Category: Geek Stuff

If you’re outside the United States, you’ve probably seen this message on YouTube before:

As the error message says, it’s a geographic restriction, meaning that the Copyright Cops in one country don’t want people in your country watching the video. Although this could be for political reasons, it’s usually all about the Almighty Dollar… or, in my case, the Almighty Pound Sterling.

One of my favorite bands, Saint Etienne, is based in the UK. And just yesterday their record label released the video for their new single, “Tonight”. As you can see from the screen cap, the video was only available to British IP addresses (they have since lifted that restriction). So how can you watch these blocked videos? Is there a way you can save them to your local computer, so you don’t have to jump through a bunch of hoops later?

WATCHING GEOGRAPHICALLY-RESTRICTED VIDEOS

This part is easy. You can click here to download a free program called UltraSurf. This is the easiest proxy server app I’ve ever seen. And I mean the easiest by a long shot. There’s no setup or installation routine: just download the app, unzip it, close Internet Explorer (if open) and double-click the unzipped EXE file. When you do that, you’ll see this on your screen:

UltraSurf hooks in to Internet Explorer and automatically opens a browser window for you. In most cases, you won’t need to do anything else, other than enter the URL of the video you want to watch into the address bar:

When you’ve finished watching your video(s), just click the “Exit” button in UltraSurf. The software will close all your IE windows. The next time you start IE, you’ll be back to your normal, proxy-free surfing!

Continue reading “How to Watch (and Download) Any YouTube Video”

Yes, I still use Microsoft Outlook. It provides me with one app for my email, contacts, calendar, RSS feeds and tweets. So there. But there’s one well-known (and years old) bug that sometimes drives me insane: when you click a hyperlink in an email, RSS post or tweet in Outlook, you get one of the following error messages:

General failure. The URL was: "http://www.domain.com" The system cannot find the file specified.

or

General failure. The URL was: "http://www.domain.com" An error occurred in sending the command to the application.

(Obviously, “www.domain.com” is an example. The address in an actual error message will vary.)

This happens because the Registry key that tells Firefox that it’s the default browser becomes corrupted or changed by some other program. I don’t know how to fix this in Windows XP, but the solution for Windows Vista and Windows 7 is pretty easy:

1) Close Firefox and Outlook, and then open Regedit.

2) Navigate to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\FirefoxURL\shell\open\ddeexec

3) Look for the “Default” entry in the right pane. The value will probably be an odd string of letters, numbers and symbols (such as “%1”,,0,0,,,,). Remove whatever text you see in this entry, then click OK and exit Regedit.

4) Restart Firefox and Outlook.

I get this problem on my computer once every six months or so, and this has always fixed it.

 

You might have seen the story on other websites: Dropbox is offering up to 5GB of free space to any account that updates to the latest version of their software. While this is true, it’s a bit more involved than some websites make it out to be (I’m looking at you, Neowin!)

Basically, you need to go here and download the latest version of the Dropbox software for Windows (although beta clients are also available for Mac and Linux, I can’t tell if the free space upgrade applies to those versions or not. The feature Dropbox is testing is the photo importer, and the FAQ at the linked site says “photo import feature is not available on Mac 10.4 and Linux”). So just use the Windows version if at all possible.

Anyway, after updating the software, connect a camera or cell phone to your computer. If you have Autoplay enabled (and you’ll need to for this), you will see this:

Click “Import pictures and videos using Dropbox”. The software will create a folder called “Camera Uploads” in your Dropbox folder, copy the pictures from your device to the new folder, then upload them to its servers. So you can disconnect your phone after the import is done, even if the upload to Dropbox will take a couple of hours. And here’s the crucial thing: you get 500MB of free space for the first picture you upload using this method, and 500 free megabytes for every 500MB of pictures you upload thereafter, for a total of 5GB. So it’s really 500MB + 4.5GB in 500MB batches, assuming you upload 4.5GB worth of pictures.

For the first few batches of imports, I was a good boy and copied pictures to my phone, disconnected the phone from my computer and then reconnected it to allow the import to start. I don’t know if this counts as “cheating” or not, but on my final round of imports I figured out that I could just copy some pictures to a flash drive and they’d import as long as they were in a DCIM folder (Dropbox won’t import images on a flash drive outside a DCIM folder). Also, know that once you’ve imported the pictures, you can delete them from the “Camera Uploads” folder; you don’t have to keep them there to earn your free space.

Be warned, however, that there is one giant pain in the ass with Dropbox’s import feature: it renames all the imported pictures based on the time and date in the EXIF data. This would be fine for importing pictures directly from a phone; after all, one could easily argue that “2012-02-06 12.35.30.jpg” is a more useful filename than “IMG_20120206_002.jpg”. But if you’ve carefully named your pictures, you’ll find this feature infuriating. And my phone’s camera has a bug where around 20% of the pictures I take are dated 12/8/2002 at 12:00, which makes the feature less than useful. I could also imagine someone going to swap out the battery in their digital camera and getting distracted for a few minutes, and the date resetting, thus screwing it up for Dropbox. This feature is not well liked by users posting in the Dropbox dev forums, so this feature may be altered or removed before going live.

In any event, I started my Saturday with 2.6GB of Dropbox space, and I now have 7.6GB of storage space for free, all for just shifting some pictures around. So I can’t complain!

This one has a long setup, so bear with me:

I was watching the Pro Bowl (football) game the other night, but had several other things going on at the time. I paused the DVR several times to do this or that, and ended up falling way behind “real time”. I wanted to use the NFL 11 app on my phone to check the score, but the app crashed upon opening. Several times. I figured that the app had been updated, and that was somehow causing a problem with the old version on my phone.

But I just couldn’t check the Market app to look for an update: for some reason, the NFL app is “not available on your carrier” (and no, I’m not talking about the NFL Mobile app that’s Verizon-only). For some reason, the NFL (or Google) doesn’t want me to install their free app on my Virgin Mobile US phone. So I’d found the apk on a message board several months earlier and side-loaded it (for newbies: Android Market keeps track of your apps and offers to update them when such updates become available; side-loaded apps aren’t tracked by Market and therefore must be updated manually).

But then I had a thought: I logged out of Google on my phone’s browser and searched the Market website for the app. I found it, and clicked “Install”. I logged in, and amazingly, the app downloaded and installed! But there was something odd: the Market was in Spanish! And it remained in Spanish the next day, too! As usual, Google support was little help, basically coming down to “check your language settings in Chrome!” even though I was using Firefox and IE on my computer.

So I tried using the following address to access the Market:

http://market.android.com/?hl=en

This reset my Market language to English, and I haven’t had a problem since. People who use the Market in a language other than English can substitute the proper ISO 639-1 code for their language in place of the en in the address above. For instance, use de for German or fr for French (assuming Google has a version of the Market in your language, of course).

As to why that happened in the first place… I have no idea. A quick look through Google’s support forums suggests that the Big G might be using some type of IP geolocation, as there were many complaints from English speakers in Puerto Rico about getting the Market in Spanish, and English-speaking Canadians getting the French version whilst in Quebec.

WordPress, the software that powers this site, was originally intended to be a blogging platform. Readers come to a WordPress site and see all the posts listed in descending chronological order. However, given WordPress’ ease of installation and use, and the huge selection of themes and plug-ins available, a lot of people have started to use WordPress as a “regular” website for their small business or band or what have you.

Which brings up an interesting question. While it’s easy to have WordPress use a page as a “home page” instead of displaying your most recent posts… how do you then link back to your blog posts?

Let me give an example: say you want to use WordPress to create a website for your band. You create a page called “Home”, and additional pages called “Music”, “Videos”, “Reviews” and “Shop”. But you also want to have a “News” page which contains timely posts using the blog system WordPress is famous for. But how do you link to that? WordPress doesn’t offer an intuitive way to do this.

Thankfully, the solution is pretty easy.

The first step is to create and publish a blank page. You’ll probably find that WordPress won’t let you publish a completely blank page; if so, just click the HTML tab in the text editor and type

  

This is a non-breaking space, so the page will look empty, but will contain a tiny bit of code so WordPress doesn’t complain about it being blank. Give this page a title like “News” or “Blog”, then continue with the next step.

Log in to the admin portion of your site if you haven’t already. Then click Settings > Reading:

If you’re running in standard “blog mode” the top radio button will be selected (“Your Latest Posts”). Change this to “A static page”, and choose “Home” as your front page (or whichever page you want as your home page) and then choose “News” (or whichever blank page you saved in the previous step) as your posts page.

Assuming you have a normal setup where all pages are included in the page hierarchy, you’ll then see a “News” link on your home page. Here’s a link in the default Twenty Ten theme:

Visitors to your site can simply click “News” to see all your blog posts, in reverse chronological order as you’d expect.

OK, I’ve looked at my favorite albums of the year and my favorite TV shows of the year… so why not take a look at my favorite podcasts?

Unlike the album list (which was restricted to albums released in 2011) and the TV list (which was restricted to new TV shows that debuted in 2011), the podcast category is simply all the shows that I enjoyed listening to this year. They’re also ranked, but don’t put too much stock in the rankings. Some podcasts are for learning, others are strictly for entertainment, so my rankings could vary day-to-day depending on my mood.

And so… the list!

#5: This Week with Larry Miller – You know how Seinfeld was described as “a show about nothing”? Well, Larry’s podcast is pretty much like that, too. It’s just comedian Larry Miller talking about whatever crosses his mind that week. Sometimes it’s funny stories about his college days, or his early days as a stand-up comedian in New York City (there’s a great story about him working at Studio 54’s “haunted house” one year). Other times he talks about being on the road or his family life (there’s a long-running feature called “Hamper Update”, in which he discusses his attempts to get his wife to buy a new clothes hamper for the bathroom). This show isn’t always funny, but I like it because it comes from the heart. Larry is genuinely a great guy, and it comes through in his show. More info here.

#4: Judge John Hodgman – If you’re a nerd, you probably who know John Hodgeman is. If not, he’s Jason Schwartzman’s arch-rival Louis Green on Bored to Death. Or you might remember him as the “PC” from Apple’s “I’m a Mac” ads. In any case, Hodgeman has created a podcast where he creates a “People’s Court” style courtroom to decide the real issues that Americans care about. In one case, a friend asked another friend to record something on his DVR, then never came over to watch it. The friend asked Judge Hodgeman to either force the friend to come over and watch it, or give him his blessing to delete it after a few days. In another case, Hodgeman had to determine when it’s OK to crash at a friend’s house, and if age and\or financial status come in to play. It’s a funny podcast, and definitely worth a listen! More info here.

Continue reading “My Top Podcasts of 2011”

I normally keep anywhere from 30-50 tabs open in Firefox at any given moment. There are two specific downsides to this. For one, restarting Firefox takes forever, because the browser has to load 30-50 web pages at once (although this isn’t really a Firefox-specific problem; any browser would take a while to open 40 pages at once). The second problem is that Firefox often eats RAM like candy. It’s not uncommon for Firefox to use anywhere from 1GB to 1.5GB of RAM on my system.

But the folks at Mozilla added a nifty tweak to Firefox 8. If you go to the General tab of the Options pane, you’ll see a new check box that says “Don’t load tabs until selected”:

If you check this box, Firefox will keep track of which tabs you have open, but won’t actually load the page until you select its tab. This tweak was added to speed Firefox’s start-up time (and, as such, works beautifully). But the tweak also greatly reduces the amount of RAM Firefox uses in general. When I enabled this option a few days ago, I had 48 tabs open, and Firefox was using 1.2GB of RAM. After restarting, I selected a few tabs and Firefox was only using 443MB of RAM. I’ve had the same session open for three days now, and have opened and closed several windows (and still have the same “base” of 30+ tabs open) and Task Manager reports that Firefox is “only” using 553MB of RAM.

OK, so I’m about two years too late with this, but yesterday I wanted to copy all 100+ GB of my music from my desktop computer to my netbook, and this came in really handy!

Robocopy is a command-line file copying tool from Microsoft that has been included with Windows since Windows Vista. Its name comes from “Robust File Copy”, and Robocopy offers a lot of features that are unavailable with most command-line file copy apps. For instance, you can have Robobopy include NTFS permissions on copied files, so if you need to move a file share from one server to another, you can use the /SEC switch to include all the appropriate permissions. And my favorite switch – /MIR – can create a mirror of a folder at another location, which is excellent for backups.

One of the longtime complaints about Robocopy was that it was single-threaded, meaning it would only copy one file at a time. However, the version of Robocopy shipped with Windows 7 is able to copy up to 128 files at a time using the /MT switch!

By default /MT generates 8 threads, but you can change this by adding the number of threads you want, such as /MT:6 for six threads or /MT:24 for 24 threads. As mentioned, the maximum you can do at one time is 128, so /MT:128 is the most you can do.

You might need to play with this to how many threads works best in your situation. I started copying my music with twenty threads, and my poor netbook just couldn’t keep up. In fact, file copying seemed slower with twenty threads than it did with one! So I reduced the threads to six, and it copied all my music in record time!

Sadly, unlike previous versions of Robocopy, the Windows 7 version doesn’t work on earlier versions of Windows, like Windows XP. So if you STILL haven’t upgraded, here’s one more reason to do so.