King of all Ryans Blog

Day of the Week

2007-11-20T21:24:00.000-05:00

I was mulling about at work today and mentioned something about Dickens and got to looking up Charles Dickens and the fact that he died from a stroke. Just being curious, I was wondering what day of the week his death was on, June 9, 1870.

It was a Tuesday for those of you that were wondering. However, me not being super good with numbers and also extremely lazy when it comes to thinking, it took me a while to find a website that could tell me the day of the week it was when supplied with a date. Most of the ones I found right away only worked with the 1900's.

The one I finally did find that works with any date is a great one. I found out that my two daughters and I were all born on a Wednesday. Is that crazy or what?! Anywho, the coincidences stopped there, but the site is a great site; with morse code translators and fantastic unit conversions.

Feel free to check it out and give a shout out in the comments below to let everyone know what day of the seek you were born on.

HowTo: Make a Glass Beer Bottle into a Cup

2007-11-16T09:30:00.000-05:00

What you need: Your favorite beer bottle, nail polish remover, string, scissors, water and a lighter.

Now you can make your favorite beer bottle, whether it be one of the major brands or some kooky looking microbrew, into a great pen cup for your desk at work. This would also make a great inexpensive present for one of your drinking buddies.

Feel free to submit pictures of your bottles in the comment section below!

[via geeksaresexy] video source

Deal Days: Get upto 50% off of Indi DVD's at Amazon

2007-11-14T22:15:00.001-05:00

Amazon.com is having a great sale on some fairly recent indi titles on DVD. Titles include Garden State, Napoleon Dynamite, 28 Days Later and One Hour Photo. Those last two don't really seem to fit into with what is available, but it is nice to see there is a wide selection.

[via TheBargainist] Amazon

Monoface: Time Waster and Freaky Screen Saver

2007-11-14T21:47:00.000-05:00

This time waster is a twofer: you get to waste time and get a great screen saver that will be sure to freak out your cube mate as well as any passer-bys.

The people down at monoface took pictures of 15 people and made different parts of their face interchangeable; eyes, nose, mouth, head/shoulders. You can go over to their site and mix them all around and see what crazy faces you can come up with. You can also download the monoface screen saver. With the screen saver version, it will do the mixing up for you during screen saver mode.

I had fun on the site for a few minutes and am still having fun with the screen saver. Troy's tongue (pictured) is my favorite to put onto any of the faces. What's your favorite?

[via DownloadSquad] monoface

Pancakes in a Can... Need I say more?

2007-11-14T21:20:00.000-05:00

Ladies and gentleman, the wait is finally over! From the people that brought you cheese in a can, whipped cream in a can and any other freaky thing you can think of in a can, comes pancakes in a can.

It doesn't actually sound all that repulsive does it? And it saves you the time and effort of pouring the water and powdered instant batter mix into a bowl and mixing it together for about 2 whole minutes. Now, with Original Batter Blaster you can just shoot that junk into a pan and wait till syrup and butter covered bliss is obtained.

Please, for the love of God, let me know if you have tried this and how it tasted in the comments below!

[via OhGizmo!] Product Page

Firefox Quick Tip: The Mouse Wheel

2007-05-23T21:28:00.001-04:00

No matter how popular Firefox gets and no matter how many people use it on a regular basis, there are still people out there making slow use of something that is literally right at their finger tips; the mouse wheel.

Pop quiz hot shot; how do you open and close tabs in Firefox, and do you even make use of multiple tabs? I still catch people around the office right-clicking on links to open them up in a new tab, or clicking the red "X" button to close a tab (they might even have to select that tab then hit the close button), waisting precious internet time when they could be doing something more useful like testing the work's firewall to see if you can take a look at naked pictures of Caprica Six from Battlestar Galactica.

The correct answer to my pop quiz is by using the mouse wheel and yes. Stop with the right-clicking and just click the mouse wheel on that link and it will magically opne it up in a new tab. This even works in Internet Explorer 7.0! Then, to close down any tab, just do the same thing; mouse wheel click on it. The tab you wish to close doesn't need to be your active tab, you can just wheel click on any tab that is open and it will disappear.

Another nifty mouse wheel trick is nice to have when you have too many tabs open and auto tab scroll comes into play. Just place your courser on the tabs bar and scroll the mouse wheel. You will then be side scrolling from right to left over all of your open tabs. This bypasses the left/right arrows that pop up when you have too many tabs open.

Flashback: Oz + Dark Side of the Moon

2007-05-22T19:48:00.000-04:00

After taking a look at the list of movies that came out this week, I have decided that there is nothing work buying or even taking the time to get it by "other means." If you don't believe me, here is the list of movies released to DVD this week:

I'll admit that I didn't see the Rotten Tomato ratings till I just did this post for the above movies, but I did see the trailers for some of them (Apocalypto is one that sticks out the most) and they are just not my kind of movie.

more after the jump

So, if some of you readers our there are like me, I say just grab something off of the DVD rack in your family room, Vincent's picks at the video store or get inspired to rent something at the video store that is from my up-to-date list of movies I own. Or you can sit back and watch the classic sync up of The Dark Side of the Moon to The Wizard of Oz:

Either way, you will have something better to do until next week when something good, hopefully, gets released.

Last Chance to Get Bejeweled Deluxe for FREE

2007-05-22T11:15:00.000-04:00

As a Mother's Day special draws to an end, Bejeweled Deluxe is free until tomorrow (May 23). It is a bit tricky to get it for free, but just follow these easy instructions and you will be good to go:

Go to the Popcap website and click BUY NOW
Fill out the required information
Scroll down and click "Click here" and add “FREE4MOMS” in the coupon code field.
Click on “Click here to Redeem” before you continue
The “Item total” should show a price of $0.00
Click continue until you get to the download link
Install and play

It is a good game and a great one to add to the usual Windows game lineup of solitaire and minesweeper. Once downloaded, installed and registered you can enjoy unlimited regular play as well as time trial.

[via ghacks]

Upgrade

2007-05-21T22:22:00.000-04:00

Just upgraded the blogger template and am giving it a test run. Please ignore.

Organize Status Bar: Firefox Add-On Of The Day

2007-03-15T21:21:00.000-04:00

Today's add-on could be a great one for all you Obsessive Compulsive people out there, or for people that just don't like how your status bar icons are arranged. Organize Status Bar is an add-on for Firefox for all platforms that lets you adjust how things are displayed in your status bar. You can move, hide or show the add-on icons in the status bar for what fits your personality. You can now take control over what is going on in that magical little bar down there. And, if you want to start all over again, just hit Reset to Default to put everything back to the way it was before you started.

Unlocker: Download Of The Day

2007-03-14T08:27:00.000-04:00

It never fails. When ever you are attempting to clean out some space on your hard drive, you always run into that one file buried in a sea of files that just doesn't want to be deleted. Sure you can reboot and then delete it. But who has time for that kind of time consuming thing these days?! Well, say good by to that file, the Unlocker way.

With Unlocker, you are able to find out what process is actually using the file that you are trying to dump into the 'ol recycling bin. Now the only hard thing to do is find out where the file is, if it is in a folder that has a ton of files that is. Unlocker is easy to use and completely free to download. And that price is just right for me.

[via TechNibble]

More Pissiors

2007-03-12T22:43:00.000-04:00

A while back I did a story on some crazy urinals from around the world. Wouldn't ya know it that more and more are popping up all over the place:

more crazy pics after the jump

Those last few aren't urinals, but are some kind of crazy. Anyone know of any others that should make the list?

[via JoBlog]

Weather Watcher: Download Of The Day

2007-03-12T22:24:00.000-04:00

Today's download has been around for a while. But, like anything that has been around for a long time, you need fill in the people that missed it the first time around.

Weather Watcher is a light java application that is basically a full-blown weather station for your desktop. This thing has a ton of options as well. You can customize how often it updates, what cities to watch, and you can even set the program as your wallpaper.

What Weather Watcher basically does is tell you the present and extended forecast for your selected city. It will also let you know the current temperature, wind direction and speed, and barometric pressure and weather it is rising or falling. Simply hover your mouse over the day of the week in which you want to know more details about that day's weather.

It doesn't get more easy than that, for arguments sake that is. Weather Watcher will also minimize to the task tray if you hit the red "X" in the top right-hand corner, it will not close the program. Minimized in the tray, Weather Watcher will let you know what the current temperature is, also. Hover over that temp to see what the current conditions are.

This is a great program that will meet your weather needs throughout the day. It is also much more speedy than that slow poke of a weather man that makes you watch the entire news program to see what the extended forecast is. Something to help that curious wife out late at night.

Download Of The Day: AllSnap

2007-02-02T23:02:00.000-05:00

I use Winamp, different versions of Linux and have come across multiple kinds of AIM clones that are a heck of a lot better then AIM itself. And the way the windows work in all of those programs, they usually have a "snapping" effect when you bring one of the windows close to the edge of your desktop. I have come to like this for some reason and now want it on all of the windows I use in XP. And this is now possible with AllSnap.

With AllSnap, you can adjust the setting of your desktop so that windows can snap to the edges of your desktop, windows can snap to each other and so that windows can snap to the vertical and/or horizontal center of your desktop. You can also make it so that you can lock down your desktop's boundaries so that you can not move any window outside of the viewable area of your desktop. I'm not too keen on some of the settings, but having them set allows you to use the alt key to toggle the settings on and off while moving any windows around. I definitely recommend this one for a test run. It is a very light program that is easy to use and allows for you to have your desktop a bit more tidy.

Update Time

2007-01-30T20:22:00.000-05:00

Sorry about the lack of posts these past couple of weeks. I am now a member of the blog team over at The Download Squad (DLS). They are going to pay me money to blog about software, Firefox add-ons and whatever else that I see fit that needs more attention, so I wanted to save the posts for DLS.

I will keep posting to this site, however. I have started posting over there, but there are some rules that I'm going to have to adjust to get used to. The one rule that I'm have some trouble with is if I have a topic to post about I can't post about it if it has already be posted to DLS in the past. Well, there has to be some dramatic changes to the subject in order to justify the "new" post on the same topic (for example, a new version release of a program). So, long story short, I will be posting about things on this site that are "reruns" on DLS from 2 years ago. But they will be in my own words and based on my own experiences.

The site I'll be moving to, by the way, is, like I said, Download Squad. I took it upon myself to comment frequently on tech blogs that I subscribe to in my reader. Turns out that one of them payed attention a bit more than the others, which lead to them recruiting me. So take that as a lesson: Comment and comment frequently! I made a sort of New Years resolution to make some money off of blogging. I guess it doesn't matter where I am doing the blogging so long as I'm making some extra money doing it. The extra stream of readers as of late has helped, but there is more money to be earned and more software to write about. So...I'm off, but be sure to hold onto this site in your reader, because I will definitely be making more posts here. Just add this one to your reader as well.

Kitchen Tech

2007-01-29T20:51:00.000-05:00

This is for all of those guys out there, and perhaps some women, that have just too many power tools. It is now time to start converting them into something more useful and multi-purpose. I am, of course, talking about the pepper mill drill attachment.

Sure you could buy one of those battery powered pepper mills where you would also have to buy a large package of AA or AAA batteries to keep them working for a long time. Or, you could just use one of the 3 to 5 electric or battery powered drills you have lying around the house! Ahh yes, memories of Tim, the tool man, Taylor are popping into my head as we speak: This pepper mill needs MORE POWER!

All this little modification needs is two things. Number one: A pepper mill, one with a flat top that needs to be twisted would be more proffered (not the type that has an arm sticking out of it that you crank); Number two: A power drill, one with a keyless chuck would be more proffered. Insert the top of the pepper mill into the drill and adjust the chuck as needed until the pepper mill is sitting nice and snug in the drill. Then all you have to do is aim and shoot next time you are throwing a fancy-smancy dinner party. This modification, however, is not just for fancy dinner parties. This pepper mill drill would be the perfect accessory to anyone's grilling tool belt.

[Video after jump]

Firefox Add-Ons Of The Day

2007-01-16T20:23:00.000-05:00

No, that is not a typo. My next suggested FF add-on goes great with another one. First on the list is Firefox Extension Backup Extension (FEBE). With FEBE, you are able to export all of your add-ons into one folder. For ease of use, you would put this one folder on your jump drive so that you can take your add-ons with you where ever you go.

FEBE also allows you to preform other backups. You can backup bookmarks, preferences, cookies, entire profiles, user names, passwords, security certificates, search plugins, history, permissions and even themes in addition to the add-ons. You can backup all of them at the same time or pick and choose which you would like to backup, then you can choose what you would like to restore. You can also dump the backups to a specified folder anywhere on your computer. And the final great feature in FEBE is the scheduler. You can choose to backup your items of choice automatically on a daily, weekly or monthly schedule for any time of the day/week/month.

The only problem with FEBE is that each add-on you have backed up is backed up individually. However, if you use FEBE's fantastic companion Compact Library Extension Organizer (CLEO), all of that nonsense will come to an end. Once you have all of your add-ons backed up to a folder, you use CLEO to smush them all into one file that FF can read. This one file will now contain every single one of your add-ons and you just need to double click it in order to install them all onto you PC at work or a friends home, for example. With CLEO, you are also able to select which add-ons that you want to cram into the one file, as well as name that one file whatever you want.

Two thumbs up for both! And, as always, if you have something better please let us all know in the comments below. I am also taking recommendations that way, as well.

Linux On A Stick: Part II

2007-01-15T20:41:00.000-05:00

Two weeks back I did part 1 of Linux on a stick. In part 1, we spoke of how to get a Live CD onto your USB jump drive and the problems with it. Using the Live CD version on the jump drive alone allows you to boot to your jump drive into the distro of Linux that you have chosen. However, anything you change while in this live CD session will not be saved. Therefor, if you changed anything, such as download NEdit because you are sick of GEdit, you will have to do it all over again next time you decide to boot from your USB jump drive. With the Part 2 technique, that I am about to describe, you will be able to have such changes saved.

Ready to get to it now? Ok, first off, you need to know if your your computer can boot from the USB drive. Just do a restart and go into the bios set up (I have a completely separate menu on my computer that is called the boot menu that I can get to if I hold down F8, then I just select from the list of available items that I wish to boot from. You may just have to deal with the bios, however). From the bios, go into the boot area. Go down to where is says something along the lines of "1st boot item" and change it from your master hard drive to your USB jump drive. Your drive may have to be plugged in for you to be able to select it from the bios screen. If you do not have the option to boot to the USB jump drive than you can just stop reading here and keep using your live CD version or you can update your bios.

[More after the jump]

For those of your that are able to boot to your USB jump drive, hit up THIS site to take the Linux test to see which distribution of Linux is best for you. Like it says on the site, this is not an exact science, but rather just some basic questions to see what you like most about the different versions of Linux that are out there. I dig Ubuntu and knew that I was going to use Ubuntu for the install that I will soon describe. But my results also suggested that I would like Fedora as well. I haven't heard much about Fedora, and what I have heard wasn't good, but I am more willing to give it a try now. I will also give this tutorial a test using Fedora to see if the same procedures will work on multiple distro's of Linux. But that will be another post in the future, lets kick this pig into gear.

First up, I'm using Ubuntu and will be installing this on a 2 Gig PNY Attache USB 2.0 jump drive. So head on over to their site and get yourself a disc image. And I will also be installing Ubuntu on the drive, but there are different versions of Ubuntu. The ones I recommend getting is either the latest version of Ubuntu, which is code named Edgy, or the latest version of XUbuntu, code name Edgy Eft. Ubuntu is the full blown version of Ubuntu, while XUbuntu is much more scaled down. XUbuntu would be more ideal for you if you want a lighter version of an OS running on your computer or if you have an older computer that really can't handle the full version. The first step that needs to be done is to partition your USB jump drive. So go ahead and burn the image of your choice to a CD and boot to it.

Once your live CD is up and running, open up a terminal window and type in "sudo su", with out the quotes of course. You are now in root mode and will save yourself some extra typing during the upcoming commands that you will need. Now we need to delete the partition(s) that reside on your USB jump drive, but first we need to find out where it is and what it is called. If you didn't already, plug in your jump drive, it will automatically be mounted for you. Now type "fdisk -l". You should now see a list of drives that reside in your computer. One of them is your jump drive and is usually mounted to the folder /dev/sda. Now, thinking ahead a bit, I made 2 partitions: one for the files the OS needs and one for the OS itself. The first partition will be the bulk of the jump drive and will be accessible when you are in Windows, while the second partition is just for Ubuntu and you will not be able to see in Windows. I read one tutorial online that used a 1 Gig jump drive and made the first partition 700 Mb and then the rest of the drive for the second partition. So I just made that into a percentage and turned 70% of my 2 Gig jump drive into the first partition and used the rest for the OS partition. Now that you have the sizes in mind for your partitions, type in "umount /dev/sda1" then "fdisk /dev/sda". Now I will put the next commands in a tabular form for easy reading. Its just for creating the 2 partitions and then writing them to the jump dirve.

WARNING: This will erase everything that is on the jump drive. Do a back up if you want to keep something!

Code	Results
p	Shows partitions on the jump drive, they all need to be deleted
d	Ready to delete partition
1	Delete partition 1 on /dev/sda
d, 2	Delete partition 2 on /dev/sda, if there is one present
n	Create a new partition (partition number 1)
p	Make that partition primary
1	Call it partition number 1
ENTER	Accept the starting cylinder number
+1700M	Ending cylinder number (size of the first partition in Mb)
a	Make this partition active
t, 1, 6	Make this partition FAT format
n	Create a new partition (partition number 2)
p	Make this partition primary
2	Call this partition number 2
ENTER	Accept the starting cylinder (this is the end cylinder from the first partition)
+300M	Use up the last of the jump drive for this partition
w	Write the partitions to the drive

Now that we have created the partitions, we need to format them:

mkfs.vfat -F 32 -n (SOME NAME) /dev/sda1
mkfs.ext2 -b 4096 -L casper-rw /dev/sda2

You can name the first partition whatever you want to, but the second partition MUST be named casper-rw. Now remount the partitions by unplugging the jump drive and plugging it back in, they should mount automatically. And then we are now ready to install Ubuntu to your jump drive. Shutdown your computer and reboot to your normal operating system. Once there, open up your file explorer and navigate to your Ubuntu CD that you burned and just booted to and copy the following files to your (SOME NAME) partition. You should actually see the name that you named it in the file explorer window. Also, make sure that you have the ability to see hidden files if you do not already (in the file explorer in Windows, Tools menu -> Folder Option then the View tab and check "Show hidden files and folders"). Now start copying:

From the CD to the root of your (SOME NAME) partition, copy the following:
Folders : 'casper', 'disctree', 'dists', 'install', 'pics', 'pool', 'preseed', '.disk'
Files : all files from the folder 'isolinux', 'md5sum.txt', 'README.diskdefines', 'ubuntu.ico', 'casper/vmlinuz', 'casper/initrd.gz', 'install/mt86plus'
If you decided to use XUbuntu, you will not see some of these files or filders. Don't worry about that and just copy over what you do have that is on that list, it will still work. In the root of your jump drive, rename the file 'isolinux.cfg' to 'syslinux.cfg' then open it with notepad and erase everything in it. Now copy the following into the file:

DEFAULT custom
GFXBOOT bootlogo
APPEND preseed/file=preseed/ltsp.seed boot=casper initrd=initrd.gz ramdisk_size=1048576 root=/dev/ram rw quiet splash --
LABEL custom
menu label ^Start Ubuntu in persistent mode
kernel vmlinuz
append preseed/file=preseed/ltsp.seed boot=casper persistent initrd=initrd.gz ramdisk_size=1048576 root=/dev/ram rw quiet splash --
LABEL live
menu label ^Start or install Ubuntu
kernel vmlinuz
append preseed/file=preseed/ltsp.seed boot=casper initrd=initrd.gz ramdisk_size=1048576 root=/dev/ram rw quiet splash --
LABEL xforcevesa
menu label Start Ubuntu in safe ^graphics mode
kernel vmlinuz
append preseed/file=preseed/ltsp.seed boot=casper xforcevesa initrd=initrd.gz ramdisk_size=1048576 root=/dev/ram rw quiet splash --
LABEL check
menu label ^Check CD for defects
kernel vmlinuz
append boot=casper integrity-check initrd=initrd.gz ramdisk_size=1048576 root=/dev/ram rw quiet splash --
LABEL memtest
menu label ^Memory test
kernel mt86plus
append -
LABEL hd
menu label ^Boot from first hard disk
localboot 0x80
append -
DISPLAY isolinux.txt
TIMEOUT 300
PROMPT 1
F1 f1.txt
F2 f2.txt
F3 f3.txt
F4 f4.txt
F5 f5.txt
F6 f6.txt
F7 f7.txt
F8 f8.txt
F9 f9.txt
F0 f10.txt

Now, save and close the file and you are all set to boot to your "new" jump drive that is now a full blown operating system.

Some side notes:
The tutorial that I borrowed some info from also installed the grub boot loader. I, however, could not get grub to install to my jump drive using that part of the tutorial from the other site. If anyone out there knows a way to install grub, please let me know and I would be happy to update this post with that info as well as credit you for it.

Other than that, everything works great. I just go into my boot menu and boot to my jump drive and then take it from there. Some things you might want to do is mount your hard drive(s) that are in your computer:
From a terminal window,

sudo su
fdisk -l
cd /media
mkdir windows
mount /dev/hdd2 /media/windows

That hdd2 might be different for you. Just look at the results from the fdisk command to see which is the ntfs partition of your windows hard drive and then enjoy! Any feedback, positive or negative, or any additions on something I missed would be well appreciated in the comments below.

Update:
If anyone out there has some storage space that has a ton of bandwidth, I would be more than happy to make a couple of zip files that contain the files and folders that are copied from the Live CD to your jump drive. Just give me a heads up in the comments below if you can supply a spot on the net for the zip file.

Image source: Linux Forum
Original Tutorial: Ubuntu Site
[Read part 1]

Firefox Add-On Of The Day...TWOFER!

2007-01-12T21:51:00.000-05:00

I figure that since its been about a week since my last Firefox "daily" add-on post that I would lay 2 on you at one time! Hey, I did say it would be somewhat daily.

Ok, #1! Love it and hate it at the same time, its Auto Copy! Yes, with this add-on you will be able to highlight text to effortlessly copy that text to your clipboard. Then click on the mouse wheel button to paste it into another field that your mouse is hovering over. This is really close to the feature that all Linux distributions have, so Linux users rejoice. Thats the love part. Now.. bring on the hate! Say you want to copy something into a field that already has text. How would you normally paste something to replace that text? I'll let you know how in order to help the flow of this post carry on in and orderly fashion. You would highlight the text and then paste over it, essentially replacing what was there with what is on your clipboard. You cannot do this with Auto Copy. If you highlight anything... Let me rephrase that. If you highlight ANYTHING, it copies it to the clipboard. So, needles to say you will have to do a little thinking, as well as trial and error, to get used to this add-on. But I definitely suggest a try of it.

NUMBER 2! Who is this person? No, I'm not asking you a question and that is not a link to some goofy picture of some gay porno dude. Who is this person(?) (witp) is the name of the Firefox add-on that is add-on NUMBER TWO in this crazy twofer! Situation: You putzing around the internet and come across a good article and start reading it. All of a suddon you come accross this name that you have never seen before and the article does a crap job of letting you know about him/her. With witp you will be able to highlight that name and right-click it and go into a new menu for the add-on. In this new menu you will be able to select from a vast array of websites to find out who this person is. Everything from IMDb to good old Google. From the name, it looks like the author may have just wanted to use this for people, but you can actually just search for anything. Just highlight it and choose which search engine you want to use.

Also, accepting suggestions. I can't find all the good ones myself. Feel free to leave your favorites in the comment section below.

Download Of The Day: Launchy

2007-01-12T15:38:00.000-05:00

With just the click of Alt+Space (or whatever you choose the hot key to be), you can launch any program on your computer by just typing in the name of that program. It is just that simple! And its all possible with Launchy. I've had this little application for a few months now and use it all the time. Have you ever had a game install in the most bizzarr folder structure ever? Most games install in the Programs directory on your C drive, and then get placed into a folder that is titled after the manufacturer of that game. Do you know who makes all of your games? You might, but then, every once in a while, you get an off beat game and are lost to be able to find the program on your C drive. Especially if you opted to not have a quick launch or desktop icon made, either by accident or on purpose.

It is also a very light program that you could never tell is running until you hit the hot key to activate it. Just make sure to check the box for making a shortcut to Launchy on your desktop. Then you can drag and drop the shortcut into your Starup folder in the start menu. This way Launchy will start when Windows starts. You can also change the position of where the Launchy window will pop up as well as change the skin of it to make it a closer match to your desktop theme. The most useful part of this program is its ability to keep index of multiple directories to open different types of files. It is customizable, so you can add or remove directories or file extension types that it can open up.

HowTo: RSS Feed + µTorrent

2007-01-11T21:17:00.000-05:00

New Smallville on tonight (which kicked ass!), new Heroes next week, & God knows when Lost is going to kick back up again at the new 10 o'clock time. Time to boot up µTorrent and start hunting and pecking around for a good high def copies of the latest episodes as they air. Not me, however, I do it all automatically. With RSS feeds. And, now, so can you.

First off, get µTorrent. Either get the standalone version or the full installer package. It really doesn't matter, but you don't need to install anything when you get the standalone version. Start it up and run through the configuration of what port to use. If you use a router you will need to set up port forwarding on the port you set up µTorrent with. Then, to test out your settings, hit the "Test if port is forwarded properly" button. If you see green you're good to go. If its red, read up on how to do port forwarding. Feel free to hit me up in the comments area if you have some trouble with that.

[More after the jump]

Next step is to get the RSS feed url for your favorite show. Head on over to tvRSS and fill in the "Show Name" field with your favorite show. To make this HowTo a full blown example, I'll do a search with you. We will use Smallville for this example, so go ahead and put in Smallville into the field and hit enter or the Search button. Don't worry about the results, you just want the url to the search results. Go ahead and right click on the "Search-based RSS Feed" text that is just above the posted search results (where the red arrow is pointing to) and click "Copy Link Location" ("Copy Shortcut" if you're using IE).

Now comes the µTorrent part. Head on over to your µTorrent window and press Cntrl+R on your keyboard. This will open up the RSS Downloader window in µTorrent. Go to the "Feeds" tab, if you are not on it already, and click on the "add" button on the bottom of the window. Right-click and paste what you copied from the previous step from the tvRSS feed's search. Now, before you hit ok, do your self a favor and put "Smallville|" at the begining of the feed so that it looks like the following:

Smallville|http://tvrss.net/search/[Ton more of a url here that I took out because it was too long]

No spaces around the bar between the name of the show and the feed url. Now hit ok.

Now go into the "Favorites" tab, the next one over from the "Feeds" tab. Click on the "Add" button on the bottom left-hand corner of the RSS Downloader window. The fields that I filled in are shown in the picture. For the name, use the * for wild cards. I just wrap the show name in them. I also capitalize the first letter of each word of the show name and replace spaces with *'s. This will ensure that your results will catch any version of the shows name whether there are dashes or not in the title of the torrent file that you will be automatically downloading. For example, you will download all of the following files:

poopies-best-damn-torrent-creation-Smallville-poopy-episode-5
Smallville-09-04
blah-blah-blah-Smallville-yackaty-shamckaty

Wild cards are awesome! Then go ahead and hit the "..." button at the end of the "Save In:" field and pick a spot where you want all of your episodes to be saved. Hit the down arrow all the way to the right of the window for the "Feed" field. This is where that "Smallville|" trick I talked about will come in handy. You should be seeing "Smallville". If you didn't put that "Smallville|" in front of the feed url then you would see the big huge long RSS url that you copied into the feed field in the "Feeds" tab. Select "Smallville" and continue reading. Click on the button next to "Quality" and pick HDTV. You gotta get the best, right? Check the box for "Episode Number:". Here you do not use wild cards but ranges. I only messed with the episode numbers in the range format and leave the season number alone, but assume that the same results would be achieved. But I'm in µTorrent so much that it isn't much trouble for me to change one number in each of my fav's once a year. So go ahead and put in 06x01-99 into the field for the episode number filter. This will ensure episodes 1 through 99 of season 6 will be downloaded. And then I have "Give download highest priority" just in case if I have something else downloading at the same time.

The history tab is for what you downloaded already. If the show is in the history tab then it will not be downloaded again. The releases tab is for what is available from the RSS feed. If something was not downloaded for some reason, then double check this tab and see if it is available. You might have to tweak your favorite settings for the show a bit. The show names are in a drop-down menu in this tab. So, to make it a bit easier for you, hit that drop-down and select your show to see what is available.

And thats it. All you have to do now is to repeat the above steps for other shows that you like and leave µTorrent on for the night when you favorite show is on. It will automatically start the download when the torrent file is updated in the feed. It downloads the torrent file locally and then starts up the torrent with µTorrent and saves it to the location you specified. The episodes to shows are usually available about an hour or two after the show airs. And if the show is popular enough, like Smallville or Lost is, it will only take about an hour or two to download the entire show. Every once in a while there might be more than one of the same format uploaded. So you might see that there were 2 of the same HDTV versions of Smallville were downloaded. No worries, just delete one of them. If I missed anything please let me know and I would be more than happy to adjust the post.

Download Of The Day Review: CrossLoop

2007-01-10T21:54:00.000-05:00

I found out about CrossLoop yesterday from one of LifeHacker's "Download of the Day" posts. I gave it a quick test and then made a comment on LifeHacker's site about the program. CrossLoop personnel then saw my comment on LifeHacker and then questioned why I had a bad encounter with the program. As said in my rebuttal from Mrinal's comment, I really think it says something about the program when they come this far (2 sites) to get down to just why an individual user, such as myself, had this bad encounter and what they can do to make this a bit better. Thus the reason for this post.

Just a bit of background, I have just recently started a small business where I help out people (just friends so far) with their home PC's, laptops and home networks. As an incentive to call me up instead of someone else, I though that it would be a great idea to throw in some remote access assistance from time to time. Which lead me on a quest to find a good, if not great, remote access program. One that I was most familiar with was LogMeIn, but I am always open for testing out something new. And when I saw LifeHacker's post about CrossLoop, I couldn't wait to give it a test run when I got home that day. The results, however, as you can see from my comment on LifeHacker, were not that good.

[Results of full review after the jump]

Now, cutting to the chase, I'll give a short list of things that turned me away from CrossLoop. Quick heads up, I will be comparing this to LogMeIn. So you can just assume that if the feature is not in CrossLoop it is in LogMeIn, but I'll just stick to the CrossLoop side of the discussion as to not possibly confuse anyone.

So, first on my list of things that didn't float my boat about CrossLoop is that the connection was very slow. There was an extremely noticeable delay when doing anything. You also are not able to use any windows shortcut keys, such as the windows logo key, alt+tab or ctrl+alt+delete. If you do any of these things while in your CrossLoop session you will just be doing them to the computer that you are on and not to the computer that you are connected to. I did implement a download on the computer that i was connected to and then the connection crashed. The person that i was connected to had AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) running and i was downloading the LogMeIn setup executable at the same time. I was also connected to a laptop that had a weak connection to a wireless network. I am pretty sure that it was a combination of all of these things that created the crash, mostly the weak connection to the internet, but the laptop never lost the internet connection. After asking the person that I was connected to if she lost her internet connection, she said no. You are also not able to adjust the session window size. It stays the same size depending on what the resolution is of the computer you are connected to. The window does not go off of your desktop, it just has the adjustable bars on the right side and bottom so you can scroll all over the place to get to where you need to go on the desktop. An adjustable zoom feature would be extremely helpful in this situation. Another small pet peave is that it removes the background image of the person you are connecting to and does not put it back when the session is done. And my last issue that i noticed was that the whole "host" "join" thing seemed a bit backwards. If you are the host, then people connect to your computer and see what your doing, not the other way around. I think that it should be changed to say something else, like "Professional" and "User", or something a bit better, it would make it a bit more understandable.

This is just one users point of view, please do not take this post as an excuse to not give this program a test. My experience may be completely different than someone else's. I also encourage your feedback from both this post and your experience with CrossLoop or any other remote access program for that matter.

[Update]
It was pointed out to me that CrossLooop is also a sort of open source application. I say sort of, because it uses TightVNC and then CrossLoop has their application wrapped around that. Yeah, sounds confusing doesn't it? I'll let Techknight's blog post explain it better for you. I'm not sure what the benefits to us as a consumer that this level of open source would be. Since they are using TighVNC open source code wrapped up with propriatary software, it definitely would be cheaper once all of the bugs have been worked out and there is a pro version. I'll let readers point out the other benefits.

Something Else To Do Before You Die

2007-01-10T08:50:00.000-05:00

A roller coaster with a 4th dimension! This is Eejanaika, and it is not just your average, run of the mill coaster here folks. You are sitting in a seat, and you take off onto the track. Only this time, on this ride, there is an extra set of tracks that controls what your seat is doing throughout the ride. I spins you 360 degrees while you are flying around the track. It would probably be better if you were in the superman position, but this is still nothing that USA has that I am aware of.

[Video after the jump]

Eejanaika is at Fuji-Q Highland in Japan. It holds the Guinness world record for number of inversions at 14. Other specs are as follows:

Maximum Speed 126 km/h
Lift Height 76 m
Angle of Descent 89 degrees
Track Length 1,153 m

There are also a bunch more great pics HERE.

via TechEBlog [Knuttz]

Where To Get Free Music

2007-01-09T20:41:00.001-05:00

Want quick download time without the long wait with bit torrent or some other type of peer-to-peer software? Well look no further. With this small list of music tools, you will have your music in no time from any pc at work or at home.

The first on the list is my favorite and is actually integrated in a blog post from Digital Wire. The post is one about Google's search tools and how to use Google to get some music or use it as a proxy server (a way to get around the fire wall at work). The proxy may, or may not, work for you. I am not one that recommends using proxy services at work, but, if the music is available, go for it.

[More after the jump]

This is just a post on a blog that has a type of Google search in the post. It utilizes a bounce file saved in the inner workings of the site and allows you to enter your desired search into a text field. Hit enter after you put in your artist and/or song title and you are whisked away to a Google search that looks into parent directories all over the net for the song/artist combination that you entered. After clicking on one of the Google search results, you are brought to a directory of sorts that lists what is available to you. If you see something you might like, click on it and you will be brought to a page where it should automatically play the song for you. If you like the song, go back a page to right-click and save the file to your local hard drive. I've been using this service for a while and hope that the files, as well as the blog, does not go anywhere. This is the first on the list because I use it the most and have had the most success with.

Next on the list, Sideload. Sideload is very different from the Digital Wire post's search field, because it is a website that is continually building it song base from it's users. Users create an account and are able to upload songs to their "File Locker". You then do a search on the main page or browse through the library manually flipping through the alphabet. If you think you found something you like, you then click on the song title and are brought to another page where you can preview the song. If you like it, there is a download link to download the song to your hard drive.

This one is not as good as the first on the list due to the need for subscribers and free users. Yes, there is a free service for you to get your file locker, but of the 3 packages it only makes sense to get the premium package at $40/year for the unlimited size limit of your locker. I just use it as a search to see if they have anything I like. But, again, due to the need for paying subscribers, this selection is pretty dated as well as weak.

Next up on the list, iTunes. Every once in a while I, a PC user, might be a little desperate for a song that either I or my wife needs. And at just $0.99/song, how can you say no to just 1 or 2 songs? I really just use to use iTunes for their podcasts, but have since either stopped listening to podcasts or am using digg as my podcast player/search engine.

Honorable Mentions:
This is the part of the post where you can listen to the songs, but might not necessaraly be able to get your hands on a copy of it.
1) Pandora: Great site and great selection! This is a place where you can go to listen to a ton of music and rate it as it comes to you. If you don't like 6 songs in the same hour, you are stuck listening to everything that comes. Or you can create another station and swap back and forth between your 2 stations when you limit is maxed and it will automatically skip the song you hate. Just be sure to rate it, or you might hear it again. It use to be that the songs were downloaded locally to your hard drive and then streamed to the Pandora web player. I believe they changed something since I started using this service a year ago, because the songs no longer appear where they used to appear in a temp folder. I also tried using the Pandora Jar hack with no successful results. Perhaps a reader can enlighten me on if the songs are still downloaded locally or not? Or if Pandora Jar still works?

2) Last.fm: A site where you can either search for you favorite band or song in order to listen to a song. Or where you can browse users and see what they rate as a good song. This is another site that has a great music library.

3) Pandora.fm: A fantastic site that combines both musical libraries and functionality from both Pandora and Last.fm and plays it through the Pandora player in your browser. Again, this site used to download the songs locally to a temp folder and then stream it to my browser player, but no longer functions like that.

4) Music.Yahoo: Another great site that encourages you to rate as many things as possible. I say "things" because you can literally rate just about anything that has to do with the song your listening to. Everything from the album, to the song to the artist. Similar to Pandora, there is a web based player that streams songs that you have rated, and then suggests other songs based on your ratings, allowing the player to more "smartly" predict something that you would like to hear. They have 3 different qualities, low/med/high, where you have to get the pay service for high quality. But consider saving a buck and sticking with the med or low quality and save yourself a headache when your boss starts complaining about you sucking up all of your companies bandwidth. And, again, similar to Pandora, there is a limit on the amount of songs you can skip over if you do not like it. Only this time you are stuck listening to it, or you can just reload the page.

5) Radio.Blog.Club: No rating system or ads. Just do a search and then you are given results that display user's names that have the song in their player. Click on the results to be transported to the user's main page where you are able to look through their player that has songs loaded up in it. Great if you want to listen to the full song of one of your favorites.

I'm sure that this list is just a short one and encourage any reader to let us know about any other service that they frequent. Myspace is an okay site as well. Do a search for a band and you they have a player on their myspace page. Sometimes you can download the song instead of playing it. 9 times out of 10, however, the download option is not available. And that is why myspace is here instead of the honorable mentions list. I don't think it is that good, but felt that others would mention it.

The Digg Review

2007-01-09T11:20:00.000-05:00

Digg is new now, version 3.0, and has been for a while now. I feel it is time for a review in order to point out a few things that need some changes, other than the pretty new 2.0'ish interface.

First off, you can now customize the "Front Page" stories to conform to what you want to see. Don't like a Front Page full of nothing but Wii stories? Then get rid of them! Click on the customize button, located under your "Profile" image, and uncheck the Main Gaming category. Like to read about "Time Wasters" web based games though? Then just uncheck the "Gaming News" sub-category under the Gaming catagory.

I have fallen in love with this new feature because I only have and play PC games. And ever since the ps3 and Wii came out, there have been nothing but stories about them and hacking them. It gets a bit monotonous after a while.

[More after the jump]

The top "doggs" over at digg also separated video stories from news stories. If you go into your profile, or anyone's profile, to view stories dugg, submitted or commented on, you now need to hit the "Videos" tab on the top right of the window in order to check out the funny videos that are being passed around.

This is somewhat useful if you are on the lookout for videos or news, but I do not feel that it is completely necessary. But it does save me a search where i have to check videos, so it is a useful addition.

And then there is the beta feature of Podcasts. This is just in beta so I can go on for quite a while about what needs to be adjusted and fixed. I'll save you from reading that, and just encourage that you go and check out some podcasts through it. One thing that I will comment on is that it seems that the whole podcast system is a bit Digg/TechTV/Tech biased. Taking a look at the podcast's main page now: diggnation, twit, dl.tv, tiki bar, ctrl+alt+chicken... All hosted by and starring digg peeps and/or past techTV hosts, or endorsed by digg. But, this is still in baby beta mode, so i'll leave it alone for now.

One feature that I really thing should have been changed with the new update to digg is the rss feed. The way the front page works is that the popular stories make it to the front page. And if you have an rss feed aggregator like I do, Google Reader, then you would like to subscribe to the content that make it to the front page. You don't want to be left out alone in the dark do you? No, so you subscribe to the front page. But now you can customize the content that makes it to "your" front page. Are you able to subscribe to "your" front page? Yes, you can. But, you will be subscribing to the old front page where you will see every single Wii/ps3/360 story. I don't know, maybe there is a way to get an rss feed to "your" front page, but its not with the rss button that is on the front page, thats for sure.