Tech from Lifehacker

Alpha Geek: Copy DVDs to your iPod

by Rick Broida

So Apple wants you to pony up $14.99 for Pixar’s Cars when you already own the DVD? Nuh-uh. Don’t think so. Seems like you should be able to copy that DVD right to your iPod.

You
can, provided you have the right tools and some time to kill. With free
software and this tutorial, you can copy almost any DVD in your library
to your iPod for on-the-go viewing. Let’s get ripping.

Lucky Mac users

Mac users have an easy solution in the form of open source gem Instant HandBrake,
which not only rips DVDs but also converts them to the iPod-friendly
MPEG-4 format. (Hurry up with the Windows version, developers!) If you
need help using it, try this tutorial.

The Windows two-step

Windows users will need two programs: DVD Decrypter, which we’ve featured in numerous how-to articles; and Videora iPod Converter.

To
summarize the process, you’re going to use DVD Decrypter to “rip” the
contents of a DVD to your hard drive and Videora to convert those
contents to a format the iPod likes–namely, MPEG-4. When all that’s
done, you’ll use iTunes to copy the movie to your iPod, as you would
any other video file.

Step 1: DVD Decrypter

1. Insert your DVD and start DVD Decrypter.
2. Click the Mode menu and choose IFO.
3. Click the Tools menu, select Settings, and then choose the IFO Mode tab.
4. In the Options section, click the File Splitting field and set it to None. Click OK to exit the Settings dialog.
5. In the right-hand section of the interface, click the Stream Processing tab and check the Enable Stream Processing box.



6. Immediately
   below that box, uncheck everything except for the first video and audio
   items. In other words, only two boxes should be selected.
7. Back
   on the left side, in the Destination section, click the folder icon to
   determine where DVD Decrypter should place your ripped files. (I’m
   usually in favor of something like My Documents > My Videos >
   Movie Title.)
8. Finally, click Decrypt and be prepared to wait 20 minutes or so while the software does its thing.

Step 2: Videora iPod Converter

1. Fire up Videora iPod Converter.
2. Click
   Setup, then click Browse next to the Output Videos field. This is where
   you’ll choose where to deposit your converted movie. I recommend My
   Documents > My Music > iTunes > iTunes Music > Movies, but
   only for sake of organization. You can output the movie anywhere, so
   long as you know where it’s going to land. Click Save to finish the
   operation.
3. Click Convert, and then click the Transcode New Video button.



4. Navigate to the folder on your hard drive containing the movie you just ripped. You’re looking for a file with a name like VTS_01_1.VOB. Select the file and click OK.
5. In the Title field, enter the name of the movie.



6. Finally,
   click Start and be prepared to wait upwards of two hours (the time
   varies depending on the speed of your PC, the length of the movie,
   etc.). Don’t be concerned if the progress meter gets to 100% and the
   software still appears to be running. It’ll finish when it’s finished.

Step 3: iTunes

When
Videora is done, all that remains is to start iTunes. If you followed
my suggestion above, the newly converted movie should be in your Movies
folder. If not, you’ll need to import it. (Here’s how.) From there, just copy the movie to your iPod and start watching!

Before I go, let me pass on a few final tips. First, if you encounter a DVD that gives DVD Decrypter trouble, try DVD Shrink
instead. Second, whenever possible, choose full-frame (rather than
widescreen) versions of the movie. The video iPod’s screen is small
enough already without losing more of the image to letterboxing.

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Tech from Techcrunch

Geni Launches

David Sacks’ new startup Geni, which we wrote about last week, has gone live.

The initial product is a very easy to use Flash tool to create a profile and a family tree – including siblings, spouses, cousins, aunts and uncles, and their families. When you add a relative, there is an option to add their email address and have the tree sent to them as well. They can add their own data, extending the tree, and Geni will launch tools to merge overlapping trees.

There is more information on the About page. The company has raised a round of financing from Founders Fund.

I’ve started my family tree and have added a few email addresses. It will be cool to see my relatives further expand the tree. And it will be really interesting to take a look at Geni a few years from now, as more and more trees are merged together.

Update: Geni is viral. In my test tree, I added my dad’s email address but didn’t otherwise mention the site to him. I just went back to Geni and noticed the tree has been extended significantly (see image below). And now some of those people have been emailed as well.

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Geni

Tech from Lifehacker

Download of the Day: XiphQT (Windows/Mac)

Windows/Mac only: Freeware QuickTime plugin XiphQT adds support for Ogg audio files in QuickTime and iTunes.

We’ve been highlighting players like Jajuk that feature support for popular containers and codecs like Ogg and FLAC, and while this plugin currently doesn’t support native FLAC, it does add support for Ogg. If you really want to expand your playable filetypes, but you just can’t bear to ditch iTunes, this plugin is worth a download. — Adam Pash

XiphQT

Tech from Techcrunch

Keep an Eye on Shelfari

Seattle-based Shelfari is a book centered social network that launched last fall. There’s lots of competition in this space, including Library Thing, Listal, Delicious Monster and others. The basic idea is to tell Shelfari all of the books you own, and have an online visual representation of your library. Book fanatics and book clubs are the target audience.

Shelfari isn’t as big as Library Thing (key Library Thing stats here), but it is a better designed site and they have a great looking widget to show off the books you own. Shelfari also allows users to insert their Amazon affiliate ID and make money off of any books sold from people clicking on the widget.

Library Thing sold 40% of itself to ABEbooks last year, so they have essentially taken themselves off the market. An acquisition or further financing would have to be approved by them. But the space is interesting enough that venture capitalists and bigger companies are starting to take note, and Shelfari is a good platform.

There are rumors that Shelfari will be acquired or raise a round of financing soon. Perhaps then they’ll be able to hire someone to write those pesky FAQs.

Shelfari was founded by former RealNetworks employees Josh Hug and Kevin Beukelman. John Cook wrote a good launch article about them last year.

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Shelfari

Tech from Lifehacker

Run Windows apps on your Linux desktop

We’ve covered how to run Linux on your Windows PC a few different ways, but for you patient Linux users who need a little Windows, SearchOpenSource.com has the details on setting up VMWare to run Windows apps.

Citrix is expensive and seems to be overkill for just a few network/security administrators’ laptops or desktops. This recipe consists of a laptop/desktop running Linux in a GUI with VMware Server, a Windows XP VM and a product called 2X Application Server for Windows Terminal Services. Once you are done, you will have a Windows XP VM running as a service and loaded with any applications that you may need.

I didn’t try this out myself (my Linux box is in the shop) but it seems like a great solution for full-time Linux users who need just a taste of Windows once in awhile. Thanks, Harley! — Gina Trapani

Running Windows as a VM on Linux with VMware Server [SearchOpenSource.com]

Tech from Lifehacker

Download of the Day: AntiVir PersonalEdition (Windows/Linux)

Windows and Linux only: Rid your system of viruses and keep them at bay with Avira AntiVir PersonalEdition, which joins the ranks of such esteemed free anti-virus tools as Avast, AVG and ClamWin.

The program promises to detect and remove more than 80,000 threats, including trojans, worms, dialers and the like. It can stop master-boot-record viruses and previously unknown viruses, perform scheduled scans (at whatever times you specify) and fetch virus-definition updates automatically.

AntiVir’s clean, tabbed interface should please novice and expert users alike, though I was surprised by the lack of a simple “scan now” button. Even so, my Norton AntiVirus subscription just expired; I think this will be taking its place.

What’s your favorite free (or even commercial) anti-virus program? Tell us about it in the comments. AntiVir Personal Edition requires Windows or Linux. Thanks, Tracey! — Rick Broida

AntiVir PersonalEdition [Avira]

Tech from Lifehacker

Find your cell phone with Google Maps’ click-to-call

Next time you misplace your cell phone and don’t have another phone on hand to call it with, do what reader Aaron does: take advantage of the new, free click-to call feature in Google Maps and let them call you.

Bonus #1: It’s easier, quicker, and less embarrassing to let Google ring up your phone than it is to email a friend to ask if he’ll call your missing phone yet again. Bonus #2: You’ve had a hard day – you’ve misplaced your phone, you’re obviously tired, and you’re probably hungry – take double-advantage of the Google Maps click-to-call and order a pizza from the guy on the other line. — Adam Pash

Tech from Lifehacker

Download of the Day: Ophcrack Live CD

The free, open source Ophcrack Live CD is a Windows account password cracking tool designed to help you recover lost Windows passwords.

After you download the 462mb .iso and burn it to a CD, just restart your computer and boot up the Live CD. Once the CD boots, Ophcrack automatically loads and is on its way to cracking your password. So how well does it work?

Honestly… Ophcrack is creepy. It cracked my (somewhat mediocre) 13-character alphanumeric password in about 5 minutes. Like most powerful tools, Ophcrack can be used for the forces of both good and evil, but for anyone who’s been locked out of their Windows user account because you can’t remember your password, Ophcrack can be very good. It may also encourage you to beef up the security of your user account password – that’s what it did for me. Thanks K-milo! — Adam Pash

Ophcrack

Podcasts from Digg

50+ Free Courses on iTunes from UC Berkeley

Get free podcasts of full-fledged courses from UC Berkeley. Excellent courses from the humanities, social sciences, and physical and natural sciences. This is a great educational deal.

Tech from Techcrunch

AdBrite Makes Brilliant Video Product

Ad Network Adbrite, which we wrote about in November, has soft launched a new video product that is going to be very popular with bloggers and other sites that embed a lot of video.

The new product is called In Video. Adbrite has created an embeddable video player similar to YouTube, Photobucket, etc. (see video below using their player). If we choose to show a video on TechCrunch, we can use this embeddable player, and at our option it will include Adbrite ads and our logo as a watermark. Anyone who takes the content and embeds it on their own site will show the same video, with the same ads and watermark (revenue goes to the original video creator). And all click backs on the video go to the original site (whereas with YouTube all click backs go the original YouTube site).

Whether you want to embed ads or not, this is the best way I’ve seen to show video on your own site.

Adbrite is not hosting video, so you’ll have to upload it to YouTube, Photobucket, or wherever, in .flv format and then point Adbrite to the URL for the video.

In Video is in private beta testing – users can sign up for an invitation on the about page.

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Adbrite

Tech from Lifehacker

Watch full movies and TV shows with Simplistic Video Links

Watch full-length TV shows and movies over at Simplistic’s Movie Links, a site that scours YouTube for movie clips and splices them together into one watchable whole.

The process isn’t perfect: for example, Borat is chopped into ten parts. However, if it’s a Sunday afternoon, and you’re looking for something that might get you out of helping to clean out the garage, this might be a good fit (speaking completely hypothetically, of course). — Wendy Boswell

Simplistic’s Movie Links [via Fimoculous]

Tech from Lifehacker

Remotely download torrents to your Mac

While we’re on the subject of bittorrent, weblog TorrentFreak has posted a relatively simple step-by-step tutorial for remotely downloading torrents to a Mac.

All you’ll need is a chat client (iChat or Adium) and your favorite bittorrent client. The author sets up a torrent-only IM account that automatically accepts file transfers only from his contact list, then configures his bittorrent client to watch the transfer folder for new .torrent files. This is an interesting idea, and is certainly a simple alternative to some slightly more complicated methods of remote bittorrent downloads. My only problem is that I’ve found chat apps notoriously unreliable for file transfers, but maybe those are my own demons. — Adam Pash

A Simple Way to Remotely Download Torrents on the Mac [TorrentFreak]

Tech from Lifehacker

Hack Attack: How to run Windows and Mac apps side-by-side with Parallels

by Adam Pash

A few months ago, I detailed how to switch between the Windows and Mac operating systems on an Intel Mac using Parallels. I didn’t think things could get much better than that – until the release of the latest Parallels beta, that is.

The Parallels beta includes a new feature, called Coherence, that hides the Windows desktop and allows you to run Windows apps in their own windows on your Mac desktop. The result is that you can intermingle all your Mac and Windows apps on the same desktop. I know what you’re thinking: Disgusting! Unnatural!

Trust me people, I felt weird about it, too, but after setting it up, I can tell you this much: Sometimes something that sounds so wrong can feel so right. Today I’ll show you how to set up Coherence in Parallels and how to launch Windows apps directly from your Mac.

Since the current build of Parallels Desktop Beta is open to the public, you can install the beta and try out Coherence for free (always nice). But first thing’s first – the screencast! Here’s what Parallels with Coherence looks like.

So, how can you get your Mac to run this unholy marriage? Actually, it’s quite easy.

Install Parallels Desktop for Mac Beta

First, head over to Parallels and download the free Parallels Desktop for Mac build 3036 Beta. Yep, while it’s in beta, this build is absolutely free, so as long as you’ve got an Intel Mac, you can do this for free. Run through the installation.

Install Windows in Parallels

If this is the first time you’ve installed Parallels, you need to install a new Windows virtual machine. Rather than recounting the entire process, head over to my side-by-side Windows and Mac feature and start at “Install XP as a virtual machine”. It’s a simple process, so get installing if you need to. When you’ve installed Windows, be sure to re-install Parallels Tools by booting up Windows in Parallels and then going to Actions -> Install Parallels Tools. Done? Then get ready for the fun part. It’s time to:

Set up Coherence

Now that you’ve got Parallels with Coherence mode installed and a working installation of Windows, it’s time to tweak your installation for Coherence mode. None of these tweaks are necessary to run Coherence, but they’ll help keep the line between Windows and your Mac pretty thin.

• Set your Windows taskbar to Auto-hide by right-clicking the taskbar, selecting Properties, and checking “Auto-hide the taskbar”.
• Move your taskbar to a side of your screen away from your Mac’s Dock. Stacking the taskbar on top of your dock (or even underneath the menubar) just doesn’t work that well.
• Set your Windows desktop wallpaper to match your Mac’s. The easiest thing to do here is just set your desktop with as a solid color. The reason this is useful is that Coherence works by hiding your entire Windows desktop while creating a window that lets Windows apps peak through. When you drag these Windows around, you’ll notice that your Windows desktop can bleed through around the edges during the move – unless you’re using the same wallpaper, that is.
• Turn off your Windows screensaver. Parallels is great at hiding your Windows desktop, but your screensaver is another story. The solution is simple enough, though – just disable your screensaver in Windows by right-clicking the desktop and selecting Properties -> Screen Saver, then choosing (None) from the drop-down menu.

At this point, if you haven’t already, switch into Coherence mode by selecting View -> Coherence in the Parallels menubar. The Windows desktop should disappear, but you should still be able to launch apps from the start menu or using an app launcher like Launchy. Very cool.

Launch Windows apps directly from your Mac

Parallels does not (yet) support launching Windows apps from OS X. However, if you want to get this functionality, the VerySimple Dev blog has hacked together a Windows app called DockSync intended to work in conjunction with a Parallels shared folder. It’s a fairly primitive app at this point that monitors Parallels shared folders for files ending with .task extensions. The .task files contain Windows command line actions. Short story shorter, you can script a command via Applescript or Terminal that will output a .task file to the shared folder. The .task file will be picked up by DockSync and executed at the Windows command line.

The advantage here is that with DockSync, you can do all of your launching from your Mac, meaning you’re that much closer to erasing the line between the two operating systems (if that’s the kind of thing you’re going for). To get DockSync up and running, download and install it on your Windows virtual machine (it requires .NET 2.0), then just follow along with the Readme file inside (it’s a very simple process). What’s even cooler is that, since it’s just executing command line actions, you can use it to do things like set up quicklaunch workspaces with batch scripts.

Seamless drag and drop between Mac and Windows

Oh, and as if Coherence wasn’t badass enough, Parallels now has seamless drag and drop of files between Mac OS X and your virtual machine operating system. Both ways. Handy.

To be honest, now that I’ve set up Parallels using both Coherence and Fullscreen modes separately, I’m not sure which I’ll use more. Since I like managing my desktop apps with VirtueDesktops, I may continue running in fullscreen mode a lot of the time just to keep things compartmentalized. (If you’d forgotten how well Parallels works with desktop switching, check out the video below).

On the other hand, there are plenty of times (drag and drop, for example) where using Windows in coherence with my Mac will come in very handy, particularly at those times when I just need to use that one Windows app. Either way, Coherence in Parallels is incredible, and should go a long ways towards boosting productivity for dual-OS users with Intel Macs. As I said, the beta linked to above is free to try out, but if you decide you do want to eventually purchase the app, it’ll run about $80. If I didn’t already have Parallels, I know what I’d be asking for this Christmas.

Adam Pash is an associate editor for Lifehacker whose needs aren’t satisfied by one measly operating system. His special feature Hack Attack appears every Tuesday on Lifehacker. Subscribe to the Hack Attack RSS feed to get new installments in your newsreader.

Tech from Lifehacker

FaxZero sends free faxes

The LifeClever blog raves about free outgoing internet fax service, FaxZero:It’s free and lets you send a PDF or Word document to any fax number in the USA. FaxZero prints an ad on the coversheet,…

Tech from Lifehacker

How to set up dual monitors

Tech mag PC World has a video demonstrating how to install and configure a dual-monitor setup.

The video shows how to upgrade your graphics card (which may or may not be necessary), identifies the difference between analog and digital connectors and explains when you might need to use an adapter. It also wisely suggests backing up your PC before getting started.

We’ve long been proponents of the productivity gains afforded by dual monitors, and this video offers a good introduction to this essential upgrade. — Rick Broida

How to Set Up Multiple Monitors [PC World]

Tech from Lifehacker

Alternatives to cable TV

If you’re considering pulling the plug on your cable television bill for good, home theater site Floppyhead has 6 alternative sources for getting the good shows, including streaming internet shows, Netflix and borrowing DVD’s from your local library.

Our own Wendy also recently covered a bunch of ways to forget TV and watch the web. Usenet – preferably accessed via the web like with EasyNews – is also a television junkie’s paradise. Thanks, Kevin! — Gina Trapani

6 alternatives to help you ditch cable television [Floppyhead via PVRWire]

Tech from Techcrunch

Online File Conversion Services

Zamzar, a free online file conversion tool, launched last week. Like a similar tool, Media Convert, Zamzar allows users to upload a file and have it converted into a number of formats.

Common uses for Zamzar include converting PDF documents to Word, iTunes AAC files to MP3, and Flash (flv) files to MP4 for iPod use. Up to five files can be converted simultaneously. The process takes a few minutes – Zamzar emails a link to the converted file when it is done. It worked well in our testing. Note, however, that Zamzar does is not able to convert DRM’d files. The maximum file size is 100 MB, but there are no limits on the number of files converted.

Zamzar has a better interface and design than existing service Media Convert, although we found Media Convert to convert files more quickly in our testing. Media Convert also allows input files to be locally stored or from a URL, saving users an extra step if a file is on the Internet. Also, Media Convert converts the file while you wait, and gives a download link on screen when the process is completed. Since no registration is required, users are not required to give up an email address as they are with Zamzar.However, only files that are 50 MB or less can be converted using Media Convert.

Both services are useful, particularly when converting flash movies (from YouTube, etc.) to MP4 for viewing on an iPod.

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Media Convert, Zamzar

Tech from Lifehacker

Download of the Day: iCall (Windows)

Windows only: Voice-over-IP service iCall lets you make free calls from your PC to any landline or mobile phone. Skype does, too, of course, but that may end at the end of the year.

What’s more, iCall offers lower international rates, like 1.4 cents/minute to the UK and 9.6 cents/minute to India. Skype charges 2 cents/min and 15 cents/minute, respectively.

To use iCall, you need a microphone-equipped headset and the iCall software. Unfortunately, the latter offers no help in configuring the former. Any good VoIP app should let you set volume and microphone levels. The iCall applet is nowhere near as user-friendly as Skype’s, either.

That said, iCall worked really well in my tests. Voice quality was generally excellent–better than I get with my everyday VoIP service (SunRocket). You might want to give this one a try. iCall runs under Windows 2000 and XP only; it’s free except for international calls. Thanks, Mark! — Rick Broida

iCall

Tech from Lifehacker

Online file conversion with Zamzar

Zamzar is a web-based file conversion tool that can convert your video, audio, images, and documents from nearly any format to nearly any format you like.

For example, if you’ve never felt that you could quite figure out how to convert that video you took on your cameraphone to a format you can play on your iPod, Zamzar can do it for you. Zamzar is similar to previously-mentioned online file converter Media-Convert, and both services sort of blow my mind, but I found Zamzar to have a cleaner, easier to use interface, and Zamzar can handle files up to 100MB vs. Media-Convert’s 50MB limit. Also, Zamzar lets you convert more than one file at a time, provided you are doing the same type of conversion for each file. — Adam Pash

Zamzar [via Download Squad]

Tech from Engadget

LaCie’s Ethernet Disk mini hits 500GB, finally

Filed under: Storage

Announced in January 2005, the 7200rpm 500GB LaCie Ethernet Disk mini is finally prepped to ship. In the UK anyway, where it can be pre-ordered for £245 inclusive of VAT. While the link to the US site is hot, the link to order for $299 remains dead as AIBO. The Ethernet Disk mini functions as a NAS for Windows, Mac and Linux boxes with support for UPnP A/V, Apple Bonjour, SMB, AFP, and more. It’s better than that though, since it can also be plugged directly into your Mac or PC via the USB 2.0 interface for some external disk action when the network is unavailable. Hell, it even features an additional USB host port allowing you to expand capacity even further or pull photos directly from your USB equipped digital camera. Let’s just hope they’ve boosted the transfer speeds as well. Shipping “late October 2006″ which, in case you didn’t know, means today LaCie.

[Thanks, Adam]

Read — LaCie Ethernet Disk mini 500GB (US)
Read — LaCie Ethernet Disk mini 500GB (UK)

 

Tech from Lifehacker

Hack Attack: One-click DVD rips

by Adam Pash

I love a good DVD as much as the next guy, but the whole optical media world has been on my shitlist lately. I’m sick of renting or Netflix-ing a DVD, getting an hour into it, then hitting the scratchety-skip zone that freezes up my DVD player and leaves me unable to finish my stories.

My solution to this problem is to rip every DVD I rent to my hard drive as soon as I get it. In my experience, a rip smooths over those un-renderable sections of the DVD without issue, so when I’m ready to watch the ripped DVD, it’s certain to be scratch and skip-free. Since I’ve got no time to sit around clicking through dialogs to rip my DVDs, I’ve put together my very own one-click DVD ripping solution.

Check out the automated DVD rip action here:

Okay, so it’s a pretty boring video, but the one-click rip is pretty handy. The AutoHotkey automation works on any Windows PC, but it’s particularly useful on your home-brewed Windows DVR.

Note on file format: This method doesn’t rip DVD’s to DivX or some other more highly compressed format, because I want to navigate using the default menus like it’s a real DVD (especially important for several episodes of a TV show on a single DVD). This method’s resulting VIDEO_TS folder can be played by any software DVD player, including Lifehacker favorite, the free media Swiss Army knife that is VLC media player, or any number of packaged DVD software apps like WinDVD. Also, if you ever decide you want to turn the rip back into a physical DVD, it’ll be in the perfect format for quick and easy burning.

Download and set up DVD Shrink

The first thing you’ll need to do is download and install DVD Shrink (you can download it at Softpedia here). Be sure to let DVD Shrink install to your default Program Files directory, since the automated script below counts on finding DVD Shrink there. Once it’s installed, you’ll need to go through a trial run of ripping a DVD with DVD Shrink to get an idea of the process involved and to get your preferred settings all sussed out.

First, put a DVD in your computer and run DVD Shrink. Hit the Open Disc button or select File -> Open Disc. DVD Shrink will take a minute or two to analyze the disc and then you’ll see the DVD structure in the right pane and the compression settings on the left. For our purposes, we’re going to keep all of this at the default settings (so video compression remains set to “Automatic”).

Next hit the Backup! button or go to File -> Backup…. In the Backup DVD pop-up, you should tell DVD Shrink where you want your DVD rips saved (i.e., the target folder). You should use something like C:\DVDs\DVD Name (though, naturally, DVD Name should be replaced by the name of your to-be-ripped DVD). The VIDEO_TS and AUDIO_TS folders (which can be played with your software DVD player) for the DVD will be saved in this directory. Setting this default now is important, because when the automated rip runs, it will use the folder path up to the last folder (i.e., C:\DVDs), creating a new folder with a name you provide (normally the name of the DVD). Hit OK and the backup will begin. At this point, cancel the rip so you can try it with your fancy new one-click rip (be sure to delete any files that may have already been ripped).

The one-click DVD rip

So now’s where my best friend in the entire Windows world, AutoHotkey, comes into play. I’ve put together a script that automates every step I’ve covered above into one handy executable. It works like this: You load your DVD, then double-click the Automatic DVD Rip executable. You’ll be prompted to enter the name of the DVD (make sure it’s a unique name each time). Once you hit enter, the rest of the process will take care of itself. If you’re an AutoHotkey-er interested at looking at the innards of the script, you can download the source script here.

If you’d rather just get straight to the ripping, I’ve got several executable (.exe) scripts available for download depending on your DVD drive name. For example, on my two Windows boxes, the DVD player is the E: drive on one and D: on the other. I’m putting out D:, E:, and F: scripts, but if your drive is mounted to a different letter, let me know and I can easily upload another to accommodate (or just make a few tweaks to the source script above and compile it yourself – might sound daunting, but it’s AutoHotkey – almost anyone could do it!). Download the D:, E:, and F: executables below:

• Automatic DVD rip D-Drive.exe
• Automatic DVD rip E-Drive.exe
• Automatic DVD rip F-Drive.exe

As is, creating DVD backups doesn’t get much more simple than DVD Shrink. However, I love the one-click solution on my home-brewed DVR, since I can assign the execution to a button on my remote. That means I can put in a DVD, hit the rip button, enter the title, and then go back to watching TV. The DVD rip script keeps the process running from step to step, minimizing DVD Shrink whenever possible so the rip mostly takes place in the background. That said, I still plan on using the one-click script on my main computer, as well.

Additionally, if you’ve got a copy of Nero, DVD Shrink integrates nicely with Nero for burning new DVD backups if that’s your goal. My script isn’t streamlined for burning a backup disc, but it could definitely be used for that purpose, especially with a few more tweaks to my AHK script.

I’ve only be able to test the script on a couple of my home computers and a friend’s, so if you give it a try and find a glaring error, let me know and I’ll fix things up. Otherwise, welcome to the world of quick and easy DVD backups and skip-free DVD watching.

Adam Pash is an associate editor for Lifehacker who’s AutoHotkey crush is finding its way into every corner of his Windows PC. His special feature Hack Attack appears every Tuesday on Lifehacker. Subscribe to the Hack Attack RSS feed to get new installments in your newsreader.

Tech from Lifehacker

Transfer files and settings to a new PC

At one time or another, most users have faced the daunting challenge of migrating to a new PC. What many users don’t know is that Windows XP comes with a tool designed to simplify the process: the Files and Settings Transfer Wizard (FAST for short).

Although FAST doesn’t move installed applications, it does copy folders, address books, e-mail accounts and messages, IE favorites, Outlook data, and most other crucial files and settings. It’s easy to use and comes free with Windows XP.

You can find FAST by clicking Start > All Programs > Accessories > System Tools. The utility can copy all your stuff via a network, a direct cable connection between the two PCs, or removable media (like a portable hard drive). I’ve used the wizard numerous times in the past, and it always works like a champ. And I’ll be using it when my shiny new notebook arrives next week.

What’s your favorite migration method? Would you like to see a Lifehacker feature detailing the step-by-step process of moving to a new PC? Let us know in the comments! — Rick Broida

Tech from Lifehacker

Download of the Day: Office Accounting Express 2007 (Windows)

Windows only: Microsoft Office Accounting Express 2007 is a new accounting suite designed with startups, small businesses, and eBay sellers in mind. Oh, and it’s free.

Free? Microsoft software? Free? Sure enough, this surprisingly versatile package costs absolutely nothing. Certainly Microsoft’s goal is to lure users to its $149 Office Accounting Professional 2007 suite, but I suspect plenty of business owners will find that Express does everything they need.

Specifically, the software can create quotes and invoices, track expenses, manage payrolls (via ADP’s integrated payroll service), produce all kinds of reports, list items on eBay, track auction activity, send PayPal invoices, and much more.

Office Accounting Express 2007 requires Windows. And, no, you weren’t dreaming: It’s free. Thanks, M. Ahmad!— Rick Broida

Microsoft Office Accounting Express 2007 [Microsoft IdeaWins]

Tech from Boing Boing

HOWTO ditch your landline but keep your DSL

Cory Doctorow:www.digitalnoir.com Dry-loop DSL is a new service being rolled out by telcos across the USA. It’s a DSL line without phone-service, and in an era of mobile phones and VoIP, that sounds like a good idea. Land-line? What land-line

Of course, it’s not that easy — the phone companies don’t want you to ditch dino-phone service, so you need a good HOWTO before you embark on your dry-loop odyssey. The Eat Our Brains group-blog has a great post on how to game the system:

It took me almost an hour to reach a live Verizon rep who could talk to me about it. They make it as hard as possible to change over. They charge an extra $5 a month for your DSL connection if you don’t have a land-line. You have to put your DSL service on a credit card, rather than pay for it on a phone bill. Tragically, they haven’t figured out how to bill you for DSL, I suppose. You have to turn off both services, then start up your DSL service anew, with a two-week gap in between.

Here’s how to game their system:

First, since it’s technically a new DSL service if you do this, you qualify for promotions and rebates as a new customer. Dell, for instance, offers a $100 rebate if you order Verizon DSL through them. (Similar rebates with other DSL providers, incidentally, and you don’t have to buy a computer to get the deal.)

Link(Thanks, Steve!)

Tech from Lifehacker

Download of the Day: VMware Converter 3.0 Beta (Windows)

Windows only: Reader Randy shares this bit of love for VMware Converter 3.0:

The process of converting an existing physical machine to virtual for running under VMware can be convoluted, tedious, and fraught with peril. The free (for now, at least) VMware Converter 3.0, now in beta, greatly simplifies this process. It will even “hot clone” a machine while it’s running.

This could come in very handy for tasks like backing up Windows in a VM. VMware neophytes should also check out Create virtual machines the easy way. Thanks, Randy! — Rick Broida

VMware Converter 3.0 Beta [VMware]

Tech from Engadget

FairGame, a new(ish) way to unDRM iTunes tracks on your Mac

Filed under: Portable Audio

While we’d love an easy (and legal) way to strip DRM from our iTunes-purchased songs on our Macs, that probably won’t happen anytime soon, so we’ll just have to settle for the next-best thing: re-encoding those protected AAC files using Apple’s own iMovie software. While we first heard about this hack in the summer of 2004, it was a bit too labor-intensive on a per-file basis to be troubled over. However, we just caught wind of a new program called FairGame that serves as an automated interface to re-encode your audio files using that technique, and converts a protected iTunes track into an unprotected AAC file; it’s not quite DRM-stripping in it’s purest form, but for many a Mac user it’s going to have to do.

[Via iPodNN]

Tech from Lifehacker

Download of the Day: AppDelete (Mac)

Mac OS X only: Freeware program AppDelete is an uninstaller for Mac applications.

In general, removing apps from Macs is a simple matter of deleting the application, but you’ll normally have a few preference and config files that stay behind. AppDelete scans your computer and automatically deletes any items associated with the app you’re removing, and all you have to do is drag the application you want to remove onto the AppDelete icon. Previously-mentioned program AppZapper does the same thing, but for $13 as opposed to free. Granted, AppZapper has a bit niftier of an interface, but after testing both apps for deleting a couple of programs, I found that they both identified and deleted the same files, so for my money, AppDelete is the way to go. Once again, AppDelete is a free download for Mac OS X only. — Adam Pash

AppDelete [via FreeMacWare]

Tech from Lifehacker

One phone number to rule them all

GrandCentral is a brilliant new web app that lets you consolidate
all of your phone numbers into one number, meaning someone can call you
on your GrandCentral phone number and all of your phones (cell phone,
work phone, home phone) will ring. And then it gets interesting.

If you don’t want every one of your phones ringing each time someone
calls your free GrandCentral number, you can set rules by friends,
family, work, and others, defining where the calls should be directed.
When a user leaves a message, you can listen to it online or directly
on your phone. The remaining set of features on GrandCentral are a
little mind-blowing, in that “I’d never thought of that, but how am I
now living without it?” sort of way.

When you pick up
a call that’s been forwarded with GrandCentral, you can choose to
answer it, send it to voicemail (which will be done automatically if
you don’t answer), or send it to voicemail and listen in on the message
as it’s being left in real time (just like you’re listening to someone
leave a message on an answering machine). You can interrupt a
“ListenIn” message at any time and join the conversation by pressing
star (*).

If you’re on a call and you decide that you want to record your
conversation, just hit 4 at any time. You can also record personalized
greetings based on contact groups and upload your own MP3s to be played
in place of your ring.

All of this can be done with GrandCentral’s free account, though
there are a few limitations to the free account (none of which severely
hinders the service). As you can tell, after spending the morning
playing around with it, I’m pretty impressed with this service. The
only problem I’ve had with GrandCentral so far is that making calls
from the online interface (which, similar to Jajah,
connects to your phone, then the phone of the person you’re calling);
it seems like a simple part of the functionality, but who knows – maybe
I’m doing something wrong (I’m not).

I’m not ready to tell all of my contacts to start calling my
GrandCentral number just yet, but I may in time. If you give it a try,
let us know what you think about it in the comments. Thanks Nick! — Adam Pash

GrandCentral [via TechCrunch]

Tech from Lifehacker

Spell your phone number

Clever web site PhoneSpell takes the numbers of any phone number and suggests words they spell for easier memorization.

For example, 836-8725 spells “tent-sale”, “vent-salt” and
“tent-pals.” Not every number combination will give you a memorable
word or phrase, but many will. PhoneSpell says they don’t record your
phone number, but to be safe, leave off the area code. Great for kids
or anyone with a bad memory for numbers and no cell phone quick dial. — Gina Trapani

What does your phone number spell? [via Pogue's Posts]

Tech from Lifehacker

Photoshop Tip: Create professional HDR images

The Backing Winds weblog details how to create high dynamic range (HDR) photos using Photoshop.

HDR images use a rather trendy exposure style that you’ve certainly
seen before, but if you’re not sure exactly what HDR images look like,
check out the HDR tag
on Flickr and you’ll be convinced you need to HDR out your whole photo
library. You probably don’t want to take things that far, but this is a
great method for adding some real zip to your images under the right
circumstances. — Adam Pash

How to Create Professional HDR Images [Backing Winds]

Read more:

How To, Image Editing, Photography, Photoshop

Tech from Lifehacker

Geek to Live: Roll your own timeline

by Gina Trapani

I have a terrible memory, especially when it comes to when
things happened. Significant life events – like graduating and 9/11 -
are all landmarks that help me remember when events occurred relative
to them (i.e., “that was before I moved to California.”) But
there are still long periods of my past that are just a big amorphous
blur – especially before I started using a computer every day.

As a result, I’ve always been fascinated with digital timelines
as a memory aid and reference: the ones that occur as artifacts of
other activities (like our sent email folder and digital photo
collection), and the ones we can purposefully construct for historical
documentation.

So today I’ll go over how to visualize a series of events using the open source dynamic widget called Timeline.

Tech from Lifehacker

The top 100 free Gutenberg Project books

Keep track of the most popular free ebooks at the Gutenberg Project with their Top 100.

You have quite a few sorting choices available to you here: Top 100
EBooks yesterday, Top 100 Authors, Top 100 EBooks in the last 7 days,
Top 100 Authors last 7 days, Top 100 EBooks last 30 days, and the Top
100 Authors in the last 30 days. This should give you plenty to browse
through, and when you’ve got a few all picked out? Download ‘em and make your very own book binding. — Wendy Boswell

Top 100 [Project Gutenberg]

Tech from Lifehacker

Turn Google into your own personal (free) Napster

Google is good for so many things, among which is searching for all sorts of files, including MP3′s. Here’s a quick primer:

• -inurl:(htm|html|php) intitle:”index of” +”last modified” +”parent directory” +description +size +(wma|mp3) “Nirvana”

• -inurl:(htm|html|php) intitle:”index of” +”last modified” +”parent directory” +description +size +(wma|mp3) “Nirvana”

Just substitute the term “Nirvana” for any band or singer you might
be looking for, and your search will lead you to open indexes that
contain downloadable music files. — Wendy Boswell

Turn Google into Napster 2000 [Marc and Angel]

Read more:

Google, Mp3, Search engines

Tech from Lifehacker

Create unique voicemail greetings for each caller

Web site YouMail is a free web app/voicemail service that lets you
record personalized greetings for different callers in your contact
list.

YouMail works like this: After you go through their somewhat arduous
set up, which requires you to change your phone’s default voicemail
behavior (makes sense, but it’s a lot of work if you just want to try
it out), you can start recording custom greetings for different
contacts.

To get started, you’d want to record a default message that will be
heard by any caller for whom you don’t record a personalized greeting;
message recording can be done either with your cell phone or inside
your browser (Java is required for in-browser recordings). After you
record the default message, you can get started setting up personalized
greetings for individual contacts – or so one would hope.

Tech from Lifehacker

Download of the Day: CamStudio (Windows)

Windows only: Can’t bear to explain to Dad again how a bookmarklet works? Record a short video demonstration using screen recording software CamStudio.

The free CamStudio doesn’t quite have nearly the number of killer editing features our favorite
(but ‘spensive) Camtasia Studio does, but it records .avi files that it
can convert to .swf Flash files easily enough, which can be small
enough to email or load up on your web site. Above is a quick movie I
shot with CamStudio showing off Firefox 2′s horizontal tab scrolling in
action. For another example, view a CamStudio movie that demonstrates how to download the software from SourceForge (with voice recording.) CamStudio is a free download, Windows only. Thanks, Tephlon! — Gina Trapani

UPDATE: Sorry for the autoplaying movie, folks. Try as I might I can’t get it to NOT play automatically.

CamStudio

Tech from Lifehacker

Download of the Day: Yep (Mac)

Mac OS X only: Freeware program Yep is a PDF viewer and organizer for your many PDF docs.

Think of it as iPhoto for your PDFs. After you install Yep, it scans your hard drive and gathers together all the sundry PDF docs scattered about your computer into one handy, searchable interface. Yep supports tagging and searching your entire PDF library, and if you’ve got a scanner, it even integrates with your scanner for easy addition of your paper documents. I’ve been getting a lot more eBooks and whatnot in PDF form lately, and I’ve been dying for something to aggregate and keep track of them. Looks like Yep might be just the ticket. Yep 1.1 is free, requires Mac OS X. Thanks Jason!

Yep [via Cheap Mac Apps]

Tech from LIfehacker

Bypass all Windows Genuine Advantage validation

Haklabs has posted an 8-step solution you can use to bypass the annoying Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) validation process for any Microsoft product installation–not just IE7.

We here at Lifehacker don’t condone piracy of any kind, which WGA is meant to prevent. But as Gina so eloquently put it in a comment on the IE7 story:

Besides feeling like Microsoft virtually pats you down every time you install their software, [WGA] also increases the amount of time it takes to install their software.

WARNING: I haven’t tried this process myself, which requires you to install a small utility. Proceed with caution. — Rick Broida

Bypass WGA in Style

Tech from Lifehacker

Get organized with GTDTiddlyWiki

by Jason Thomas

Everyone has to find their own killer personal organizational app, and for me, it’s a single, free HTML document called GTDTiddlyWiki. The self-contained standalone mini-wiki is packed with features but it doesn’t dictate how you work – it provides a canvas on which you can design your own process improvements and workflows.

Don’t let GTDTiddlyWiki’s unusual name put you off. It’s one of the best organization apps available, and in fact it beats the pants off all the commercial organizational software I’ve tried.

If you’re looking for your killer app, today I’ve got a primer on how I’ve put GTDTiddlyWiki to work for me.

What’s GTDTiddlyWiki?

GTDTW is an HTML document that you save to your local hard drive and edit there using you web browser. When you save information, it edits itself, and stores what you’ve written in an internal data format. This is very convenient for people who are into portable apps on USB keys, because it’s completely self-contained, always with you and only requires a web browser to edit. It’s also very easy to back it up: just send it up to your Gmail account every few days, or better yet schedule a job to do it for you.

To download GTDTW, right-click this GTDTiddlyWiki link and save it to a folder on your desktop. Don’t save it to your desktop if you intend to keep it there; I’ll explain why in a minute. In fact, you don’t even need to save it at all: you can follow through most of this tutorial with the one that’s up there on the site.

Now that you’ve saved it, load it up in Firefox. You’re going to see something like this (click to enlarge):

Over there on the left is a menu. That’s all editable, and it’s one way you can get around in GTDTW.

Over on the right are what they call “tiddlers.” These are analogous to pages in a traditional wiki. You could also say that they’re like notecards in a Hipster PDA, and that’s no accident: GTDTW was designed from the get-go to work like index card stacks. You can even print tiddlers to index cards, so you have a nice way of dumping out lists and so on for when you’re on the go.

Editing GTDTiddlyWiki

There’s a button on the menu to the left that says “CreateNewTiddler.” Click it. On the right, you’ll see a new card appear. Double-click it, enter a title — for now, call it Lists — and type in some text. When you’re finished, click “done” or just hit Ctrl-Enter. Your tiddler’s finished now. But it’s not saved permanently yet. To do so, click “save changes” on the menu. Your first time it will trigger a Firefox warning telling you that the Javascript wants to save something on your local hard drive. Click the “Allow” button and check off “Remember this decision” so you don’t get asked every time. You’re good to go now, and next time you load up GTDTW your new tiddler will show up in the system.

Note: If you’ve never done much with wikis before, the formatting involved can seem daunting at first. GTDTW syntax is a simplified version of the highly evolved app that runs Wikipedia, but it does take getting used to. Bear with me; after a little practice it becomes automatic.

Building your GTDTiddlyWiki

You’ve probably evolved a number of organizational methods of your own that fit your own work style. You’re probably going to want to edit the menu to reflect your own process. To do that, click on the “MainMenu” button in the menu. It pops up a tiddler. That’s right — the menu itself lives on a tiddler, and you can edit it just like any other card. Click the yellow “edit” button on the MainMenu tiddler. You’ll see a number of entries in brackets. Add a new one: type “[[Lists] ]” and close the card. Now, over on the left, you should see the item appear in the menu. Click the menu item Lists and the new card you made earlier should appear. Snazzy.

You might want to call it something more descriptive than that. I have one called “Ideas” that I use to reference other cards containing ideas for articles, projects, etc. Here’s how to link to other cards from within a tiddler:

Say you’re going on vacation and you need to remember to bring everything with you. That would be a new list, so you want it to be referenced from your “Lists” card.

Open up “Lists” from the menu, or if you already have it open, just double-click it to edit the card. On it, you have whatever you typed earlier. Now, type “VacationList” and close the tiddler. It’s important that you make it one single word with two capitals (“camel case”). That’s a WikiWord, and it’s how wiki’s indicate links to other pages. Alternatively, you can just enclose the word in double brackets like we did above.

You’ll see that VacationList link is on there, and it’s in italics. The italics mean that the tiddler hasn’t been created yet. Click that link and it’ll create a new tiddler called VacationList. You can edit that tiddler to indicate everything you need to bring with you. You can make it a bulleted lists by typing an asterisk ahead of each word.

If you want, just paste the following text into your new card:

!Packing
*Into Suitcase
**Scarf
**Gloves
**iPod

!Shopping
*Sporting Goods Store
**New Boots
**Trail Mix
**Pocket Heaters

When you click “Done,” here’s what it should look like:

Here’s a tip for things like shopping or packing lists you might print out to index cards: If you use a double asterisk, it’ll result in an empty circle instead of a solid bullet. That way, when you finish each item on the list, just fill in the corresponding circle. Make sure to use a sharp number 2 pencil! That and numerous other tips are on the FormattingInstructions menu item.

Configuring GTDTiddlyWiki

There are a few little usability issues with GTDTW, but they’re easy to get around. Firstly, you should go into “options” on the menu and click “AutoSave.” I also uncheck “EnableAnimations,” because sometimes the animations can result in slowness, especially if you’re running from remote over X or through something like VMWare.

The reason AutoSave is so important is because GTDTW lives in Firefox. More specifically, it lives in a Firefox tab. It’s real easy to forget and start up multiple instances of GTDTW, making you run into version control issues. You also might just accidentally close the tab GTDTW is on, and even though it’ll ask you to confirm, you don’t want to be adding a lot of cards to the system, switch to another tab and forget to save it.

In Options, you’ll also notice a checkbox labeled “Save Backup.” That button is the reason why you don’t want to throw GTDTW onto your desktop. It saves incremental backups every time you make a change, each one in its own new file. This is nice in case you make a mistake or need to revert, but it can result in clutter that you don’t really need, so you want to place GTDTW in its own separate folder. Once your GTDTW file grows to a few megs or so, you’ll also want to go into its folder and clear out some of the older backup files occasionally to save disk space, because it can add up.

When I want to back up my GTDTW, I just send it to a Gmail account I’ve set up for handling backups. I have a Linux cron job that sends it up there every day. That way, you keep running incremental backups of your work over time. It’s not good to use Gmail as a primary file storage, but it’s great for backups like this because it keeps everything nicely organized by date. You could also just use your “Gmail This” bookmarklet and add your saved GTDTW file as an attachment. Here’s a previous LIfehacker feature on emailing yourself backups on Windows.

External links to your other capture tools

For a while, I was adding everything under the sun into GTDTW. Now, not so much. The file will get big, bloated and unwieldy. For a while, I was linking to files on my local hard drive (see the LinktoFolders tiddler under FormattingInstructions), but that’s unwieldy too if you move from computer to computer.

Better to link to your Google Notebooks and store information there. Just add an external link to a tiddler like so: [[MyNotebook|http://www.google.com/notebook/] ]. If you’re logged into Google Notebook, it’ll bring up your full page view. In Firefox, you can just middle-click the link and it will open in a new tab.

Ready to print something to notecards? Just hit “Print” from your browser and the tiddlers you have open will print just as nice as could be.

You’ll find that your methods for using GTDTW will evolve over time. For a while, I was using GTDTW for my monthly planner. Now, under my “Agenda” menu item, I have a link to my Google calendar. You guessed it– it’s just the same as above, except the link looks like this: [[http://www.google.com/calendar/] ].

GTDTW is a great tool for research, organizing different clippings, images and whatnot into an format that’s easy to navigate and search. In fact, you might want to save Google searches to look at later. Just link to them: [[Lifehacker|http://www.google.com/search?q=lifehacker] ]

I could go on for probably twenty more pages about all the ways I’ve used GTDTW. I’m not even touching on how to use tags, or the search utility, or the full-featured regular expression searching that it offers.

GTDTiddlyWiki took getting used to, but now I use it every day. But in its customizability lies a pitfall: it has the potential to be an incredible distraction and time-waster. Don’t just play with it like a new toy and then discard it. Work up a system and stick with it for a while, actually use it. Then, after you’ve integrated it into your workflow, start refactoring: look at the way you’re using it and figure out how you can streamline your process. That’s how you get continual improvement over time.

For more ideas of what you can do with these great apps, check tiddlywiki.com. Also, thank the developers. They deserve it.

Tech from Lifehacker

Download of the Day: Adobe Soundbooth beta (Windows/Mac)

Windows and Mac: Adobe’s new Soundbooth app promises to make short work of editing audio. The software can remove noise from recordings, polish voice-overs, add audio effects and filters, and create custom music to fit a production.

In other words, Soundbooth is like an upscale version of everyone’s favorite open-source audio editor, Audacity. But if you’re heavily into audio and want a working sneak-peek of this new Adobe product (before they start charging for it), the beta stands ready for downloading. (And because it is a beta, make sure to view the known issues list before installing. An ounce of prevention and all that.) — Rick Broida

Adobe Soundbooth

Tech from Lifehacker

Early Adopter Download of the Day: Paint.NET 3.0 Alpha (Windows)

Windows only: Advanced image editor Paint.NET is a free Windows Paint replacement on steroids.

With incredible features (for a free image editor) like layers, red eye fixing, action history, extensive effects and multi-document management, Paint.NET’s the way to go if you’re in need of a serious image editor but don’t have the cash for a Photoshop license. We’ve been fans since several versions ago, and each revision impresses us more. Version 3.0 is in alpha; final release is due out February of 2007. Paint.NET requires the free .NET runtime, and is a free download, Windows only. — Gina Trapani

Paint.net [via TechCrunch]

Tech from Lifehacker

Download of the Day: iPod -> Folder (Windows/Mac)

Windows and Mac OS X only: Freeware program iPod -> Folder allows users a super-simple way to do a full backup of their iPod on any Mac or Windows computer.

We’ve actually posted a few methods for backing up your iPod in the past, but iPod -> Folder is a nice standout both for its simplicity and it’s Windows and Mac versions. The downside is that iPod -> Folder doesn’t allow you to selectively backup music, so it’s an all-or-nothing affair. That said, this is a great little app to download and stick on your iPod so you can easily “back up” your music at any computer. Thanks Rory!

iPod -> Folder [longfingers.com]

Tech from Lifehacker

Download of the Day: iSquint 1.5 (Mac)

Mac OS X only: Freeware program iSquint is a catchall video conversion app for your video iPod.

While we have mentioned iSquint once before, a new version has just been released to convert videos to the newly supported iPod resolutions (640×480 in H.264 – the new standard for downloads from the iTunes store). Other than that, iSquint is still the best solution for one-click, simple conversion from virtually any codec to iPod compatible video. — Adam Pash

iSquint

Tech from Lifehacker

Download of the Day: TVUplayer (Windows)

Windows only: Freeware program TVUplayer lets you watch potentially any TV channel for free.

TVUplayer works like this: Someone (called a “broadcaster”) records live TV on their computer, then sends out the stream to the world at large. From that point, the more people who decide to watch the station, the better the “signal” you’ll receive, since TVUplayer uses peers to redistribute content similar to bittorrent (or that’s how I understand it). That means it’s going to be uploading plenty while it’s running (and believe me, it did). What I was most impressed by is that TVUplayer was less than 1 minute behind my live TV, which is pretty impressive.

The quality was good, especially for streaming video, but this will depend on the channel you watch. If you try a station with fewer viewers, the signal won’t be as strong, and you stream will suffer.

Will this last? Probably not. But if you’re looking for yet another good way to watch some free TV on your computer (with channels like ESPN, HBO, Comedy Central, and all the major networks), TVUplayer is a good place to look. — Adam Pash

TVUplayer [TVU networks via Web TV Hub]

Tech from Lifehacker

Download of the Day: Ext2 Installable File System (Windows)

Windows only: Freeware program Ext2 Installable File System lets you read ext2/ext3 formatted partitions from a Windows computer.

If you’ve set up a dual (or even triple) boot of Linux, whether Ubuntu or not, chances are you’re using an Ext2 file system when you’re working in Linux that your Windows boot just can’t read. We’ve covered mounting NTFS partitions from the Linux perspective before, but this software should take care of this problem from the Windows perspective. Thanks Thomas! — Adam Pash

Ext2 Installable File System For Windows [fs-driver.org]

Tech from Lifehacker

Convert files with Media-Convert

Media-Convert is a free online service that will convert audio, video, and text files for you, from and to virtually any kind of format.

All you need to do is figure out where the file is resting on your machine and what format you want it converted to (Media-Convert automatically detects what kind of format the file is in). For instance, maybe you need to switch an Access database over to an Excel spreadsheet – you can do that here. Converted files show up in a couple of different formats: URL, zipped, mobile, or downloadable from the site itself. — Wendy Boswell

Media-Convert.com [via Digital Inspiration]

Tech from Lifehacker

Use your EV-DO phone for internet access

The handy hardware hackers at Engadget have put together an extensive tutorial for using your EV-DO pocket PC phone with your laptop (Windows or Mac).

Engadget is using a Verizon phone (XV6700), but they claim that most of the techniques are applicable to other EV-DO devices. The post covers connecting via USB on a Windows computer and Bluetooth on a Mac. Gina recently covered using your cell phone as a modem from a similar angle using her Sprint schwag, but if that method didn’t work out for you, you might want to give Engadget’s post a look. — Adam Pash

How-To: Use your EV-DO Pocket PC phone for internet access [Engadget]

Tech from Lifehacker

Hack Attack: Play games on your iPod for FREE

by Adam Pash

Recently Apple announced that you can buy video games for your 5G video iPod for 5 bucks a pop. Cool, right?

But what if you don’t own a video iPod? What if you’re stuck in the world of pre-video obsolescence? Worse yet, what if you don’t have 5 bucks? The new games for sale at the iTunes Store aren’t for you, and that’s not quite so cool. Luckily, you can still play video games like Texas Hold ‘Em, Tetris, and Bejeweled (all of which are for sale at the iTunes Store) on pretty much any iPod with a little bit of virtual elbow grease for free. Here’s how.

iPodLinux and Rockbox

Two non-Apple tools allow you to play games on your iPod: iPodLinux and Rockbox, both of which are completely free and open source. I’ve used and been impressed with both, but today we’ll stick to iPodLinux since it’s easier to install. I’ll describe the process from the perspective of a Windows user, but iPodLinux installers are available for Mac OS X and Linux as well.

Getting games up and running on iPodLinux is a pretty simple 3 step process:

1. Install iPodLinux
2. Install some games
3. Play your games

It’s not exactly news that you can play games on an iPod with iPodLinux, but you may not know just how easy the process can be.

Step one: Install iPodLinux on your iPod

NOTE: Though I haven’t had any problems using iPodLinux, you could potentially run into a snag that would require you to restore your iPod’s firmware, which could mean you lose all of the music currently on your iPod. So do back up your iPod’s music and files before proceeding.

First, download the iPodLinux Installer and extract the contents to a folder on your computer. Don’t use a temporary folder, since you’ll use the installer more than once, and this is where it will backup your current firmware and settings for easy uninstallation if you choose to get rid of iPodLinux.

The iPodLinux wiki currently claims that the installer doesn’t work properly if you’ve upgraded your iPod firmware with the new iTunes 7, but I am running the latest firmware on my 4G iPod and didn’t have a problem. Your mileage may vary, but if you do have a problem with your iTunes 7-upgraded iPod, you can always downgrade your firmware with the iPod Updater 2006-06-28 in order to install iPodLinux (since iTunes 7 has been somewhat of a mess, scads of people are downgrading anyway).

If you’re ready to give it a try, run the installer. Again, the iPodLinux people make a point of telling you that lots of iPods aren’t officially supported, but you’ll find that for most purposes (at least for the games we’ll be installing), pretty much any iPod should work fine.

Installation is straightforward. Plug in your iPod with disk mode enabled and run the installer, keeping the defaults. You may be told at some point (at least I was) that there’s some dependency errors, but just click OK and barrel ahead.

When you get to the boot loader options, you have a choice: You can have your iPod automatically boot to Apple’s default firmware (holding the Rewind/Back button during the boot process will load iPodLinux), boot iPodLinux by default (holding Rewind boots Apple firmware), or select the iPodLoader2, which gives you a boot manager interface where you can choose what to load each time you start up your iPod. In most cases, I’d suggest loading the iPod firmware by default, though I’m currently using iPodLoader2 (pictured above) without problems.

When your installation is complete, go to iTunes and eject your iPod. You may have to plug your iPod into the wall outlet to complete the installation, but the next time your iPod starts up you should be able to boot into iPodLinux.

Step two: Load some games

Now that your iPod is dual-booting Linux and the default Apple firmware, it’s time to get those games running. Plug your iPod into your computer, boot your iPod into the Apple firmware, and run the iPodLinux installer again. This time the installer will recognize that you’ve already got iPodLinux installed. Select “Update my existing installation” and hit Next. The installer should take you to a page of packages you can choose to install on your iPod. This is where you can choose your games.

The installer gets a little buggy for me at this point, but you can get around it easily. When the package list finishes downloading, I don’t always get the option to go to the next page and view the packages. However, if I hit Back and then Next, I’m taken to the package list. (I’m but one man, so this may or may not happen to you.)

Once you make it to the package installation tree, you can select from a long list of cool games and other modules for your iPod. [1] Select the games and modules you’d like to install, hit next, and wait for the installation to finish.

Step three: Play your games

Once the installer finishes, you can eject your iPod and boot back into iPodLinux. Once the interface is loaded, go to Extras -> Games (just like you would on Apple’s firmware) and you should see all of the games you installed. Here’s a quick taste of all the games I’ve been playing on my 4G iPod:

BlueCube (Tetris)

DuckHunt (It’s surprisingly playable on an iPod, but chances are the dog will laugh at you more than normal)

iDeal (Deal or No Deal game)

iGem (Bejeweled)

PodPoker (Texas Hold ‘Em)

TuxChess (Chess)

Keep in mind that some of these games work and look a little better than others, but all of the games I’ve mentioned work very well on my 4G iPod. And they’re all free.

As I said earlier, iPodLinux isn’t the only way to play games on your iPod; in fact, I’ve had plenty of fun in the past playing Doom with Rockbox (in my experience, it’s much easier to set up Doom in Rockbox than iPodLinux). If you’re feeling particularly ambitious, you can set up a triple-boot of Rockbox, iPodLinux, and the default Apple firmware using iPodLoader2.

Whatever you choose, it’s pretty easy to get a bunch of fun games on your iPod for absolutely free. If anyone out there has tried iPodLinux or Rockbox and you want to weigh in, or you’ve got any questions about this process, direct your iPod-game-lovin’ energy to the convenient comment box below.

Finally, if you’re looking for more ways to have fun with your iPod, check out my other iPod-focused features.

Adam Pash is an associate editor for Lifehacker who doesn’t have a 5G video iPod and wouldn’t buy games for it even if he did. His special feature Hack Attack appears every Tuesday on Lifehacker. Subscribe to the Hack Attack RSS feed to get new installments in your newsreader.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] The package list is also the place to go to remove troublesome modules. For example, the MPD module has caused iPodLinux to freeze during boot-up for me, but removing it through the installer takes care of this problem. Also, if you try a game you don’t like and what to remove it, just come back to the package installation tree and uncheck it. [back up]

Tech from Lifehacker

Save money by going on vacation in the off-season

Summer’s over, and so is vacation time, right? Not so fast; you can save a hefty chunk of change (and miss the crowds!) by going on vacation in the off-season:

During the low periods, airlines, hotels, tour operators, and other travel companies are eager to attract paying customers by offering deals. Price-cutting, freebies, and special offers suddenly become the norm in places that wouldn’t dream of offering discounts when demand is high.

What are some ways that you’ve take advantage of the off-season? Let us know your thoughts in the comments. — Wendy Boswell

Low season, low cost: Five tips for off-peak travel [Smarter Travel via Sound Money Tips]

Tech from Lifehacker

One phone number to rule them all

GrandCentral is a brilliant new web app that lets you consolidate all of your phone numbers into one number, meaning someone can call you on your GrandCentral phone number and all of your phones (cell phone, work phone, home phone) will ring. And then it gets interesting.

If you don’t want every one of your phones ringing each time someone calls your free GrandCentral number, you can set rules by friends, family, work, and others, defining where the calls should be directed. When a user leaves a message, you can listen to it online or directly on your phone. The remaining set of features on GrandCentral are a little mind-blowing, in that “I’d never thought of that, but how am I now living without it?” sort of way.

When you pick up a call that’s been forwarded with GrandCentral, you can choose to answer it, send it to voicemail (which will be done automatically if you don’t answer), or send it to voicemail and listen in on the message as it’s being left in real time (just like you’re listening to someone leave a message on an answering machine). You can interrupt a “ListenIn” message at any time and join the conversation by pressing star (*).

If you’re on a call and you decide that you want to record your conversation, just hit 4 at any time. You can also record personalized greetings based on contact groups and upload your own MP3s to be played in place of your ring.

All of this can be done with GrandCentral’s free account, though there are a few limitations to the free account (none of which severely hinders the service). As you can tell, after spending the morning playing around with it, I’m pretty impressed with this service. The only problem I’ve had with GrandCentral so far is that making calls from the online interface (which, similar to Jajah, connects to your phone, then the phone of the person you’re calling); it seems like a simple part of the functionality, but who knows – maybe I’m doing something wrong (I’m not).

I’m not ready to tell all of my contacts to start calling my GrandCentral number just yet, but I may in time. If you give it a try, let us know what you think about it in the comments. Thanks Nick! — Adam Pash

Tech from Digg

More Pentium 4 price cuts coming

The largest price cut goes to the Pentium 4 631, which runs at 3.0GHz, has 2MB of L2 cache, and an 800MHz FSB. It will sell for $69 in quantities of 1,000—a 58 percent reduction. The Pentium 4 641, clocked at 3.2GHz, but with the same cache and FSB, will go for $74; the 3.4Ghz Pentium 4 651 will sell for $84.

Tech from Digg

More Pentium 4 price cuts coming

The largest price cut goes to the Pentium 4 631, which runs at 3.0GHz, has 2MB of L2 cache, and an 800MHz FSB. It will sell for $69 in quantities of 1,000—a 58 percent reduction. The Pentium 4 641, clocked at 3.2GHz, but with the same cache and FSB, will go for $74; the 3.4Ghz Pentium 4 651 will sell for $84.

Tech from Digg

More Pentium 4 price cuts coming

The largest price cut goes to the Pentium 4 631, which runs at 3.0GHz, has 2MB of L2 cache, and an 800MHz FSB. It will sell for $69 in quantities of 1,000—a 58 percent reduction. The Pentium 4 641, clocked at 3.2GHz, but with the same cache and FSB, will go for $74; the 3.4Ghz Pentium 4 651 will sell for $84.

Tecg from Engadget

How-To: Serve video to your TiVo

Filed under: Features, Home Entertainment

TiVos have been hacked on and modified by dedicated hardware enthusiasts ever since they first showed up on the scene in the late 90s. Video streams can be pulled off of them and re-inserted by hand, but previously that was a rather painful process — and playing non-TiVo video was even more painful. In today’s How-To, we’ll show you how to serve up your archived video to your TiVo with a click of your remote.

Today we’ll be using a piece of software called TivoServer to set up a… TiVo server. Because the TiVo is designed to only play back TiVo recorded video, it can’t play back video that’s been encoded in other formats. The nice thing about TivoServer is that it pretends to be another networked TiVo, and it actually re-encodes video on demand to the format that TiVo is expecting.

We’re sure you understood that, but here’s the short version: TivoServer will serve up your collection of DivX / AVI / whatever codec videos for playback on your MRV-enabled (unencrypted) TiVo.

Stock TiVos include some video encryption, but it’s easily disabled when the box is hacked. We modded ours by hand, but we hear that the TiVo Zipper hack can also take care of this for you.

For today’s How-To, we’ll serve using our Ubuntu Linux box. It’s on the same LAN as our TiVo, but otherwise there’s nothing special about the installation. The machine doesn’t have to be the latest and greatest — we’ve successfully run TivoServer from a 700Mhz Pentium III.

Our DirecTV TiVo has been networked and modded to allow the MRV (Multi Room Viewing) feature to work. With it, the DTiVo can transfer and receive shows to and from other TiVos with MRV enabled. (OK, this pic is of our HD tivo, but you get the idea)

Download TivoServer for Linux from the download section on SourceForge. You’ll want to grab tivoserver-0.4.3-linux.gz and save it to your home directory. It’s a standalone binary, so you don’t need to install any pre-requisites that Ubuntu doesn’t include. (And yes, there are OS X and Cygwin versions.)

Create a video directory in your home directory (i.e. /home/willo/video). Alternatively, you can create a symbolic link to the top directory of wherever you like to keep your video files. TivoServer doesn’t allow us to change the location that it searches for videos.

Copy some video files into your video directory. TivoServer won’t start unless there’s something in there. (If you add files later you’ll need to restart TivoServer.)

Open up a shell and cd to wherever you saved tivoserver-0.4.3-linux.gz. To set it up, unzip the file, make it executable, and run it:
gunzip tivoserver-0.4.3-linux.gz
chmod 755 tivoserver-0.4.3-linux
./tivoserver-0.4.3-linux

TivoServer should be running if you put your video files in the right place. Now go visit your TiVo.

At the bottom of the Now Playing List, you should find TivoServer. Select it.

Under the TivoServer, you’ll find your list of shared videos. Select one to test it out.

Select one of your videos and hit Watch on this TV.

The TiVo will request the file and TivoServer will transcode and send the stream to the TiVo.

Once TiVo has enough in the buffer, it’ll give you this splash screen. Go ahead and start playing the show.

Sweet, geeky success.

TivoServer is a nice piece of software, but it has a few problems. There’s no config file, so you have to point ~/video at your video location. If it chokes on a file it doesn’t like (like some DVDs we encoded with XviD), it will crash. Support for TivoServer can be found at the dealdatabase forums.

Still, even with its quirks, TivoServer means that you can archive your videos using DivX (or whatever makes you happy) to conserve storage space and play them back on any networked TiVo in the house. Good luck, and may the forc– nevermind.

Tech from Techcrunch

NBC to put new primetime shows online for free

The race to put TV on the internet continues with an announcement today from NBC that all of their new prime time shows will stream for free this fall. Each show will have a cast member, creator or producer “host a live blog immediately after the premiere episode,” according to the episode. Does this mean a live chat or several blog posts with comments enabled and responded to? One way or the other, it’s an interesting attempt to turn a streaming broadcast into a public event.

On October 1st, the NBC Universal video player will undergo an upgrade for the shows and will offer a high-resolution, large-format version. See our post yesterday about the new NBC Universal online video marketplace NBBC for a look at the simple but clean looking player the company offers now. NBC also offers some shows on iTunes.

“When you launch a new season,” Jeff Gaspin from NBC says, “it’ s important that you get the shows in front of as many eyeballs as possible.” Well, at least as many as is possible with streaming not downloads and through your player and not on YouTube. Though to be fair, NBC has made up with YouTube to some extent.

NBC’s announcement follows yesterday’s news from AT&T, who have teamed with MobiTV to offer their broadband customers 20 streaming channels of cable and made-for-broadband TV, including Bloomberg Television, HGTV, Food Network, History Channel, Oxygen, Maxx Sports and the Weather Channel. That service will cost $20 per month and aims in time to offer a wider catalog of channels viewable on PC, TV and mobile devices.

I personally would be more likely to pay $20 a month to get the some news and sports channels on my phone than I would sit through free primetime TV on my computer and chat with TV producers. Blake Robinson at CrunchGear covered this today as well though, and he says that some of the shows set to stream will be well worth watching.

NBC

Tech from Lifehacker

Hack Attack: Get more from Google Desktop

by Adam Pash

Here at Lifehacker, we’ve got plenty of love for Google Desktop – like Wendy’s recent beginner’s guide to mastering Google Desktop search. Personally, I love Google Desktop as a desktop search app, but I’m more interested in it as an application launcher first and search tool second. Out of the box, however, GDesktop isn’t well-configured as an app launcher, and overall there are a few missing features that could really improve the program.

This week I’m going to introduce you to how I use Google Desktop search, from the best preferences configuration and plug-ins to a quickly scripted feature I feel is sorely missing.

Optimize your settings for app launching

First, let’s discuss settings. Out of the box, Google Desktop’s defaults are fine, but since I prefer using GDesktop primarily as an app launcher (I launch programs a lot more than I search for files), there is one setting that I consider absolutely necessary.

As Wendy highlighted in her feature, double-tapping Control will bring up your Google Desktop quick search box. Chances are, unless you’re doing some hardcore digging for files, you’ll be able to find the file or program you’re looking for in the as-you-type quick search results, without the need to view the results in your browser. So the very first setting I change is under Display -> Quick Find, where instead of “Search by default,” I’m all about “Launch programs/files by default.”

This simple tweak turns Google Desktop Search into a much more useful application and document launcher, and though I’m sure many of you made the same change as soon as you installed GDesktop, it’s one of those settings that can make all the difference if you haven’t.

Open containing folder script

Often, when I’m looking for a file that I don’t know the name of, I do remember the name of a file in the same directory. Alternately, a lot of times I just want to open up a directory in Windows Explorer, but GDesktop only indexes common folders like My Documents or My Computer. You can right-click a search result and select Open Folder, but I’ve always felt that a keyboard shortcut would be a lot easier… so I made one. (Where would I be without you, AutoHotkey?!)

Using the Open Containing Folder AHK script, when you find the file whose folder you’d like to open, hit Shift+Enter and you’ll open the file’s containing folder rather than the file. You can download and run the GDesktop AHK script as an executable below and give it a home in your startup folder, or, if you’re an AHK scripter, just add the following text to an existing AHK script.

+Enter::IfWinActive ahk_class _GD_ScreenSrchBoxSend, {AppsKey} FReturn

Open Containing Folder in GDesktop [AutoHotkey executable]

Re-indexing your hard drive

Unfortunately, Google Desktop isn’t always on top of its game, and from time to time files seem to disappear. For example, for a while Google Desktop could not find Opera, and as a result I couldn’t launch it quickly and easily. If you want to band-aid one missing file (like my opera.exe) one solution is to move the file to another directory and then back to where it originated. Google Desktop should pick up on the move and re-index the file.

Alternately, if you feel GDesktop is missing out on a lot of files, a re-index may be in order. To do so, click on the Google Desktop icon in the system tray and select Indexing -> Re-index. Google Desktop will start indexing your hard drive from scratch. Be warned: re-indexing your hard drives takes some time.

I’d love to automate this process to re-index my hard drive every couple of weeks, but an afternoon with AutoHotkey proved fruitless on this one. If anyone else comes up with a good solution, please let me know.

Move your index

With the TweakGDS plug-in, you can easily move your GDesktop index files to any drive you please. The index files can fill up over 1GB of space on your computer (at least they do on mine), so if you have space concerns on a main drive, moving the index may be a wise idea.

TweakGDS (Requires .NET 1.1)

Incorporate Google Desktop into Windows Explorer

If you use Internet Explorer as your default browser, the Google Desktop Search Plug-in for Windows Explorer gives you a Windows Explorer interface to the search tool with the familiar Windows-F shortcut (familiar if you’ve ever used XP’s default file search, that is) or by clicking Search in the Windows Explorer toolbar. Double-tapping Control seems a lot easier to me, but in case you’ve found old habits are hard to break, this is a cool plug-in.

Google Desktop Search Plug-In for Windows Explorer

Google Desktop Gadgets

Google recently held a contest to design hot new gadgets for Google Desktop. Unfortunately, the results of the contest were rather unexciting, much like the whole world of Google Gadgets, in my opinion. I am, however, willing to be convinced otherwise, but as-is I feel that the whole Google Gadget world is completely uncompelling and still miles behind the Yahoo/Konfabulator/Dashboard world.

As such, I don’t use the sidebar at all (turn it off by clicking on the GDesktop icon -> None. However, here are a few gadgets that stand out:

• Google Calendar
• diGGGadget
• Quick Grocery List Builder
• System Monitor
• Del.icio.us Bookmarks
• Dictionary

More Google Desktop goodies

Finally, the Google Operating System blog’s recent Ten reasons to use Google Desktop offers a few more great ways to use Google Desktop, namely to:

• Launch Control Panel items. You can type control panel, mouse, add or remove programs, and so on. Very handy.
• File recovery. If you keep Google Desktop settings to their default, deleted items will not be deleted from your index. Of course, if you don’t like being pointed toward deleted files (I don’t), you can turn off this feature in the preferences.
• Replace Gmail offline. If you allow Google Desktop to index your Gmail account (you need to turn this on in the settings), you can search your Gmail even when you don’t have an internet connection.

Ten reasons to use Google Desktop

If you’ve got any of your own favorite Google Desktop tips and tricks, or perhaps you want to convince me of the value of Google Desktop gadgets, I’m all ears. Let’s hear your thoughts in the comments. Don’t have an account? No problem, now you can get one.

Adam Pash is an associate editor for Lifehacker whose twitchy pinky is never far from the Control key. His special feature Hack Attack appears every Tuesday on Lifehacker. Subscribe to the Hack Attack RSS feed to get new installments in your newsreader.

Tech from Lifehacker

Back up your phone contacts online with Zyb

Web site Zyb backs up and syncs your cell phone’s contacts and calendar data so that you’ll never have to go through the pain of manually entering in contacts on a new phone again.

As if that wasn’t cool enough, it does more. After you start using Zyb, you can enter new contacts and calendar information online, and Zyb will sync them with your phone. What’s more, you can share contacts with other Zyb users, so you and your friends and family can all live in glorious, synced bliss. Unfortunately for me, my phone is not one of the 200 phones supported by Zyb, but chances are yours is. Oh, and did I mention Zyb is totally free? If you give it a try, let us know how it works for you in the comments or at tips at lifehacker.com. — Adam Pash

Zyb [via Gizmodo and Cool Tools]

Tech from Lifehacker

How to produce semi-professional videos

The Download Squad has posted part 1 of a two part series on producing your own semi-professional videos (because everybody likes making a fun video every now and then).

Keep in mind that in general, semi-professional in this context means “on a budget.” If you’ve got a digital camera that can shoot videos, a tripod (around $20 if you don’t have one), something that rolls, duct tape, and a computer, you’ve got pretty much everything you need. The post suggests using open source audio program Audacity with an external microphone if your camera doesn’t have great sound, but if you can get away with using just your camera’s microphone, it’s probably a good idea.

If we’ve got any semi-professional videographers out there, why don’t you give us your tips in the comments. — Adam Pash

Produce your own semi-professional videos – Part 1

Tech from Techcrunch

MySpace To Sell Music Through Snocap

MySpace is getting into the music business. They announced today that they will allow nearly 3 million unsigned bands to sell their music directly to Myspace users. Snocap will provide the back end technology for the service. Fox Interactive, MySpace’s parent company, also took options to purchase SnoCap stock pursuant to the deal (Fox recently took an equity stake in startup SimplyHired as well).

The music will be sold in MP3 format without copy protection of any kind (see eMusic and Amie Street for similar models, as well as others). This comes as major labels are starting to experiment with free music downloads, albeit with copy protection.

It’s unclear whether Myspace will also offer music from major labels pursuant to the deal. The agreement does not prohibit these sales, and Snocap has deals with most major labels. Downloads of music from labels would require copy protection pursuant to Snocap’s existing deals.

Look for additional deals from Myspace as they continue to develop their overall music (and revenue) strategy.

MySpace, Snocap

The Ultimate Mac List for (Free) Apps… and more

Title speaks for itself. Link

Tech from Engadget

myTunes: the simplified iTunes DRM stripper for Windows

Filed under: Portable Audio

Earlier this week we told you about the first tool we’ve yet heard of that strips the FairPlay DRM from the iTunes Music Store v6 tracks you bought, called QTFairUse. Unfortunately, because this tool was still very raw and in Python, so it didn’t seem entirely there yet for the rest of us; well, today we’re one step closer with myTunes, a small (50KB), simple, graphical Windows app designed to strip the DRM off your iTunes tracks lickety split. Based on the QTFairUse Python code (and not that of the original myTunes from way back in the day), this app unfortunately only strips DRM in real time, meaning that while it automates the process as you churn through your playlist, it also requires you to play through your library song by song (compared to FairUse4WM, which strips PlaysForSure DRM en masse). Also, after the FairPlay has been stripped, you still have to use another tool to reconstruct your track from your raw AAC file (which also means you have no metadata). In other words, even though this tool simplifies a lot of the process, it’s still also a huge pain to use, so you’d better be prepared to bust out some shell scripting until the next version of myTunes is released (when they intend to automatically add the headers and metadata, making it a one step process). But it did most definitely work, click on to get an idea of what you’re in for with this early version of myTunes.

[Thanks, Pete]

So the first thing we did was, of course, update to the very latest version of iTunes for Windows (6.0.5.20) and buy a song from the iTunes Music Store.

We love Ultravox, so we picked an appropriate song…

As you can see, we’re prepared for major cash outlays for our editorial.

Once you have your track ready to play, fire up myTunes, set your decoding path, and enable myTunes.

Then, just hit play on your DRMed track, and it will begin the DRM stripping process.

Like we said, it goes in real time, so be patient. You’ll probably want to leave this thing running overnight (hey, that’s 8 hours of un-DRMed music a day, not too bad).

Once it’s done decoding, you have to use another tool called faad.exe to construct a playable AAC ADTS file. Kinda sucks, but it only took 2.8 seconds for Hymn to get built back up. Then we moved all our files (the FairPlay DRMed file, the raw AAC file, and the reconstructed AAC file) to our other machine for testing.

As you’d expect, this is what happened with the AAC file tried to play in VLC. No go — that’s copy protection for ya!

Neither would the raw AAC file play, but that wasn’t a surprise either. The resulting file from faad worked just fine, though.

Unfortunately it had no metadata (as expected).

However, as you can see the bitrate was kept intact, and the file size was almost identical to its original. We can’t yet confirm that this was a lossless DRM stripping method, but we’d wager it is (or at least very close to it). For what it’s worth, we heard absolutely no discernable loss in sound quality. Happy fair use everybody!

Tech from Engadget

HTC Excalibur / O2 Xda cosmo caught in the wild

Filed under: Cellphones

You know it, you need it, and now you can finally loose your wild-eyed gaze upon these non-blurry pics of the HTC Excalibur. Or more appropriately, the Xda cosmo as this fully-functional, pre-release device from O2 Germany has been re-dubbed. Yeah, Germany, which explains the Z and Y switcheroo on zee handy’s QWERTY QWERTZ keyboard. Still, with an expected September/October European release (coming to The States a few months later), we’d expect the specs and cosmetics of this quadband GSM/GPRS/EDGE, WiFi, Bluetooth, and 1.3 megapixel cam WinMo 5.0 Smartphone to push through to production with few, if any changes. Click-on for a few more hi-res shots courtesy of the::unwired.

[Thanks, Martin]

Tech from Engadget

Creative Technology introduces Zen Vision:W

Filed under: Portable Audio, Portable Video

Speaking of Singapore, Creative Technology officially introduced the Creative Zen Vision:W this morning. Of course, last we heard from this little guy was just a week ago, when Popular Mechanics called it the “best screen we’ve seen on a portable media player.” Creative issued a formal press release earlier today, and now we’ve got some of those magical numbers to throw around: 4.3-inch screen, 16:9 format, can view up to 4.5 hours of video, carry 240 hours of vids, and hold up to 15,000 songs. Also, the Zen Vision:W has a Compact Flash slot (there’s an optional adapter for other types of media), for direct transfer from a digital camera — a feature that we’d love to see on other media players as well. It’ll be presented at COMEX 2006 in Singapore starting tomorrow for S$649 ($412 US). Its big brother, the 60GB version, will be priced at S$749 ($475 US), but won’t be available until the end of September. Also mentioned was the rumored size-bumped Zen Vision:M (S$599, or $380 US), which is now at 60GB, available for pre-order at COMEX and for sale online and in retail stores island-wide by September 2006. For those prices, let’s hope that this new widescreen format really catches on, because that original Zen Vision viewing angle was really awful. Come to think of it, maybe we won’t wait on that Singapore bureau, after all.

[Thanks, Kai]

P.S. – Sorry about that cruddy photo, we’re waiting for nice, shiny press pics.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments

Tech from Techcrunch

Podango to Create Podcast Channels

Yet-to-launch Podango, based in Salt Lake City, is trying to corner the podcast market by aggregating popular, topic-specific podcasts into expert-driven channels. The goal is to combine multiple podcasts, which may only be publishing weekly, into a 3-5 shows per day channel with a single RSS feed. Just like old-style television and radio stations.

Podcast directories, like those created by Yahoo and iTunes, are very popular ways of finding new, good podcast content. Podango wants to take this a step further and mash the talent up into topic specific channels, taking some of the work out of finding good content by listeners. If they are successful, look for the established players to quickly follow suit.

Podango will recruite station directors, who in turn will recruit podcasters for their channels, manage the channel using an Ajax drag and drop admin interface, and help recruit advertisers. The hope is that listeners will gain from having a person select the best podcasts for a given category as well as avoid dead air time since shows will be queued one-after-another. Podcasters will gain an audience. Station Directors will have a chance to make “$25K to $250K a year or more.” Of total revenue, Podango will keep 30%, leaving 70% for station directors and individual podcasters.

If this works, I’ll be signing up for sports editorial and their equivalent of Comedy Central. Hurry up and launch, Podango.

A screen shot of how a channel will look is below.

Podango

Tech from Techcrunch

Universal to try ad driven music downloads through SpiralFrog – still with DRM

If you’re familiar with this story, see the updated details at the end. Universal Music, the corporate parent behind labels like MoTown, Geffen Records and many more, announced this morning that they will be making their entire catalogue available for free download through New York based startup SpiralFrog.com starting this fall.

SpiralFrog will offer free downloads wrapped in a still undisclosed form of digital rights management technology. How tired. Executive bios indicate the company has been around for more than two years, but we’ll see if they were doing anything more than lining up big names for their corporate roster, music partnerships and advertisers for the site. How about coming up with some workable alternative to the pathetic state of DRM with two years of work?

Music lovers have been demanding a different business model for some time, and it looks like at least some industry heavy hitters are going to give it a go via SpiralFrog. We’ve profiled several independent sites experimenting with new business models for music lately (Amie Street, Sellaband and Magnatune) but you had to expect the big guys to try something more traditional. See also eMusic, low cost and DRM free.

The CEO of Spiral Frog, Robin Kent, was former CEO of advertising firm Universal Mccann. Their CTO, Vesa Suomalainen, was an executive at Microsoft for 12 years. SpiralFrog’s management and directors is made up of a long list of big media execs, like Frances Preston (former President and CEO of BMI) and Jay Berman (former Warner representative to the RIAA). SpiralFrog told the Financial Times that they were in talks with Warner, EMI and Sony-BMG as well. This is clearly big media’s attempt to try free downloads driven by ads, but it’s still caught up in DRM!

Is there any chance that the ads will generate enough revenue to cover the costs to be incurred? Perhaps if the site is high profile enough there is. High end clothing retailer Perry Ellis is already lined up to advertise on the site. Sounds like a gamble to me, but we’ll see.

Update with details: I just got off Skype with the fantastic Neville Hobson (see FIR), who’s doing PR for Spiral Frog. He wasn’t able to convince me that this was really a compelling service, but he did provide some juicy details.

Spiral Frog will offer a desktop downloader for Windows Media Files (no iPods!) that can be listened to on one PC and two portable devices. Here’s the kicker – you must log in to the Spiral Frog service at least once per month, and see their ads, or your files will stop playing! The details aren’t fully set in stone, but it will be something like that. There will be links to third party sites of the record labels’ choosing if you’d like to buy your freedom to at least skip the ads.

Spiral Frog will also offer far more than just music, but also video and other digital content. The selling point here is that users will be able to access media legally, without the malware, bad network connections and pirate’s shame that comes from other online media sources. Weird Al’s new “Don’t Download This Song” must be linked to in reference to those arguments!

It will be an exciting day if the major labels come up with something truly more compelling than piracy on one hand or coercion on the other – but I don’t think this is it.

SpiralFrog, Universal

Tech from Techcrunch

Webshots Redesign Launches, Video Coming

CNET owned Webshots, a massive property with 420 million photos, relaunched moments ago with a new interface and a number of feature changes.

The most notable changes are to the limits on photo uploading. Free accounts are now able to upload 1,000 photos plus an additional 100 photos per month (the additional photos are applied retroactively and continue to accrue even if not used). Premium accounts, which are $30 per year, allow for 5,000 initial photos plus 500 more per month. Photos are archived at original resolution, and resized for presentation on the site only if larger than 2400×2400.

In another notable move, Webshots will be allowing users to upload video to their webshots accounts starting in September. Video will be transcoded into Flash video for viewing on the website. Our long-time opinion has been that photo sharing sites needed video as well, to allow people to store vacation and other photos and videos in a single location. Look for this feature eventually on Flickr as well.

Our previous coverge of Webshots is here.

Webshots

Tech from Digg

Share Huge Files Online with Gigasize (1.5 GB/FILE!)

Gigasize is new on the block, but compared to sites like Rapidshare and Megaupload, it is light years ahead. Without signing up, you can host files up to 1 gigabyte, or sign up to host huge 1.5 gigabyte files. Could sites like this kill P2P networks?

Tech from Digg: iTunes 6 finally cracked

Remember Hymn? You should, back in the day (like, um, 2004) it allowed you to strip the FairPlay DRM right off iTunes Music Store bought files just like that; well, it’s been a long time in coming, but a new app called QTFairUse looks like it can now be used (with some amount of difficulty) to dump iTunes version 6.0.4 – 6.0.5….

read more | digg story

Tech from Techcrunch

Famster’s hamster wants to network with your mom

Famster is a Flash based social networking site with a long list of features. Created by Whittier California web design company Ivenue, it’s an attempt to take online social networking mainstream for adults. There’s no clear business model yet and I find the site’s branding a little creepy, but the feature set is staggering and the site is so well designed that it’s likely to win over a lot of people in its target audience.

Features include 1GB of “filing cabinet” storage, 1 GB of encoded video storage, a Famstermail email account with 1 GB of storage, unlimited photo uploads, scrapbook pages, a blog, a simple RSS reader, calendering, to-do list sharing, contacts lists with Yahoo! maps integration, a recipes section with 23,000 preloaded recipes and a place to store your own and several other family oriented features (like family tree mapping).

The company heralds a feature that monitors for registered sex offenders in your geographic area. Famster has pages of links to off-site articles about online safety for children, with titles like “Online Predators: It’s worse than you think.” At least one recent study finds that the risk is actually not as big as you might think and Famster’s pandering to widespread fear is a little off-putting to me. Combine that with the stale name of the site and the annoying hamster buddy icon and the site doesn’t do it for me personally, but whatever.

Web IM, better photo handling across components, mobile blogging, photo and video sharing, SMS support and calendar reminders are all listed as coming soon.

It’s a good thing storage is so cheap these days! Storage space was far more limited until Famster hit the front page of Digg last week and people complained. There are no ads on the site and no premium accounts. This is obviously a site that has had a lot of time put into it. It looks great.

There’s also a visual component where you can create an image of your home and avatars for your family members (think CyWorld minihompies) though the long list of things you can change about your avatars does not include the cheekbones. Without the ability to change cheekbones, everyone ends up looking the same in a creepy sort of way.

Cheek bones or no, the site has a strange mix of features that will likely appeal to early adopters and to family users. Ultimately it’ll be the family users that the company needs to satisfy and they may not need things like permalinks for photo pages. These sorts of services must be a stab in the dark and mystery moves like corporate partnerships could make or break Famster. Just as likely, the company could be hoping to be scooped up by someone larger. It wouldn’t be a bad idea for a large media company seeking a family friendly social networking site to grab Famster. Look out Good Housekeeping, here comes the Famster Hamster.

Famster

Tech from Techcrunch

Zooomr launches zoomable picture in picture feature

Photosharing upstart Zooomr launched a number of new features today, the most notable one called Portals. It’s a means of linking zoomable pictures inside of each other. It’s quite striking, as you can see from the video below.

Zooomr also released annotation features today that include the ability to leave notes on images that are color coded by friend status and people notes, or notes that display Zooomr usernames of people hovered over.

The way the Portals work is that just like text notes can be added to photos, Portals lets image publishers tie photos together with boxes that appear when the image is hovered over. Viewers can pan around inside the embedded picture or click to view the picture itself.

Publishers can use Portals to give their images depth and detail. There’s no limit to the number of Portals that can be put in a single image and one Portal image can lead to another. Thus shots from a distance can have multiple close ups folded in; something that could be great for architecture, nature and group photos.

Zooomr

Tech from Techcrunch

Guba starts price war on movie downloads

Guba, who recently added professional content from Warner and Sony to its user generated lineup, announced today that it’s dropping prices on rentals and purchases.

View-On-Demand (VOD), a 24 hour rental priced from $1.79 to $2.99 will drop to $.49 for catalog titles to $.99 for new titles. Download-To-Own (DTO) will go from a range of $9.99 to $19.99 to $4.99 for catalog titles and $9.99 for new releases.

Guba’s CEO Tom McInerney said Guba is making this decision to test the demand impact and build the brand: “I think what’s interesting here is actually trying to get at what prices for a digital download make sense for consumers. No one has done a reasonable test here. We’re losing money but the data will be very valuable to bring back to the studios. I’m quite curious myself.”

McInerney further indicated that demand has been higher for ownership than rental which is contrary to previous consumer research, so it will be interesting to see if these prices tilt the mix towards rental. $.49-$.99 is pretty darn cheap.

DRM still limits the number of devices and copies, the content still plays on a Windows Media Player on a 640 * 480 screen, so the overall offering has not changed save the price. But more titles continue to come online and MCInerney indicated it will reach 1,000 within 3 months, so at least there’s a broader selection than when first previewed here.

Was it a sign of desperation? “Things are selling well,” McInerney said. Whatever ‘well’ is, they could be higher. Obviously, you don’t drop prices if product is flying off the virtual shelves and it’s a lot harder to go back up. So it’s a gamble on Guba’s part that it will drive some serious demand and help goose the studios to lower their wholesale prices. At least, it’s further evidence that Guba has the trust of the studios, which will help its potential exit opportunities somewhere down the road.

Comments on the initial post here indicated TechCrunch readers were unimpressed with the initial offer for the price. Is it more attractive now?

Guba

Tech from Techcrunch

Hullo To Enter VOIP War With Free Product

The VOIP wars are already crowded with more competitors than can possibly build a business. Well capitalized players like Vonage and Skype battle with nimble startups like Gizmo and Jajah in a race for relevance. All have their own twists on the idea of cheap or free calls using the internet. The most recent entrant, Hullo, is a worthy addition to the crowd. Hullo is most like Jajah, with a few notable differences.

Jajah allows easy phone-to-phone calls from their website. It has a somewhat complicated pricing structure, but the important thing to know is that it is free or damn close to free for most calls in the US and Europe. To make a call, you type in your phone number and the phone number you are calling. A moment later your phone rings. Pick it up and the person you are calling is ringing on the other end. From that point on it’s a normal phone call. Jajah generally requires you to initiate calls from their website, although they do have an Outlook plugin, firefox extension and Mac address book plugin as well to ease the process of calling. Simple, straightforward, cheap.

Hullo is a little different. The actual process of having a call is the same as Jajah – first your phone rings, then the person calling you. But as Alec Saunders notes in his review, it does a lot more, too.

First of all, it’s impossible to spend money on the service, at least for now. Everything is free. If you compare closely to Jahah, that isn’t saying much because Hullo only works in North America and Jajah is free in that market. But there are no complicated pricing plans to figure out before making a call.

Hullo is a client-based application that looks like an instant message box. It runs separately from the browser (and unfortunately is only available for Windows machines).

But where Hullo really shines is in the added features. You can make a call from any normal phone or directly from your computer with speakers/headset and a microphone. You can also do group calling by dragging contacts into the call or adding a new phone number. If you need to switch phones, you can drop off the call and add your other number.

Hullo is also useful as a call forwarding device. They issue every user an extension on a normal phone number. When that number is called, Hullo will call your saved phone numbers in the order you tell it to, until it tracks you down.

In our limited testing we found Hullo to have excellent sound quality and a useful productivity tool even when you are away from your computer. A Mac client is needed (or a Firefox plugin), and the interface on the site could use a good scrubbing. They should also kill the free concert ticket promotion – Hullo doesn’t need gimmicks like that to get users. But the service itself is excellent. And like Jajah, it is useful even if you are calling people who are not users of the service.

We also agree with Alec that the service would be better if they added instant messaging and presence features. I would also strongly suggest that they add in a simple call record feature. Podcasters will then flock to the product.

Hullo, Jajah

Tech from Techcrunch

FreshBooks pushes the envelope in online billing

There’s a number of lightweight online invoicing services available, but one Toronto’s FreshBooks is seeking to differentiate itself with some interesting integration with other services.

FreshBooks, formed in 2004 and formerly called 2ndSite, today began allowing users to automatically send invoices to customers by US Postal Mail. Customers who have said they prefer not to use online billing will receive their invoices by first class mail with a window envelope inside for easy payment. The service has in introductory price of $1.09 per US invoice with bulk discounts. Customers receiving invoices by snail mail will be encouraged to go online for dispute resolution and to switch to online billing. BillMyClients is another online service that offers a postal mail delivery, but currently charges a higher per piece rate.

FreshBooks has also released an API for integration with other software and web services. Using the API, new client relationships and invoices can be created inside FreshBooks directly through other sites. Unfortunately the current API doesn’t allow for recurring billing to be set up, but FreshBooks says that’s on its way in the next API release. Competitor Blinksale (our coverage) is also working on releasing an API soon.

Finally, FreshBooks will soon offer integration with PipelineDeals, a pay-as-you go Salesforce competitor.

FreshBooks doesn’t compete with Blinksale by price, but integrating with other services including the good old physical world may be the new area of competition for this and other sectors of small business online.

FreshBooks

Tech from Techcrunch

Let’s Share Some Files – Four Services Compared

File sharing has long been a popular use of the Internet. I remember sitting at my laptop and asking a friend to name a song, and then seeing if I could download it off of Napster and play it before he could find the cd on the shelf, put it into the player and play the song himself. I often won those competitions.

The old Napster is long gone, but was of course replaced with many other P2P networks. Today, a significant portion of Internet traffic is comprised of files being moved over bittorent, a popular and completely decentralized way of sharing files.

Bittorent, though, requires some basic technical knowledge and is neither anonymous nor safe. The RIAA and MPAA routinely monitor these networks and attempt to collect IP addresses of computers they believe are involved in the transfer of copyrighted files. And bittorent is notorious for transferring files that (sometimes) contain viruses, spyware and other malware.

Enter private file sharing networks. WASTE was released in 2003 and allowed people to create private networks among trusted friends. Files could be shared without worrying about malware or prying eyes. All that was needed was trust among the members of a particular network. The downside of WASTE was that setting up and participating in a network was not trivial to do. Private networks did not take off and achieve mass use and adoption.

A new crop of services has popped up recently to make it much easier to share files with a private network of friends and other trusted people. Allpeers, Zapr, Pando and Exaroom are all fairly recent entrants.

AllPeers

We’ve followed Prague/UK based AllPeers from the very beginning, and are very familiar with this product.

Allpeers, which is apparently launching imminently (but is not live as of the time of this post), is a Firefox plugin that uses bittorent technology to complete file transfers. You add friends to your AllPeers network and then send and receive files from them. The interface is intuitive, and there are no restrictions on file sizes or amounts transferred. AllPeers is incredibly easy to use, allows transfers of files and/or folders, and works on any machine that you can run Firefox. We also stressed tested the product by transferring very large files and shutting down Firefox and then the computer itself during tranfer. AllPeers picked up where it left off as soon as Firefox was reopened, which is great.

Like the others, AllPeers is free. But, unlike Pando and Zapr, AllPeers completes file transfers without the need to confirm via email first. However, all sides of the transfer must have AllPeers installed on Firefox.

Zapr

Sydney and Singapore based Zapr , which we profiled here, opened up for public beta testing earlier this week – you can sign up here.

Zapr is a downloadable application that looks and feels a lot like an instant messaging client. You can drag files into Zapr and send them to an email address or Zapr username. The recipient(s) receives an email with a link to the file. Clicking on the link initiates a download of the file through the browser. There are no limits on file size.

Zapr is not using bittorent on the backend and does not upload the file to its servers before transfer. The file is transferred directly from one computer to the other, and requires that the sender be online for the file to transfer properly. This also means that if a user shares a file with 100 people, that will trigger 100 distinct downloads from that user’s computer which will hog bandwidth and very likely crush individual transfers. For that reason, Zapr is not really a private sharing network, but really an easy way to initiate a one-to-one transfer. We also had problems restarting a transfer when it was stopped. Also, anyone who gets access to the link can download the file.

Zapr is built on the .NET platform and therefore is only available for use on Windows machines.

All in all, we like the Zapr user interface but its current limitations make it significantly less useful than AllPeers or Pando. Of note is the fact that, of the four services, Zapr is the only one that doesn’t require recipients to have the Zapr software installed on their computer.

Pando

Pando, based in New York, recently reached 1 million downloads of its software. Pando is a desktop application that runs on Windows or Mac machines. Users drag files into the application and tell it the email address of who to send it to. Multiple recipients are fine, and Pando can transfer folders or files.

Pando has an intelligent, bittorent based back end. When you send a file, the first thing Pando does is upload it to its servers. Recipients receive the file directly from the sender as well as the Pando servers, and if there are multiple recipients then the bittorent efficiency effect really kicks in as all recipients also become senders.

Recipients receive an email and initiate a transfer by opening a small attachment (you must have Pando to download the file).

Pando is an efficient and user friendly service. We’d like to see it initiate transfers without the need to click on an email attachment, and the addition of buddy lists would be a good way to ease the annoyance of re-typing the email address of someone you often share with.

Exaroom

San Francisco based exaroom, which launched in late July 2006, is a Windows only service that requires a download. Once installed, a user can share files within their My Documents folder with other exaroom users. New shared files are viewable through the application interface, and downloads are completed via the browser download manager.

Exaroom is a good way to make your My Documents folder permanently sharable with certain friends, but the lack of features compared to the other services make it a less useful product.

Summary

All four of these services are useful tools for sharing large files with a trusted network.

Each is useful for different goals. However, a popular service that we excluded from this review, yousendit (profiled here), also solves the basic need to transfer a large file to another person or group of people. If you are looking to create a long term sharing network, Allpeers is the way to go. It has platform flexibilty (works on Windows, Linux and Mac), allows creation of buddy lists that allow easy multiple transfers over time, and does not require the use of email to confirm file downloads.

Thanks to Nick Gonzalez for research assistance on this post.

Tech from Lifehacker

Download of the Day: Freenigma extension (Firefox)

The Freenigma Firefox extension adds easy encryption to your web-based email (including Gmail, Yahoo Mail, and Hotmail).

Freenigma is still in beta, so you have to go through a bit of rigamarole to get it set up (like signing up for an invitation, then registering for an account), but for the privacy-hound, it looks like a promising way to add some security to your web-based email. For those of you who don’t want to go through the hassle of signing up for yet another service, you can still encrypt your Gmail messages with this Greasemonkey script, and if you’re not web-based, encrypting email with Thunderbird is only a few steps away. If you encrypt your email, let us know your method of choice in the comments or at tips at lifehacker.com. — Adam Pash

Freenigma [via iSpider.pl]

Tech from Lifehacker

Keep track of Web 2.0 with OriginalSignal

OriginalSignal is a nice way to keep track of the top 15 Web 2.0 trackers: TechCrunch, 37Signals, eHub, and more.

The interface looks and feels like PopUrls, right down to the lack of an RSS feed. However, it’s a nice way to get group headlines at a glance – just plop it into your browser toolbar and keep checking back. One nice thing – you can rearrange the blog modules to appear in whatever order floats your boat on the page. — Wendy Boswell

OriginalSignal.com [via .etc]

Tech from Lifehacker

Download of the Day: FairUse4WM (Windows)

Windows only: Freeware program FairUse4WM removes the digital rights management (DRM) from your Windows Media files.

Specifically, FairUse4WM works only on Windows Media DRM 10 and DRM 11 (aka, PlaysForSure). While “this program is ONLY designed and intended to enable fair-use rights to PURCHASED media,” as it stands, the program will strip the DRM from any PlaysForSure file, whether you’ve purchased or just rented the song. So it’s really up to you to ensure the fair use of this program and your music.

As someone who’s not too keen on the current state of DRM, I can say that FairUse4WM is definitely a tool I’d recommend using under the right circumstances. Let us hear your thoughts on this snazzy new music liberator in the comments or at tips at lifehacker.com. — Adam Pash

FairUse4WM – a WM/DRM removal program [Doom9 forum via Gizmodo]

Tech from Lifehacker

Geek to Live: Put your idle computer to work for you

by Gina Trapani

You’ve heard of SETI@home, a screensaver that uses your idle computer’s otherwise wasted CPU cycles to analyze telescope data in search of extraterrestrial life. SETI@home is an outstanding example of a distributed computing project using idle computer time to achieve a greater goal. But wouldn’t you like to put your computer to work for you automatically while you’re away from your desk?

You can. Using a simple program called RunSaver, automatically kick off tasks for your Windows computer to work on while you’re away.

Why not Windows Task Scheduler?

Sure you can schedule tasks to run at specified times, but tasks set to run when the computer is idle:

• Don’t require you leave your PC on all night
• Will never interrupt you in the middle of working on something else
• Better fit folks with varying daily work schedules
• Suit low priority processes that should happen whenever they can but never interrupt anything more important

What kind of work can your idle computer do?

Some examples of tasks your computer can complete while you’re at lunch:

• Download the latest MP3′s on del.icio.us or your favorite music blog using wget
• Backup your blog using wget
• Sync your files to another computer using rsync
• Delete all the files in your Downloads folder or junk folder older than two weeks with the hard drive janitor script
• Email yourself critical documents or simply back them up to a thumb or network drive

Or any combination of those. All you need to do is place all the commands into a single batch script (a file with the .bat extension) that can run whenever the screensaver kicks in. Here’s how.

Set up RunSaver

1. Download RunSaver for Windows. (Written using Lifehacker favorite AutoHotkey!) and save it to C:\Windows\System32\
2. Create a batch file called idlework.bat, and enter the commands you want your computer to perform while you’re away. For example, I sync my remind calendar files from my server to my local machine using rsync like this:

   rsync -az ginatrapani.org:/home/gina/docs/remind d:/data/gina/docs

   
   Your script can contain any number of working commands to get your job done.
3. Once you’ve got a working script, add a line to the end of the file which kicks off the screensaver itself. I happen to like the classic starfield ‘saver, so I add the line:

   ssstars.scr /s

   
   Find other screensavers in the c:\windows\system32\ folder also with the .scr file extension.
4. Right-click on your Desktop and choose Properties. From the Screensaver tab, choose “RunSaver” from the list of possible ‘savers. Then, click on the Settings button and choose your idlework.bat file, as shown. (Click to enlarge.)
   
   Hit OK, and Apply, and from here on in when you step away from your computer? Your idlework.bat script will kick off automatically.

How do you get your computer to be more productive while you’re at lunch? Let us know in the comments or to tips at lifehacker.com.

Gina Trapani, the editor of Lifehacker, likes to squeeze every ounce of productivity out of her PC. Her semi-weekly feature, Geek to Live, appears every Wednesday and Friday on Lifehacker. Subscribe to the Geek to Live feed to get new installments in your newsreader.

Tech from Lifehacker

Reader Poll: Buy digital video online?

Earlier today, our brothers-in-tech at Gizmodo took a first look at the not-ready-for-primetime digital video service from Amazon. When we asked them what they really thought about it, we couldn’t make out much of what they said because they were gagging on all the DRM.

Despite the fact that every popular music store short of eMusic has hefty DRM restrictions that can put a real damper on portability and usability, stores like iTunes are raking in more and more dough every day (what happens when you don’t want an iPod anymore?!); so I’m wondering:

<p><b>Gawker Media polls require Javascript; if you’re viewing this in an RSS reader, click through to view in your Javascript-enabled web browser.</b></p>

If I’ve missed your nuanced take on the situation, make your thoughts known in the comments or at tips at lifehacker.com. — Adam Pash

First Look: Amazon’s Digital Video Service [Gizmodo]
Amazon Digital Video FAQ [Digital Video]

Torrents from Lifehacker

Your new favorite bittorrent site

Web site Scrape Torrent is a bittorrent search aggregator that scours the most popular torrent sites to find you the best download available.

Next time you’re searching out a torrent, before you go looking all over the interweb for that one special download (you know, the totally legal one?), you might want to give Scrape Torrent a look – it may just save you a buttload of time. Got your own favorite, secret bittorrent site? Whisper it to us in the comments or at tips at lifehacker.com. — Adam Pash

Scrape Torrent

Yoga for Girlfriend from Lifehacker

Get free yoga videos delivered daily

Web site Yoga Today offers daily downloads of a new, free yoga video through iTunes or directly on their site.

When a reader recently asked for advice on getting into yoga, it turned out that a lot of our readers keep their minds and bodies in focus with a little bit of the yoga. Whether you love yoga and you’re looking for a little more spice in your routine, or you want to try yoga but don’t want to pony up the greenbacks to buy a video or join a class, Yoga Today’s videos could be just what you’re looking for. Thanks Tim! — Adam Pash

Yoga Today

Tech from Digg

Linux Laptop Installation Survey

You want to install Linux or other UniXes on your laptop or notebook? Here are links to installation reports about Linux (BSD, Solaris,..) on almost any laptop or notebook model. Includes overviews of Linux with different laptop CPUs, other UniXes on laptops and notebooks, Linux on widescreen laptops and more.

Interesting Job Interview Advice

Bhuvana Sundaramoorthy’s Blog » 50 COMMON INTERVIEW Q&A

Tech from Techcrunch

Finally (Almost): AllPeers

UK/Prague-based AllPeers is a Firefox extension that will allow for group P2P file sharing using the browser. A persistent buddy list in a sidebar is created. Files can be shared with those buddies by dragging a file, folder or URL into their name. It’s just as easy to share the file with multiple people. The core technology is based on bittorent.

We’ve followed Allpeers through the initial rumors, first public screenshots and their March venture funding by Mangrove Capital and Index Ventures.

They’ve kept quiet recently, saying they’ve been making small changes to their interface and big changes to their infrastructure to handle scaling issues at launch. I’ve been testing the product with co-founder Matthew Gertner – this is going to be a very popular application. Very large (video) files transfered in my tests without difficulty, including after repeatedly shutting down the browser mid-transfer. Like other bittorent clients, the transfer picked back up again after relaunch.

The company won’t say when they are launching, but they’ve been bleeding in beta users for a few weeks and the date is clearly not that far away. They’ve also said they’ll allow me to give 50 300 immediate access accounts away immediately – these are first come, first serve in the comments. Just give me the email address you want to use, in the comment.

A potential competitor in this space is Zapr, which we recently covered. Zapr is handling file sharing via a stand alone client. AllPeers says they’ll have a non-browser client as well, later this year.

Animation Studio on a LiveCD

KToon LiveCD!: Start your own animation studio with Linux

If you want to try KToon quickly and without dealing with library dependencies, then you should try our LiveCD. You just have to download the iso image, burn it, and then boot your machine from cdrom.

Tech from Lifehacker

Geek to Live: Rescue files with a boot CD

by Gina Trapani

Few moments in computing are as heartbreaking as when you turn on your trusty PC only to receive that bone-chilling message: “Boot sector corrupt. Config.sys missing. Disk cannot be read.“

In other words, “You’re screwed.“

Or are you? Just because your computer can’t boot up Windows from your hard drive doesn’t mean you can’t boot it up with another operating system on another disk just long enough to rescue your important files. Today we’ll use the completely free Knoppix Linux Live disk to safely move your files on a failing hard drive to a healthy USB drive – no Windows required.

Note: There are lots of bootable CDs and DVDs that you can use to get your computer running long enough to grab your files, like the previously-mentioned BartPE, which requires your original Windows installation disk to build. If you want a familiar Windows solution and you have your original installation disks, that’s the way to go. This is for the slackers who, ahem, lost or don’t have access to the original Windows disks, and who aren’t afraid of a different-looking operating system.

Let’s get started turning your machine into a Linux-CD booted powerhouse.

0. Take stock.

For the latest version (as of writing, 5.01) of Knoppix to run, you need:

• Intel-compatible CPU (i486 or better)
• At least 82 MB for graphic mode (which is what you want)
• A bootable CD-ROM/DVD drive (IDE/ATAPI, Firewire, USB or SCSI)
• A standard SVGA-compatible graphics card
• A standard serial or PS/2 mouse, or IMPS/2-compatible USB Mouse

I have a USB mouse and keyboard which I wasn’t sure would work – but they did. If you’re also all USB, it’s a good idea to have PS/2 option around just in case.

1. Prepare your Knoppix disk.

You have two options for getting the Knoppix bootable disk: download and burn one yourself, or order one by mail.

DIYer’s in a hurry can download an .iso file and burn it to their own CD or DVD. (This, naturally, requires a CD or DVD burner and burning software.) If you go this route, make sure you choose the most recent .iso file available (currently KNOPPIX_V5.0.1CD-2006-06-01-EN.iso). If you’re going the DVD route, be sure to get your file from the “knoppixdvd” folder on the download server.

Alternately, if you’ve got time (or no friend with an available burner), order up a Knoppix CD via mail for anywhere from a $1.50 to $5.00 at one of these vendors.

2. Set your computer to boot from the CD or DVD drive.

Here’s where things get as tricky as they’re gonna get. When your computer starts up, it boots itself on disks in a particular order (usually the floppy A: drive, then the C: drive) as set in the computer’s base configuration (called the BIOS). To boot from CD or DVD, you have to edit this disk order to make your computer go to the CD or DVD first. How you do so will differ from machine to machine. On my Dell, when it first starts up, there’s a message to “Press F2 to enter setup.” That’s what you want.

So first, insert the Knoppix CD into your CD/DVD drive. Shut down your computer. Disconnect any peripherals you don’t need to grab your files (like a printer, wifi adapter, remote control IR device, anything unnecessary.) DO connect any drive you want to move your files TO (like a USB drive.)

Then start up your computer and watch carefully for the message on how to enter your BIOS settings (like my F2 message) and hit the right key. Once you get yourself in there, there will be a Boot Sequence option. Go into it, and select the CD drive as the first bootable option, as shown below.

WARNING: One false move inside your BIOS and your computer can get really screwed up. Be careful, and only edit the boot sequence settings.

Once it’s set to boot from CD first, save and quit the BIOS.

3. Boot up from CD.

Now that the CD’s in the drive and your computer’s set to boot from it, you’re golden. Once you restart, you should hear the Knoppix disk spinning right away. Your computer will bypass your crippled hard drive and begin booting up Linux. First thing, Knoppix will ask you to confirm you want to indeed boot into Linux by hitting Enter.

Once you do, the Linux penguin will appear above textual progress messages as Knoppix gets itself started. It will take some time to detect your devices, so just let the anticipation overcome you. Eventually, you’ll get to the full-on Knoppix desktop, which looks like this. (Click to enlarge.)

Note: I had to reboot three times before I got Knoppix running. The first time the boot sequence got stuck in the “Auto-detecting devices” process. Once it was over 20 minutes, I shut down, unplugged everything except my monitor, keyboard, mouse and USB drive, and tried again. The second time I got to the desktop wallpaper but was told I didn’t have enough memory for graphics mode (which I most certainly do) and was kicked into text mode (the command line) instead. I didn’t want that. The third try was a charm – startup happened in a minute and a half with a full on KDE desktop shown above with all my disk drive icons and the task bar.

Moral of the story: if bootup ain’t going well, try try again.

4. Rescue your data.

For those of you with no Linux experience, Knoppix will look odd and scary, but it isn’t. You’ll notice hard drive icons on your desktop. Click on one to browse its contents: your Windows files. To copy your important documents, open up your USB drive (click on the icon) and simply drag and drop them onto it.

When I first tried this, I got a message saying I didn’t have permission to write files onto the USB drive. (Click to enlarge what that looked like.)

If you have that problem, change the permissions by right-clicking on the USB drive, and choosing “Change read/write mode” as shown. (Click to enlarge.)

Then, you can simply drag and drop files from your hard drive to your USB drive, as shown. (Click to enlarge.)

Once you’ve got all your files onto your USB drive, you can shut down, reset your boot order to where it should be, and go rebuild your PC knowing that you’ve got your data safe and sound.

A Linux boot CD or DVD like Knoppix is also an awesome way for the curious to muck around in Linux without having to install it. Just pop in the CD, reset your boot order and go.

Any lifehackers have tips and tricks for wrangling their wayward PCs with a Linux boot disk? Let us know in the comments or to tips at lifehacker.com.

Gina Trapani, the editor of Lifehacker, had to ask Google how to take screenshots with the GIMP. Her semi-weekly feature, Geek to Live, appears every Wednesday and Friday on Lifehacker. Subscribe to the Geek to Live feed to get new installments in your newsreader.

Tech from Techcrunch

Zapr makes drag and drop file transfer easy

Sydney and Singapore based Zapr is beta testing a simple way to transfer large files for free. The company recently changed it’s name from Zingee. Users download the company’s desktop client, add email addresses for friends and then drag and drop files or folders from their computers onto the interface. Friends then receive an email that includes an URL linked to the file on the uploader’s computer. The computer storing the file has to be on in order for the file to be accessed. If the file is moved from its original location on your computer, the URL no longer works to download it.

The company assures users that friends have access only to the single file linked to and that there is no adware with the client. Windows XP and the .Net architecture are required for uploaders, but not for downloaders.

The service is in invite-only beta right now, but you can sign up for an account. Future business models could be affiliate partnerships, storage or more advertising if the service really takes off.

Mike has made mention of this company in the context of online storage in the past, but I think this is something different. The drag and drop to a desktop client could work really well for Windows users seeking a solution faster than going through the more complicated UI of an online storage solution. It has a more asynchronous feel than IM file transfers. For some users seeking a fast, free and easy way to transfer files to collaborators, Zapr could be a good fit.

Zapr

Tech from Techcrunch

Webshots to relaunch with a Web 2.0 look

There won’t be tagging, but CNet’s photosharing site Webshots is adding a number of features reminiscent of Flickr and getting a whole new look. The relaunch will occur some time in late August, but an alpha site is up here. The site currently looks straight out of the 90’s, it will be interesting to see how established users react to the redesign.

The Webshots team told Premium users in an email today that at relaunch Webshots users will be able to comment on each other’s photos. Premium users will have their accounts increased from 5,000 images total, with the limit being bumped up 500 images each month in the future future. Photo quality will be improved, information about the type of camera used for each photo will be included and advertising space will be decreased. Users will also be able to see aggregate stats and comments on their personal Webshots pages.

We last wrote about Webshots when they launched their very nice uploader in May, called AllYouCanUpload. A month prior, the company initiated its College Live section – a social networking feature for college students.

Webshots was purchased by CNet from Twofold Photos, Inc. in 2004 for approximately $70 million dollars. Webshots has approximately 19 million registered users posting almost a million images a day in online photo albums. A total of 400 million photos have been uploaded to date (compare to Flickr, a much younger service, with about 200 million photos). For comparison, Yahoo! Photos is reported to have 30 million users, Photobucket reports having 19 million users and Flickr approximately 2.5 million. It’s clear who’s the trendsetter here, though, and that’s liable to continue with innovations like Flickr’s rumored drag and drop geotagging in the works.

Webshots

Tech from Techcrunch

Webshots to relaunch with a Web 2.0 look

There won’t be tagging, but CNet’s photosharing site Webshots is adding a number of features reminiscent of Flickr and getting a whole new look. The relaunch will occur some time in late August, but an alpha site is up here. The site currently looks straight out of the 90’s, it will be interesting to see how established users react to the redesign.

The Webshots team told Premium users in an email today that at relaunch Webshots users will be able to comment on each other’s photos. Premium users will have their accounts increased from 5,000 images total, with the limit being bumped up 500 images each month in the future future. Photo quality will be improved, information about the type of camera used for each photo will be included and advertising space will be decreased. Users will also be able to see aggregate stats and comments on their personal Webshots pages.

We last wrote about Webshots when they launched their very nice uploader in May, called AllYouCanUpload. A month prior, the company initiated its College Live section – a social networking feature for college students.

Webshots was purchased by CNet from Twofold Photos, Inc. in 2004 for approximately $70 million dollars. Webshots has approximately 19 million registered users posting almost a million images a day in online photo albums. A total of 400 million photos have been uploaded to date (compare to Flickr, a much younger service, with about 200 million photos). For comparison, Yahoo! Photos is reported to have 30 million users, Photobucket reports having 19 million users and Flickr approximately 2.5 million. It’s clear who’s the trendsetter here, though, and that’s liable to continue with innovations like Flickr’s rumored drag and drop geotagging in the works.

Webshots

Tech from Techcrunch

AOL/AIM users to get 5GB free storage

The one upsmanship in giving away storage continues with an announcement today from AOL that come September the company will provide 5 GB of free storage on the company’s XDrive system to anyone with as little as an AOL or AIM screen name. AOL purchased XDrive last August for an undisclosed sum.

Chris Gilmer over at AOL owned Download Squad reports the service will include permission based file sharing, scheduled automatic backups from your hard drive to Xdrive, automatic upload of e-mail attachments from AOL Mail or any non-AOL POP3 or IMAP-compatible mail providers and a lot more. Perhaps most important – there’s no charge for file transfer.

Apple’s .Mac service starts at 1GB, is upgradeable to 4GB, has a data transfer rate upgradeable up to 250GB per month and isn’t free. A free account with Streamload’s MediaMax offers 25GB of free storage but has a 1GB monthly transfer limit.

We did a comparison of 13 storage companies in January, but the market just keeps changing. Who will top today’s AOL announcement?

Consumer level data storage seems to be becoming a loss leader and features will likely become the only differentiator if this race for the bottom on price continues. I wonder how many people will make the leap from using this free storage to using other AOL services where they will be more likely to generate meaningful ad revenue. It doesn’t appear that there will be any imperative to do so.

From giving away many previously paid services free to broadband users (yesterday) to hiring away top social bookmarkers (first 10 announced today) and now throwing free storage at anyone who wants it – AOL is certainly making a lot of plays to revive itself. (Update: The company announced today that it will cut approximately 25% of its global workforce by year end.) Apparently creating a blight on the planet with its promotional materials that would be an eyesore from space if put in one pile wasn’t enough, but maybe promotion 2.0 will work better.

Tech from Lifehacker

A beginner’s guide to IRC

Newbies to IRC, or Instant Relay Chat, will appreciate TechSoup’s top ten IRC tips for beginners.

There’s a lot of good stuff here, including:

• Pick a Good IRC Client: “Because there are so many different IRC clients to choose from, you could easily spend a whole day trying to decide which is best. The good news is that many of them are free or available as shareware, so there is often no harm in trying them out.”
• Add a useful IRC bot to your channel: “An IRC bot is a program that acts like an IRC client but behaves totally autonomously. These are often the slaves of the IRC world, given mundane tasks that a human would be fed up with.”
• Keep log files: “Virtually all IRC clients give you the option to log your chat to one or more files. This is extremely useful if you need to check back on something that was said last week or even longer ago.”

These tips are a great way to get your feet wet with IRC. — Wendy Boswell

Top Ten Tricks and Tips for New IRC Users [TechSoup.com]

Tech from Lifehacker

Download of the Day: iColorFolder

Windows only: Free, open source program iColorFolder lets you color any folder on your computer with the right-click context menu.

If you’ve considered speeding up your Windows navigation by changing icons, iColorFolder is a quick and attractive way to color code your folders for easy identification. I’ve been meaning to get more organized with my folder system lately, so with the ease of the right-click iColorFolder, I’m starting my folder color coding today. Thanks Harmohn! — Adam Pash

iColorFolder [Sourceforge]

10 Unknown Windows Freeware Applications You Should Know About

This list has some good ones like ISO Recorder, Hamachi, and Windows Unattended Edition:

http://www.pcfastlane.com/joomla/content/view/2039/27/

Cheap AMD Chips Coming

This site has a graph of price drops coming to AMD chips in Octobe:

http://images.dailytech.com/nimage/2094_large_amd_pricing_1023.png

Tech from Lifehacker

Make your own web forms

I’m (slowly) building a new website right now, and I’ve been looking for good general web forms.

So far, the best resource I’ve seen is at the Form Assembly. Not only can you build your own web forms, but there’s also 130 form templates you can play around with, as well as eight different stylesheets.

There are a few things that you have to pay for here (secure forms, branding options, etc.), but for what I needed – free form creation – the price tag was a whopping $0.— Wendy Boswell

The Form Assembly [via etc]

mail2web

Here’s one of those things I think is neat, but am not sure
how I’d use it. There is probably a cool way to use this to
interface with email when you have a device that requires pop servers
or something like that. I will have to look into it a little deeper.
Here’s what they say:

Pick Up Your Email from any computer, anywhere in the world. No need to register!

Tech from Digg

Yahoo, Microsoft team up to join Yahoo!, MSN Messger IM communities

Well, AOL watchout. Yahoo and MSN claim that they will have the largest community of over 350 million users, once this happens. It’s now in beta, but is expected in the coming months. Mac users are still out of luck for a while, it appears.

MusicOnCommand

This place does the following:

Hear a song on the radio you want to download?  Just call Music on Command at (866) 585-8748.  We’ll identify the song and artist for you.  We will also email you links to download the song.  All for free!  So why not give it a try?

Panda

This site scans you computer to figure out what viruses you have. I already do this with Norton’s online scan, but this is a good second opinion.

http://www.pandasoftware.com/products/activescan.htm

Wirefly

This thing lets you compare all the wireless plans in your coverage area. You put in you area code or zip or something like that and it gives you a chart. I need to do this. I’m due for a phone.

Sharpmail

This site lets you send emails anonymously. I’m not sure when or why you would do this, but it seems like a good idea in some way. Perhaps not. I don’t really know. This is their own description:

Sharpmail has have been helping
visitors send
anonymous email and
anonymous SMS for over 6 years! As one
of the longest most established
anonymous email
and anonymous SMS
service providers you can be sure that you will get fast
SMS and
email
delivery when ever you need to! now with
WAP interface