Category: Geek Stuff

All versions of Firefox 3.x have been affected by a strange “bug”: all Flash-related content has a tendency to “stutter” every few seconds (especially YouTube videos, but also non-video things like those “Know It All” quizzes on Facebook).

Back on November 30, 2008 I posted this article, in which I postulated that the problem was related to Firefox’s “session saving” capability. In fact, I specifically said:

Disable anything that saves your sessions (tabs). This not only includes extensions like SessionSaver or Weave, but also Firefox’s built-in session saving tool.

So it was somewhat surprising to see that someone else had stumbled across the “solution” to the problem this week in posts at Lifehacker and Download Squad.

Do I get “attboy” and “THANK YOU!!!” posts on this site? Nooooooo, I sure don’t! Such is life on the Internet, I guess.

I will admit that the “Lifehacker solution” is a bit more elegant: go to about:config and change the value of:

browser.sessionstore.interval

from 10000 (milliseconds) to 300000 (milliseconds). This changes how often Firefox saves your session information from every 10 seconds to every 5 minutes, which, while not eliminating the stuttering completely, should drastically reduce them.

Can anyone tell me if Firefox automatically saves a session on close, regardless of the interval settings?

I have long been a fan of Digsby, a multiprotocol instant messaging application. Like Trillian and Pidgin, Digsby can connect to all the major instant messaging services like AIM, Yahoo! Messenger, Windows Live Messenger, ICQ, Google Talk and Jabber. Unlike the others, however, Digsby can also connect to social networks like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and LinkedIn. It even has a built-in email checker, too.

Digsby has always been free. This presents a problem for the company that develops it: how can you make money when your product is free?

For the past couple of versions, they have used product tie-ins with the Digsby installer to install various toolbars and other applications. This isn’t unheard of in the software world (even Sun’s Java installer asks if you want to install the MSN toolbar… isn’t that ironic?). And even if Digsby had more toolbar offers than most, they were easy to click “No” to, and you only had to deal with it once, during the install (after that, all Digsby upgrades run automatically in the background).

Continue reading “A Digsby Warning”

Twitter is, of course, a highly popular “microblog” site where people post short items about their lives. Microsoft Outlook is an all-in-one program that does email, RSS feeds, calendaring, task lists and more.

If, like me, you’re one of those people who uses Outlook several hours a day, you might be interested in TwInbox, a free plug-in that allows you to send, receive, archive and search tweets in Outlook:

Setup is really simple: just install the plug-in and provide it with your Twitter login information. The plug-in allows you to receive all your tweets in a single folder, or you have have TwInbox create subfolders for each person you’re following. As mentioned, you can create new tweets from Outlook, too. What’s more, because every tweet becomes a standard Outlook post, you can archive the tweets to a PST file and search them like anything else in Outlook! In fact, the only thing you can’t do is follow new people (you’ll still need the web interface for that).

TwInbox is free and available here.

This is sweet!

The freshly announced XD09 measures in at 5.24 x 0.58 x 5.24-inches and 8 ounces, or slightly beefier than your average CD case. Pioneer claims that it’s the most compact drive design yet. Essentially this means if you can carry your optical media around with you, then you can carry the player for it too.

via Pioneer’s ultraslim DVR-XD09 burner is more jewel case than drive.

Video LAN Client (better known as VLC) is one of the most popular cross-platform media players. Long famous for the ability to play almost any type of video file and the ability to stream video over a network, the newly-released VLC 1.0 has one cool new feature: the ability to quickly and easily create clips from almost any video file!

Just open a video and click on View > Advanced Controls on the VLC client. You’ll see a new toolbar with the following buttons: record, take a snapshot, loop point A to point B, and frame by frame. All of the options are pretty cool: “take a snapshot” captures an image of the video and sends it to your “Pictures” (Vista) or “My Pictures” (XP) folder (it’s what I use in all my Ashes to Ashes and Mad Men recaps). To use the “loop” feature, you simply click the “loop” button where you want the video to start looping, then click it again where you want it to stop looping; VLC will then play the loop back forever or until you press the STOP button. “Frame by Frame”, as the name suggests, lets you go through a video frame by frame; just click the button to stop on a frame, then click it again to advance the video.

But this post is about the nifty “record” feature. Just click the “record” button when you want to record a clip, then click the same button again when you want it to stop recording. VLC will automatically save the clip in your “Documents” (Vista) or “My Documents” folder (XP).

See the big red button? Just click it to record!

The video will be the same format as the original, and there doesn’t appear to be any way to have VLC convert it to say, FLV or MPEG. But still, it’s a nifty feature for quickly creating a clip from a TV show, movie or sporting event to send to friends.

Download VLC for Windows, Mac, BeOS, most flavors of Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris and more here.

It’s been a long time since I wrote anything about Bittorrent, mainly because I rarely use BT these days, as there are far too many direct download sites out there offering the same content for half the bandwidth and none of the fear of getting busted. But still, there is the occasional thing I can only download via a Bittorrent client, so I thought I’d offer a bit of advice as to which torrent file you should download from a website.

You see, if you use a torrent search engine like Mininova, it’s possible to get multiple hits for the same thing. If you’re searching for the latest episode of True Blood, for example, you could get hits from multiple trackers. So which one do you choose?

At first glance, you might think that choosing the one with the largest swarm (total number of seeders and leechers) is the best call. Unfortunately, this is incorrect. What you want is the torrent with the highest ratio of seeders to leechers. Because there are fewer leechers in this swarm, the seeders have more bandwidth to offer in this scenario than they do in one where there are thousands of people in the swarm.

Read more about it at TorrentFreak.

I normally hate recommending software like this, but…

Last week, I wanted to see a highlight reel of game 7 of this year’s Stanley Cup finals. I went to nhl.com and looked, but their video library is difficult (impossible?) to search. I then went to YouTube, thinking that someone might have uploaded their own copy. But lo and behold, the NHL has an official YouTube channel, and I was able to see the highlight reel in glorious 720p video!

I really wanted to keep a copy of the video, but there was a problem: most of the “download YouTube video” sites (like keepvid) allow you to save the FLV (standard quality) or MP4 (high quality) videos, but not the HD versions. I found a couple of bookmarklets that supposedly let you save the 720p versions, but I couldn’t get them to work.

Frustrated, I saw a link to some software called Youtube Downloader HD, which promised to download any version of the video available on the site. I downloaded and installed it… and it just works!

All you’ve gotta do is a) select the version of the video you want, b) paste the video’s URL into the app, then c) click “Start”. It’s that simple, folks!

Youtube Downloader HD is for Windows systems only and is freeware. Snag it from this site.