Category: Geek Stuff

For years, I’ve loved the freeware utilities put out by SysInternals and Nirsoft. If you have a problem – especially an obscure one – and SysInternals or Nirsoft make a utility that addresses the issue… it’s the only way to go to fix it. Unfortunately, most of their products are standalone command-line apps, and it’s difficult to grab them all and throw them on a flash drive. Or at least it was. The freeware app Windows System Control Center gives them all a nice UI to navigate, so each tool is only a couple of mouse clicks away:

Remember WSCC is only a UI – you’ll still have to download the actual programs from SysInternals and Nirsoft.

Many Windows users hate Apple’s iTunes with a passion. Windows users come from a world of choice, where there are dozens of media players out there, and it’s easy to choose which one you prefer. Don’t like Windows Media Player? Use WinAMP, foobar, RealJukebox, MusicMatch, or whatever floats your boat. Windows users are also used to having options available. Most Windows users I know prefer having complete control over an install. We get pissed when a program installs something without our approval. And iTunes is really guilty of doing just this.

iTunes used to be software that you used to rip and play CDs, buy songs from iTMS, and transfer music to your iPod. Now, however, Apple thinks you want to do everything with your Apple product, especially the touchscreen devices. Whether you want it to or not, iTunes installs lots of software on your system that not only is pointless for many users, it even leaves possible security holes open and unnecessary services running!

To slim down an installation of iTunes, download the latest full installer from Apple (as of this writing, that would be iTunes801Setup.exe). Unzip the installer using WinZIP, WinRAR or your favorite compression program. Inside the unzipped folder, you will see the following files:

iTunes.msi
Quick Time.msi
AppleSoftwareUpdate.msi
AppleMobileDeviceSupport.msi
Bonjour.msi
MobileMe.msi
Setupadmin.exe

Note: for 64-bit versions of iTunes, most of the above programs have “64” appended to their names, such as “iTunes64.msi”.

Here’s what each one does:

Continue reading “Slimming Down iTunes”

As I’ve said many times on this blog, iTunes is a great program for moving songs to your iPod, but it’s a crappy program for managing your music. That’s because it’s a “closed ecosystem”. As I noted in this post about iTunes Library Updater, after you install iTunes the program will scan your computer and look for music files to add to the iTunes library. Once this is done, however, there’s no way to add music to your library other than by ripping a CD with iTunes or buying music from the iTunes online store. If you want to use another program to rip your discs, or if you’d like to buy music from some other source, like Amazon’s MP3 store, you can’t add that music to your library without a third-party application like iTunes Library Updater.

I recently came across a need to export an iTunes playlist into the standard .M3U format. As you might guess, there’s no way to do this within iTunes itself, but I did find a nifty little app that can handle the task: iTunes Export.

The program is as simple as they come: just run the EXE, point it to your iTunes library, choose the iTunes playlist you want to export, then pick a destination for the new playlist. In a few seconds, you’ll get a M3U playlist (or a Windows Media (.wpl) or Zune (.zpl) playlist, if you prefer). You can then play the playlist in WinAMP or any other software player that supports M3U playlists, burn an audio CD with Nero, or copy the playlist to a portable player that supports M3U playlists.

One of the most popular articles on this site is this post about “hacking” the Motorola w370, a mobile phone distributed by Tracfone, a prepaid cellular provider in the US. The phone recharges via a standard “Mini USB B” connector, the same type of connector used to connect most digital cameras to desktop computers. However, with this particular model, the USB connector is connected to a standard charging unit; you cannot use a regular USB cable to charge the phone.

Or can you? jimcofer.com reader Andy left a comment in the original “hacking the w370” post that said this:

I was able to get my phone to charge off of any windows XP or Vista computer. To do this you need to download Motorola End User Driver Installation which you can find here http://www.modmymoto.com/guides/e2/getconnected.php When you plug into a USB port it will detect the phone and install the drivers (first time only). Now I hardly ever use the wall plug.

I can confirm that this works, albeit with a couple of caveats. First of all, the hyperlink to the required software on the page Andy links to gave me a 404 error. I found an updated version of the drivers at this page. And, in testing this software out at home, I think I found an even easier way to install the phone on your computer and enable charging via USB:

Continue reading “Motorola w370: Hacked?”

Netbooks are small laptop computers that ship with the latest energy-saving processors, smallish amounts of RAM, small SSD storage devices, built-in Wi-Fi and stripped down operating systems that can run quickly on such meager hardware. Although you can buy a netbook with Windows XP installed, most netbooks come with some form of Linux on them. In a sense, they’re more like “extremely useful PDAs” than actual laptop computers, but the distinction is slight.

The big draw with netbooks was supposed to be their low price. When manufacturers announced pricing for netbooks, prices of $199 or $249 were bandied about. People were excited – and why not? A laptop computer with a color screen that could play back movies and mp3s and had built in wireless for less than 2 bills? Sign me up!

The only problem was that initial demand was so high that manufacturers felt free to ignore their previous quotes of $199, aiming instead for the $399 to $499 range. One manufacturer (Asus) really ran with the idea, releasing ever beefier netbooks with ever more bizarre price points. The Eee PC 1000, for example, comes with a 10″ widescreen LCD, a 1.6 GHz Intel Atom CPU, 2GB of RAM, an 8GB SSD, and a 32GB SDHC card for $650. That’s a lot of sexy new technology, but for that kind of money you can buy a “regular” notebook from Dell with Windows XP, a 14″ screen, and 80 GB hard drive.

Thankfully, a couple of things have happened that have started to push prices down. Initial demand has fallen off, so manufacturers are dropping prices to keep up sales. And Dell, the 800 pound gorilla of the IT world, just released their own netbook. So prices should fall considerably by Christmas time. Case in point? The afirementioned Asus Eee PC 1000 – the price has recently fallen from $650 to $449.

Harry McCracken, founder and editor of Technologizer and former editor-in-chief of PC World, has posted this entry in his blog about the mistakes he’s made with IT implementations throughout the years. Most of it is pretty basic stuff, but it’s worth a read to refresh yourself on the causes of IT disasters. After all, most people tend to take their jobs a bit casually after doing them for several years. Harry’s entry just might slow you down and make you think before doing something that just might screw the pooch. Here’s a sample:

Biting off more than I can chew at once. You don’t need to address every issue that technology can solve for you all at once. In fact, if you try to, you’re more likely to create new problems. Worse, you may have more trouble diagnosing and fixing them than if you changed one thing at a time. I just wish I always remembered that.

Like I said… basic stuff, but well worth a read.

Last week, the guys from Google released their own web browser: Google Chrome. And thus, Google fanboys all over the ‘Net fell to their knees in religious ecstasy, chanting over and over again: “Google my master, Google my master…”

Look, I frankly just don’t see the point of all this. On the Windows platform you already have Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera and Safari. And now there’s another browser? And what does Chrome do that any other browser doesn’t? Well, nothing, actually. And it actually lacks a lot of the features that other browsers have, even boring old Internet Explorer.

After using it for about a week, I can honestly say that the one (and only) feature I like about Google Chrome is the “paste and go” feature in the address bar. If you cut and paste an address into Chrome’s address bar, you can either “Paste” it or “Paste and go”, which pastes the address then automatically loads the page in question. Nice, but hardly groundbreaking, especially when the “Right-Click Link” extension does the same thing in Firefox without the need to paste the address into the address bar.

As of this writing, Chrome doesn’t have any extensions. None. So you either get the full “Chrome experience” or you get nothing. No AdBlock, no Weave, no DownThemAll… nothing. Oh, you can hack together something similar to a lot of Firefox extensions – see this post from Lifehacker for instructions on setting up Privoxy as your ad blocker in Chrome, for example – but it’s nowhere near as elegant as Firefox.

So… for now… I’ll stick with Mozilla, thanks!