CHRISdotTODD

What would it be like if your life was like Facebook or another social network? You might find acquaintances from long ago showing up at your door. This first video helps you see what that might be like. The first video is from some blokes in England, Idots of Ants -- they are Benjamin Wilson, James Wrighton, Elliott Tiney and Andrew Spiers. This is just one of many videos available on YouTube by the Idiots. If you have a tech job, many others likely do not understand what you do. Of course you spend most of the day playing computer games. And when your non-technical colleagues have technical problems, they are all the same problem, caused by the same thing, requiring the same fix. In this case, it's because the website is down. I hope you enjoyed these video shorts as much as I did.

I found a great, free site that will take my mp3 music and create ringtones. With audiko.net you can search for existing ringtones, upload your own mp3 or enter a URL of an mp3 or YouTube video. The ringtones should work with most phones including the iPhone. When you upload a file, it takes only a few minutes to process, and then you can select the music segment that you want converted to a ringtone. The one problem with the entire process is that you cannot play your uploaded file, so you need to determine on your computer or mp3 player the time mark to start and stop the clip. Audiko.net is able to process files so quickly because they only use the first 75 seconds of a clip, which should be fine in most cases. If you opt to use a YouTube file, the process takes a bit longer, but still works. Of course with YouTube, the audio is not likely to be as good as what you can get from an mp3 file. When the ringtone is ready to download, you can get it in mp3 format, m4r, (the iPhone forma

Updated 17-Oct-08. Some good news on the Wells Fargo security front. Though the ignoring of extra password characters is still true, you have to exceed 14 characters before you see this behavior. A 14 character password is sufficiently long enough where this should not be a significant issue. The reason behind the case insensitive username and password is so the same system can support phone interaction as well. Though this lowers the security level, it is compensated for by limiting failed logins to 3 attempts. After the 3rd failure, the user must contact the bank before they can try again. In listening to Security Now , a TWiT Network netcast, staring Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte has reported over several episodes in September that the Wells Fargo online login is not as secure as it should be. This report came from users of Secuirty Now. The first report was that the password would still work if it had extra charcters at the end of it. It was not determined to whether the length w

In an effort to tell the stories of Obama and McCain and their positions of Net Neutrality, Popular Mechanics put together a great article describing the various issues involved in the Net Neutrality debate. Though too late in the game for Obama and McCain to devote time to sitting down and discussing with Popular Mechanics, they did get enough information to know the general positions -- Obama wants enough regulation by government to provide an open Internet while McCain does not want government involvement. Popular Mechanics summarized it as "John McCain is against Net neutrality and Barack Obama is for it." The Popular Mechanics article does a good job describing the role of the ISP and the so called "last mile". We're reminded about the ethical issues around conflict in interest the ISPs have. For example, the ISP can provide a slower or throttled bandwidth, which would impact VoIP (Internet telephone) from 3rd parties while making sure their own VoIP solu

Here's just one way to improve the performance of Firefox, through enabling pipelining. Pipelining is having the browser send a subsequent request before receiving a response from the prior request (standard behavior). Pipelining also provides the facility to include multiple requests within a single packet. Mozilla reports the highest potential performance gains for those web pages that have a higher latency rate. Here's how to configure Firefox: Enter about:config in the URL bar Click the warning button Enter "pip" in the Filter -- this should reduce the list of options to four items Click on the Value field for the following two entries and change from False to True network.http.pipelining network.http.proxy.pipelining Click on the Value field of network.http.pipelining.maxrequests and set the value to 8 Start enjoying a faster Firefox If you set the maximum requests for pipelining too high, you could actually see or just perceive a slower response time, so if y

If you have ever tried to switch to a UNC name while working with the Command Prompt, you have found that it can cause you a problem. What you need is a mapped drive to the UNC path. Using pushd , you can accomplish this. pushd will map to the last available drive (i.e. Z:) and automatically switch you to that drive mapping. Here's the syntax: pushd \\server\share\path For example, \\mycompanyserver\commonfiles\project1 Of course when you're done, you may want to unmap that drive. No problem, use popd . With popd , it will switch you back to the path you were on and unmap the drive letter. Here's the syntax: popd z This is a great solution for those batch files that require a drive mapping, but you do not want to keep the mapping alive all the time.

Most of us who have purchased iTunes music know that we can remove the DRM from the M4P audio files by burning the music onto a CD. But if you have a large collection, this can be very time consuming -- though having your music backed up to CD isn't a bad idea. For those of you who do not relish the idea of bacing up each every track, there might be a solution available for you. This first program, MagicISO , will convert up to 3 minutes per song for 14 days without purchasing -- I tried a song under 3 minutes and it seemed to work fine. You can buy it for $30 or get it free when you buy a 3rd party item or service through their site. For example, you can get the 2009 Entertainment Book for $25. Your second option is NoteBurner -- a $35 software that will allow you to burn to a virtual CD, and then back to MP3s. This batch converter works with iTunes, Windows Media Player, RealPlayer, Winamp, and SonicStage. Another option is TuneBite . TuneBite appears to play and capture, getti

Many applications we use come with built in spell checkers; with F7 being the most common way to execute the spell checker. With more and more web based apps, I seem to find myself occasionally not having a spell checker or the spell checker is cumbersome. For me, this no longer is a problem. I have been using a free product called Enso Words from Humanized for over 6 months as my spell checker. Here's how simple it is: Highlight what you want to check (ctrl-A to select everything) Hold the Caps Lock key down and start typing "spellcheck". In my case, just an "s" is enough to put spellcheck in the top of the Enso list. Release the Caps Lock key If there are no misspellings, Enso Words will tell you so. If there are, a window will open with your text, and the misspelling will be highlighted. Click and hold on the misspellings to see possible correct spellings. Select the correct spelling or select Learn. Alternatively, you can type the correct spelling. When you

I recently noticed a new problem with Word and Excel opening rather slow -- on a new laptop no less. And when I was connecting through our VPN to the office, I would get an error message, "The printer has not yet responded... Continue to wait?" Turns out there was a problem with my default printer definition in Windows being corrupt. I delete the old definition and created a new definition (Add Printers and Faxes) and the problem has gone away.

I ran across a great article on Royal HeHe2-ness from guest blogger Ian McLean about DRM and why it needs to go. Why Its Time To Kick DRM To The Curb give a good perspective on the options for digital media companies and consumers. Mr. McLean re-enforces the fact that honest folks are impacted, while the less honest have a better product. Further he also points out that in many cases there are free alternatives that are as good or nearly as good as the expensive DRM software packages. Give this article a read.