For example I find this tool useful when I need to copy some new songs to one of my mobile phones which does not play any mp3 file with more than 128 kbps. Some mp3 files have 192, 320 so all I need to do is to load them in the program and down-sample them to 128 kbps. All this easy as pie. This app knows how to handle CD, WAV, WMA, OGG, AAC, AC3, AIFF, FLA, MP3, MP4 and some other audio formats.

Unlike many other application suites out there this one only supports audio editing so it is a lightweight app which has some disadvantages (small amount of space occupied, loads and runs very fast, simple interface and very friendly).

If you are a more experienced user there is always the possibility of using the command prompt interface for doing all your tasks in a more professional way. If you are a rookie or an avarage user the GUI is very helpful. Some other features like adding an incremental value at the end of the file name to make a difference between the files, deleting the original file after conversion, overwriting it, logging the process, etc. are also present.

So as a wrap-up this tool can be looked up as a command-line MP3 converter for your daily basics operations or a command-line audio converter for  the most experienced users.

Much has changed since I started using Blaze MP at the start of last year and new features have been implemented so that it keeps being a competitive product. With its impressive features list it will pretty much satisfy even the most demanding users. I have to tell you that I am a pretty big fan of Blaze Media Pro as I wrote a tutorial (in romanian) some time ago about how to save the soundtrack of a movie with this great tool. Things haven’t changed for me since then as I use this great application even today. Why ? Because it’s small, it’s fast, it knows how to get the job done nice and easy. As an old Blaze MP user I tell you that it’s very easy to edit mp3 files and save them as ringtones for your mobile phone, save screenshots from different movies or clips.

I must mention the great help section of the site. Detailed, step-by-step guides showing you how to do everything with this neat tool are just waiting to be read. Also have a look at the screenshots to try and see how the program looks like.

After the installation process of Ubuntu itself (all went ok) when the login box appeard for the first time I noticed that the resolution was 640×480. That was very weird because all the distros I’ve ever tried on this PC were setting up by default a 1204×768 resolution.

Normally, the first thing I went to do was to change the resolution as it was very annoying. I was very surprised to see that only 640×480 mode was available. I said to myself that after I will install the nVIDIA driver everything would be ok. I installed the driver through the native hardware driver window (something like Device Manager from Windows). Rebooted the system and all was the same. Checked the available resolutions nothing was there to choose from. I was clearly seeing that the nVIDIA driver was succesfully installed because even Compiz was using it at full throthle but only on 640×480.

I tried to solve things with EnvyNG, by editing xorg.conf, installing the nVIDIA drivers the hard way, typing in a lot of commands that were related to video settings but nothing seemed to work. I did a little bit of research but nothing relevant came up. People had the same problems but their solutions were not working for me.

I was on the point of installing Ubuntu 7.10 again but the following command saved me:

gksudo displayconfig-gtk

All you have to do is to type that command in a terminal (root access is required) and from there just choose your display model and the corresponding resolution and frequency. The settings will be applied after you log in again.

This is a very easy and effective way of correcting this problem.

Furthermore there are yet two other scripts that can help you with your forum browsing. With them you can toggle pagination on and off for both threads and topics.

Another interesting script is helping you to view posts older than 24 hours. You don’t have to be an expert to change a few lines of code in order to get it to show you the latest posts in X hours (which might be useful).

A preview of the content from the last post is automatically displayed when the small post icon is hovered using this script. Unfortunately this only works on a prosilver based theme (don’t know why).

For better accessibility you can use this script because it will highlight your topics which could be relatively useful.

There are a few greasemonkey scripts for WordPress. One of them can be used to display the version of the installation behind the blog you are currently browsing. It will also tell you if that blog allows trackbacks or not.

Another script will tell you which package is used for gaining statistical information on a blog. This script knows to identify a bunch of potential stats collectors so you don’t have to worry about that. If stats collector is used you will know it.

The next greasemonkey script isn’t exclusively for WordPress as it can be used web wide. It identifies nofollow links and applies a pink background to the corresponding url, so that you can identify it.

As a wrap up these are a few interesting scripts for greasemonkey that are worth trying.

I’m sure the issue with Yahoo! Messenger stealing focus is very common out there. It is annoying mostly because for example when I am engaged in a captivating chat with a friend and I am typing really fast (~60 wpm), the flash ads from the Y!M window swap and I find myself focused on the wrong window. Of course that for me this isn’t such a big deal (but still very annoying) as it is for others who look at their keyboards as they type and when they look at the chat window and see it empty… that’s not a pleasant sight.

Now let’s cut to the chase and get rid of this problem once and for all. It’s very simple and all you have to do is to open Notepad or any other text editor and open the file C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\hosts (yes, that’s right, no extension there). A full explanation about that file is given and marked as a comment in the file.

So, after the default line (127.0.0.1       localhost) just add 127.0.0.1 insider.msg.yahoo.com

Well that’s it. Very simple and effective.

Here’s how it looks without ads:

I was pleasantly surprised to find out that FireShot and Gmail Manager joined Alexa Sparky and StumbleUpon extensions which were already compatible with FF.

Now I must patiently wait until Colorzilla, del.icio.us bookmarks, Firebug, Greasemonkey, Live Pagerank, Smart Digg Button and TinyUrl Creator will all be fully compatible with FF 3 which is just around the corner. Many would ask why didn’t I just go for a forced install. I have one big reason for not doing that: I don’t have time for it.

Off-topic: Some asked me what happened with my blog. I feel somehow in debt and I need to answer them. Just imagine that from my average time of 5 hours allocated every day for browsing the internet, reading feeds, blogging in general I have come to a staggering 15 minutes a day just to keep myself informed with major updates without actually writing something. This unfortunately is because I only have about 3 weeks until my first exam will be here. I will give my best and hopefully after 5^th of July I will get back to serious blogging. Again, thanks a bunch for your understanding.

Of course, web hosting companies noticed this trend and tried to offer something attractive and competitive for this newly emerged community called bloggers. For a start-up blog you don’t actually need a lot of bandwidth, storage space and so on. You need a decent amount of everything. I would say the “smallest” package would suit you best for about 6 months (depending on your blog’s growth). After that you would probably like to switch to the next package or if the hosting company gives you the chance, why not customize your current package in order to fit your needs. For example now you don’t need 250MB of storage space, now you need 1GB but you don’t need 15 databases or so, 3 are enough. So that, in my opinion, would be really great; the opportunity to customize your hosting package.

What I suggest you should do before diving in the hosting “pool” is read a couple of reviews about a decent number of hosting companies. Do that just to see what others think about them. Read, read and read happy customers opinions and listen to what some not so happy customers have to say about a particular company. I for example, would read 70%  negative reviews and 30% positive reviews. Of course, it is crucial that you collect your information from some highly trusted sources. Sources that don’t do positive reviews for money or in exchange of other services. You need to find yourself a highly regarded, honest source of web hosting companies reviews. For example before I want to buy a product on the internet I try to dig out some information about it on different forums, reviews sites, etc. just to make sure and to know what others think about it.

Web hosting geeks is a place where you can find web hosting reviews and a lot of information related to some fairly well known web hosting companies. If you want to find out exactly what a company is about all you need to do is to read a couple of reviews related to it. For example a review page has a couple of sections that should interest you. The first one contains a logo of the reviewed company, a link to their site and some pricing information. The next section would contain the host rating and some information about general and additional features. A particular section of interest would be the third one because it contains the customer reviews. Feel free to read as many as you can and make sure you ignore the ones that are nothing else but spam. You can submit your own review if you like. A very important section is about what the host’s script library includes. If you have some dependencies to consider then you definitely should pay attention to these. A live demo might be available as well. Again, a  relatively important chunk of information is in the 5th section where you can find out what the hosting service includes and/or supports. You should definitely pay attention to this section as you don’t want to end up with a host service that for example doesn’t support PHP 5. The awards section  should be so important but might be interesting. In the end a section that contains an overall wrap up of the  review. However if you are not satisfied with what you find over at Web Hosting Geeks you can use their web hosting articles page and choose to find out more information about web hosting by reading some interesting  and relevant articles. The left sidebar can be of great help when it comes to filtering the site’s content as it provides quick access to what might interest you. Also based on their reviews, on the home page you can view the list of the top 10 web hosting companies.

So, that pretty much covers it all. If you would like to read further helpful advices and tips that could help you make up your mind check out their other site. If you prefer a more friendly approach, a blog would be the answer.

As a conclusion, if I was to start all over again this would be the start point.

I was very curios to find out what would happen to the other blog I was talking about in a past post (click on the link to find out more). I wasn’t surprised by the outcome though: PR0. That blog had a PR3 before the previous PR update. After that, apparently because Google thought so, it’s PR was 0 again. Now, after the update that took place yesterday it still has a PR 0. So, it looks like FeedBurner’s Buzzboost doesn’t hurt your blog (as I suspected). In all this time I browsed a lot of blogs and websites and I saw things very similar to Buzzboost and the PR of that particular blog wasn’t affected. I wonder which is the reason why Google didn’t updated (or did it?) the PR for that blog. How long does it take for Google to update the PR ? Is it over in one day ?

Daniel Scocco over at DailyBlogTips had an admirable idea of entitling 1st of May as the “RSS Awareness Day”. He wrote about his initiative and invited everyone to get involved. Though I found out about this quite some time ago I didn’t had time or I wasn’t in the mood to write about it. However today I’ve said to myself that it’s better later than never.

I think that the best definition for RSS out there is over at Wikipedia so I’m going to quote them:

RSS is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines, and podcasts. An RSS document (which is called a “feed” or “web feed” or “channel”) contains either a summary of content from an associated web site or the full text.

RSS keeps you updated with the latest news from your favorite blogs, sites and other web hosted entities that support RSS. Information is a very powerful asset. For example I have a feed list containing about 50 subscriptions. Every day I take some time off and read new articles from different blogs I’m interested in. It is a very effective way of being connected to the news stream. I find RSS way better than e-mail subscriptions (or newsletters) because it helps keeping my e-mail address for private use. Also you have better chances at keeping your Spam folder a little emptier because you don’t go on every blog or site and fill in your e-mail address. Basically you are just an anonymous reader out there and there is nothing that could link you to the articles you read. That, right there my friends is just a terrific possibility.

Related to feeds that display only a preview of the article. That is, in my opinion, a very bad practice. Hoping your subscribers will visit your blog to see all of the post content you forget about what is RSS all about. Provide full feeds of your articles and let your readers choose whether to visit your blog or not.

As you probably noticed the link that takes you to the RSS content of a blog or site is almost every time accompanied by the well known RSS icon. Different RSS icons are available every day as they are relatively easy to design. Check out the following resources links:

• Feed Icons
• Free Glass Style RSS Icons
• RSS: Best design practices and icons
• Free RSS Feed Icons
• Over 35 Different Styles of RSS icons
• 60 Great RSS Icons for your blog
• All the RSS Icons You’ll Ever Need
• 51 Top RSS Buttons for your blog
• Free RSS Icons & Buttons for your Website

Hopefully the above links will take you to some relevant RSS related icons so you’ll can achieve a seamless RSS integration on your blog or site.

For example I know a couple of guys that were patiently waiting for the latest version of K2 as this was their only reason because of which they delayed the upgrade of Wordpress on their blogs.

I used this theme for quite a lot of time on my other blog and actually created a modified version of it. I must say that this is one of the greatest themes out there with hundreds of customizing possibilities available. I strongly recommend it to people who don’t like to manually edit the code when they want to modify the look of their blog.

Don’t know what K2 theme is all about ? check out my other post.

Download K2 RC6