Sync ipod (and scrobble to last.fm) with Winamp

I posted a while ago about scrobbling to last.fm without iTunes, so i thought i’d write about how to do this using winamp and the ml_ipod plugin.

Once you have installed winamp all you need to do is download the plugin from the site above and install it. If you want to scrobble to last.fm you need to check the box during the install as this feature is not installed by default.

Once it is installed, connect up your ipod (it supports most ipods) and it will ask you for some details about what model of ipod it is. You will also need to enter your last.fm details into the “Audioscrobbler for Winamp” plugin (found under General purpose plug-ins).

You can then sync your ipod with your winamp library. Each time you sync it will update the playcounts (both ways) and submit any newly played tracks to last.fm. As with any other method of scrobbling you need to make sure you sync before playing any tracks in winamp, otherwise any previously played tracks will not be accepted by last.fm

There is very little configuration required for the ml_ipod plugin although there are a lot of options that you can explore.

Ipod Preferences screenshot

Transfer window

(Screenshots taken from the ml_ipod website)

Add Removable Device Icons to your desktop

Desktop Media is a small free application for Windows which adds drive icons to your desktop automatically. It will add USB drives, local hard drives, cd/dvd drives and network drives. For removable devices the icon only appears when the media is present, so if there is no cd in the drive you won’t see the icon. It also allows you to hide certain drives so you can show only the ones you wish to see. You can also save the position of the icons.

This feature is present in most (all?) linux distros and Mac Os X, and is one thing i did wish was available for Windows, and now it is!

Spybot 1.6 has been released

I don’t normally post about new releases of software but i thought i’d make an exception (i might even start to post a bit more about different software releases if they are justified).

A few days ago Spybot Search & Destroy was released. This is one of the programs that i install straight away after installing Windows. For those who haven’t heard of it before it is essentially a spyware scanning and removal tool. It does however, have a number of additional features that are very useful, such as monitoring the registry for changes (spyware/adware can attempt to change parts of the registry) and gives you the option to allow or deny the change.

The main changes from the previous version are:

• Improved Scan Speed
• Up-to-date browser support
• Easier On-Access Use
• OpenSBI

Head over to www.spybot.info for more information and to download

about:crashes in Mozilla Firefox 3

Did you know that Firefox 3.0 automatically sends error report to Mozilla whenever your Firefox session crashes?

You can find out how many times Firefox has crashed and what it is sending to Mozilla, by typing in about:crashes into the address bar and pressing enter. You should see a screen similar to this one:

You can click on any crash report to get its details. (When i’ve tried this it has taken a long time and i’ve not actually managed to view the report, but your milage might vary)

You can also see the top crashers by version (only version 3 - including the alphas/betas have this feature). Here are the top crashers for Firefox 3.0. It even shows you which browser the crashes were on so you can see if it’s a O/S issue or not!

Install Netgear DG834 firmware on a sky router

I recently was given a sky router by a friend, which actually turned out to be a Netgear DG834GT but with sky’s own firmware on it (probably just a tweaked version of the netgear firmware but with some aspects disabled).

I decided to try and remove the sky firmware and reinstall the original sky firmware. I discovered a good guide on how to do this on the skyuser forum, this is the post i used.

I’ve spent the last few days trying to recover the router, as the recovery tool you have to use causes Vista to Bluescreen! I initally thought i’d bricked the router but as i spent more time researching i discovered that it could still be saved!

So this post is basically to provide more advice to people wanting to re-flash their router, mainly highlighting a couple of things missing from the guide in the skyusers post above.

1. DO NOT USE VISTA! The Netgear recovery tool does not work properly on Vista, and every time i tried it caused my computer to bluescreen.
2. Make sure you only have one firmware file in the directory. This is the problem i had and until someone mentioned this on another site i had two firmware files in that directory. As soon as i took one out it worked. Just for reference, when both files were there the recovery tool didn’t see the device. I tried several computers but no luck. I went back to the original XP machine i used and made sure i had just one firmware file and it worked stratight away.
3. You may need to set a static IP address. If you do, use the following settings:

IP Address: 192.168.0.2

Subnet mask: 255.255.255.0

Default gateway: 192.168.0.1

DNS Server: 192.168.0.1

Without the post on the skyuser forum i would not have managed to recover my router, so a lot of thanks goes to all the users there. I hope this post helps anyone else in the same situation, please post if this is of use to you.

Piclens

I discovered this site/application/plugin today. It’s called Piclens and it allows you to view the media (Pictures, audio, video) on a webpage in a cool 3D full-screen view.

It works on a number of ‘big’ sites like Facebook, Google images and YouTube. It even plays the video/audio within the view so you can look at youtube videos with ease!

This is a view when zoomed out

This is a view when closer and moving sideways

It seems to be very cool, but time will tell whether it has a real use or just something to go “WOW!” at when you show people.

Manually downloading Folding@Home core’s

Lately i’ve had some trouble with Folding@Home not downloading the necessary cores automatically. I’ve had to resort to manually downloading them and hex-editing them to get the .exe core. I’ve now found a way to automate this process, using Cygwin.

1. Download cygwin from here
2. Install with default settings (if using Vista you need to “Run as administrator” and also choose to install “just for me” during the setup process.
3. Once installed run cygwin and let it set itself up.
4. Copy and paste this into a new text document:

tail -c +513 Core_%1.fah > Core%1.exe.bz
bunzip2 Core%1.exe.bz
mv Core%1.exe FahCore_%1.exe

5. Save it as folding.bat (you can give it a different name if you like, it’s not important) in your cygwin home directory (will be something like c:\cygwin\home\<username>\)
6. Type the following into the cygwin window:

chmod 775 folding.bat

7. Download the folding@home core from here
8. Place the downloaded file into your cygwin home directory
9. Type the following into the cygwin window:

./folding.bat xx

(where xx is the number of the core eg. Core_11.fah would be 11

10. you should now have a file named FahCore_xx.exe (where xx is the number of the core)
11. Place that file in your folding@home directory (eg. C:\program files\Folding@Home)
12. Folding@Home should now be able to use the core

Hidden 3D Benchmarks in Vista

Over at the HowToGeek site (again!) they’ve posted about some “hidden” 3D benchmarks in Vista. They don’t do anything useful when run on their own (although when run as part of the System Assesment Tool they do…) but they look pretty cool

First of all, open a elevated command window, then type one of the following commands:

• winsat aurora
• winsat d3d -texshader -totalobj 15
• winsat d3d -objs C(20) -texshader -totalobj 50
• winsat d3d -totalobj 20 -objs C(20) -totaltex 10 -texpobj C(1) -alushader -noalpha -v -time 10
• winsat d3d -totalobj 20 -objs C(20) -totaltex 10 -texpobj C(10) -alushader -v -time 10

You will get some pretty interesting animations appear on your screen. The above commands can be tweaked to get different results so why not have a play?!

Here are some screenshots (courtesy of the HowToGeek page) of what the benchmarks might look like:

Create a shortcut to eject a USB Drive

Over at the HowToGeek site they’ve posted about a way to eject a specific usb drive from a shortcut or hotkey.

First off you need to download this application. Unzip it and place the “USB_Disk_Eject.exe” in your windows directory. (This is not necessary but means that you won’t have to type the whole path to the exe file each time you want to use it)

Then you can either double-click the exe file to display a window that lists each of your connected USB drives.

or you can use the command line. To view the ’switches’ you can use, open a cmd window (Windows+R then type cmd) and type “USB_Disk_Eject.exe /?”

Here you can see each of the options.

You can now eject a drive by specifying the drive letter by typing something like this:

usb_disk_eject /removeletter G

or this:

usb_disk_eject /removename “Ben’s Ipod”

or this:

usb_disk_eject /removename “*Ipod”

To create a shorcut on your desktop to do this, right-click on the desktop, go to “new” then click on shortcut

In the window that comes up, type in the command that you want to run and click “Next”. Give the shortcut a name on the next page and click “Finish”. Now, whenever you double-click that shortcut it will eject the USB Drive from your computer.

Installing Windows Vista SP1

Having downloaded Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1) at work, I decided to install it on my machine at home. While SP1 has been released to manufacturing, it is not publicly released. I decided to document the process and post it here for others to see.

When you first run the installer for SP1 it performs a short setup routine, during which you are told to create backups of your files, and on the final screen that the install my take an hour or more.

A timeline of when each stage was performed:

0 minutes	Started install
13 minutes	Logs off Screen shows “Configuring updates: Stage 2 of 3″ (i believe it did stage 1 first, but it happened very quickly so didn’t see…)
14 minutes	Machine reboots for the first time
15 minutes	Screen shows “Configuring updates: Stage 3 of 3″
16 minutes	Screen shows “Configuring updates”
19 1/2 minutes	Screen shows “Installing Service Pack: Stage 1 of 3″
27 minutes	Screen shows “Installing Service Pack: Stage 2 of 3″ This started extremely slowly (about 3% in 90 seconds) but then sped up and completed very quickly
30 minutes	Machine reboots for the second time
32 minutes	Screen shows “Installing Service Pack: Stage 3 of 3″
35 minutes	Install finishes and i am presented with the usual login screen

(screenshots of the install follows)