tech brain farts.com: November 2004

Google Searches - Learning to master this free tool

Friday, November 26, 2004

Google is one of the most powerful and underutilizied tools on the Internet today dispite it being the most popular search engine. Most folks just use it for straight forward searches without proper boolean operators. Knowing the right search strings is absolutely crucial to yielding the right results.

Check out the following Google search strings:

Appz
DVD Rips
Xvid
Gamez
MP3

It’s interesting to see what Google will turn up given the right string… Poke around, and have fun.

Konfabulator for the PC platform

Wednesday, November 24, 2004

One of my favorite Mac applications, has now been released for Windows. It was actually released last week, but I only just got around to downloading it . If you have not heard aobut this app yet but are into Desktop customizations using apps like Desktop X, Samurize and so on, you will absolutely love this application. It is called Konfabulator.

If you have no idea what Konfabulator is, download it, you’ll love it! I guarantee it !! Once you have done that, download widgets that do everything from tell you time aqnd weather to bandwidth use and free space on different drives. You can get new widgets at this site.

It is one of those productive timewasters !

Here is a screenshot of some the widgets, imagine the possiblities !

Real Player Alternative

Tuesday, November 23, 2004

Have you tried to install the Real Player recently to play .RA files. It essentially installs a bunch of garbage on the system and is a huge resource hog. I have found a piece of freeware called Real Alternative, that is a replacement and a small footprint on your system. Real Alternative will allow you to play RealMedia files without having to install the official RealPlayer. You do need a media player that is capable of playing RealMedia files. The included Media Player Classic supports it. Supported are RealAudio (.ra .rpm), RealVideo (.rm .ram .rmvb), RealText (.rt), and ReadPix (.rp). Not fully supported are: Streaming smil files (.smi .smil) and Realmedia embedded in webpages.

It can be downloaded here ....

http://www.free-codecs.com/download/Real_Alternative.htm

Bit Torrent Client - Azureus

Thursday, November 18, 2004

I have been asked repeatedly what is best Bit Torrent client there out on the market. When I first started using Bittorrent, I was just content with leeching much as possible and having people leech as much as possibe from me UNTIL I got a call from my ISP about overuse of bandwidth and abuse of their EULA. Well to make a long story, short I needed client that allowed me to limit my uploads. After some research and user group searching I found a Sourceforge project called AZUREUS. It is FREE, it is FAST and it is feature packed. I have been a loyal user ever since. There are now a crapload of different Bittorrent clients out there , the few have the feature set and ease of use of Azureus. It is patched regularly and is written completely in JAVA thus allowing porting to many OSes. So check it out ESPECIALLY if you are still using the original Bittorrent client (God forbid) ! This app can be downloaded from the following link below. Have Fun !

http://sourceforge.net/projects/azureus/

Media Player Classic

Wednesday, November 10, 2004

Media Player Classic is just the simplest, easiest and most versitile player I have ever used on the PC platform, period ! It supports every codec under the sun from divx 3.x, 4.x, 5.x, v-Vid, Ogg Vorbis and so on, out of box (so to speak, cuz its FREE) and and is completely compatible with other codecs on the market. The most impressive feature for me other than it being free, is the low memory overhead. It is fashioned after the old school windows media player and not the new inflated Media Player that comes with Win 2000/Xp.

It can be obtained from Sourceforge, the home of all great things Opensource ! Here is the link to the download page ...

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=82303&package_id=84358

VLC is yet another great all purpose media player, but it seems to play havoc with my slow ass PC !

Here is a screen shot of the interface, don't let the seemingly simple interface fool you, it is a VERY POWERFUL little application.

P.S. OPENSOURCE AND GNU forever !!!

Normalize and fix MP3s without converting to WAV

Tuesday, November 09, 2004

Here is another little proggie that allows you to trim mp3s without losing quality by having to convert them to wav files first. Mp3Trim is that proggie. It's FREE, it's easy to use, and it does a lot more than trimming if you want it to. Add fade ins/outs, normalize volume, even clean up bad data within the file.

You can also use Audacity. It is an open source project that allows you edit mp3 and wav. There are also tons of other things for you to play with!
Check it out http://sourceforge.net/projects/audacity/

MP3 DIRECT CUT is yet another app in the same category that is apprently very good, though I have never tried it myself.

Anyone looking for an OSX version of this might try:"MP3 Trimmer"
http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/12965
Seems to be very similar to MP3Trim. It allows trimming (duh), fading and doesn't require you to reencode the file. However, this app is shareware and if you don't wanna wait sixteen seconds before you save the file, you'll have to register.

(Hopefully these links are still LIVE, by the time you read this..., I am sorry if they aren't)

FireFox Extention: Switch Proxy

Friday, November 05, 2004

Yet another reason why I love FireFox: SwitchProxy. SwitchProxy is a FireFox extension that allows you to ‘switch’ between anonymous ‘proxy’ servers at a chosen interval. Anonymous proxy servers allow you to mask your true IP address giving you an added layer on anonymity.

This is very similar to Steganos Internet Anonym

Downloads & Links: FireFox SwitchProxy Anonymous Proxy List IPLocator

Pixie

Monday, November 01, 2004

Here is a great little utility that I used repeatedly in my web designing exploits. And once again it is free ! It is a colour picker for abolutely anything on the screen including the Windows shell, explorer and logos. It will tell you the Hex, RGB, HTML, CMYK and HSV values of that colour that you picked, no matter where on screen ! It is really hard to put into words how useful this little application is for webmasters, so give it a try ! Here the link for download below...

http://www.nattyware.com/pixie.html