Category: Geek Stuff

Have you ever wanted to convert a video file to an audio file? Like, maybe you wanted a small clip from TV show to use as a ringtone, or maybe your favorite band was on Conan or Kimmel and you wanted an audio version of their performance for your iPod or smartphone?

There are dozens of apps out there that claim to do that, but most of those websites seem scammy, as if the download is malware or the ads might infect your computer with some kind of virus. And even the legit apps often have some kind of toolbar or search engine they want to install.

But did you know that VLC, the malware-free Swiss Army knife of video players, can also convert video to audio?

Just open VLC and choose “Media” > “Convert/Save”:

In the window that appears, click “Add” and choose the video file(s) you want to convert:

Next, click the down arrow on the “Convert/Save” button and choose “Convert”:

On the next window, make sure the “Convert” radio button is selected, then choose the type of audio file you wish to create: OGG, MP3, MP4, FLAC or CD (WAV):

Choose an output destination, then press “Start”. VLC will appear to play the file: the main VLC window will appear, and the progress bar will move as if the video is playing at high speed, but no video will be displayed. When it reaches the end of the video, the conversion will be complete. You can then edit the audio in Adobe Audition (spendy, but awesome) or Audacity (free, but not as good as Audition).

By default, VLC will convert the audio to a 128kbps mp3. This is fine for things like ringtones.

If you’d like to convert at higher quality, select “Audio – MP3” at the previous step and then click the Options icon (the icon with the screwdriver and wrench). Click the “Audio Codec” tab:

Here you can adjust the bitrate as necessary. However, note that increasing the bitrate will not improve the converted file if the new file’s bitrate exceeds the original file. For instance, if the audio in the original file is 192kbps, editing the bitrate to 320kbps won’t make it sound any better; it’ll just make a larger file. You could, however, change VLC’s default bitrate from the 128kbps to 192kbps to get the best quality from the converted file.

I’ve been using Firefox full-time since 2003 or 2004, and have amassed a pretty large collection of bookmarks. I’m also one of those guys who regularly has 150+ tabs open across 3-4 Firefox windows.

Of course, when you have that many tabs open for a week, Firefox tends to hog up a TON of RAM. So what I sometimes do is bookmark all the tabs in one (or more) window(s) by clicking a tab, choosing “Bookmark All Tabs” and saving the folder as “2012.09.17a” (or whatever the date is; the letter is if I have more than one window to save). I save this in a bookmarks sub-folder called “Sessions”.

An odd thing happened recently: I was using Firefox with 100+ tabs open (like you do) when the Firefox window suddenly “blinked”, as if Windows was having trouble redrawing the window. I didn’t think much of it until a few minutes later, when I noticed that a giant chunk of my bookmarks were missing! There hadn’t been any kind of error message or notification; the stuff was just gone. I bookmarked three of my four open windows in my “Session” sub-folder, then exported the remaining bookmarks to an HTML file, and restarted Firefox… and my bookmarks were still missing.

Getting most of my missing bookmarks back was easy. Firefox keeps backups of your bookmarks, so all I had to do was open the bookmarks manager and choose “Import and Backup” > Restore and choose the day before:

But the previous day’s backup did not include the session windows I’d just bookmarked. I checked History > Recently Closed Windows, but the windows I’d bookmarked only a few minutes before weren’t there, only a couple of windows I remembered closing a few days before.

The bookmarks for those three windows were “trapped” in the BOOKMARKS.HTML file I’d saved before I started all this. How could I get them back?

Well, I could always open a new Firefox window, open the BOOKMARKS.HTML file with that, and manually re-open each tab. But that seemed like a huge pain in the ass: I’d bookmarked three windows with 120+ tabs. Manually clicking each link in the BOOKMARKS.HTML file and saving it all over again seemed laborious.

I could have also manually edited the BOOKMARKS.HTML file in a text editor. But when I opened the file in Notepad++, I found that it’s not exactly human-friendly:

So… what to do?

In a flash of inspiration I thought of it: Internet Explorer! I opened a Windows Explorer window and created a folder on my desktop named “Temp Faves”. I then went to the favorites folder in my profile (c:\users\&username&\Favorites) and moved the few IE bookmarks I have to the temp folder on my desktop. I then had IE import the bookmarks from the BOOKMARKS.HTML. Going back to the Windows Explorer window, I deleted all the new “Favorites” except for the “session folders” I’d saved just before this whole mess started. I then went back to Firefox’s bookmarks manager and told it to “Import Data from Another Browser”, choosing only to import my IE favorites. Firefox imported them into a folder called “Favorites from Internet Explorer” (or something like that). I then used Firefox’s bookmark manager to move those sub-folders to their rightful place in the “Sessions” folder of my bookmarks. I then deleted the “Favorites from Internet Explorer” folder… and BOOM! In the most roundabout of ways, I was back where I had been before!

I have been a hardcore Firefox user since at least 2005. But I still use Internet Explorer from time to time. For example, because my netbook has limited CPU and RAM, I usually close Firefox (and its 6-15 open tabs) when I’m not using it. If I want a web browser to check one thing really quickly, I’ll typically just use Internet Explorer rather than wait for Firefox to open and load all those tabs.

Because I mostly use Firefox, if I happen to be using IE for whatever reason and see something I want to bookmark, I’ll usually just drag the favicon from the IE address bar to the desktop. This has traditionally created a standard desktop shortcut that’ll open in the user’s default browser. I can click on the shortcut later to open the link in Firefox, or drag the shortcut to my Dropbox folder so I can use it on my desktop machine or Android phone.

But then Microsoft went and screwed this up. In Windows 7, Microsoft changed this behavior so that if you drag an icon from the IE address bar to the desktop you create a “pinned shortcut” instead, one that only opens in IE… which is a nifty feature if you’re an IE user. But what if you want to create a good, old-fashioned shortcut that opens in the default browser?

You have two options.

The first is to hold down the SHIFT key as you drag and drop. This will create a “normal” shortcut that will open in Firefox, Chrome or whatever your default browser is.

The second is to drag and drop as usual, but then change the shortcut’s extension from .website to .url. Unfortunately, there’s no way (that I can see) to do this from the Windows UI. So you’ll have to break out the command-line and type something like

ren *.website *.url

at the desktop (or wherever you saved the .website shortcut). You can also, of course, do this with any existing pinned shortcuts, too.

I’ve used this site to publish lists of all sorts of favorite things: TV shows, albums, radio stations, Firefox extensions… Yet it occurred to me the other day that, despite having an Android phone for almost two years now, I  haven’t done a “Best Android Apps” post yet. So let’s fix that!

Below are some of my most favoritest Android apps. I’ve tried to keep the list as general as possible: I have several sports apps I love, but not everyone loves sports, so I’ve left them off the list. All apps listed below are free, although many have “Pro” or “Ad-Free” flavors, too. Some require root access, but these will be noted as such. All links are to the app’s page on Google Play.

*     *     *

Shush! – This app silences the ringer on your phone for a given amount of time. But the best part is that there’s no “app”. You just use the volume buttons on the side of your phone to silence the ringer, and a window pops up asking when you’d like the ringer to come back on. There’s also an option to choose the volume level when the ringer comes back:

I use this app every single day: I charge my phone on my nightstand, but don’t want the various notification sounds to wake up me or the missus. So I set it silence the phone until 08:30 or so the next morning. I say “or so” because there’s no way to have Shush! resume the ringer at a specific time. As you can see from the screen cap above, there’s an awkward rotary menu, and it selects time in 15 minute chunks. So if I use Shush! at 23:07, my only options will be to restore the ringer at 08:07, 08:17, 08:37, or 08:47. I kind of wish Shush! also had a whitelist feature, where calls from people I choose could override the settings. I know such apps exist, and I’ve used them before, but I keep coming back to Shush! ‘cos it’s simple and it “just works”!

Alarm Clock Xtreme Free – If there’s one thing Google Play has tons of, it’s alarm clock apps. I should know: I’ve tried a hundred of them. And Alarm Clock Xtreme is my alarm of choice. You can use the app as a traditional alarm clock (choose the time, set the mp3 you want as the alarm), but the reason I like it is that it has math CAPTCHAs. Yes, you have to solve math problems to turn this alarm clock off. And, because of that, I’ve almost never overslept with this. You can choose how many math problems you want, and how complex you want them to be (“11 + 4” or “227 / 6”?). It also has a “graduwake” feature, where the alarm starts softly but gets louder as it goes on. There’s even an option to have “decreasing snooze duration” (i.e. the first time you hit snooze, you get 10 minutes; the second time you get 8 minutes). Despite so many options, the app is simple, and most importantly, the app is reliable. I’ve tried other alarm clocks in the past, and believe it or not, many had problems waking the phone from deep sleep. Like Shush!, Alarm Clock Xtreme “just works”!

Continue reading “My Favorite Android Apps”

In keeping with this site’s long tradition of being the LAST SITE ON THE INTERNET to bring you important news, enjoy this Android-related article!

If you have an Android device, you probably already know that every app you download is saved in your account at the Google Play store. There are several “official” reasons why this is, the most obvious being that if you upgrade to a newer phone (or your current phone is lost or stolen and replaced), you can simply log in to your Play account and download your apps all over again. It’s also helpful to have a single Play account with all your apps if you have more than one Android device.

Removing apps from your phone is easy: just go to Settings > Applications, find the app you want to uninstall and click on it, then click the “Uninstall” button. But removing apps from your Google Play account used to be impossible. Cynics say that Google did this so that it could inflate the numbers of downloaded apps for PR purposes. Google said it was just trying to help users keep track of their apps.

For most people, the whole thing was a giant pain in the ass. Many went on downloading sprees when they first got their device(s) and now their accounts are clogged with dozens of apps they no longer use. Some apps are only good for a certain time, like the London 2012 Olympics app or the Euro 2012 soccer tournament app. Maybe a user thought they had malware once, and they downloaded several antivirus apps to try and fix it.

The point is, most Google Play accounts are littered with apps users no longer want or need. They’re not really “hurting” anything by remaining in Play accounts, but some of us despise clutter. Why won’t Google give us some way to delete apps we’re absolutely, positively sure we don’t want any more?

Well now they have. Open Google Play on your device and scroll left to the “All” category. You’ll see all the apps in your Google Play account. You may press on any app not currently installed on your device to install it if you wish. But you’ll also see the international “No” sign by any apps not currently installed on any of your devices:

Just click the “No” sign and then click OK to acknowledge that you wish to permanently remove the app from your Google Play account. Wait a few minutes for the Play app to sync with the store, and the app will be gone forever! According to some things I’ve read at other sites, users of newer Android versions (ICS? Jellybean?) can long-press on the “No” symbol to select multiple apps for deletion at once; however this doesn’t seem to work on my Gingerbread phone. Regardless, I’m overjoyed to FINALLY get rid of all those useless apps I never, ever use!

Way back in 2007, I wrote this post, which details how to get a Windows XP computer to return to the desktop (console) at the conclusion of an RDP session.

Microsoft’s client operating systems only support one session at a time, meaning that you can have a standard “desktop” session with your Windows PC, or you can connect via Remote Desktop for a remote session. But you can’t do both at once. And when you connect via Remote Desktop, the desktop (console) session is locked, and will remain locked after you log off, until the console user unlocks it via the keyboard.

Needless to say, this is a pain for remote support of Windows users. Normally, I’d have to log in via Remote Desktop, do what I had to do to fix it, then call the end user and tell them that I was done. They’d then unlock their computer and go about their business. But the article I posted in 2007 shows you how to create a shortcut that disconnects the remote user and unlocks the screen, so the end user knows that he or she can use their computer again.

Unfortunately, the batch file from the 2007 post doesn’t work with Windows 7. Microsoft apparently changed the way TSCON works, rendering the old batch file useless. But fear not: I’ve finally figured out how to make it work in Windows 7! Just copy and paste the text below into your favorite text editor (I prefer Notepad++) and save the file with the extension .BAT or .CMD:

tscon.exe 1 /dest:console
exit

Here’s the critical thing: when you’re connected remotely and want to return the user to the desktop session, right-click the batch file and choose “Run as Administrator”. A UAC prompt will appear; click “Yes” and your RDP session will end, and the console session will be unlocked on the remote computer.

I’ve owned several mp3 players over the years. Back in 1998, I got a Diamond Rio PMP300 for Christmas (which was eventually stolen… enjoy your 32MB mp3 player, jerks!). After that, the girl I was dating at the time gave me a Samsung UpRoar for my birthday, the first cell phone to feature mp3 playback. After I moved to Charlotte, I upgraded to a Samsung SP-i600, a giant clamshell phone running Windows Mobile 2003. The i600 was pretty nice for its time, but I’ve always been the kind of guy who prefers a single gadget that does one thing well over a “Swiss Army” gadget that does many things poorly.

You would think an iPod would be right up my alley. But iPods were expensive when they first came out, and I was reluctant to buy an Apple product. The search for a music player that was better than the i600 but fairly inexpensive led me to the Sony NetMD MiniDisc Walkman:

Sony developed the MiniDisc in 1992 to compete with Philips’ Digital Compact Cassette (DCC). While DCC was an abject failure, the MiniDisc fared slightly better. The format was popular in Japan, where record labels enthusiastically released albums in the MD format (record labels in the rest of the world? Not so much.). But because of the strength of the dollar against the yen at the time, MiniDisc players were just too expensive for most folks in the United States. And the fact that only component (non-portable) MiniDisc players had the ability to record also limited the appeal. A few years after MiniDisc players hit the market, CD burners became popular, allowing people to burn their own CDs for use in nearly ubiquitous portable CD players. So, by the early 2000s, the MiniDisc was all but a dead technology.

Sony is also the poster child of “Not Invented Here” Syndrome. Sony executives dismissed the mp3 format as an inferior technology. They, of course, considered Sony’s own ATRAC encoding to be a better product. That may or may not be true, but what really mattered was that no one was trading ATRAC files on the Internet, or ripping their CD collections into ATRAC files. So Sony sat on the sidelines, touting their “better” in-house technology, while Apple sold iPods by the million.

Continue reading “RETRO TECH: Sony NetMD Walkman”