windows Live Hotmail contacts

I like the new looks and think that the font sizes are much better than the previous interface. I don't know how much faster it actually is but I noticed a speed difference. I also like the new 8 themes that you can access under Options. As for the contacts I normally use my chat clients

interface to email them so I really don't need better access.

VLC Media Player

2008-10-13T19:45:00.004-03:00

VLC Media Player recently updated their program with their 0.9.x series first issued on September 16th, 2008. They have refined, simplified and improved the interface of this great media player program so that I can finally recommend it to the average windows user.
VLC Media Player evolved from VLC or Video LAN (local area network) Client so its’ name is a little confusing. VLC Media Player has all the functions of VLC and Video LAN Server (VLS) as well as the general media player functions. The upshot of this is that VLC MP has the ability to stream media content across your LAN in addition to its’ media playing functions. It can also change the format of the digital video which is known as transcoding. These extra functions are handy to have all in one program. Admittedly, the average user may not use them, but the opportunity is there.

The best thing about VLC Media Player is that it plays just about every kind of video you can find on the internet. The only exception to this is the copyrighted Realplayer format which is thankfully dying a slow death. I was very happy to recently notice that the CBC web page has stopped relying on Realplayer.

Other media programs, such as the ubiquitous Windows Media Player, require the user to find and install a codec to play different kinds of media. The right codec for the right program are often not easy to find as many media companies want you to use their propriety codecs. Well known codecs include: Divx, Xvid, MP4, Ogg (an open source format), MPEG-2 (the DVD codec), Quicktime, and ASF.

The Following Section explains some of the more technical aspects of codecs and digital video and it’s not required to understand why VLC is such a great program.

A codec is the key that media players use to decompress digital video which is technically quite different from analogue video. In traditional film each frame the video was stored on the celluloid media (at 32 frames per second). When you convert images to a digital format, it is in its’ most basic form as a string of ones and zeros, and each frame is stored as a separate entity taking up a lot of memory. To get around this storage size problem, digital video doesn't keep 100 percent of all the frames on your hard drive. It only keeps a certain number of frames, which are known as Key or I Frames, and also keeps a list of the differences between the key frame and the next frame and the next frame after that until it reaches the next key frame.

This saves huge amounts of space by reducing the total number of frames saved since the difference in content between those 32 frames a second is normally very small. With this selected storage process, the amount of data required to produce the same image is much smaller. This entire process is called video compression and a codec or a COmpression DECompression algorithm tells your computer how to interpret your video files and turn them into the pictures on your monitors.

Hockey Night In Canada

2008-10-07T01:50:00.003-03:00

Well it's that time again Hockey is back and that normally comes along this time of year when it's dark when you get up from work and the leafs are starting to change (no Dan not those Leafs they are never going to change, they'll just keep on breaking your heart every season). But this year it won't be quite the same, as many of my Canadian readers will already know, as the CBC failed to sign a contract to keep the theme song to Hockey Night in Canada.

Called by some the second national anthem of Canada it was quickly snatched up by TSN and was recently recorded by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. Click here to hear the "new" version.

Now that the CBC needs a new theme they've set up this website with the final 5 contestants of their anthem search. I encourage you all to have a listen and vote for your favourite.

If you'd like a CD copy of the song it's available here.

A Great Blog Article About Chrome

2008-09-21T02:27:00.002-03:00

Yes I know I've been posting too much about Chrome but this article is smart, concise and just so happens to agree with my previously stated opinions so it must be worth sharing.

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/common-google-chrome-objections/

Another Great Feature of Chrome

2008-09-20T22:00:00.001-03:00

As I've been recently testing out all the functions of Chrome and I was wondering where the update function was and as I found this article on the Google support page that it automatically updates itself whether or not Chrome currently running.

Unlike most of the articles I've been able to Google on this issue, I don't feel that a program that updates itself is somehow violating my computer privacy. It's not removing or altering my personal data or information.

I think that this is a great function especially in settings that have large number of computers, such as businesses, schools and libraries, and don't have the time to spend to update their systems. Especially as it seems to be a constant battle that few people and institutions have the time or inclination to wage.

Open Source Rocks

2008-09-14T17:15:00.002-03:00

I was thinking about Chrome last night and what it means that it's open source and then I realized that Firefox is also open source. This means that Firefox can "poach" any of Chrome source code that they want and vice-versa.

Will we soon see a Chrome coloured Fox?

Google Chrome

2008-09-10T21:10:00.002-03:00

Google has released a new browser: Chrome. Chrome is still in beta, which is supposed to mean, that they've released out to the public for some testing. (more information on the general release cycle off software on Wikipedia).

Unfortunately Google has a history of leaving their products in beta, such as their Internet e-mail service Gmail, which has been in beta since 2004. There has been much speculation about why Gmail has never gone into "Final Release" and I suspect that it never will (see this esquire article for Google's explanation of the permanent Beta tag).

Google makes their money off advertising and having the best browser based e-mail isn't going to increase their market share in advertising. But what Gmail did was force Microsoft, Yahoo and other browser based e-mail providers to provide more space. When Gmail was offering 1 Gigabyte of space the Hotmail was only offering a paltry 2 Megabytes. And I think we can all see how Google can profit from a more robust Internet where more people are transferring more data.

Why would Google release a browser? Why would it be completely unheard of on the Internet until the day before it was released? Google has published a web-comic book to explain their reasons. It's 39 pages long and goes into the fairly technical reasons of how they developed a "better" browser but as it's a comic it's nowhere near as dry and boring as it might have been. This article on PBS by Robert X. Cringley speculates that Google's reasons are that Internet Explorer 8 is now in Beta and shockingly it favours Microsoft's websites and ignores current Internet standards so other pages don't look as good. It goes on suggest that Google's greatest fear is that Microsoft would integrate ad-blocking into IE8 (for more on Ad-Blocking read my article on AdBlock Plus for Firefox). So hopefully Chrome is the stick will push IE, Firefox, Opera, and Safari into providing better products and if they don't Google can always take Chrome out of Beta and provide their clients with access to the Internet that favours their business model.

The other factor that insures that Google isn't going to make bundles of cash off Chrome is that it's open-source, which means that its code isn't encrypted and that anyone who can read its programming language can open it up and see how everything works and make changes and then release their own derived copy. When most people think of open source they think of Linux or Creative Commons, which are some of the best examples of products that run on an open source model. For more on open-source go to the Open Source Initiative.

Now the biggest factor why I switched from IE to Firefox was that Firefox used to be noticeably faster then its Microsoft counterpart at the time. After surfing with Chrome for a while it does seem to be slightly faster and this article at Lifehacker and this article at Zdnet (which was the number 2 hit on Google for: "is chrome faster") support my observation, but I doubt that the average user cares that their browser is milliseconds faster then another.

The reason I've stayed with Firefox over IE is the plug-ins, which means you can customize your browser to do all kinds of great little tricks. Now Chrome doesn't have plug-ins, this will be likely be changed in the future as it is open-source, but Chrome doesn't really seem to need them as it's standard bells and whistles and sleek design are easy to use and sexy. While users could get the many of the features of Chrome in Firefox they don't come standard and most non-power users I know don't use plug-ins. This article from Lifehacker details some of the plug-ins that can implement some of the better features of Chrome for Firefox.

Now what Chrome has that other browsers don't is how it keeps your tabs running as separate processes, the upshot of this is that if one tab crashes the rest of your browser keeps on running. It also has an Incognito Mode, or as it's more popularly known as Porn Mode, which turns off your History and doesn't store any files on your computer.

Now I have found a bug with Chrome in that it doesn't like the scroll function on the touchpad of my laptop and much like the Happy Vertical People Transporters of Douglas Adam's The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy will only go down and refuses to go up.

Hopefully this great fast little browser will put a dent in IE's 80% market share and hasten it's death. Since I wrote this previous article on why I dislike IE the percentage of readers of this blog using IE to read it has actually increased!

Google's New Favicon

2008-06-02T22:17:00.005-03:00

As I'm sure that many of you have noticed, Google has recently changed their favicon (for more on favicons and how to create your own read this previous article).

I'm not sure I like the new icon that much but then I've never really liked change. Please comment with your opinons.

Cell Phone Hacks

2008-02-27T00:03:00.000-04:00

Try out new phones and see all their screens and features

http://www.tryphone.com/home.seam

I think this site is pretty cool as most cell phone stores only have empty plastic boxes as display models that are useless in helping you decide on buying a new phone.

Get rid of that annoying person who can't remember numbers

I used to have this "gentleman" who was always calling me looking for his girlfriend at all hours of the day and night. But, now I never hear him call as I followed some advice I found on the net and created a ringtone of silence and set his custom ringtone as silence so I never hear him call and he only gets my voicemail. This can also be useful for automated dialers, such as the Halifax Public Library. While these calls are important, I don't need them ringing all the time. For those kind of calls voicemail allows me to listen to them when I'm ready instead of when they call.

http://babytoolkit.blogspot.com/2008/01/hack-your-cell-identify-regular-wrong.html

Skip Automated Machines to Get a Person

Lifehacker revealed that some automated phone answering programs are programmed to recognize frustrated swearing customers and forward their calls to an actual person.

http://lifehacker.com/software/customer-service/skip-straight-to-the-operator-with-your-dirty-mouth-179352.php

Star Trek - New Site and Teaser Trailer

2008-01-26T18:00:00.000-04:00

Paramount has released a teaser trailer for the upcoming Star Trek movie, this newest installment in the Star Trek franchise and 11th feature film will be directed and produced by J. J. Abrams and according to information released through startrek.com will cover the very earliest adventures of the U.S.S. Enterprise under Cpt Kirk, played by Chris Pine.

Vista Drive Icon

2007-11-30T20:25:00.000-04:00

Vista Drive Icon changes the icons in Windows XP's My Computer Folder into icons that resemble the style of the hard drive icons in Vista. The best part about that is that it places a status bar in the icon which lets you see how much space is left on each of your drives.

I've been using it for a few weeks and find it quite handy and haven't noticed any changes in my computers performance.

Firefox Released a New Version 2.0.0.10

2007-11-27T21:43:00.000-04:00

Just wanted to let you all know that Firefox released a new version (2.0.0.10) yesterday, November 26, 2007.

This new version fixes multiples important security issues. So it's important to update your browser to protect your computer from malicious attacks.

Firefox should update itself but if it hasn't yet I recommend clicking of the 'Check for Updates...' command under the 'Help' menu or going to www.firefox.com and downloading the updated version.

Foxmarks 2.0 - An Ever Greater Firefox Extension

2007-11-23T23:50:00.000-04:00

I first wrote about Foxmarks in this post and everything I said is still true but now Foxmarks is faster and has more features. My personal favourite is that it now stores your favicons (more about favicons here). It also now only uploads the changes to your bookmarks instead of the entire list of bookmarks every time which makes it work much faster.

To read more about the changes click here for the post on the Foxmarks blog.

While there was server problems right when they launched the new version those all seem to be fixed and foxmarks 2.0 works great.

http://www.foxmarks.com/

Controlling Which Programs Start With Windows

2007-11-20T21:01:00.000-04:00

Mike Lin has written a great little app called Startup Control Panel which allows you to see all the different places where there might be commands to start programs when windows starts. So if you can't seem to get MSN Messenger to stop loading when you restart windows this is the program for you.

It installs very quickly and adds an icon to your control panel which handily named "Startup" that you can open and then you uncheck any program you don't want to start with when Windows loads.

I would recommend that you Google any program that you are unfamiliar with before you remove it.

Search Engine - Great New Podcast

2007-11-13T22:30:00.000-04:00

Search Engine is a great new show from CBC, it discusses and explores how the Internet effects culture and politics and vica versa without getting all that excited about the gadgets and technology.

It's a great program that uses online collaboration to produce each episode, so if they are exploring a topic on which you are knowledgeable or just opinionated about I'm encourageing you to put in your 2 cents.

If you don't have the time to listen to the Podcasts (and No you don't have to have an iPod to listen to podcasts) their web page has summaries of each show and links to the topics discussed. So I suggest that you read my posts on podcasting and commenting on blogs part one and part two and start Search Engining.

Make your LCD Screen Happy

2007-11-10T21:25:00.000-04:00

I used to always have a red background as my monitor always had one pixel that was stuck on as bright scarlet but I recently found JScreenFix wick has a Java Applet that fixes stuck pixels on LCD screens. If you have burnt in images on a CRT or old tube style monitor there isn't much that that you can do other than replace it with a slimmer LCD monitor.

All you have to do is turn your monitor up to it's highest resolution and run the JScreenFix Applet until the pixel becomes unstuck.

Ubuntu

2007-11-09T17:00:00.000-04:00

Well I haven't posted in a while cause my free computer time has been spent messing around with Ubuntu, an open source, community developed Linux based operating system. And best of all it's free! Imaging that a free operating system. I've also been spending a lot of time trying out and playing new computer games which I'll write about in the upcoming weeks.

You can even get CD's of Ubuntu mailed to you for free. The best way to try it out, if you have a computer that will boot from a CD and a CD burner, is to download the ISO (i.e. disk image) from the web site burn your own copy and reboot your computer.

Now the Live CD version of Ubuntu won't load as quickly as the installed version but you do get to see all the bells and whistles.

Ubuntu comes loaded with: Firefox, Openoffice, Pidgin (an AOL, ICQ, MSN, Google Talk, Jabber, and Other Chat Client), some good games, a photo editor and manager, a music and media player, and lots of other great programs that are easily accessible using the Add/Remove Programs Utility that actually adds Adds Programs unlike Windows XP. Ubuntu is also available in numerous languages.

Now comes the big question: What are the system requirements and do I have to buy a new computer to run it? and the Answer is NO! Ubuntu is available for PC, 64-Bit and Mac architectures, and it only requires 256 MB of RAM and at least 2 GB of disk space. Now if you have an older computer or laptop you can also try xubuntu which is designed for older and lower end computers.

Unlike microsoft and mac Ubuntu releases a new version every 6 months so the Operating system is constantly improving and getting better.

Now why switch to Linux? I personally haven't I'm running ubuntu on an old hard drive that I salvaged and use Ubuntu's boot screen to run Windows XP when I need it. But there are many reasons first and foremost is the lack of serious Linux viruses, according to an article at http://www.theregister.co.uk/:

"There are about 60,000 viruses known for Windows, 40 or so for the Macintosh, about 5 for commercial Unix versions, and perhaps 40 for Linux. Most of the Windows viruses are not important, but many hundreds have caused widespread damage. Two or three of the Macintosh viruses were widespread enough to be of importance. None of the Unix or Linux viruses became widespread - most were confined to the laboratory."

Confined to the laboratory means that these viruses were developed by Linux programmer in an attempt to test their own software. The most famous Linux virus codenamed "bliss" even comes with a handy command "--bliss-uninfect-files-please".

The next reason to run Ubuntu is that it's blistering faster than XP. From a cold start (computer turned off) it's completely loaded in under 75 seconds if I don't screw up typing in my own password. Compared to the fact that I'm used to getting out a book every time that I restart XP it's blistering fast. This measurement is also difficult to make as Windows teasingly displays the desktop before you can actually access it and then continues to load programs unlike Ubuntu which is loaded from the moment you see it.

Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of The Crystal Skull

2007-09-12T13:05:00.000-03:00

Sheia Lebeuf accounced the title of the new Indy movie at the MTV music awards and it's going to be Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of The Crystal Skull. For more indy info check out www.indianajones.com.

Suprnova Is Back

2007-08-24T14:00:00.000-03:00

For those of you who didn't jump on the torrent bandwagon at the very beginning you might not remember Suprnova but it was the granddaddy of all torrent sites, and while it didn't have the useful features that most torrent sites have today, such as being searchable or maintaining torrent statistics, it was a bit like the Portobello Road of Bedknobs and Broomsticks:

"...where the riches of ages are stowed. Anything and everything a chap can unload, is sold off the barrow in Portobello road. You’ll find what you want in the Portobello road."

Now the original Suprnova shut down after receiving numerous legal warnings, and suffering several server outages. So the owner of the domain name supernova.org recently gave it to the good people of The Pirate Bay who re-launched the site and posted this comment to all those who oppose torrents:

"This is how it works. Whatever you sink, we build back up. Whomever you sue, ten new pirates are recruited. Wherever you go, we are already ahead of you. You are the past and the forgotten, we are the internet and the future. y'arr!"

More Proof That Indy's Back!

2007-08-08T22:12:00.000-03:00

Here is the new Indiana Jones Teaser Poster:

Fainting Goats in The Movies

2007-08-04T20:28:00.000-03:00

As explained in the video below there is a species of "fainting" goats which for some reason seem to only ever be referenced in romantic comedies. Fainting Goats at Wikipedia

French Kiss - 1995
Stars Meg Ryan as woman travelling to France to confront her fiance who ended their engagement while at a conference in Paris. She mets Luc, played by Kevin Klein on the plane.

The Truth About Cats and Dogs - 1996
Stars Janeane Garofalo and Uma Thurman who together make the "perfect" woman after Jeaeane lies about her appearence to Ben Chaplin. A young Jamie Foxx plays Ben's best friend.

Addicted To Love - 1997
Stars Meg Ryan and Matthew Boderick as two people to break up Kelly Preston and Tchéky Karyo as Bodericks wants Preston back and Ryan wants revenge of Karyo's for breaking her heart.

Firefox Version 2.0.0.6

2007-07-31T23:01:00.000-03:00

Just wanted to let you all know that Firefox released a new version (2.0.0.6) July 30, 2007. This new version fixes a few security issues. Firefox should update itself but if it hasn't yet I recommend clicking of the 'Check for Updates...' command under the 'Help' menu or going to www.firefox.com and downloading the updated version.

Swedish Pop Music

2007-07-30T17:10:00.000-03:00

Peter, Bjorn & John - Young Folks

For more Peter, Bjorn and John Videos check out this post at Getting To Maybe

Per Gessle's 2003 five time platinum in Sweden Album: Mazarin.
Per Gessle - Har kommer alla kanslorna, Which means here comes all the feelings.

Per Gessle is probably best known to North American's as the Guitarist in the 80's pop group
Roxette. Per Gessle at Wikipedia Here he is in their song "The Look":

Roxette's "It Must Have Been Love", is probably their best know song as it was featured in the sound track of Pretty Woman and this music video includes clips from it.

Indy's Back and This Time It's For Real

2007-07-25T22:00:00.000-03:00

After many different announcements and discussions in the press it seems that Spielberg, Lucas and Ford finally found time and a script that they like.

The newest installement in the Indiana Jones will star Harrison Ford, Shia LaBeouf, Cate Blanchett, John Hurt, Ray Winstone and Jim Broadbent. It's scheduled to be released on May 22, 2008.

Most notably missing is Sean Connery as Dr Jones Sr but I'm sure that it will still manage to explore Indy's Father Issues as it's a Spielberg movie.

http://www.indianajones.com/community/news/news20070621.html

Microsoft Updates

2007-06-13T16:45:00.000-03:00

As June 12th was the second Tuesday of the month it's a Patch Tuesday. This means that Microsoft has released this months set of security fixes for Windows Operating Systems and Office for this month. I highly recommend that if you're running Windows that you run Windows Update and install the new updates.

One of the standard Patch Tuesday updates for Windows XP is the Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool, which scans your hard drive looking for common viruses and spy-ware; if it then finds any it informs you and then attempts to remove them.

Here is a CBC article that further explains this months updates.

Advanced Googling

2007-06-09T02:00:00.000-03:00

Here are some advanced Google search commands you may not know about

Tilde or ~ (shift top left hand key) makes Google search from synonyms

e.g. the search: ~cake recipes
Would return cake recipes and desert recipes and more.

Asterisk or * (shift 8) makes google fix in the blank

e.g. the search: the sandwich was invented by *
Returns "The sandwich was invented by John Montagu" while the search: the sandwich was invented by (no asterisk) does not.

Creationist Museums

2007-06-09T01:34:00.000-03:00

Thanks to Spudman for passing on an article to me via the evil time wasting site: facebook. Well I don't know where all the money for a creationist museum is coming from as I thought that museums were starting to suffer everywhere and the $19.95(US) admission fee isn't cheap.

The original article I read was from the NY Times, but as they want people to sign up to read their articles I'll link to this article from the Guardian as it is free and I love the "Thou shalt not lie" line included in it. I also found this CTV piece about a creationist museum in Alberta which is located 68 km south of, one of the best museums I've ever had the privilege to visit, the Royal Tyrrell Museum.

I did already know about the Holy Land Experience from Morgan Spurlock's 30 days. This park at least pretends to be about recreating history, instead of re-inventing it. But I personally wouldn't go to or take a child to a theme park that simulated crucifixion, especially with a gate price of $30(US).

Apple Confirms iPhone Release Date

2007-06-04T23:59:00.000-03:00

Launch Date for iPhone Revealed @ BBC News

Well now that Apple has decided to wade into the high end cell phone market I'm waiting for the army of iPhone clones to be released. I'm also hoping that Apple's pressure on the market will mean that I be able to turn in my iPod and Motorola V635 for a real intergrated mp3 player/cell phone/portable video player with bluetooth compatibility.

What Make and Model of Cell Phone do you use? Leave a comment with your phone specs and what you love and what annoys you about it.

Interesting Blog

2007-06-03T22:24:00.000-03:00

I've been keeping my eye on http://www.ibelieveinadv.com/ for a while and now that it has some Canadian content I really think it's worth sharing.

It's an interesting blog that showcases good print advertising from around the world. Please leave me a comment with some of you're favourite ads off the site.

Firefox Released a New Version

2007-06-01T04:10:00.000-03:00

Just wanted to let you all know that Firefox released a new version (2.0.0.4) yesterday, May 31, 2007. This new version fixes multiples security issues. Firefox should update itself but if it hasn't yet I recommend clicking of the 'Check for Updates...' command under the 'Help' menu or going to www.firefox.com and downloading the updated version.

I Think This May Be The Last Video I'll Ever Need To Post on Evolution and Atheism

2007-05-23T01:32:00.000-03:00

Via: VideoSift

Republican Debate Footage

2007-05-06T01:57:00.000-03:00

Well I was looking at videosift again, and once again there is an evolution video in this week's top ten videos.

While I'm not shocked that the former Baptist Minister Mike Huckabee, and Sam Brownback the Senator from Kansas(where religious conservatives on the Kansas State Board of Evolution changed the science curriculum to include the teaching of a non-existent debate on inclusion of supernatural forces in science) would publicly state that they don't believe in evolution I wonder where they are getting their funding, as running for president can't be cheap.

Humanist Video

2007-04-26T00:00:00.000-03:00

Well after coming across intelligent design videos on videosift this week I decided I'd look into the ID vs Darwin debate on the internet and was surprised to discover that there is a huge amount of debate going on over what I considered an non-issue.

As with any issue with a scientific theory stemming from religious objections it seems to have become entangled in the issue in the existence of a god, and after seeing some of the more bigoted and vicious comments about Atheists on the internet I bumped into the advert I embedded at the end at this article.

I think there is some really smart marketing going on in this commercial and if anyone knows where the music is from please post a comment as I just can't quite place it. Is it possibly similar to the music from American Beauty?

After reviewing videos and articles on both sides of the God/Atheist and the Evolution/Intelligent Design debate I was shocked to learn that according to a recent survey published, in the American Sociological Review in the April 2006 edition under the title "Atheists As "Other": Moral Boundaries and Cultural Membership in American Society" by Edgell, Penny; Gerteis, Joseph; Hartmann, Douglas (reported about here in the Minnesota Daily and here at ABC), that Atheist were the ranked lowest trusted group of people. The article stated that took it's data from a national(American) study conducted in 2003.

The most shocking piece of data that I found in this survey is that Americans would rather vote for a openly homosexual presidential candidate that an candidate who was a proclaimed Atheist. Which is still true according to this Gallop Poll.

I was also quite surprised that more people answered that they object to their child marrying an Atheist than the number of people who who said they object to their child marring a Muslim.

Which I found particularity interesting after having watched Morgan Spurlock's (of Super Size Me fame) new show 30 days. The premise of his show is too have someone move into a different situation for 30 days. In different shows I watched a southern Christian man live as a Muslim and a suburban Atheist woman move in with a born again family and I thought that the man living as a Muslim had a much harder time dealing with the general public. But the stay-at-home-mom doesn't have to be in public wearing clothes that distinguish her as belonging to a different culture and belief system.

Well all I can say is that all this reading I've done I'm glad to live in a multicultural country and I want to rejoice in all the differences that exist in humanity as without diversity how would evolution work ;-)

Test Drive

2007-04-24T19:32:00.000-03:00

Test Drive is simply amazing, after trying some of the other free recovery software it's simply the fastest and best.

My father's hard drive decided to erase itself for no particular reason so I set about trying to fix it. I suspect that the drive was either infected with a virus or there was an electrical spike. Most of the other "recovery" software I tried wasn't free but I was able to see if it could recover the files before I had to purchase the full version, after a minimum of 30-45 minutes scanning the drive it they all told me that they could "recover" the files. Meaning that they could copy the files to another drive. Now this didn't actually fix the problem that the Master Boot Table (ie the hard drive's index) was broken.

Image trying to find the books in the library if there was no card catalogue and all the books were printed on loose pages stacked in one long row. The commercial recovery software told me that it could discern the books from one another, and not all that accurately. Test Drive scanned the drive incredibly quickly I estimate it was under two minutes and then it told me to press R to rebuild the index. Then all I had to do was run the Windows Disk Check Utility and in under 10 minutes I had a readable fully working drive with no loss of data.

Grand Merci to Christope Grenier and all the people at CG Security, your product is Fantastic. It fixed my NFTS partioned hard drive that Windows XP would only recognized as being in the unreadable RAW format and saved years of family photos and genealogy research.

Top Rentals and Torrents

2007-04-22T23:08:00.000-03:00

I was surfing around and I discovered TorrentFreak.com and read there most downloaded DVDrips and wondered how they might compare to actual sales and rentals, so I compiled the following Top 10 lists.

Here are the Top 10 Video Rentals from Rogers Video

Top 10 Movies

The most popular DVD's on Amazon.com. Updated hourly. Summarized on April 22 at 1140 AST

Planet Earth - The Complete BBC Series
The Queen
The Secret (Extended Edition)
Night at the Museum (Widescreen Edition)
Planet Earth - The Complete BBC Series [HD DVD]
An Inconvenient Truth
The Last King of Scotland (Widescreen Edition)
Casino Royale (Two-Disc Widescreen Edition)
Planet Earth - The Complete BBC Series [Blu-ray]
Deja Vu

TorrentFreak.com's Most Popular DVDrips posted April 22

Another Great Firefox Plugin - Adblock Plus

2007-04-18T16:24:00.000-03:00

One of the features I've always enjoyed in Firefox is the ability to block ads. All you have to do is click on the banner or image at select 'Block Images from www.webpage.com'.

Well as I posted earlier in the month I've joined Facebook and I decided that I didn't like looking at the same ad over and over again for a product I would never buy and right clicked on the offending ad and blocked it. Well let me advise you to NOT do the same, as the advertisements will be replaced with epileptic shock inducing Flash based commercials. If you've ever surfed over to the seedier side of the internet you will be familiar with this rapidly flashing "You're the 42nd Visitor" type of ad.

I decided I wasn't about to give up and go rooting around in my Firefox settings to unblock the appropriate advertiser. To save my monitor from early death by over stimulation, I decided to see if someone had already solved my problem and lo and behold on the Firefox Recommend Plugin page was Adblock Plus.

And while it even blocks the very few ads I have on this site I still have to recommend it, but I would ask that you click the drop down arrow next to the red stop sign it installs to let you know it is working and select 'Disable on xick.blogspot.com" as I've always attempted to make the advertising on this site only for products I use myself.

I invite you all to enjoy a calmer less annoying internet by switching to Firefox and using Adblock Plus.

Fullerscreen For Firefox

2007-04-10T21:54:00.000-03:00

Fullerscreen is an add-on for Firefox, written by Daniel Glazman, which makes the normal fullscreen function take up the entire screen. I can attest that it works with Windows XP and Ubuntu (a version of Linux that I'm trying out and will post more about in the weeks to come).

Press F11 in both Firefox and IE to experience your current full-screen browser. Fullerscreen takes over the menu space above the page and the Start Bar space below the page.

NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day Using Fullerscreen

Here is my article about how to take you're own screen shots.

Free Antivirus Software: Part 2

2007-04-09T15:41:00.000-03:00

This is an update to Free Antivirus Software.

Over the past week I've tested Avast's and AVG's free virus scanner. I didn't encounter any viruses using either of them which I think is mostly due to my own virus avoiding behaviour.

So I can't attest to which is better at finding and killing viruses I can say that I prefer AVG based on its interface. Avast's over-slick interface seemed unnecessary to me and I think it’s a big mistake for their brand. Anti-virus software should be utilitarian and simple. Pretty Graphics and buttons that look like Japanese Stereo Controls don’t inspire confidence in something that supposed to protect you. AVG has large buttons with the essentials: 'Scan Computer', 'Scan Select Areas' and 'Check for Updates'.

I also found that Avast's tray icon was distracting as it is animated to spin every time it scans a file, which is every time you open a file or program. So it's constantly spinning which is nauseating and panic inducing, as the good people at Microsoft have trained me that something popping up or moving in the system tray means your computer is about to go on strike.

I also like that you can turn AVG completely off while when you disable Avast it stays in the system tray with an X over its icon. Sometimes, when you’re not engaged is high risk activities, you want to be able dedicate all your computer power to one task, such as burning disks, Ripping DVD's, or running system checks .

But as both of these programs are free I recommend that you try both, but not at the same time as that would make any computer run slowly, and see which runs best on your system.

Facebook Might Be Growing On Me

2007-04-08T00:08:00.000-03:00

Well it's the end of the first full day of the great Facebook experiment and I have to say in terms of this blog it's a complete success!!!

Today set a new record for daily visits with 26 visitors... No Wait it's 28 visitors two more of you sneaked on while I was writing this post.

So, I'd like to say a big thanks to all my "new" Facebook friends for browsing over and I'd welcome any Computer/Internet/Geek questions they might like answered.

Facebook Addiction???

2007-04-07T00:16:00.000-03:00

After reading numerous blog posting and newspaper articles about Facebook or 'Crack’book, as some of my internet friends have taken to calling it, I decided to take the plunge and joined. Hopefully this will allow me to delete all the initiations to join in my inbox. I poked around I added some friends, I tagged some photos and I waited for the intermittent reinforcement that makes things addictive to humans and so far I'm still waiting...

I'll admit that my joining wasn't just a social experiment it was a blatant attempt to fill another addiction of mine which is this blog and the statistics I gather from it using Google Analytics. I'm hoping that facebook will be a interesting way to promote my blog and increase the number of readers.

At the end of every day, I log into my gmail and analytics account and I look (normally in vain) for comments to reply to and then I find out what the total number of visitors is for the day. I read what keywords people are using to get to my site and then type them into Google to see where I fall in the list. #3 up from #5 last week for "What Would You Do If I Sang Out of Tune" and #5 for "IE Forge" are the highest I've gotten. And I'm #20 for "Xick" and #21 at the Forums for Trillian is also me .

Then I import the data into Excel and try to estimate how many days it will take until I have 30 unique visits in one day. I don't know when I decided that they would be my goal for this blog but I have to say I've come up with some interesting ways to forecast the growth of my readership and I'm almost back to my previous Uber-God Excel status that I had when I was working in a Finance Department.

I also get to see that if I don't post for 3 days that my number of daily readers tends to crash and decrease by around 50%. So I've taken to writing at least 2 articles at a time and publishing them on different days to make sure I don't have the 3 day fleeing of readers.

I've also taken to not actually seeing my blog by surfing to http://xick.blogspot.com so that I don't contaminate the data with my own visits.

If you're on Facebook, and you want to add me or let me into the secret of why it's addictive to you please post a comment!

Might as Well Facebook It I'm Addicted @ Polar Daddy

Infected By Facebook @ Econadvice

Hooking up in a hooked-up world @ Globe and Mail

Grownups get their Facebook fix @ Globe and Mail

Clean Up Your Bookmarks with AM-Deadlink

2007-04-05T06:00:00.000-03:00

As we all know the internet is changing everyday as pages are updated, deleted or moved and if you have many bookmarks sometimes it's too much to keep track of them manually. Especially if you're like me and you still have bookmarks that you used for your grade 12 Biology project.

While the 'Organise Bookmarks...' feature of Firefox is great for organizing your bookmarks into folders it doesn't keep track of which links still work.

AM-Deadlink from www.aignes.com is a great little program that checks all your bookmarks or favourites in Firefox, IE, and Opera and it also updates all your favicons. For more on favicons see this previous article. This is great if you are using Foxmarks (read about Foxmarks here) to transfer your bookmarks, as it doesn't keep track of your favicons.

Once you install AM-Deadlink you choose which browser you want to check using the drop down list and then press the red apple for it to check all your bookmarks and update the favicons. It then presents you with a sortable list so you can either update or delete your broken bookmarks.

Download AM-Deadlink here.

CNET's 5/5 Review here

File Hippo Update Checker

2007-04-04T08:00:00.000-03:00

Well this is freeware at its best. It’s small, fast (took 12 seconds to run on my machine), it's simple to use and best of all its so darn handy you'll wonder what you did without it. File Hippo Update Checker fills a void that been open for a long time; I remember that CNET used to have a similar service at www.updates.com that I miss dearly.

So all you have to do is download this small file (104K) run it and it will open your web browser to a site with links to all the software that needs updating on your PC. It's that easy.

Try it, it's the best thing since colour monitors.

Free Antivirus Software

2007-04-03T21:53:00.000-03:00

I erroneously posted that AVG was not longer supporting their free antivirus software. In fact they are no longer supporting the old version of their free antivirus software as they have released a new version.

It is available for download here.

Avast also has a free scanner which may be better as they have scored higher than AVG in the AV Comparative tests over the last year of so.

Avasts Scanner is available here.

I'm going to try them both out and I'll post my experience with both after I've had time to check out all the bells and whistles.

Online Virus Scanners

2007-03-30T23:50:00.000-03:00

Many different virus companies now offer free online virus scanners that will scan individual files or your entire computer. And now that AVG has stopped supporting its free virus scanner I'm going to have to find another alternative.

All of the online scanners that I looked seem to only work with Internet Explorer and don't appear to be Mac or Vista friendly.

I used to use Trend Micro's free online scan but it, crashed the last few times I've used it so I decided I'd try a few new ones out.

I previously wrote this article about the comparative cost of virus scanners, which used the ratings from AV comparatives. I decided to try out some of the higher ranking companies utilities.

I first tried to use the 5th ranked Kaspersky's free online scanner but was unable to get it working after many attempts. It can be found at this page.

I then moved onto the 4th ranked F-Secure's online scanner available here. It only works with IE and Windows XP before it started I had to download about 23 megabytes and it took less than 5 hours to scan my primary hard drive. I don't know the exact time as it doesn't have a timer built into it and I didn't feel like watching it scan for hours on end. After running the online version I decided to try out the 30 day free trial of their virus scanner. It was faster to download then the online version and it scanned all 3 of my harddrives in 2 hours it also found more "viruses" (I think it was more malware than actual virii).

The last program I tried was from the 10th Ranked Bitdefender, which only received a 2 star rating compared to the full 3 star rating that Kaspersky and F-Secure received. Its interface was by far the easiest to use and it has an 'Estimated Time Left' countdown clock that I found particularly useful. It took around 3 hours to scan my primary hard drive but it was quicker to download than F-Secure. The final report was linked to pages that actually had useful information about the viruses found and what steps to take to deal with them unlike the virus databases at F-Secure which I found lacking in detail and would not be friendly to the average user.

Google Thinks You Can Swim Across An Ocean

2007-03-30T00:20:00.000-03:00

I don't know if this is a glitch or if one of the programmers at Google decided that this would be funny, but Google Maps will now give Directions from Canada and the US to most of Europe via a Pier in Boston. I got as far as Moscow before I ran out of roads that Google recognized.

Swim The Ocean With Google Here

Make IE more like Firefox

2007-03-27T14:00:00.000-03:00

Well I wrote about how to make Firefox look like IE now I'm going to show you how to make IE a little more like Firefox.

First I'd start with the with the Registry patch that moves the Toolbars back to where they belong

Relocate the menu bar in IE7 to the top of the window

Then you have to install Inline Search, one of my biggest peeves with IE is that the ‘Find in Page’ utility is in the Stone Age compared that that of Firefox. Inline search from IE Forge replaces the old IE search with a better application that mirrors the functionality of Firefox.

IE Forge - Bend IE to your will

Foxmarks - A Great Firefox Extension

2007-03-26T22:00:00.000-03:00

Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer a great little app that allows you to keep your bookmarks the same no matter where you go. This is useful if you use more than one computer. I use foxmarks with the copy of Firefox I keep on my thumbdrive which means I can turn any Windows computer with a USB port into my own personal internet browsing machine instantly.

To install it you click on the download now link on Foxmarks which takes you to the Mozilla Add On page and then click on the green install now button. Then when the next screen pops up you click install and then restart your browser. Once you've signed up for a Foxmarks user name and password you can start backing up your bookmarks to the Foxmarks server and they'll be available anywhere you go. And if you don't want to install the foxmarks add-on to every computer you use you can access your bookmarks on the foxmarks website. You can even access them this way using the dreaded Internet Explorer.

NSFW as A Matter of Fact It's Really Not Safe Anywhere

2007-03-24T22:24:00.000-03:00

I found this video at www.qi.com and it reminded me why I love British Television and that the Puritan Values are still alive and well in North American Media.

Warning, it contains Adult material and while Hilarious is probably in very bad taste.

Enjoy

Quite Interesting Chat

Produced by The Viral Factory.

Music Sales Are Down but Are They!

2007-03-22T12:03:00.000-03:00

I was reading this article at Yahoo today US CD sales plummet as people turn to digital music downloads. The short version of the Article is that this year 89 Million CD's and 99 million digitized albums (188 M total) were sold compared to 112 Millions CD's and 119 million digitized albums(231 M total) in the same period last year. While individual track downloads went from 242 to 288 million.

Now let's say the average CD has 12 tracks(yes I pulled that number out of thin air) so that would give us total music sales of this year 188 M + 242/12 M ~ 208M compared to last year 231 M + 288/12 M ~ 255M. Of which of the total 208 M there are 99+242/12 digital music downloads or 57.2% compared to year before 255 M of which there are 119 +288/12 or 56.0% .

I think that 1.2% variance over a year shouldn't be described as a plummet so tsk tsk to the Journalist that has bought into the CD producers press releases.

Firefox Released a New Version

2007-03-21T12:54:00.000-03:00

Just wanted to let you all know that Firefox released a new version (2.0.0.3) yesterday, March 20, 2007. This new version fixes a security issue. Firefox should update itself but if it hasn't yet I recommend clicking of the 'Check for Updates...' command under the 'Help' menu.

RSSing Your Torrents

2007-03-20T23:00:00.000-03:00

Well when you mix RSS Feeds (as discussed in RSS - Is It Really Simple and Subscribing to RSS feeds) with torrents (discussed in Torrents Are King) you get torrents automatically found and downloaded while you're sleeping or at work. So instead of searching for the torrent files every day your computer automatically downloads and starts running the torrent.

So you can turn your computer into a DVR or TIVO for your favourite TV shows and even better than DVRs the people who encode the videos remove all the advertisements. For more about DVRs and Commercials read The Death of Reruns.

So first you will need a Torrent Client that handles RSS feeds, uTorrent has one already built in and you can download a plugin for Azureus, which is Java Based and therefore Mac Friendly.

You can download µTorrent here (I recommend the Installation Program version) and Azureus here.

Here is how you setup µTorrent to download RSS feeds:

Install µTorrent
Run µTorrent
Press Ctrl-R to Open the 'RSS Downloader' window or click the orange RSS symbol on µTorrent's taskbar.
Click on The 'Feeds' Tab then the 'Add' Button to add a new Feed
Now you'll need the internet address of an RSS feed I recommend: EZTV RSS - http://www.eztvefnet.org/rss.xml
now if you preface the Internet Address with a name and a vertical bar like: EZTV|http://www.eztvefnet.org/rss.xml µTorrent will Refer to the Feed as the name in all the other tabs instead of the bulky internet address.

Now you need to teach µTorrent what shows you want to download for which there are 2 methods.

The easier of the two is to now click on the 'Releases' tab where you can see a summary of the RSS feed content and find the show you want to download Right Click on it and Select 'Add to favourites'. Now you need to do this for every show you want, if the show you want isn't currently on the RSS feed it will be the day after a new episode airs.

The second method is to manually enter the information for the shows you want into the 'Favourites' but I haven't had much luck with this method and find the 1st better at actually downloading the correct torrents.

Once you have the show you want listed in 'Favourites' you have to finish filling in your preferences. You should put where you want the file to be saved on your computer and you can set a label that you can use within µTorrent. I personally label all my Television as TV.

If you're a computer neat freak like me you can use this to download each show into its own directory. First browse to where you want the downloaded files to end up. For Example, open the 'My Documents' folder then create a new folder using the 'File' Menu - 'New' command and rename it Video and then create a folder inside that with the title of the appropriate show e.g. Lost or House or whatever is appropriate.

Now once you get all your favourites set up, and if you leave µTorrent running, the torrent and the video file will download by themselves.

Please Comment with any questions or suggestions or request screen shots that would make setting up your torrent RSS feeds easier.

Firefox Tips and Tricks 2 - Multiple Homepages

2007-03-15T22:41:00.000-03:00

Here's a neat little tip if you want your copy of Firefox to open all your favourite sites.

You go to the 'Tools' Menu and Select 'Options...' then you click on the 'Main' tab. Which should give you a view like this:
Now all you have to do to have multiple home pages is to type them into the home page filed and separate them with an "|" which is shift \ (right above the Enter Key) on my keyboard.

E.G. http://www.cbc.ca|http://news.bbc.co.uk|http://xick.blogspot.com etc etc...

Antivirus Software

2007-03-13T23:14:00.000-03:00

I recently discovered that there is a company that ranks Anti-Virus Software called Anti-Virus Comparative.

Here is their ranking of the Anti-Virus software. I've also included the prices of a home user 1 year subscription (rounded the nearest dollar or euro) as I found them on the manufacturers websites. I used XE.com to convert the currency values.

Finding the prices wasn't easy and finding trail versions of the AV software was even harder. I think this might be why I haven't heard of many of these programs as they need to hire a marketing team that actually tries to make it simple to purchase their product.

Name	USD	Euro	CAD
G DATA AntiVirusKit (AVK) 17.0	44.87	34.00	52.74
TrustPort	N/A	N/A	N/A
AVIRA AntiVir Personal Edition Premium 7.03	26.40	20.00	31.02
F-Secure Anti-Virus 7.01	105.58	80.00	124.09
Kaspersky Anti-Virus 6.0.2	50.00	37.89	58.76
eScan Anti-Virus 8.0	25.00	18.94	29.38
Symantec Norton Anti-Virus D5114.0	40.00	39.24	34.03
ESET NOD32 Anti-Virus 2.70.23	40.00	39.24	34.03
AVG Anti-Malware 7.5	45.00	34.10	52.89
BitDefender Professional Plus 10	60.00	45.46	70.52
Fortinet FortiClient 3.0	N/A	N/A	N/A
Avast! Professional Edition 4.7	40.00	30.31	47.01
Norman Virus Control 5.82	68.90	52.21	81.00
F-Prot for Windows 6.0.5.1	30.00	22.73	35.26

The First 6 received 3 star rating while the bottom 8 received a 2 star rating, I didn't include the other 4 programs that were rated below 2 star.

Ordered by Cost

Name	USD	EUR
eScan Anti-Virus 8.0	25.00	18.94
AVIRA AntiVir Personal Edition Premium 7.03	26.40	20.00
Symantec Norton Anti-Virus D5114.0	40.00	39.24
ESET NOD32 Anti-Virus 2.70.23	40.00	39.24
F-Prot for Windows 6.0.5.1	30.00	22.73
Avast! Professional Edition 4.7	40.00	30.31
G DATA AntiVirusKit (AVK) 17.0	44.87	34.00
AVG Anti-Malware 7.5	45.00	34.10
Kaspersky Anti-Virus 6.0.2	50.00	37.89
BitDefender Professional Plus 10	60.00	45.46
Norman Virus Control 5.82	68.90	52.21
F-Secure Anti-Virus 7.01	105.58	80.00

iTunes - Cleaning Up Your Library in Windows

2007-03-11T00:53:00.000-04:00

Well as I was exploring some of the new features of iTunes this week (see this previous article) I once again encountered some of the problems of running it in Windows. These mostly have to do with some of the design issues with iTunes. While I'm a huge fan of Winamp and find it easiest to use to play my music its easiest to use iTunes with my iPod.

As iTunes was designed to run songs downloaded from the iTunes music store and to copy your cd's into a digital format to store on your computer and it does this best and doesn't do a really good job keeping track of the rest of your music collection. For example, lets say I decided to re-organize some of my music files; either renaming them, updating their ID3 tags using another program, or deleting songs that were once cool but now embarrassing to have lying around. iTunes fails to keep track of changes and when you try to access the files it displays an error message and opens a file browser to find the missing file.

I used to use a program called idletunes that used to clean up and find broken files in the iTunes Library, it also added the Album Covers before iTunes added this feature in version 7. Unfortunately idletunes is doesn't work with the newer versions of iTunes. So after much Googling (where I kept on finding links to idletunes on page after page) I eventually found a program that fixes most of the annoyances of iTunes.

The very aptly named iTunes Library Updater is a great little utility that makes using iTunes much easier, and removes all your broken songs in the iTunes library quickly and simply.

But instead of me rating and raving about it for pages and pages I've decided to make this my first reader generated posting. Please comment with any questions or problems you have with the program and I'll do my best to find answers. I'll post images of screens you like to see and how-to's of any process you're interested in or have difficulty with. Also please post your questions about cleaning up your own music files and updating the ID3 tags of MP3's.

Update to Daylight Saving Time

2007-03-10T23:55:00.000-04:00

Update to Daylight Saving Time - Another Reason To Keep Your Computer Updated

Well as today is the great day of change and I've finished shifting all the clocks in the house I thought I'd try and answer my questions about energy savings and DST. Using Google Blog Search I found the following article at Environmental Economics that referenced the following paper from The University of California at Berkeley. (As a Canadian I would like to note that they spell centre incorrectly which can't help their academic credibility)

RYAN M. KELLOGG and Hendrik Wolff, "Does Extending Daylight Saving Time Save Energy? Evidence from an Australian Experiment" (February 14, 2007). Center for the Study of Energy Markets. Paper CSEMWP-163.
http://repositories.cdlib.org/ucei/csem/CSEMWP-163

Which has the following Abstract: (I've highlighted the conclusion)

Rising energy prices and environmental concerns are driving countries to consider extending Daylight Saving Time (DST) in order to conserve energy. Beginning in 2007, the U.S. will lengthen DST by one month with the specific goal of reducing electricity consumption by 1%. In this paper we question the findings of prior DST studies, which often rely on simulation models and extrapolation rather than empirical evidence. By contrast, our research exploits a quasi-experiment, in which parts of Australia extended DST by two months to facilitate the Sydney Olympic Games in 2000. Using detailed panel data on half-hourly electricity consumption, prices, and weather conditions, we show that the extension failed to reduce electricity demand. We further examine prior DST studies and find that the most sophisticated simulation model available in the literature significantly overstates electricity savings when it is applied to the Australian data. These results suggest that current plans and proposals to extend DST will fail to conserve energy.

When I have the time to read the paper I will post more.

A 3rd Good Reason to Not Jump Into Vista

2007-03-07T06:26:00.000-04:00

If you have an iPod its not really happy being plugged into a Vista Machine, which is probably another reason that lots of people will switch to Macs until Vista is really up and running.

"iTunes 7.1 fails to fix several major flaws, including the potential to corrupt an iPod if it is ejected from the Windows Vista file system using the operating system's "Safely Eject Hardware" option instead of the eject function in iTunes." - CBC News

But the new version of iTunes (you should all update if you're an iTunes or Quicktime User) should fix some of the digital rights problems with Vista. iTunes 7.1 also supports a new full screen Cover Flow (which is pretty cool, see screen shot below) and improved files sorting options.

"How To" take your own screenshots

Daylight Saving Time - Another Reason To Keep Your Computer Updated

2007-03-06T03:43:00.000-04:00

This year Daylight Saving Time or DST is starting a month earlier. The US government has changed DST in a attempt to save energy by having more sunshine in the evening. Other than Nunavut all Canadian Provinces and Territories(which the exception of Saskatchewan which doesn't observe DST) have announced that they will follow suit. So we will changing our clocks the second Sunday of March instead of the first Sunday in April. So if you haven't updated your computer in the last 6 months it won't correct itself. So all you Windows users run Microsoft Update and get you're computer up to snuff.

Now I wonder if everyone having another hour of sunshine will really decrease power usage. It's not going to reduce the number of hours that your fridge or how much the tv is going to be running. I would think that banning incandescent bulbs like Australia and Nova Scotia would have a much bigger effect.

The Death of Reruns, TV Guide and the Numerical Channel

2007-03-04T20:40:00.000-04:00

Well the magic of torrents and the internet means you don't have to wait for studio's to release shows on DVD or watch commercials.

I recently heard a piece on the radio about how the Nielsen Ratings for television in the states are being changed to cover Digital Video Recorders(known to many as DVR, PVR for Personal Video Recorder or by the brand name TIVO) and keep track if the viewer fast forwards the commercials.

The New York Times recently published this article claiming that 2/3rds of DVR viewers watch the commercials and that most watch the first and last commercial of the commercial break so that they don't "miss" their program. The article also stated that younger viewers fast forward more.

This seems to indicate to me that only 2/3rds of the owners of DVRs have read their manuals and that the younger viewers are embracing this new technology and all its perks. And I’ve never minded having to rewind back to watch the 30 seconds of my show in its original speed. But I can understand why people don’t like to have to backtrack as I’ve never been happy with the ability to fast forward and rewind in digital media. It was easier when you knew the speed at which your VCR would resume after you let go of the button and actually hearing the reels whine as the tape was wound from one spool to the other. 16 times doesn’t seem fast enough to me and skipping 5 seconds ahead seems disjointed and confusing.

What is interesting about this is that the Television Industry is finally beginning to accept DVRs and similar technology when only a year ago the networks were following the old TBS model of not having shows start or end on time. So if you recorded a show you'd miss the conclusion that aired between 8:00 and 8:01. Or you'd be unable to record 2 shows on 2 different networks back to back without missing parts of both shows.

Between 1981 and 1997 TBS used to start shows 5 minutes later then other Networks. I always assumed that they did this so it was harder to switch channels as you would have to miss the end of the TBS show if you wanted to watch another show on a different channel. The Wikipedia article on TBS calls this Turner Time and points out that it also gave TBS a separate entry in the TV guide.

But the TV guide isn’t something I think about very often, I have gotten used the fact that the up and down button and the order of the channels is frustratingly backwards on the digital guide. I can remember doing the all TV themed crosswords and circling future shows and movies I wanted to watch. I used to be able to waste a good half hour when there was nothing on reading the TV guide. But now that it’s digital and it's on the TV and has to download every time I try to looks at future dates and all the channels can’t all be displayed on one screen it’s nowhere near as user friendly as the old paper versions.

One feature I miss from my last television provider was if I used the channel up and down buttons it skipped over the channels I didn't subscribe to so I didn't have to see the Channel Unavailable Screen over and over again. But I'd bet that they've gone to what my current provider does which is to make you realize just how many more channels(filled with shows I'd never watch) you could have access to for the low low price of...

But I wonder if all the new channels would even fit on one page and now that you can get Broadcast, Cable and Multiple Satellite Providers just about everywhere the task of producing a TV guide that would contain all the different options and still be readable would be a daunting task.

I’ve also realized that I no longer have memorized what channel goes with which station this is partially due that I didn’t grow up in Halifax and that I rarely nay never punch in the numbers anymore. I find myself reading the Station Titles and ignoring the numbers, I know that food is higher (so I have to scroll down?!) number than BBC Canada but I don't know their numbers.

Digital cable, torrents and Video on Demand have changed my viewing habits even though I don't yet have a DVR. And I'm sure that Television and media will keep evolving and hopefully it will be to better serve the consumer.

Link to More About Users Not Fast Forwarding(sorted by relevance by me)

PVRBlog
Blogowogo
Betanews

P.S. This article started off as a comment on this article on MadJennyFlintsMadTales
so I'd like to thank her for the inspiration.

Office Chair of the Future

2007-03-02T23:58:00.000-04:00

Well I wanted to write an article about this chair:

Cause it looks so cool and as a joint research project, between the University of Alberta and the Woodend Hospital in Aberdeen, Scotland, showed an angle of 130 degrees is best for your back(see image below) for which this chair seems perfect. But after reading the article that accompanies the picture at www.popsci.com I can't seem to find who actually makes this chair.

Image From the BBC (read the whole article here)

I have read a few other blogs that reference this article and they've all got the name of the chair wrong. It's Not the Humanscale's $1000 Freedom Chair as Geekologie reported or the Herman Millers $1400 Aeron as teaoodle article implies. While the Freedom Chair (shown below) is close it is nowhere near as futuristically cool and seems to be much more upright then the unidentified prototype.

So to any journalist who reads this article or anyone who can find me find more than the phone number of the sales or subscription departments of Pop Sci I would love more information or help contacting the authors Peter Hall and Lauren Aaronson or the Photographer Nick Kaloterakis.

Now That The Envelopes Are Open..

2007-02-26T22:44:00.000-04:00

Update I made some errors that I have corrected in this version.

I posted some of the odds for the Oscars in an earlier post and I thought I'd look into how accurate the odds makers were. Here are the Catorgories that I was able to find odds for with the favourite in italics and the actual winners in bold.

		$10	$10 bet
"Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role"	Odds	bet on winners	Bet on Best Odds

Leonardo DiCaprio (Blood Diamond) 8/1	9
Ryan Gosling (Half Nelson) 18/1	19
Peter O'Toole (Venus) 6/1	7
Will Smith (The Pursuit of Happyness) 3/1	4
Forest Whitaker (The Last King of Scotland) 1/4	1.25	12.5	12.5

"Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role"

Penélope Cruz (Volver) 20/1	21
Judi Dench (Notes on a Scandal) 22/1	23
Helen Mirren (The Queen) 1/25	1.04	10.4	10.4
Meryl Streep (The Devil Wears Prada) 15/1	16
Kate Winslet (Little Children) 7/1	8

"Best Animated Feature Film of the Year"

Cars 1/3	1.333333		-10
Happy Feet 5/6	1.833333	18.33
Monster House 12/1	13

"Best Achievement in Directing"

Babel (Alejandro González Iñárritu) 10/1	11
The Departed (Martin Scorsese) 1/5	1.2	12	12
Letters from Iwo Jima (Clint Eastwood) 4/1	5
The Queen (Stephen Frears) 14/1	15
United 93 (Paul Greengrass) 17/1	18

"Best Foreign Language Film of the Year"

After the Wedding 30/1	31
Days of Glory (Indigènes) 8/1	9
The Lives of Others 3/1	4	40
Pan's Labyrinth 1/10	1.1		-10
Water 23/1	24

"Best Motion Picture of the Year"

Babel 7/2	4.5
The Departed 3/2	2.5	25
Letters from Iwo Jima 5/2	3.5
Little Miss Sunshine 5/6	1.833333		-10
The Queen 19/1	20

"Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role"

Alan Arkin (Little Miss Sunshine) 1/1	2	20
Jackie Earle Haley (Little Children) 10/1	11
Djimon Hounsou (Blood Diamond) 9/1	10
Eddie Murphy (Dreamgirls) 2/3	1.666667		-10
Mark Wahlberg (The Departed) 5/1	6

"Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role"

Adriana Barraza (Babel) 14/1	15
Cate Blanchett (Notes on a Scandal) 11/1	12
Abigail Breslin (Little Miss Sunshine) 2/1	3
Jennifer Hudson (Dreamgirls) 1/8	1.125	11.25	11.25
Rinko Kikuchi (Babel) 11/1	12
		$149.48	$6.15
Won/Lost		$69.48	-$73.85
Return on Investment		86.85%	-92.31%

I also converted the UK style odds into European style odds that make more sense to me. Out of curiosity I also calucalted what would happen if you bet the minimum of $10 on both the winners and the favourites. As you can see above betting on the favourites would have cost you $75. So the odd makers weren't dead on but they didn't have to pay out that much more as there wasn't any huge surprises.

Now using the same data I can find out MadJenny's picks (from her comments in the original post) would have fared. Helen Mirren (+10.40), Ryan Gosling (-10), Babel (-10) and Martin Scorcese (+12) which yields an ROI of -94.00% which is about the same as the Bookies. Now before CE gets all excited, yes I did give all of the values equal weights which is wrong because I can't judge how strongly MadJenny's was in each of her decisions. I can't decide her opportunity costs (for more on opportunity cost read this Article of CE's)

And this of course makes me doubt the validity of the system I used to calulate the ROI's of the favourites and the winners. Lets just pretend that as a Geek I've taken more Math then is strictly healthy and I devised a betting scheme where I had assumed that the odd makers are right and bet more on the categories where the odds are lowest. Lets say that instead of betting the minimum of $10 on the lowest return bet of Alan Arkin for Best Supporting Actor I bet $50, while keeping all the bets on the favourites the same. (now this is where I made the mistake as Eddie Murphy had the best odds but I perceived it as Alan Arkin as I was sure he was going to win) This would mean that I would almost break even. Now all I need is a formula where the amount I bet is calculated off the odds...
Any math geeks out there want to take a crack at it?

There would have to be a constraint for the total amount of money you would want to bet. And it would probably be easiest to use numerical odds... Hmm I'll think about this one and update if I can find a easy system. Also if I look at the actual winner in comparison to the favourite they were all within 1 of the favourites with the exception of Foreign Language which was 2.9 with an average deviation from the favourite was 1.1.

Firefox Tips and Tricks

2007-02-24T23:45:00.000-04:00

Here are my favourite keyboard shortcuts for Firefox:

Crtl F

Opens the find in page search bar, which allows to quickly find what you are really looking for in large web pages.

Crtl +

Makes the text larger, which reduces eyestrain

Crtl -

Makes the text smaller

Shift Del

Removes entries from the address bar, just click the dropdown menu and it will remove all the misspelled and sites you never want to see again.

IMDB got a facelift

2007-02-23T23:54:00.000-04:00

IMDB the Internet Movie Database, which is owned by the good people of Amazon.com has a snazzy new look and I like it.

I've always been a big fan of IMDB and it's always good to find details and trivia about your favourite movies and movie stars. If you're a TV junkie it recently changed its format for tv shows so that it keeps track of every episode and it's guest stars. While this makes some of the older tv shows information a bit wonky its great for tracking down the names of up and comers.

Here is a screenshot of the Old Look

And The New Snazzy Look

Please comment on what do you think about the new look.

For More On IMDB try Wikipedia

PeerGuardian - Protect Yourself

2007-02-22T18:34:00.000-04:00

PeerGuardian from Phoenix Labs is a great piece of freeware that helps you stay away from the copyright police. It blocks connections with known computers/servers of the RIAA, MPAA, ad sites and spyware. This minimizes the amount of information they can collect about you and won't allow your computer to download files or images from them. I'd recommend it to anyone using P2P clients and torrents.

Download it here

For more detail about PeerGuardian read it's Wikipedia Article.

Update:
If PeerGuardian's Icon starts to blink in the System Tray that mean it has blocked a connection.
It's blocked 37 connections in the first 15 minutes that I have run it.

You might also want to change the HTTP settings to off if you use hotmail as PeerGuardian blocks hotmail as it is full of ads.

Video The Future of the Internet - Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us

2007-02-18T23:36:00.001-04:00

Pass The Envelope Please...

2007-02-16T03:18:00.000-04:00

Well with the Academy Awards coming up I though I'd share some Oscar related links

http://www.oscars.org - Official Site

Wikipedia Entry

Apple Trailers of Oscar Nominated Films

And the very best site of them all:

OSCAR TORRENTS!!!!!!!!

Where you can download torrents for all the nominated movies sorted by category.

For an explanation of torrents please read this post.

Here is some of the odds being offered by a Wagering Site I found. I’ve put the leader in italics. What do you all think of them is your favourites against the odds???

Here is an explanation of the odds I lifted from the same site:

Fractional odds are represented as a fractional number and show what your profit will be on a one-unit wager. For example, odds of 4/1 ("four-to-one" or "four-to-one against") means that you stand to win $4 for every $1 you wager. On the other hand, odds of 1/4 ("four-to-one on") means that you must wager $4 to win $1. When the odds are 1/1, you'll win exactly what you wager.

"Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role"

Leonardo DiCaprio (Blood Diamond) 8/1
Ryan Gosling (Half Nelson) 18/1
Peter O'Toole (Venus) 6/1
Will Smith (The Pursuit of Happyness) 3/1
Forest Whitaker (The Last King of Scotland) 1/4

"Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role"

Penélope Cruz (Volver) 20/1
Judi Dench (Notes on a Scandal) 22/1
Helen Mirren (The Queen) 1/25
Meryl Streep (The Devil Wears Prada) 15/1
Kate Winslet (Little Children) 7/1

"Best Animated Feature Film of the Year"

Cars 1/3
Happy Feet 5/6
Monster House 12/1

"Best Achievement in Directing"

Babel (Alejandro González Iñárritu) 10/1
The Departed (Martin Scorsese) 1/5
Letters from Iwo Jima (Clint Eastwood) 4/1
The Queen (Stephen Frears) 14/1
United 93 (Paul Greengrass) 17/1

"Best Foreign Language Film of the Year"

After the Wedding 30/1
Days of Glory (Indigènes) 8/1
The Lives of Others 3/1
Pan's Labyrinth 1/10
Water 23/1

"Best Motion Picture of the Year"

Babel 7/2
The Departed 3/2
Letters from Iwo Jima 5/2
Little Miss Sunshine 5/6
The Queen 19/1

"Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role"

Alan Arkin (Little Miss Sunshine) 1/1
Jackie Earle Haley (Little Children) 10/1
Djimon Hounsou (Blood Diamond) 9/1
Eddie Murphy (Dreamgirls) 2/3
Mark Wahlberg (The Departed) 5/1

"Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role"

Adriana Barraza (Babel) 14/1
Cate Blanchett (Notes on a Scandal) 11/1
Abigail Breslin (Little Miss Sunshine) 2/1
Jennifer Hudson (Dreamgirls) 1/8
Rinko Kikuchi (Babel) 11/1

From The Mailbag - Website Icons

2007-02-15T04:04:00.000-04:00

Canadian Economist said...

[...]I have a question: how do I create a really cool icon for my blog? I see some blogs have them - before the web address at the top of the screen - like Google's [G] or the CBC logo when you go the their web page[s]. Do you know what I mean?

Thanks!

Dear CE,

Yes, I do know what you mean, and this is one of the many benefits of browsing with Firefox. These icons work best in Firefox and are slow to load in Internet Explorer 7 and they don't even appear IE 6's Address bar is it only uses them for bookmarks. Making this even more embarrassing to Microsoft is that these icons were their invention.

The icons you are referring to are know as favicons. For more technical detail please refer to this Wikipedia article.

Now to create a "cool" icon is hard as most of them are 16 pixels by 16 pixels or 32 pixels by 32 pixels so you need an easily recognizable image. The Google 'G', CBC logo and even the Blogger B are all good examples of simple images with 1 colour.

Thanks to the wonders of Google I found this page Favicons From Pics where you can convert any image on your hard drive into the proper format.

Now it's important to start with a square image so the aspect of the original image is maintained. Here is an example of even a image that doesn't lead to a nice icon looking much better when its cropped square (using Picasa, of course!) before conversion.

Off Centre

Centred

The incredibly well sighted of you readers might be able to see that I used an image of myself that CE took.

Now even the icon with the proper aspect doesn't seem cool to me, I find myself squinting at it. Lets remove some of the colour and make it less busy. Lets start by making the background white. Not only will this make the image less busy it will help it blend into the address bar better and make its shape appear to not be square. And everyone knows it's not cool to be square.

White Background

Well we are getting slightly cooler. Now what makes an icon look really slick is that it matches or Contrasts with the colours and style of the web page. And the red shirt doesn't go well with my blue page.

Colour Complimented

While this is an improvement its still pretty lame. The reason that the Google G, Blogger B and CBC symbols are so good is that they are simple and one colour.

One Colour

One Colour and Simplistic

Contrasting Colour

Another Good Reason to Not Rush Onto the Vista Bandwagon

2007-02-13T02:15:00.000-04:00

According to PC world Microsoft is already developing their next OS which they are planning to have ready by the 2nd half of 2009. Now if they actually manage to get a product out on schedule I will personally be shocked but the problem is when they release a new OS that normally means they stop updating an Older OS.

Microsoft: Vista Follow-up Likely in 2009

My First Reader Question!!!

2007-02-12T00:14:00.000-04:00

TT said...: Dear M,
How do I take a screen shot of a program (that does not have the option of selecting save as. The program is crazy because it also does not have a print screen option. But I know from my colleagues that i can save the screen shot somehow with Adobe maybe or picassa 2??. Then download that to a screen.
T.

TT the print screen function in windows isn't on any menu in a program as it's on the Keyboard. On a standard keyboard it's to the left of the Scroll Lock key and is labelled "Prt Scr". When you press this key windows takes a picture of you're current desktop and copies it to the clipboard.

Image of a Standard Keyboard

On your Toshiba Laptop it will be on the top row in between the F12 and the Windows Key.

Image of Toshiba Laptop Keyboard

Now for some strange reason (probably to do with Apple's Lawyers) Windows XP's clipboard viewer is called the Clipbook viewer the fastest way to see it is to go the the Start Menu and select run and type in "Clipbrd". Now you can see what you copied but you can't save it in a useful image format.

So its easiest to never use the "Clipbook" viewer and open an Program that handles Images. Windows XP comes with Microsoft Paint which you can find under Start -> Programs -> Accessories or you can run it by typing "mspaint" using the run command.

Now all you have to do is paste to get your Screen Shot into Paint. I personally use the Ctrl and V keyboard command or the Paste command is in the Edit menu. Now Paint doesn't have a Crop function so I would save a copy of the file and open it with Picasa to edit the image.

Better Understanding where All your Space went part II

2007-02-11T14:57:00.000-04:00

I found this neat little program that graphically illustrates what is taking up space on your hard drive. I found it pretty handy, sometimes its good to take a non-numerical approach.

Windows Directory Statistics

Here is what the program window looks like:
It displays your folders by size with a percentage of drive space, much like Treesize, which I discussed in this article.

But at the bottom it shows what file types are taking up the most space with a coloured map.

Make Firefox look like Internet Explorer

2007-02-09T21:56:00.000-04:00

For those of you who don't want to switch over to Firefox because you're afraid of change and want your browser to look the same as it always had here is an article that details how to make Firefox look exactly like Internet Explorer. So it will look the same and run faster and be more secure.
Make Firefox Look Like Internet Explorer

And for the rest of us who don't like using Explorer here is a site with a registry patch that will make the file bar be at the top of the page, like it's supposed to be!

Relocate the menu bar in IE7 to the top of the window

Your Very Own Super Suit

2007-02-08T23:56:00.000-04:00

Troy is selling his suit, put this on the list of things I'd love to own if I won the lottery. Who couldn't use a Futuristic suit that stops Bullets!

The Trojan Suit on eBay

Chair of the Future

2007-02-07T00:06:00.000-04:00

This Chair is simply amazing and would be dead handy for a small space. It's a chair for working at your desk or its a sofa for when all your friends come to party!

Air Drumming and Edited together music

2007-02-05T00:32:00.003-04:00

I was looking at the top videos on videosift and found this Video by Lasse Gjertsen, which is a feat of editing Godlyness.

And it made me think of this video made by Windom Earle a local band that really Rocks and often incorporates Video into their performances. Check out their page for mp3's of their music.

Portal Preview Video

2007-02-04T23:13:00.000-04:00

Valve has released a preview of their new single player game Portal which will ship with Half-Life 2: Episode 2. It's too cool for words.

Why do You do This to ME???

2007-02-02T00:40:00.000-04:00

I was recently going over some of my blog statistics and I discovered the following:

35.59 Percent of you are using Internet Explorer!!!!

I don't understand why you would be when Firefox is smaller, faster, skinable and has lots of great add-ons. While IE 7 is leaps and bounds better than IE 6 it is still lagging behind the newest version of Firefox.

Also there is a IE tab plug in for Firefox so if you do find one of the exceeding rare web pages that requires Explorer you can switch over with one click and open the web page in a new tab inside of Firefox.

Commenting On Blogs Part 2

2007-02-01T19:18:00.000-04:00

While I was trying to post a comment on my friends Blog econadvice.blogspot.com I was attempting to put a link to a relevant article into my link and I discovered that you have to use HTML language to make links in the comment box.

Here is the format you have to use (I've posted it as a picture so it stays in HTML language)

The Part in brackets is the url or web page address and the part after is what your link text will be. So the text in the picture above should give us a link with the Text Google that links to www.google.com like this: Google

Feel free to test it out and leave me a comment with a website that you like or think is interesting

Windows Vista - It's New and It's here to stay

2007-01-31T21:53:00.000-04:00

Well there the ad campaign had begun Windows Vista is here and while I haven't tried it out it yet I'm in no rush to change my Operating System and to start learning all the secrets all over again.

The most common question I've gotten about Vista so far is "Can my computer run it". The short answer is do you have 1 Gig of RAM or slots in your motherboard to install at least 1 Gig and preferably lots more as Vista needs at least 800 megs of RAM to run. So you'll need more if you actually want to run other programs without your computer becoming as slow as molasses running uphill in January.

Now if you do have enough RAM you'll need to make sure you have a large enough hard drive as Vista requires 15 gigs of space. This quite a jump from the 5.5 Gigs that Windows XP is currently occupying on my hard drive.

Now if you do have the necessary RAM you'll want to run the Windows Upgrade Advisor which will let you know what other problems Vista might cause with your current hardware.

As I have an ATI video card and the Vista drivers are still in Beta (that's Geek for under construction) I'm definitely not going to rush to spend the $299 (plus tax).

Here are some interesting articles about Vista at APC Magazine

10 Reasons to Switch to Vista

10 Reason to NOT Switch to Vista

Subscribing To RSS Feeds

2007-01-23T19:06:00.000-04:00

If you're browsing the web with Firefox you might have noticed that certain web pages have an RSS feed icon that appears in the address bar. For a description of RSS feeds see this previous posting.

If you're not using Firefox you should be! It's smaller and faster than Explorer and it has all kinds of neat little add ons. I invite you to click the link to the right and install Firefox.

Clicking on the RSS Feed icon in Firefox will give you the following screen. If you want to be able to read the page click on the image and it will load a larger version.

If you select the Live Bookmarks option in the drop down box, you can create a bookmark that opens up and shows you all the current article titles.

Commenting On Blogs

2007-01-17T23:51:00.000-04:00

While writing this blog has been fun and its been interesting to see what people are interested in, I think that this blog could be better. So I'm going to show you how to leave you're (yes you the reader) how you can help me improve by showing you how to comment.

You're comments or questions will help me find out what people are interested in and what they don't understand. And yes I welcome the Grammar Police and the Queen's English enforcers as well.

At the bottom of every Article in this blog there is some blue text that normally says '0 comments'

Here is a good Example

Now if you click on the comments link you get this screen

Where you can leave your comments, suggestions, corrections and questions about the article. There is an option to comment as 'Anonymous' but I would prefer that you use the 'Other' and that you fill in a name, handle or any other identifier. Multiple Anonymous postings can be confusing as to the actual number of authors and I would like a name to respond to. Hey, if Anne Landers and Savage Dan get names then so should I.

The word verifier is there to insure that actual people are posting comments and that some bot can't use my comment sections for free advertizing. All you have to do is type the letters in the image into the box below them.

So get commenting all you out there in Internet Land. If you have difficulty with commenting, please leave me a comment and I will endeavour to help ;-)

Update Jan 25, 2006

Here is another good article about posting comments from Lifehacker.

Project Grizzly Man

2007-01-15T16:49:00.000-04:00

He's Back! I will admit that I had to search hi and low to find a copy of Project Grizzly. But it as worth it to be able to watch Troy Hurtubise 'Field Testing' his bear-proof suit by having his friends hit him repeatably with a pick-up truck and inviting a biker gang to do there worst. Now if only all National Film Board of Canada movies were this cool Hollywood would be in real trouble.

Troy is back in the news hamiltonspectator and this time he has made a person-proof suit that looks a lot like Sarge from Halo !!!

Podcasting

2007-01-15T16:01:00.000-04:00

Well the biggest misconception that I encounter about podcasting is that you need an iPod to play them. This is not the case, you don't even need a portable MP3 player as you can play them on any computer with speakers.

Podcasts are simply MP3 or music files that are available for download over the Internet. Podcasts use syndication feeds, which are very similar to RSS feeds which I discuss here. These syndication feeds are small text files that inform your podcast client that there are new files available for download.

There are many podcast clients including: iTunes, Winamp, Juice (which is Mac Friendly), and Doppler. I personally use iTunes as many sites have Subscribe in iTunes links including the CBC - http://www.cbc.ca/podcasting also many of the Video Podcasts are broadcast in an Apple format that iTunes handles with ease. But when I just want to blast some tunes Winamp is still the best media player I have used.

What are you favourite Podcasts or Media Players? I listen to Quirks and Quarks and Scientific American podcasts and the French Maid video podcast is always good for a laugh.

Now Availble Via Google

2007-01-05T00:28:00.000-04:00

Well I've finally made it this Blog is now on Google!!!!!

Check It Out

If you found this blog via Google please leave a comment with the search terms you used.

Wherefore Art Thou Memory?

2007-01-04T23:18:00.000-04:00

One of the most common problems I come across while tweaking/fixing other computers is that they often don't have enough free space.

Anyone who has had any of the last few versions of Windows knows about defragging which often speed up slower computers. Well the windows defragging utility requires that a drive have at least 15% free space.

How can we find what is taking up all the memory on a hard drive? You can right click on every folder and select properties and wait for windows to calculate how much space each folder is taking up but this is a slow process and many users have most of their folders hidden as this is the Windows XP default.

Treesize from Jam-Software is a free utility that is small, FREE, and has never crashed or become buggy for me. It's one of the first things I install on any PC I am trying to diagnose.

You download it from the Jam-Software webpage and install it and then run it. All that is left to do is to go to the scan menu and select the drive you want to scan.

It takes about a minute to
scan my 30 gigabyte C: drive and it then gives all the folders in the drive sorted by size, which you can change to alphabetical under the sort menu. As you can see I have 7 gigabytes in the 'Documents and Settings' folder. Now to find out what makes up those 7 gigabytes I clicked on the plus symbol and all the folders that are inside (or nested) in the 'Documents and Settings' Folder are displayed sorted by size.

Another good use of Treesize is to find empty folders, often programs that you un-install might leave some setting files or just empty folders. As Treesize organizes the folders by size empty and tiny folders are easily found and deleted.

What's some of your favourite freeware? Leave me a comment as Free is always good.

Even Microsoft Creates Spam

2006-12-25T00:01:00.000-04:00

If you have recently installed Windows Live Messenger formerly known as MSN Messenger you may have noticed that it added 'My Sharing Folders' into your 'My Computer' folder. As I don't use this feature of WLM I found it highly annoying and spammy.

So here is how you go about removing it.

1. Start WLM and go to the Help Menu and Select About. This will give you a new window with the version number. On my computer it's version 8.0.0812

2. Go the Start Button and Select Run

3. Copy the following text into the Run Dialogue:

regsvr32 -u "%PROGRAMFILES%\MSN Messenger\fsshext.8.0.0812.00.dll

Note that the 8.0.0812 is the version of WLM if your version was different then change the number accordingly.

Voila no more useless icons that you don't need.

Take that Microsoft!

Skype and VoIP- Why Mama, Poppa and the Baby Bell's are going the way of the Dodo

2006-12-23T23:43:00.000-04:00

Well let's start with what we all know: you pick up the phone, you get a dial tone, you dial the number and if you're lucky the person at the other end picks up. Now many of us pay a monthly fee for these phones and it's somewhere around 40 dollars a month.

VoIP or Voice over Internet Protocol is what is currently trying to put the Phone companies out of the phone business buy using your internet connection to talk to your friends. Some of the more active IMers (that's instant messenger users) might know that MSN and others have the ability to have voice conversations between their users. Where VoIP carriers like Skype and Vonage are different is that while you can talk to other users you can also call regular phone numbers. So if you have a microphone you can order Pizza from your local pizza joint without having to move from your computer and you don't have to touch a phone.

Skype is current offering there service for $17.50 dollars (those are of course loonies, not USD) a year. That is $17.50 to call any Canadian or US phone number from your computer. Now this doesn't get you a phone number it is only an out-bound service. And as soon as all you faithful readers click enough ads I'm going to test it out.

Vonage is about $14.99 a month and it plugs into your regular phone but you need to have a high speed Internet connection. Which doesn't really appeal to me cause I'd rather be at my computer if I have to pause any downloads to clear up the connection.

Now some of the problems with these services is the same as using a speaker phone as most computer microphones aren't right next to your mouth like a telephone receiver unless you buy a headset. And you with Skype you CAN"T CALL 911 or 999 or whatever you call to get Emergency services.

But on the whole it's cheap and cheap is good, and even if you don't buy services you can still call other computer users for free and it sounds great. So get Skyping and you can click the call me button at the top right.

www.skype.com
www.vonage.ca

Reviews of Skype

Cnet 5/5
PCMag 4/5

It Really is What Should Have Come With Your Digital Camera

2006-12-15T17:02:00.000-04:00

Disclaimer

Well let's deal with the fact that I've gone over to the Dark Side and put Advertisements on my blog. But unlike paid celebrities and spokespersons I'm not being paid in advance. If after reading this article you decide to download Picasa you can click the link on the right and Google will compensate me. When someone actually does click the link and my account is updated I'll let you all know how much. But I'm certain it won't be close to the $450,000 that the Canadian Dating site plentyoffish makes in a month. But there is still hope, all the links in this article are put there by me and are not advertisements so click away and feel guilt free.

Now for all of you who are questioning my abilities with a camera, or are asking yourselves: "What does Matthew know about Photography?" I'll have you all know that I did earn my Photography merit badge in Scouts. Thanks to some good preparation from my mother, so thanks Mom for making me do all kinds of things I said I didn't want to try.

Picasa

Picasa is simply the best Photosuite I've used and best of all its Free! You can easily correct red-eye and you can sort and organize your photos with ease. It will also interface with your digital camera and download your pictures. It also will help you organize movies on your hard drive.

Initial Setup - Organizing Your Photos

When you first install Picasa it gives you the option to just scan your 'My Documents' folder or your entire hard drive. While scanning your entire hard drive does take longer it also finds all the photos you didn't know that you had on your hard drive, like Screenshots you may have taken in Games like Doom 3, and all the photos that came with Windows that you can never find.

Picasa allows you to organize your photos into albums inside of Picasa. It also integrates into Windows Explorer and allows you to organize your photos into folders on your computer. I recommend that you do the later as it makes it easier to find your photos if you're using other software that doesn't have access to the Albums inside Picasa.

Fixing and Tweaking Your Photos

Cropping, Rotating, Colour Balancing, Removing and much more are all a One Click affair in Picasa. I'm a big fan of the 'I'm Feeling Lucky' button as it fixes most of the more common problems. If you're starting with a photo that isn't all that good looking to begin with don't expect miracles. Your computer can't fill in information in the photo that is missing if it is over or under exposed. But it can lighten dark photos and balance the colours in the photo so that the whites are true whites and the blacks are true blacks.

Note that with 'Auto Colour' fix the colours seem brighter and some of the yellow wash of the original picture seems to have disappeared.

Publishing Your Photos

For all you Bloggers out there Picasa makes uploading your photos to your Blogger.com blog a one click affair. Just select the photo, click on the 'blog this' button, and sign into your account.

For those of you who want to share your Photos over the Internet and not clog my inbox with the 15'000th photo of your grandchild or cat, you can click the 'Web Album' button an sign up for a Hello.com account where you can share up to 250 MB's of Photos for Free. I'm sure that any of your friends who don't have High Speed Access would really appreciate this so they don't have to wait hours for their e-mail to download. By using Hello.com they can pick which pictures they would like to look at over the Internet and not download all the pictures in one shot filling their inbox and spending a lot of time waiting for the download to complete.

E-Mailing Your Pictures

E-Mailing your precious moments is easy in Picasa; all you have to do is click the E-Mail button.
This will then give you the option of E-Mailing your photos with your default E-Mail Program, so you can use the program you are already familiar with, or a Gmail account, if you have happen to have one, or with Picasa Mail, which uses a Hello.com account.

If you are going to send large amounts or very large files Gmail and Picasa Mail will only allow you to send 10 MB's of Photos at a time. So if you are going to send more you'll have to send them with your Default Mail Account or send multiples e-mails. Now I have to say that unless someone has specifically asked for these photos that no one needs 10 MB's of photos in their inbox so why not just send a few of the nicer photos instead of the all of them.

Artistic Creations

Picasa has features designed to help you make Photo Collages, and Gift Cd's for your friends, it also has plenty of effects, such as making your pictures black and white or sepia toned, or the 'Focal Black and White' tool which makes the background black and white leaving the colour just around a focal point that you select.

So it's more than just an organizer. It allows you to make your photos seem more than just snapshots and more like Art.

Google - How I Love Ye...

Picasa is owned by Google and I will admit I've turned into a bit of a Google junkie in the past month, with My Gmail Account, my Blogger Blog (owned by Google), trying out the new Google Desktop program (Which I will write about in the near future after I have some time to kick the tires), and signing up for Ads with Google Ad Sense. What can I say, I never really got on the Linux or Apple Bandwagon (but I do Love my iPod) but here is hoping that Google gives Microsoft a run for their Money. Go free markets! (That's for you Crazy Economist) If there are people out there who would like an invite to Gmail, and are willing to promise me that I won't have to provide tech support for it, leave a comment.

And As Levar Burton used to say: "You don't have to take my word, for it"

Picasa Review at Cnet 4/5
Many of the Negative User Comments here cite that you can't zoom while using the red eye, which I had no problem in doing
Picasa Review at PCMag.com 4.5/5

Necks Everywhere Rejoice - Maybe I'll Finally Cave in and Give a Laptop some respect V2

2006-12-14T16:50:00.000-04:00

Finally something that will help fix this for laptop users.

The Flybook VM
Which I Found at Geekologie
who link to GeekStuff4U where you can buy one
According to the Flybook webpage they will be sold at Holt Renfrew here in Canada

I personally have my monitor on top of 2 phone books and a Chemistry Text to make it the right height.

Napster is Dead, Long Live the Napster

2006-12-08T23:30:00.000-04:00

Napster was the first widely shared Peer-To-Peer (P2P) file sharing program. Anyone with a high-speed access could download and share their MP3 files. It was a great program but of course it was shut down as it allowed people to violate copyright laws.

3 Programs Have Risen from the Ashes of the Demise of Napster. According to Wikipedia the 3 largest networks are:

E-Donkey Network, using mostly the eMule client
Fastrack, or the Kazaa network
Gnutella, on which most people use the Limewire client

Another program that seems to be popular is Ares a former Gnutella Client that now runs on its' own Ares Network. I used to love it until it decided that it would crash my router and then never connect to the network.

eMule was never my favourite program and if I have to use a program that requires that you share tit for tat I'd rather use Torrents (LONG LIVE THE TORRENT)

Kazaa Sucks because every time I've downloaded it, I also got a lot of Malware (Malicious Software) and Adware (advertising-supported software) that I didn't want and was difficult to uninstall. There are hacked versions of the Kazaa client that don't have the adware like K-Lite, but I don't think that you should support a network that seeks to exploits its' members. So I would avoid Kazaa.

Limewire is a Java language program which means that its both Windows and Apple Friendly and that means that it will take over your processor and slow down your computer. I've also found that the many of the files that are shared over this network are not what they proport to be, so avoid any wmv files or any that all seem to be the same size. Also, the makers of Limewire are in the middle of legal battles with the RIAA so it may not be available in the near future.

In Conclusion, use Torrents for less malware, less adware, and fewer uploaded fake files. If you're looking for MP3's you normally get entire albums, and if you're already running a Torrent Client you're not slowing down your Computer to run a P2P client.

RSS - Is It Really Simple?

2006-11-29T20:39:00.000-04:00

RSS or Really Simple Syndication seems to be poking it's head up on lots of websites. Heck I even have an RSS feed for this blog.

From what I can figure out RSS are XML files which seem to be a new kind of storage file. I know that MSN Messenger (grrrrrr what a terrible product) stores its logs in XML files.

If you have an RSS Reader program it can download lots of little files from websites that contain updates to that website. This is great for blogs as you don't have to download many pages to see if there are updates. Lots of News Outlets seem to be gettting on the RSS bandwagon so you can read all the headlines and then click on only what you are interested in.

The best use I've found for RSS feeds is to get announcements about new Torrents. On the #EZTV website you can create your own RSS feed that contains only the programs that you have selected. I have yet to find a great RSS reader, if anyone tried out some I invite you to post your experiences.

IRC - Kickin It Olde School

2006-11-28T18:57:00.000-04:00

IRC or Internet Relay Chat is the granddaddy of chatting according to wikipedia and it has been around since 1988. It's not pretty and it doesn't have any fancy smileys or Video or Sound. It's all command line, and it's not easy to use so most of the time people who are using it are not the kind of Interweb people that the RIAA and MPAA go after. They are more likely to be the shadowy underground that produce all the content and store it in Servers in Sweden.

When all else fails and the Lawyers shut down all the webpages I used to Love like Suprnova.org and others, IRC is where the Elite gather to regroup and decide their next move. It's also where many torrents are released before they are posted on websites. The other good thing about IRC is that it runs on multiple networks and when the Fuzz shows up you can move to another channel.

Well there are multiple IRC clients but I like to use Mirc. It seems to be the most popular and when I'm Googling for help there are articles out there to help me.

Well that's my IRC article I know its not as good as the Torrent article but I don't recommend that unless you're an UberGeek that you start IRCing.

Well I only have the post on RSS feeds left and I'll have covered everything I promised in the Torrent Article.

Firefox How I Love Thee... Let Me Count The Ways

2006-11-27T16:51:00.000-04:00

"It's Simply the Best, Better than All The Rest!"
(Yes, I just quoted Tina Turner Let the Mocking Begin)

Not Only does it Kick Explorers Butt it Comes in a UK English version so all the wonderful u's are where they belong - It's Colour I'm Telling You

And for all you people like me who likes everything faster it's tweakable
here's a link to more information about configuring Firefox than you will ever need

Torrents Are King

2006-11-26T21:53:00.000-04:00

While many of you may have heard about torrents and all the "illegal downloading" (GO Canadian Supreme Court - Why it's Better to Appoint then Elect) I'm sure that some of you haven't so I'm going to do a little primer on them.

Torrent are small files that describe the file you want to download (ie The Newest Boy Band CD that no one in their right mind or with 100% hearing should be listening to), the .torrent points to a server that stores the computer addresses of everyone trying to share the file. Here is a diagram that I stole from wikipedia that shows you why its faster for everyone to share instead of all queueing for the file.

The Image Moves if you Click on it. I don't know how to get the animated GIF to work in the main post. If anyone could help please leave a comment

Step 1 - to becoming a copy write violator

Get a good a program that runs torrents; my current favourite (yes all you Americans there is a u in there) is µTorrent [thanks to the commenter who told me how to make that into a mhu] as it is small, doesn't crash, works its' little butt off, and doesn't have 3 gillion settings that I can't understand. While many people might know that I was a big advocate of Bitcomet, the newest version was inexplicably slow and when I need my Tv fix I don't like having to wait. Many people are fans of Azerus although I find it, and most java programs, to be a resource hog. But on the other hand if you are one of those alternative Mac People it will run on your shiny computers. According to want I've read on the net transmission is a good Mac Torrent program but I haven't owned a Mac since my fancy Mac SE (Go OS 6.0) with its 3" screen, so don't take my word for it.

Step 2 - to becoming Public Enemy #1

Find a good Torrent site. While Google is King for finding webpages (if you don't think so please comment with another search site), electronic word of mouth with IM's and forums are the best places to find good torrent sites. Often the ones that come up in Google will not be 3 Michlein Star quality sites.

Sites that I think Rock

Efnet - This site has made the transition from IRC (which I will get into in a later post) to the net with style. My favourite feature has to be the personalized RSS feed (which I will also discuss in a later post) which means with a little utorrent can get my favourite TV shows without me having to open my browser (which is Firefox - Also a good subject for a future post).

Mininova - Where Efnet links to. I like the top 10's on the front page.

IpodNova - Everything In iPod Compatible Video for those long drives and boring lectures.

The Pirate Bay - The Big Kauna of Torrent Sites just like Portobello Road "Anything and everything, a chap can unload, Is sold off the barrow, in the Portobello Road, You'll find what you want, in the Portobello Road".

Step 3 - Be Torrent Friendly

Remember to keep your torrents running and seed as much as you can so someone else can find the 7th episode of My So Called Life in 12 years.

Inaugural Post

2006-11-26T21:36:00.000-04:00

Well I've finally given in and decided to save the world from having to listen to my rants in person and instead I'll just ask you if you'd read my blog and you can all lie and say you have and save yourself from the latest rant about what I think is too cool.