Category: Geek Stuff

If you’re like me, your friends and family use different Instant messaging (IM) networks. Most of my Atlanta friends, for example, use MSN Messenger, while most of my Charlotte friends use AIM. My best friend from high school uses Yahoo! Messenger, and I have a business need to use a Jabber client.

For years, “all-in-one” chat programs like Trillian and Pidgin have allowed you to use multiple IM networks at once. I have been (and still am) a huge fan of Pidgin, a lightweight app that lets me keep in touch with everyone and not have have to run six different chat programs simultaneously. But that loyalty is wavering in the face of a new client: Digsby.

Digsby allows you to connect to the AIM, ICQ, MSN Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger and Jabber Networks. Nothing new there, really. But Digsby also allows you to receive notifications from social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. So when someone posts something on your Facebook wall or MySpace profile, a small pop-up will appear, telling you who did what. You can even hover your mouse over the social networking icon and get a summary of what’s going on, so there’s no need for you to launch a web browser just to see what’s going on with Facebook or MySpace. Digsby also supports email notifications from Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail and AOL mail, as well as any POP or IMAP account, so it’s got you covered there, too.

Digsby has been around for almost a year now, so it’s not really “new”. What is new is that newer versions of the app are much better behaved than earlier ones, which tended to be resource hogs. After being scared off of it by reports that it used up to 200MB of RAM, I’ve finally given it a shot… and I like it! One thing I especially like about it over Pidgin: it keeps like log files in the “My Documents” folder instead of hidden away like Pidgin does; this makes for easy backups with Mozy.

Ever since upgrading to Firefox 3.0 back in June of this year, I’ve had a bizarre problem with the browser. On around 10% of the sites I’d visit, the headline would be gibberish, as if the page had been encoded incorrectly. Here’s an example:

As you can see from the screencap, only the headline was affected. The rest of the text looked fine. Interestingly, if I highlighted the “gibberish text” and right-clicked on it, the proper text would displayed in the context menu (i.e. “Search Google for…”).

I troubleshot the issue as thoroughly as I could. I played with the character encodings and I made sure that the server was passing the page as TEXT/HTML and not TEXT/PLAIN. I disabled my Kaspersky Antivirus on the off chance that it was somehow messing with Firefox. I loaded up the page in Firefox’s “safe mode”. I tried creating a new Firefox profile. I tried completely uninstalling and reinstalling Firefox (including deleting any leftover files and folders, in addition to checking the “Remove my Firefox personal data and customizations” option). But nothing seemed to work.

Thankfully, a kind soul over at MozillaZine’s Firefox Support forums pointed me in the direction of my installed fonts. Some program I used installed a copy of the Helvetica font, and that was rendering the page all screwy. Once I opened the Fonts folder in Windows Explorer and moved HELV.TTF to the desktop, the page immediately began rendering correctly. Hooray!

I hadn’t thought about fonts, since only Firefox was displaying this behavior. Internet Explorer, Safari and Google Chrome all worked without complaint on my system, and the font didn’t present a problem in Firefox 2.x.

So if you have an issue where only one part of your Firefox pages are wonky… look to the fonts!

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.