Category: Geek Stuff

While I use iTunes to play most of my audio files, I still enjoy using Windows Media Player to watch video files. However, there’s one MAJOR annoyance with WMP that’s bothered me for years, and it’s this: if you’re watching a video and then insert a USB device (like a hard drive or flash drive), WMP assumes that it’s some kind of media device, and it wants to sync to it.

WMP will continue to play your video in the background, but the foreground window will change to a “sync screen” that asks if you want to synchronize your files to the device. So if you’re watching, say, a football game using WMP and absentmindedly insert a flash drive into your computer, you’ll miss a few minutes of the game as you race to figure out how to dismiss the stupid window and get back to the video.

You’d think that there’d be something in WMP’s options section where you could check a box that says “don’t do this stupid shit again”. But you’d be wrong. You’d think this would be a setting that a lot of companies would want to control via Group Policy, but if there is such an thing, I can’t find it. You could always disable AutoPlay completely, but this seems like such a nuclear option for such a niggling problem.

Continue reading “Windows Media Player and USB Devices”

Tumblr is a microblogging platform. It falls somewhere between a full-blown blog (like WordPress) and a microcommenting site (like Twitter). Imagine, if you will, a Twitter site where you could totally customize the layout and embed videos and pictures in your feed.

Anyway, many of my favorite Tumblr blogs are almost nothing but pictures. Suicide Blonde, for example, is almost exclusively pictures of pretty celebrities, fine art and kitschy home decor.

The problem with these picture-heavy Tumblr blogs is that the people who own them often post 20-30 pictures a day… or more. If you subscribe to their RSS feeds, your inbox can get clogged with posts, and getting the pictures you want to download is a core: click on post #1, click on “View Article” to open the page in a web browser, click on the picture to enlarge it, then right-click and save the image. Repeat 100+ times to clear out the RSS feed.

Thankfully, someone has com up with a better way. Gettumblrpic is a free tool for Windows that allows you to download as many pictures from a Tumblr blog as you want: just download and unzip the program and run it. Enter the Tublr hostname into the “Tumblr Blog:” box, choose how many pages of pictures you want to download, then click the download button.

It’s much easier to use Gettumblrpic to download the pictures from the first ten pages of a Tumblr site and sort out which ones you want after their downloaded than go through the whole RSS song and dance. Give it a try… I think you’ll like it!

All I wanted to do was take some XviD rips of some TV show DVDs and put them on my iPod Nano.

I knew the files would need to be re-encoded, so I downloaded the latest version of Handbrake, since I hadn’t reinstalled it since I reformatted my computer. I installed it, queued up the files with the “iPod” preset, and let it do its thing. Within 20 minutes, the conversion was done. Hooray!

I went to iTunes and clicked File > Add File to Library and added the shiny new mp4 files to my library. Hooray!

I then clicked on “Movies”, highlighted the new files, right-clicked and chose “Get Info”. I clicked the “Options” tab and changed the “Media Kind:” to “TV Show”. iTunes moved the files from”Movies” to “TV Shows” Hooray!

Since the files had no metadata (and were just sitting there in the main “TV Shows” window), I clicked on each one and added the name of the show, episode title and season\episode numbers to each one. Hooray!

Continue reading “APPLE FAIL: iTunes Edition”

Have you ever wanted the email addresses of all your Facebook friends? Sure, you could go to each of their profiles individually and cut and paste their email address into your favorite email app or a spreadsheet… but who wants to go to all that trouble? Wouldn’t it be cool if you could just click a few buttons and do it all at once? You can, and it’s a pretty easy (if unglamorous) process.

To start, you need to sign up for a free email account at gmx.com. GMX offers free email accounts, much like Gmail and Yahoo! Mail accounts. But unlike the “import contacts from Facebook” applets at Yahoo! Mail and other sites, the GMX webapp actually works (see “Notes” section, below).

On the GMX homepage DO NOT click the “Login with Facebook” button at the top of the page. Instead, create an account the old-fashioned way by clicking “Sign Up Now” and filling out the simple form by entering your name, date of birth, country and state, and an alternate email address.

Once that’s done, open a new browser window and login to Facebook if you haven’t done so already. Back in the GMX window, login to your new account, then click “Address Book” in the lower left corner, then click the “Import/Export” button at the top of the page and choose “Import”. A window with icons for Facebook and many email programs will pop up. Choose “Facebook” (duh!) and then click “Allow” or “Yes” for any Facebook security windows that pop up. The GMX applet will scan your profile and allow you to choose which contacts you want to import (I just clicked the “Select All” button). It will then save them all to your GMX account (this might take several minutes, so don’t panic if the page seems “stuck”).

Continue reading “Exporting Email Addresses from Facebook”

Just a few random web browsing tips for this Veteran’s Day:

– With most web browsers, you can simply drag and drop images to your desktop (or any other folder). So instead of right-clicking on an image and using the “Save As…” dialog, just click a picture and drag it to your desktop!

– With most browsers, you can quickly go to the end of a long web page by pressing the END key on your keyboard. Conversely, if you’re at the end of a long web page and want to go back to the top, press the HOME key.

– With most web browsers, pressing the F6 key will highlight the text in the address bar, so instead of grabbing the mouse, highlighting the address, and typing a new one, just press F6 and type in the address.

– In Firefox, pressing CTRL+K will move the cursor to the search box, and pressing CTRL + DOWN ARROW will cycle through the available search engines.

I got my current computer as a Christmas present in 2008. At the time, I didn’t have a copy of the installation media for x64 Vista… so I couldn’t do the “reformat the computer to clean off all the crud HP installed on it” thing like I normally would. And by the time I did have a copy of the media, I was so far along that I didn’t want to do the reformat. I then did an in-place upgrade to Windows 7 back in October 2009. Over time, several niggling (but hard to diagnose) issues cropped up, and this past weekend I reformatted the old gal and started over.

Like most folks, I do a lot of stuff on the Internet. And nothing is as important to me as my Firefox profile. Not only do I have saved passwords and a browsing history to keep, I also have tons of extensions and UI tweaks that would take forever to redo. That’s why I fell in love with MozBackup:

As the name suggests, MozBackup backs up your entire Firefox profile to a single, handy file. It’s a stand-alone app that requires no installer: just download, unzip and run. The entire process of backing up your profile only takes around 6 mouse clicks, and restoring everything about your browser takes just 6 clicks more. And not only did MozBackup restore the stuff I expected it to, it even restored all of my GUI tweaks after the reformat!

MozBackup works with Firefox, Thunderbird, Sunbird, Flock, Postbox, SeaMonkey, Mozilla Suite, Spicebird, Songbird, Netscape, and Wyzo and is freeware (even for commercial use).

Check it out here!

A week or two ago, Time Warner robocalled the house during the day, saying that Internet and digital phone services might be disrupted that night, as they were “implementing some upgrades that will make your Internet service faster in the future”.

Our Internet service didn’t go down that week, but it did go down last night. I became curious about the outage, as it started almost exactly on the hour, and lasted almost exactly one hour. Once the service came back up, I went to Speedtest and checked my speed:

HOLY CRAP! We have basic Road Runner service, and had been getting 7Mbps/364kbps before. Now it seems that were getting almost 20Mbps down… WOW! Too bad the upload speed remains a pokey 384kbps!

So if you’re in the Charlotte area (and specifically Gaston County, which is a different TWC franchise from Meck County), check your Internet speed… it just might be a whole lot faster!