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I went out yesterday to get a new cell phone because my Nokia 6200 decided to give me trouble with the SIM card. I went to the Cingular store in the mall here to look around. I still had about a year left in my current contract with AT&T so the last thing I wanted was to extend my contract another 2 years. I found out that the old contract gets cancelled entirely because I’m switching from AT&T to Cingular. I picked up a Motorola V551. It has a camera (still and video), can play mp3 ringtones, and has bluetooth built-in. The only thing it doesn’t have that I mentioned in a previous post is a removable memory card for the pictures. It’s not easy finding one of those without spending $500+.

I’ve added a list of blogs I read frequently to the sidebar. You’ll notice there are a few links that are repeated. I’m doing that so I can figure out which URL is tracked for updating my BlogRolling.com and weblogs.com. Once I figure that out, then I’ll be able to trim down the links.

I found a new FTP program for me to use since I want to get rid of WS_FTP. I did try a few other FTP programs like AceFTP, CoffeeCup Free FTP, and Core FTP Lite. I was going through some of the posts in the WordPress Support forum, and as I was checking out someone else’s blog, I read about them switching to FileZilla. So I clicked on the link they had given and I was happy to see that it is a SourceForge.net project. I’ve already deleted the other FTP programs I was trying out since FileZilla doesn’t have any of the annoying characteristics of those programs, like ads when opening and closing the program to keep it free.

Technorati Tags: FileZilla, FTP

I’ve been listening to Adam Curry’s Daily Source Code for a while now and for the last few weeks he has had a segment on his show called The Hit Test. The Hit Test is sent in by a guy by the name of Jan Polet. The Hit Test became so popular that Jan decided to turn it into a podcast.

I was checking out my profile on digg.com, and looking at the comments to one of the stories I submitted, and whose name do I see? Sarah Lane. Sarah Lane is one of the on-air talent on the G4 show, The ScreenSavers, and the girlfriend of Kevin Rose.

JHymn is a program that can strip the DRM (Digital Rights Management) from an iTunes purchased song. DRM was designed primarily to prevent music piracy but in exchange made it hard for honest people to have “fair use” of their music. Right now, Pepsi and iTunes are running a “contest” where you can win a free iTunes song which normally costs $0.99. What if you win an iTunes song but your portable mp3 player can’t play the DRM encrypted .m4p file? Apple would expect you to burn that song to CD and then rip it back to the computer as an .mp3. Taking an already compressed audio format, uncompressing it to put it onto a CD, and then recompressing it to another lossy file format not only takes time and wastes a CD in the process; but also degrades the quality of the original song. With JHymn, I can simply tell it to convert the .m4p file into a DRM-free .mp3 without hurting the sound quality.
I found out about JHymn from reading a post over at plastic bugs, which is a blog created by Scott Moschella, who is the line producer for The ScreenSavers. He won a free song from the Pepsi/iTunes contest and downloaded silence. 1 minute and 3 seconds of silence to be exact. And Apple would actually charge somebody $0.99 to listen to silence. So he decided to stick it to the RIAA and to Apple (only for their DRM) by detailing how he went about removing the DRM from the silence. His site wound up getting slashdotted from all the exposure he got. It was mentioned on Slashdot, kevin rose dot com, digg.com, and Alex Albrecht’s site.

Technorati Tags: JHymn

I just installed a plugin for WordPress called Spam Karma. It’s designed to keep all the comments from being filled with nothing but spam so I have less to moderate. I’ve read good things about it on the WordPress Support forum.

Technorati Tags: Karma, Spam

SMAC is a MAC Address modifying utility for network cards on Windows 2000, XP, and 2003 Server systems. The MAC (Media Access Control) Address is the hardware address of the network card. It’s similar to a serial number whereas each card is unique and every manufacturer is unique. The MAC Address of a Linksys card will be totally different from the MAC Address of a Netgear card. A program like this can come in handy for when I go to people’s houses and setup a wireless network with allowing certain MAC Addresses. I can fake the MAC Address of my Linksys WPC11 Wireless-B Notebook Adapter if one of their wireless devices isn’t communicating with the router to figure out if it’s the device or the router.

Thanks to Podz, who is a developer for WordPress, I am also checking out RSSOwl. I like that it can work on Windows, Mac, and Linux. Out of the four that I’m testing, RSSOwl is the only one that I can use on any platform. It also shows the URL’s to both the original post and to the comments. The others only show the URL to the original post. The only problem I have come across with RSSOwl is some of the feeds are missing information. For example, when I download and read Adam Curry’s Weblog, it’s missing the publish date for each post. When I download and read News Askew, it only shows the post title and nothing else. I’ve emailed the developer of the software to let him know. If they can fix it, RSSOwl will be the only RSS feed reader I use.

UPDATE: I received an email back from the developer of RSSOwl and he pointed out to me that the problems I came across were not because of the program but because of the feeds themselves were missing the information. The other RSS feed readers I was using were using the downloaded time and date as the post date and I never noticed.

Technorati Tags: RSSOwl

As I was going through digg.com, I came across this link to Computer Stupidities. A lot of the stories listed remind me of work. There are a lot that are really funny.