Author: Jim Cofer

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COOL WEB SITE: myspacegrab.com

There are tons of new bands and solo artists on MySpace. Many of these musicians are “too new” to have their songs on iTunes or even a P2P network, so your only option is to listen to their music using the MySpace player. And sadly, although the MySpace player has the built-in option to let users download songs to their hard drives, 99% of the bands out there disable the feature… which means that you can only listen to the band’s music while sitting at your computer with a MySpace page open.

Fortunately, there’s MySpaceGrab, a free website that lets you download songs from almost any MySpace page. It’s amazingly simple to use: just to to MySpaceGrab’s site, enter the external URL of the band’s MySpace profile (which is usually myspace.com/bandname) into the box on the main page and click the “MySpace Grab” button. When the next page loads, you’ll see a list of songs from the profile page on the right-hand side of the MySpaceGrab page. Just right-click any song title and choose “Save Link As…” and choose a destination. Once the download’s done… you have music!

Sadly, it isn’t always this simple. Many bands put their music on MySpace in FLV (Flash movie format) instead of MP3, so you’ll need to find a conversion tool if you want to burn the music to CD or use it or your portable player. Also, most of the mp3 files you’ll find using this tool are encoded at a sampling rate of 22,050 Hz and 96kbps mp3 format. You’ll need a tool like Audacity (it’s free!) to upsample the file to 44,100 Hz, which is the “Red Book” (CD) standard, otherwise your burning software or mp3 player might choke on the file. Upsampling won’t make the files sound any better, it’ll just make it compatible with your listening devices.

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Crazy Japanese People…

You know “wave pools” – the pools that have a wave generator at one end? This is one such pool, somewhere in Tokyo, Japan. It’s hard to believe that all those people could cram into a pool – had this taken place in Detroit, someone would’ve been shot!

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Logging In from the Command-Prompt

IT folks – ever needed to log in as someone else, but didn’t want to reboot (or log out of) the computer you’re working on? Maybe you’re working on someone’s computer and need to access a shared drive that only admins like you can access. Maybe you’re just lazy and don’t want to wait for an actual logoff.

Whatever the case may be, you can easily accomplish this using Task Manager and the command prompt:

1) Open a command-prompt window.
2) Open Task Manager (if you use CTRL+SHIFT+ESC you’ll need only one hand!)
3) Kill the EXPLORER.EXE process.
4) At the command prompt, type the following:

runas /user:RESOURCE\USERNAME explorer.exe

5) You will be prompted to enter the password for the user. Do so, and Explorer will reopen under that user’s account.

So – for example, you could enter

runas /user:DOMAIN\Administrator explorer.exe

 

or

runas /user:LOCALMACHINE\Administrator explorer.exe

 

to run Explorer as a domain or local administrator.

Remember that this is not a full logoff\login procedure, so the desktop\icons\installed program list won’t change as it would with a standard logoff\login.

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SONGS I LOVE: “Lazy May”

The Essex GreenThe Essex Green is an indie band from Brooklyn, New York. The band was originally based in Burlington, Vermont, where they were known as Guppyboy. However, a couple of members left Guppyboy; the “core” of the band decided to move to New York and try again.

The Essex Green’s “sound” is hard to pin down, as it changes quite a bit. This is especially true because the singing duties are split between guitarist Chris Ziter and keyboardist Sasha Bell. So sometimes it’s a guy singing, other times it’s a girl.

On their second album – The Long Goodbye – they often remind me of a mix between Yellow Submarine-era Beatles and Guadalcanal Diary. But that’s just me. Have a listen of “Lazy May” – from that album, naturally – and tell me what you think:

[audio:essex_green.mp3]

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Cool stuff from Lifehacker!

Lifehacker has been on a roll as of late, with even more cool articles than usual:

– A guy sawed his video iPod in half and added a hinge, so it can bend up for easier viewing.

– Got a Linksys router? Learn how to power it using only an Ethernet cable!

– Lastly, here’s a cool (and useful!) Firefox extension: Mr. Uptime monitors a non-responding website and lets you know when it’s back up, so you don’t have to leave an empty tab open and refresh the page manually!

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SONGS I LOVE: “Real To Real”

Real to Real“Real to Real” is the opening track from Simple Minds’ second album, Real To Real Cacophony, which came out all the way back in 1979.

Like a lot of bands at the time, Simple Minds seemed to be obsessed with technology and the future – “Real to Real” is all about satellites and how humans can communicate with each other almost instantly… but don’t. The song is slow, airy and spacey – just the way I like my pop music. The lyrics aren’t much – Real To real cacophony\Echo echo endlessly\Satellites communicate\Pick up signal\Then translate – but that’s not the point, really. It’s one of those songs that’s all about the experience. And this experience is pretty awesome!

Go ahead – have a listen! If all you’ve heard of Simple Minds is “Don’t You Forget About Me”, you might be surprised that this is the same band!

[audio:real_to_real.mp3]

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Sharing Calendars With Outlook 2007

One of the neatest features of Outlook 2007 is the ability to share a calendar with anyone. All you have to do is open a new email, enter the recipient and title, then click in the main message box and click Insert > Calendar. If you have more than one calendar, you will be prompted to choose one. You then choose which dates you’d like the calendar to be; you can choose pre-defined terms like “Next Two Weeks” or “Next 30 Days”, or you can choose specific dates. You the choose how much detail you want to include with the Calendar (“Availability Only”, “Limited Details” or “Full Details”). You can then click “Advanced” if you’d like and choose other features, like “Show Private Appointments” (which are hidden by default). You finally click “OK” and Outlook will go to work. Within a few minutes, you’ll see something like this in your email:

Outlook Calendar Sharing

Outlook will also attach the calendar as an ICS file that can be imported into many calendaring programs. Even better, if the recipient also has Outlook 2007, he or she can simply click a line in the email’s header to automatically import it as a separate calendar in Outlook itself – no manual importing necessary! You can even use the Overlay view to view the two calendars as one! Niiiiiiiiiccccee!

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The Mystery of Jan Vermeer

Vermeer PaintingThe city of Delft, in the Netherlands, is famous for two things.

The first of these is Delftware, a “porcelain substitute” developed in the city in the 16th century to compete with “real” porcelain, which came from China and was hideously expensive, even for rich people. Delftware is almost always white with a blue pattern on it; if you look in your grandmother’s china cabinet, you’ll almost certainly find some delftware in it – or at least a reasonable copy thereof. Delftware became amazingly popular, so much so that it was even exported into China and Japan. Amusingly, the Chinese made copies of delftware to ship back to Europe, so at some point it was possible to buy a Chinese copy of a European copy of a Chinese original!

The other thing Delft is known for is being the home of Antonie van Leeuwenhoek and Johannes (Jan) Vermeer.

Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, until very recently, was credited as being “the inventor of the microscope” in many middle and high school textbooks. But the truth is, microscopes existed decades before van Leeuwenhoek was born. However, van Leeuwenhoek did greatly improve microscopes. He was a glass grinder, and van Leeuwenhoek was a master at making lenses. And, while testing out the lenses, van Leeuwenhoek made many interesting observations that he dutifully forwarded to England’s Royal Society and other scientific groups. Even though van Leeuwenhoek was nothing more than a tradesman, really, he is known in some circles as “the father of microbiology” more than anything else.

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Three Great Programs For IT Guys

If you’re in IT support, you’ve probably come across same issues over and over again. These three utilities can take some of the hard work off you and make your IT life a bit easier:

The Offline NT Password Editor – How many times have you gone to work on someone’s computer, only to find that they didn’t know their password because they had auto-login enabled? Or maybe they’ve logged in under their own account for so long that they’ve forgotten the local admin password? It’s not something that happens often, but when it does happen, this handy lil’ app is one of the few ways to reset a password. The Offline NT Password Editor comes as a bootable floppy or CD image; all you do is download the file, transfer it to a floppy or CD, then boot into the tiny Linux distribution that comes with the editor. Everything is driven by a command menu, so there’s no way you can screw this up… mostly. The editor doesn’t natively work on domain controllers (although it can be hacked to do so; I recommend this only at your own peril!). Also, follow the advice of the app’s author and only use the editor to reset the admin password to blank within the editor. Although the password editor has the ability to change a password to almost anything you choose, the author says that you will occasionally run into a problem with doing so. It’s much safer to simply change the password to nothing (i.e. blank) and change it from within Windows.

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