When you have an iPhone or iPod touch, I’m sure one of the things that you’d like to do with it is to watch videos on it. Here, I’ll be showing you how to convert videos into formats that can be played by your iPhone or iPod Touch. Note that this will only cover videos that are already in avi or any other playable format and not videos from DVDs, VCDs or BDs.

1. First, go to Noda’s Dev Blog and download iPodME. The latest version at the time of writing is 2.2.
2. Extract the zip file to a folder and run iPodME.exe.
3. You will see a white box (listbox) under the heading of Video files to convert. Either add your video files by clicking on Add files or by dragging them onto the white listbox.
   



4. Now, you can select the profile of your video, I would recommend, “Fast, quality”.



5. Click on Convert. And all you have to do is wait. =).

That’s all there is to converting your videos. The default output folder is the same folder as the program. Enjoy! Feel free to drop any questions in the comments.

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Awhile ago, I posted about 7 Reasons Why You Should Build Your Own PC. Now I give you, 4 Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Build Your Own PC. This is for you if you are new to building your own PCs and you’re considering either getting your next PC or building one yourself.

Lack of Technical Support

Solving computer problems are one of the most annoying things that I have ever done. If you do not have much experience in diagnosing computer problems, it can be very frustrating and time-consuming. Do not try to do so unless you like to learn new things or are willing to spend hours diagnosing one stupid problem. Then again, do remember that any experience gained in solving your own problems can be used to help others such as your friends and yourself in the future when you encounter the same problems. Recall the saying, “Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day, teach a man to fish and he will eat forever.”

Time-consuming

The time needed to research the parts to buy, the time needed to build the system and the time needed to diagnose problems total up to a lot of time. If this is a factor for you, don’t consider building your own PC.

Inconvenient

Instead of just dropping off an order with a PC retailer and getting it by delivery in a week’s time, you have to get each part yourself and they might not be sold by the same store (although most of the time they are). If you live in Singapore, it’ll just be a simple trip to Sim Lim Square. However convenient that might be, you must always remember that you will have to pick the parts that you want. The last time I checked a price list from Fuwell, a shop in Sim Lim Square, it contained a list of about 30 different models from different manufacturers of motherboards, about three brands of RAM Chips, four brands of Hard disk drives, and an intimidating list of PCI Express graphic cards which listed about close to a hundred different models and brands of graphic cards. Now imagine you want the best price and you go through a handful of these pricelists, researching every part you are interested in. It’s a huge inconvenience.

Lack of Knowledge or Experience May Negate Advantages

So you have picked the parts you want, worked out your budget and you storm off to Sim Lim Square, step into Fuwell or Cybermind or any other shop and throw your list at them. The salesperson looks at you and say, “Hey you know what, I can get you a better system for $150 more.” Will you take the offer? He will highlight, calculate, and introduce you to new parts and brands that you probably wouldn’t have thought of, much less research. It will be up to you to assess the information given and decide if you need such a system.

Some motherboards include pipes for water cooling but if you aren’t adding a water-cooling system to your computer, you probably can shave off $100 by not getting such a system. Some RAM chips are so called “gaming edition” or “overclock edition” which include extra heatsinks, etc, but do you need them? Those are questions you may have to answer within a few seconds to decide if you would take up their offer. Depending on how knowledgable and honest the salesperson is, you might actually be getting a better system for a small increase in price, so you might not want to reject every offer they throw at you. It will be good to go with a friend who is knowledgable enough about computers to advise you in such a case. Otherwise, you might take up an offer in which you end up paying more for the same thing, or worse, for less.

There was once when I went to a shop asking about the difference between two motherboards. Their pricelist listed one motherboard with SATA2 and the other didn’t have anything written about the HDD interface. So I went to ask the salesperson. He pointed out confidently, “Oh, this one has SATA2, ya and the other one has 5.1 audio.”

I then asked him, “What about the HDD interface? Does it have SATA2?”

He pointed out again, “There, it has 5.1.”

I just stared with a look of disbelief, “But it’s not the same thing! One is a HDD interface and the other is an in-build audio on the motherboard!”

Then another salesperson who was more knowledgable noticed and came over to assist me. I got him to let me have a look at the actual motherboard and I noticed the SATA2 ports on the one which only advertised 5.1. Being able to identify features on motherboards is quite useful. I will probably write some articles to teach that here.

No Packaged OS and Software

In my other article, I mentioned that you can choose your OS if you build your own PC. However, more often than not, we end up installing Windows so it might be cheaper to get a PC that is pre-installed with Windows. You might even get some free software such as CD/DVD burning software. However do make sure that the software programs are full versions and not demos that expire over time. And ensure that they are not spyware or bloated crapware that slow down your computer. You can ask the salespeople what software programs are included in the PC. Any semi-decent salesperson should be able to give you a good answer.

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When you want to start a new blog, one of the obvious choices would be Wordpress. It is also the software used by this blog, Mombly.com. However, you can either get a free account from Wordpress.com or you can download the Wordpress software from Wordpress.org and install it yourself on your own web server. This article covers why you should host your own wordpress blog.

Plug-ins

You cannot use plug-ins on Wordpress.com. As simple as that. A simple no. Even if you happen to become a VIP blogger, you are still limited to plug-ins that do not modify the database. There are tons of plug-ins that make Wordpress much better than how it can be and many of them can automate tasks such as backing up the database, checking for security loopholes, keeping track of the statistics of the people who visit your blog and even help you to manage your blog’s media. Without plug-ins I would feel that even blogger (by Google) would be a better blog software.

Tons Of Themes to Choose From

You can choose from so many themes that you’ll be spoilt for choice. Why settle for the three pages of themes from Wordpress.com when you can have much more from the wonderful community at Wordpress.org. In fact, if you’re into design or programming and you are able to dig through some of the Wordpress documentation, you can even create your own themes or design your own plug-ins. The chances for customization are limitless.

If you use Wordpress.com, the closest thing you can get is to customize the CSS styles. It costs $15 a year.

Unlimited Private Users

If you want your blog to be viewed by private users, you can only have 35. True enough, most private blogs will not have more than that amount of readers but more is better, right? I could think of people who might need that more users. For example, if you’re a teacher and you have created a blog for your students so that you can relay homework to them during the holidays and have them comment back their entries, you might want enough private accounts for each of your students. 35 is just not enough in that case.

Cheaper Than Wordpress.Com

This is subjective and is based on your usage pattern. If you are fine with hosting a blog in a subdomain under wordpress, e.g. myblog.wordpress.com, don’t mind not having a domain, don’t mind 3GB of space, don’t mind ads once in awhile, you are fine with the free hosting at Wordpress.com. However, if one day you decide to get a domain, it will cost you $15 a year. If you don’t want ads, it will cost you $30 a year. If you want 5GB more on top of your 3GB space, it will cost $20 per year, 15GB will cost $50 per year, and 25GB will cost you $90(!) a year. Compare that to let’s say godaddy.com’s hosting plans. 150GB of space costs $6.99 per month. A domain costs only $1.99 with a hosting plan. The usual rate is about $10 per year. It is still much cheaper than Wordpress.com’s “upgrades”.

Host Other Applications

You won’t only be hosting one wordpress blog, will you? Maybe you will end up with a huge fan base and decide to implement a forum to allow them to interact? If you had your own hosting plan, it will simply be creating a subdirectory or subdomain and installing a forum and setting it up. You can even set up multiple blogs.

Advertisements

If you host a blog on Wordpress.com, you are not allowed to display any form of advertisements. No Adsense, no nothing. If you are looking for a blog host that allows ads and is free, try blogger.com.

If the above reasons call out to you, you should probably host your own Wordpress blog. =) If you need any help, feel free to drop comments or contact me.

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I enjoy building my own PC and I feel that it is rather enjoyable to pick the parts myself to build my own PC. For those of you who are wavering and sitting on the fence, here are some reasons, in fact 7 of them, that supports the building of your own PC.

Customized to Your Needs

Your PC can be customized to your own needs. For example, you might need a DVD writer but not need a high-end graphic card as you will never use its 3D features to play games. You can choose the parts that you’ll need. One 500GB hard disk drive? Or two 250GB hard drives? It’s all up to you. You can even decide to have 5 hard drives and raid them together in a RAID5 configuration. No problem. Try asking for that from a Dell salesperson.

Customized to Your Budget

So you only have $800 to spend? Sure, make a budget computer. Reuse your monitor, keyboard and mouse, maybe even your hard drives, why not? Sure some new Dell configurations don’t come with the monitor or keyboard and mice, but you can’t tell them to remove their DVD writer and refund you the price as you can reuse your perfectly working DVD writer from your old computer. If you build your own PC, it’s all configurable and you can shop around to find the best prices for the individual parts.

Cheaper Cost

You don’t have to spend money on things that you don’t need. If you have Windows XP already, why buy a new computer that comes preloaded with Windows XP? Use the same CD to install Windows on your new PC, or better yet, use the same hard drive and not have to reinstall. Note that you might have to do some stuff to make it work on your new hardware as Windows tends to think that you’re a pirate if you change your motherboard or too many hardware devices.

Learn More About the Parts of a PC

When you build your own PC, you obviously have to do a lot more research than just buying one off the shelf. However, the time that you spend on your research will benefit you in two ways. Firstly, it will teach you what parts are used for what purposes and how you can customize them to meet your needs. Secondly, the knowledge gained from this will allow you to better judge the power of PCs being sold as a whole and not be cheated/deceived/lied to/coerced/”encouraged” by the salespeople at roadshows to buy their uber-powered computer or some crap.

Upgrading

Can’t play the latest games? With the knowledge of the various parts of your PC, you can check out the minimum and recommended specifications of the game and decide on what you can do to make it run on your computer. Sometimes it’s just a matter of your graphic card not being up-to-date enough. No point getting a whole system which costs SGD$1200 to $2000 when you can upgrade your graphic card for $100 to $900 right?

Choose Your Own OS

For the more adventurous, or for those who know what they are doing, why pay for Windows Vista, or even XP? Install your favourite distribution of Linux for free. For those who don’t know, Linux is another operating system that you can install on your computer. Installing of operating systems are not simple but with the recent user-friendly graphical installations from popular distributions of Linux such as Ubuntu, Fedora or Mandriva, it is not very difficult too. Do note that you will not be able to run your favourite Windows applications on Linux without doing anything (read Wine) and even then not all applications will work. However, to be fair there are tons of software on Linux that do the exact same thing as the applications on Windows, so it is just a choice of converting. I will try to get some Linux tutorials up sometime in the future for those who are interested to pick up more about the OS.

No Crapware

You don’t have to put up with tons of demo applications installed in your computer the moment you boot it up for the first time. No more pre-installed applications that you don’t want and you don’t need. Only install and see the programs that you need. This is what I mean by no crapware.

That’s about it. Do comment if you can think of any other reasons. I will reply if I have the chance. Do Digg my article if you like it! =)

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Snapfish is a service by HP that allows anyone to send their digital photographs to be printed into many kinds of products. I have printed some photo prints from them, which turned out looking pretty good.

One good thing about Snapfish’s photo prints are that they are chemically developed (pardon my lack of knowledge of photography nomenclature) instead of being printed by an inkjet printer. This is the same kind of photographs you get when you send your films to the photo developing shops (although the processing seems to be different). You can get the inkjet printing from those “instant” printers outside photo developing shops. Prints that are chemically developed have longer lifespans (sometimes up to a hundred years) and will fade slower compared to inkjet prints.

Snapfish allows you to upload your photograph onto their servers before creating your products. There are tons of products that you can customize using your photographs.

Snapfish Products Page

As of the time of writing, Snapfish.com.sg has the following products:

• Photo cards
• Photo Books
• Calendar
• Gift Certificates
• Collage Poster
• Collage Mug
• Collage Calendar
• Canvas Prints
• FlipBook
• Collage Prints
• Poster prints
• Mug
• T-Shirts
• Key ring (round)
• Key ring (rectangular)
• Key ring (square)
• Prints and Prepaids
• Prepaid Prints
• Magic Mug
• Mouse pad

From what I know, Snapfish.com (their USA page) has more products. However do take note that they will be more expensive to ship over.

If you were to print a 4R photograph in a photo shop, it will cost around 40 cents for low qualities and maybe 30 cents for quantities above 20. From Snapfish, it costs 19 cents per 4R and delivery for 1-55 pieces of 4R costs only SGD$1.90. If you develop about 20 4R photos, it will cost about $0.28 to $0.29 per piece, which is cheaper than the 30 cents you will typically expect to pay at photo shops. And the savings only increase as you order more photographs. For myself, I like the service as it sends the prints to me. I don’t have to go down to develop my pictures, I don’t have to go back to the shop to collect them, they just end up in my mailbox.

Rating: ****~ (4/5)

If you don’t agree with my review or have other websites with similar services/products, drop me a mail using the Contact Me page or leave a comment. I’ll get back to you, I swear I will.

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I will be able for awhile to another country from 27th Jan to 13th Feb. I have tried to write enough articles to cover most of the time but I am unable to fully cover the entire stretch of time that I’ll be away. Do bear with me when no posts are made and I will try my best to make up for it when I come back.

Best of luck to all.

ccjx

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Mombly Review Rating allows you to add a simple rating to your reviews on your wordpress blog. The format to add a rating is simply just [ Rating:3.5/5 ].
You can even use your own pictures for the stars of the ratings. There is also text support for RSS feeds which make the ratings show up as text.

Download a copy now from the plug-in page. I am in the process of getting it uploaded onto Wordpress’s Plugin directory.

Demo: http://mombly.com/showcase/2009/01/25/demo-mombly-review-ratingdemo-mombly-review-rating/

More demos and screenshots at the Mombly Review Rating plug-in page. Get it today. =)

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It all began with a post describing a little incident.

I helped a friend of mine set up a web site for her small business. She asked me if I could install some sort of contact form for it, so she wouldn’t have to rely in people getting her email address right. Sure, she could use a mailto: link, but even then some people manage to mangle her email address in the process. She wanted something where people could simply type what they wanted, hit send, and she could be sure it got to her.

Since her site was built using Wordpress, the first place I headed was the Wordpress plugin repository. The handy-dandy integration between Wordpress 2.7 and the repository makes such things simple. By far the most popular contact form plugin is cforms II. So I installed and configured. Voila! A little complex but it wasn’t too hard to work with.

Testing it out, I noticed a link at the bottom of the contact form. It pointed to Oliver Seidel’s web site. He’s the developer for cforms II. I didn’t like the placement for the link (my friend has a credits page where I would put it). So I immediately Googled how to do this. Lo’ and behold Mr. Seidel has deliberately made it difficult to remove the link. That’s fine. His software… sort of.

See, here’s the thing: All plugins on wordpress.org are supposed to use GPL-compatible licenses. That means that users get the source code, and they can do nearly whatever they want with it. Turns out that Mr. Seidel never actually included a license in the download (so far as I can tell). And on at least one page on his site, Mr. Seidel claims the license for cforms II is not open source or GPL compatible. Specifically, he says that users may not modify or redistribute the plugin or it’s source. That’s not GPL.

cForms II is a plug-in for Wordpress that allows you to create forms which are submitted to your email. Basically it’s a supercharged formmailer for those who understand the term. It has many features, including captcha tests and the ability to create multiple complex forms. I use it on this blog to handle my feedback.

From the author’s plug-in site:

I’ve roughly spend 3000 hours on cforms and quite frankly never thought it would get to where it is today, I’m not a programmer by trade. I never had any issues with individual users adjusting my code to meet their requirements, in fact I encourage several by providing hints & tips in the cforms forum. What I do have an issue with are users taking the cforms code, modifying it, repackaging it and selling it as their effort to make profit. I do not approve of that and if that makes cforms non compliant to GPL and what not then that’s what it is.

As a programmer myself, I can understand why the author of cFormsII would not want to release his code under the GPL license. It is his right to do so and I feel that no one has the right to coerce him into releasing it in GPL if he doesn’t want to.

Many have declared (read comments on this page) cForms unfit for use just because of the license that the author has decided to release it on. I find these people ridiculous and naive. The plug-in is great. Just because the author doesn’t like it when you modify it and make money off his work doesn’t make it a bad one. Wake up, fools.

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It probably wasn’t cheap to register some of the first domain names and these are some of the first .com domain names to be registered.

Interestingly, for those not in the list, Microsoft.Com wasn’t registered until 1991, Yahoo.Com was registered in 1995, and last but not least, Google.Com was registered on 15-sep-1997.

Source: http://www.iwhois.com/oldest/

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For those of you who are still using Windows XP, you might notice that file sizes are only displayed for files. Folders only get a blank size which does not help at all.

Folder Size is a program that allows you to see the total sizes of your folders. This includes all sub-folders and files in them, allowing you to find out which folders are taking up the most space on your hard drive. This is especially useful when you want to clean up your hard disk drive.

For those who are using Vista, this guide wouldn’t help you as Microsoft removed some of the functionality needed for Folder Size to work on Vista. Mac OSX users would probably be laughing as this is a native feature in Finder. Curse you lucky Mac users!

The following images show you what you can expect from Folder Size.

Folder Size - Before you install Folder Size

Folder Size - After you install Folder Size

So let’s begin on how to get Folder Size working on your computer.

1. Go to http://foldersize.sourceforge.net/ and download the Folder Size installation program. Note that there are two versions, one for 32-bit systems and one for 64-bit systems.

   

2. Run the installation program that you have downloaded, follow the instructions and select on Complete installation when prompted. Note: if you want to select where the program gets installed, select “Custom” instead of “Complete”.
   

   Click on "Next"

   

   Select "Complete"

   

   Click on "Install"

   

   Click on "Finish"

3. Go into any folder on your computer (I would recommend trying it on C:\ if you do not have anything in mind) and you will see that it is still the same as before. (Note: if you are not in the details view, select View > Details in the explorer window that you are in.) Right click on any column and select Folder Size.
   

   Select "Folder Size"

4. You will see a new column displayed with the Folder Size heading. Move the column so that it is in the position that you would prefer it to be in.
   

   Note the "Folder Size" column

   

   Shift the column to a preferred place

5. Now, remove the original “Size” column by right-clicking on it and selecting “Size” to uncheck it.
   

   Uncheck "Size" by Clicking on It

6. And now you’re done. =) Note that some values have a plus sign “+” at the end, it means that they are still being calculated, it will update when it is done.

   

7. If you would like to make this the default view for all folders, go to Tools > Folder Options. In the “View” tab, click “Apply to All Folders”.
8. To configure the settings for the program, you can go into the Control Panel and double click on “Folder Size”. If you cannot see the “Folder Size” icon, it is because you are in category view. To change to classic view, select the option “Switch to Classic View”.
   

   Switch to classic view

   

   The Folder Size icon

9. You can set how the folder sizes are displayed, and where to use Folder Size in the Folder Size properties screen.
   

   Folder Size Properties

Do contact me via the “Contact Me” page or leave a comment if you have any questions. Do also contact me if there are any tutorials that you would like to see on the site.

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