To make it a lot less painful, let me recommend the single most important tool in a podcaster’s arsenal: the freeware audio editor called “Audacity.”

Audacity is an open-source multi-platform audio editor for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Development is supported by donations, and by purchases from the Audacity Store (and after all, who doesn’t have a use for another coffee mug, or a nice polo shirt?).

Some of the most important Audacity features for podcasters are:

• Live recording from any source (mic, Skype, line in, etc.) that your computer supports.
• Automated “noise removal.” I record in a room that has a lot of ventilator fan noise. Audacity removes all that noise with just a couple of clicks.
• Clipping, splicing, and mixing of audio tracks.
• Pitch and speed changes.
• Special effects, such as flanging and phasing.

And if you’re smart enough to “save early and save often,” you can try things out and if you don’t like them, revert to the prior version almost instantly.

Finally, Audacity can export in a number of different file formats; MP3 is probably the most important for podcasters, of course.

Try it! If you don’t like it – well, it was free.

Bypass Heavy-Handed Web Filters with Your Own Proxy Server

Your IT Department installs filters for a number of reasons, including (but not limited to):

• The lawyers told them to.
• HR told them to.
• Your manager would rather that you work while you’re getting paid for it, and browse random Web sites on your own time.
• Many thousands of Web sites contain malicious code that will silently install itself on your computer – and your employer’s network – simply by you visiting the wrong site (which could be the New York Times or Wall Street Journal – both have had third-party advertising banners that contained malicious code).

So, while it may be fun to think you’re “getting away with it,” you probably aren’t (the IT Department keeps logs, and the proxy won’t protect you from that), depending on your employer’s policies, you may be putting your job at serious risk by circumventing the filters IT put there.

Just do something smarter, OK? Like, maybe, work at work, and play at home.

First, take a look at the Spanish language version of the fix. I suggest you open it in a new tab.

Now, here’s the English translation, courtesy of Google:

Spanish to English translation

Problems with laptop battery Windows 7: workaround
Many users of Windows 7 are taking warnings related to problems with their laptop battery when in fact there is no problem.
Microsoft is currently investigating this issue with hardware manufacturers. Apparently the problem is related to the BIOS and look for an immediate update of firmware.

Consider replacing your battery “Consider replacing your battery” is the annoying error message that appears frequently in Windows 7.

As Microsoft releases the final solution for this error, then a temporary solution is to disable the error:

- Open the Control Panel Device Manager or write in the search box on the Start menu
- Select the Device Manager
- Expand and select Battery with Battery control method for ACPI Microsoft
- Right click and select Disable

And there you have it!

Beer: Now A Health Food!

If you haven’t already yelled out to the Little Woman about this discovery, show her the full report!

Source

Rare is the person who comes away from a ‘con unscathed.  In light of the recent events regarding PAX and the presence of an uninvited guest (Swine Flu), I thought the topic should be discussed. Sure, you could walk around in a surgical mask and a pair of latex gloves to protect yourselves from germs, but the ‘con is the perfect venue to be a bit more creative.  I’ve compiled a list of the top 5 costume genres you can use to keep other peoples’ germs at bay.

1. Ninja/Power Ranger/Snake Eyes/ Cobra Commander

The key feature here is some type of cloth facial covering that could easily hide a surgical mask and make you look quite dapper as well.  The requisite pair of gloves also protects your hands from germy game demos.  All these costumes are fairly readily available from various costume retailers or are simple enough to put together yourself.

2. Storm Trooper/Darth Vader/ Boba Fett

Again with this genre is the mask to hide a less aesthetically surgical one, but this time they are hard masks.  Plus, the odd sound your voice will make coming through the various layers will only serve to enhance the cosplay experience. And, again, the gloves are part of the outfit.  These, however, are probably better for the more die hard fan, as purchasing one or making one yourself can be quite daunting.

3. Steam Punk/WWII Soldier/Psycho Mantis from MGS

The big draw here: Gas mask.  Rather than use a fake one, get a real mask and outfit it with a couple of filters rated to keep biological microbes and you’ll be all set. All in all, it’s fairly simple to put together a decent outfit from thrift or army surplus stores. A pair of thin leather gloves will make button mashing easier and safer.

4. Transformer/Gundam

While certainly not the easiest costume to move around in, you could probably hide an entire respiration system within a good cardboard robot.  Make sure to bring a friend, though.  Maneuvering by yourself could prove quite hazardous.

5. Mascot-style Characters

While this is certainly something I would never encourage, there’s certainly no better way to keep everyone away from you than by dressing up as a terrifying large headed stuffed animal.

I hope that now before you head off to your next convention that you’ll remember what you’ve learned here and will take the necessary, geeky precautions.

1. Netflix:  missed your favorite show?  Who cares, just queue up the season DVDs to be mailed (or, if you’re lucky, it’s available to watch immediately)
2. Hulu:  Why not just stream the show for free?  Hulu will even let you build up a queue complete with subscriptions
3. Over-the-air HDTV:  pull in those local channels, for free, using a simple antenna and your fancy new flat-screen (or an older TV with a converter box)
4. BitTorrent:  plenty of ways to find espisodes of shows for download as well, though this is, at best, a bit of a grey area when it comes to the legality.
5. Digital stores (Amazon/iTunes/etc):  just purchase your favorite episodes to watch at your leisure

Now, admittedly, a lot of these require you to have high-speed internet (any digital download or streaming) and/or pay (Netflix, digital purchases), but the options are varied.   However, DSL is reasonably priced ($20-30/month); slap a Netflix subscription on top of that for another $15 or so, and you’re still coming out cheaper than anything the cable company (well, that I’ve seen from Comcast) has to offer – plus you’ve got high-speed internet to boot.

I guess what remains to be seen is how the cable companies will adapt to the new technology.  Yes, cable internet is most likely the fastest that most people can get ahold of (unless they’re in a FIOS market), but that doesn’t give you any discounts on your cable bill.  Will the Comcast’s of the world fight back against the pressure of free HD and online programming?  Only time will tell, but I’m not holding my breath.

According to twitter’s status page they are in the midst of fighting off a Denial Of Service Attack. http://status.twitter.com/

What is a DDoS Attack you may ask.

Well according to Wikipedia:

A denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) or distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS attack) is an attempt to make a computer resource unavailable to its intended users. Although the means to carry out, motives for, and targets of a DoS attack may vary, it generally consists of the concerted efforts of a person or persons to prevent an Internet site or service from functioning efficiently or at all, temporarily or indefinitely. Perpetrators of DoS attacks typically target sites or services hosted on high-profile web servers such as banks, credit card payment gateways, and even root nameservers.

So there you have it.  I’ll let you know more when I know more.

Update: It appears Twitter is back up for the moment. 11:48 EST

James Cameron’s “Avatar”

Star Trek DAC

District 9 Truck

The Green Hornet Car

Dalek

I hope everybody is having fun out at The San Diego Comic Con and thanks Tom.

Download HD 720p

“I don’t know if they can’t make up their mind or what the problem is over there, but the last time I checked, you don’t need two client operating systems,” said Ballmer. “It’s good to have one.”

So what are you saying, Steve? That Windows 3, NT, 95, 98, ME, 2000, XP, Vista, CE, and Mobile never happened, and that Windows 7 is the only product Microsoft has ever produced? Or that none of them are client systems? I guess that means my “Windows Remote Desktop” client is imaginary, and that the Windows CE thin clients and Windows Mobile smartphones in the building are likewise figments.

Apparently Wall Street is smarter than Mr. Ballmer thinks they are. The final line in the article reads:

“Microsoft shares fell 15 cents to $23.08 on Tuesday afternoon on the Nasdaq.”

(Reuters Reporting by Bill Rigby, editing by Matthew Lewis and Gerald E. McCormick)

Or, How I Learned to Believe Some of Microsoft’s Advice

I’ve just finished resurrecting Ursula, my Frankenputer. She was originally an HP Pavilion a1747c, with a nice dual-core AMD Athlon 64 CPU, 4 gigs of RAM, 250 gig hard drive, and reads-and-burns-everything-but-HD-DVD-and-Blueray Lightscribe optical drive. She was “debranded” when HP discontinued the model, and I was able to buy her brand-new from geeks.com for less than $200 (with only 1 gig of RAM at the time; I fixed that immediately, you betcha!). She came without an OS, so I installed Vista Ultimate 64-bit (because I have seen Windows XP 64, and brother, it ain’t pretty what it does and doesn’t run).

I thought it might be nice to try out the Windows 7 RC 64-bit OS, so I shut her down, planning to connect a second 250 gig drive and make a clone so that I can revert to Vista 64 if I decide to do so. Sadly, that was the moment my power supply decided that it didn’t want to play any more, and when it died, it took the motherboard along with it. My dear wife came to the rescue with her credit card, and I now have a brand-new 680W power supply and an Asus M3A76-CM motherboard. The video card onboard is actually halfway decent, but of course I kept my Nvidia GeForce 9600. The keyboard is a Logitech G15, the mouse a Logitech G5, and there’s a Logitech webcam as well.

If you’re going to try the Release Candidate (or even wait for the final release and buy the final product then), do yourself a favor and make a backup of your existing hard drive. It will save you from certain disaster if anything goes wrong during the upgrade process, by simply being there, ready to pop in and instantly restore your system to the pre-Windows 7 state. A good way to do this is using DriveImageXML, which comes with the Ultimate Boot CD for Windows. UBCD4WIN is something you should have anyway if you tinker with Windows PCs. A health plan that includes psychiatric care is also advisable.

After moving the memory and CPU to the new motherboard and installing that and the new power supply in the case, I hooked up a spare drive I had lying around and installed Windows 7 64 in a “clean install” manner, as if this were a brand-new PC with a blank drive. Total install time was about 45 minutes, and all my hardware “just worked. So far, so good!

All of the foregoing is to give you background on what happened when I started the upgrade. The next step after cloning the drive (which I had done on another PC, using USB 2.0-to-SATA adapters, and taking almost 20 hours to complete) was to set aside the clone, carefully marked, and install the proper Vista 64 drivers for the new motherboard. Once everything was working normally again, I downloaded the Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor Beta and ran it. Honestly, it was practically useless, as you will see further on in this article, but it did assure me that there were no glaring compatibility issues. I’d recommend using it simply to cover all your bases. It also told me that Magic Disk/Magic ISO would not work with Windows 7. Well, that’s no problem, they hadn’t been used in so long that I had forgotten they were installed, so out they went!

So, having been assured that all my hardware was supported under Windows 7, and having all my new drivers working and the latest updates to Vista 64 installed (I lost track of how many reboots that was somewhere around thirteen, by the way), I popped the Windows 7 RC 64 DVD into the drive and eagerly chose “upgrade” from the 2-item menu (the other option is “Custom.” We’ll come back to that later).

Apparently not all my installs had completed; Windows 7 required me to reboot yet again and restart the upgrade process, which I did. This time things proceeded well, and after about an hour and forty-five minutes, and several reboots and auto-resumes, Windows 7 RC was ready to use.

Except for one thing. Windows Explorer was crashing as soon as I logged in, so I had no desktop. CTL-ALT-DEL brought up the Task Manager, and I could relaunch Explorer (if I wanted to see it crash again) or any other application (all of which, including my beloved World of Warcraft, ran perfectly). Booting into Safe Mode (which incidentally is much harder in Windows 7) worked well. So I launched Chrome and started Googling for a solution. Eventually I found some advice that told me to run MSCONFIG and disable all non-Microsoft services and startup items, and reboot. That worked. Of course, now I had the “plain vanilla” Windows 7 desktop, totally unacceptable to a dedicated geek. I started re-enabling one item at a time and rebooting. Luckily, I started wondering what “Process Monitor” was in the list of Services before too many reboots. A little more research showed that it was actually “Logitech Process Monitor.” I re-enabled everything else, disable that, and rebooted. Viola! The Eagle has landed! Er, I mean my desktop is back!

But now, although my sound system is working, the mixer panel is the default “We’re not sure what hardware you’ve got, but we think this will work” version from Microsoft. Since the onboard audio is a Via HD Audio system, off I went back to Google to find the right drivers. Without too much trouble, I located a beta version of a Windows 7 64 driver. Downloaded and installed that, and finally, after about 2 hours, the system is completely functional and running Windows 7 RC 64.

Obviously, this is why Microsfot recommended a clean install. They didn’t want to support millions of baffled Vista users who were trying to upgrade (and frankly, who could blame them?).

I do not see any significant performance improvements, though. Still, Ursula has always been fairly responsive, so I’ll allow that Windows 7 is no worse than Vista, and maybe some things are better.

So, lessons learned were:

• Make a full backup of your hard drive before starting an upgrade (or clean install).
• If at all possible, perform a “clean install” and then reinstall your software; you can copy your data files back from the hard drive clone you made.
• Don’t expect to get away with less than 2 hours from the beginning of the upgrade or install process to the end; you might get lucky and finish sooner, but it’s a bad idea to count on it.

Here’s hoping that the new footage will be available online soon.  I can think of no greater use for our new 40″ LCD than to watch high-quality footage with my 8-year-old son.

I’ve just checked it myself, and I was able to log in, so hopefully it was just a temporary blip in the road, and they’ve gotten things smoothed out.

Now back to your regularly scheduled watching!

(Initially found via Appscout)