Thursday, March 27, 2008
Completely Uninstall Programs with AppCleaner [Featured Mac Download]
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Wednesday, March 26, 2008
25 Ways to Simplify Your Life with Kids
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Tuesday, March 25, 2008
Everywhere Magazine: Because travel is all around you (win a free subscripti...
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Filed under: Arts and Culture, Blogs, Photos, Stories
Here, in no particular order, is what I love about the new Everywhere Magazine:
- It's created almost exclusively by its readers, who submit their best travel photographs, stories, and articles to the magazine's website.
- Contributors who are published in the magazine receive $100 and a free one-year subscription.
- Just like the title says, the magazine realizes that everywhere is a travel destination-- not just Paris, Buenos Aires, and Tokyo, but Kentucky, Iran, and Latvia. Their stated goal is to help you "discover great new places-- in places you didn't even know had places."
- Back issues are available to download for free here.
- The magazine itself is beautifully put together and features stunning photographs, well-written articles, and a whole section on postcards. The only thing the glossy mag lacks is an ad every other page.
The featured places for the magazine's fourth issue are Barcelona and the Jersey Shore, and the featured themes are national parks and festivals. If you'd like your own content to be considered for the magazine, sign up to be a part of their online community, and read this post on their blog to learn more about submitting.
Thinking of subscribing? Of course you are. If you follow this link, you can get $5 off a subscription -- a special deal for Gadling readers!
We're giving away FREE subscriptions to the new magazine as well. All you need to do is leave a comment in the post below, and we'll randomly select you. Here are the juicy details:
- To enter, simply leave a comment below telling us about a great new place -- in a place most people don't even know had a place!
- The comment must be left before Friday, March 28 at 5:00 PM Eastern Time.
- You may enter only once.
- Five winners will be selected in a random drawing.
- Five winners will receive a 1-year (6 issues) subscription to Everywhere magazine (valued at $24.99)
- Click Here for complete Official Rules.
- Open to legal residents of the 50 United States, the District of Columbia and Canada (excluding Quebec) who are 18 and older.
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Music sharing, near and far
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Filed under: iPod Family, Software, iTunes
iTunes has historically made sharing music with friends something of a hassle. It's not impossible, but it's not a "Just Works" scenario. It does, however, make it ridiculously simple to erase your friend's iPod, but I wouldn't call that a feature. The advent of library sharing on a local network did allow for some semblance of communal music, albeit within fairly strict confines. However, a variety of solutions exist for achieving a more social level in your audio pursuits.
iPod users quickly realize that the first step is to achieve bi-directional transfer from their portable device to the computer. Several great utilities exist for augmenting iTunes' sync capabilities. We've mentioned Podworks before, and Senuti is a long-standing favorite. We've also covered iPod.iTunes, which recently underwent an update. Any of these tools can get your music from your iPod into iTunes, including your friends' iTunes, but I'll take the safe road and mention from the start that music sharing is for personal use only (which will seem increasingly ironic as you read on, but I'm sure you know the rules well enough that I don't need to elaborate).
Sharing your audio files over wider network also requires some additional software. There's Simplify Media, which we highlighted last year. You've also got KavaTunes, a shareware app that makes a web page from your music collection that looks and acts just like iTunes. And now we've got Mojo.
Mojo
Mojo makes it simple to view, play and download music from other Mojo users. You control a buddy list, allowing only certain people to access your music. And the great part is that the standard version of Mojo is free. There's a PRO version - starting at $10.95 for 3 licenses - that adds playlist subscription,
but the functionality of the free version is otherwise unlimited (reader Disconnect points out that the free version is limited to 3 Internet users, a fact I missed because I didn't add any more than that. Local network sharing is unlimited, for what it's worth).
Mojo is fairly adept at automatically navigating many network configurations and multiple protocols, automatically detecting other Mojo users. A helper app runs in the background (optional) and provides a constant connection to your authorized friends. Your available Mojo friends appear in your buddy list, and you just select a connected buddy to browse the music they've made available using Mojo's (not bad-looking) interface. DRM songs display in red, and actions taken on them will offer to let you jump into iTunes to authorize your machine. It also detects songs that already exist in your iTunes collection and greys them out. They're still playable, but the option keeps you from downloading duplicates. Songs downloaded through the interface can be automatically added to iTunes, with several options for automatic organization.
I set Mojo up on a remote server and made two users, just for fun. I uploaded a few songs and then streamed them back over the Mojo connection. It worked smoothly and I found myself considering relocating my collection to a server with enough storage and automatic backups. That would free up about half of my hard drive and make my songs accessible to any computer with Mojo installed. It might never happen, but I like the possibility ... and the idea of doing it for free.
Misu
But, let's say you want to share your music with someone standing right next to you. Obviously, the option exists to do some manual transferring of your collection from iPod to iTunes to another iPod, but there's an easier way on the horizon. Enter Misu, a new application from the developers of Menuet and Art Collector (covered previously).
Misu, which just entered a beta period, offers an extremely simple interface (check out the visuals) for connecting multiple iPods, choosing a source from the detected devices, and melding the music collections together. It compares the libraries of the source and the target iPod(s) and figures out what songs are missing. Hitting the transfer button effectively synchronizes the collections. If there's more music than will fit, it will offer to stop when the target device is full. Misu doesn't offer any options for manual management. It also doesn't currently work with iPod touches, but that functionality is planned.
The Misu beta isn't publicly available, but the developer is opening it up to TUAW readers. To limit the number of beta testers, the invitation will last for 24 hours, starting this morning. People who get in on the beta will also receive a licensed copy of the final product, free. If you've been looking for a program that fills the person-to-person iPod sharing void, grab the Misu beta and take it for a spin. The super-secret code you'll need is 48372.
You'll want to set your iPods to disk mode, and you may want to disable the "Start iTunes when connected" option. Have fun with all that legal music sharing.
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Turn Your PC into a DVD Ripping Monster [Feature]
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Papercraft Enigma machine
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Here's a piece of crafty crypto history: a downloadable, printable papercraft Enigma machine, embodying the notorious Nazi cipher broken by Alan Turing and co. during WWII. You can also buy reasonably priced bulk-printed versions on heavy card-stock. Link (via Schneier)
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Wednesday, March 19, 2008
Top 30 Most Wired Airports
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Download Music from Your Friends' iTunes Libraries Over the Internet with Mo...
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Create a booklet from any PDF document with BookletCreator
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Friday, March 14, 2008
Announcement: DivX Pro free for the Holidays!
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Another nice find from fellow blogger Amit over at Digital Inspiration...
For a limited time, you can download and install DivX Pro during the holiday season. Happy Holidays! You can check out Amit's post here...
What's so great about DivX is the ability to compress full length movies down to about 700Mb or so with very high video quality. I use DivX encoded videos on my Archos 404 all the time.
Follow Amit's instructions:
via [Digital Inspiration]Step 1: Download DivX Pro at divx.com [Select the Mac or Windows version]
Step 2: You can either share your email address with DivX to get your own serial number for DivX Converter or if you don’t want to receive DivX offers in future, just use the following serial numbers:
For Windows: A3NI9M7P47B325A52C26
For Mac: 338BSZ759249T26B2M9EClick Register and you are done.
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[Cool Download] Copy music/videos/etc. to and from your iPod without iTunes:...
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http://www.sturm.net.nz/website.php?Section=IPod+Programs&Page=SharePod
Supported on: Windows only
Now, I'm calling this one a "quick blurb" because I don't have an iPod, so this one isn't Rob tested, but I've heard lots of things about it, and it seems to be the software of choice for all you iPod owners.
The one thing that bothered me about iPods, Zunes and some other personal media players is the proprietary way in which you have to copy music and other media files to the device (some devices, not all). Also, some players (like the aforementioned iPod and Zune) want to format themselves in hopes that you aren't trying to pirate music. Forget the fact that we just might have more than one computer we would like to synchronize with.

You can also use SharePod as your primary music manager and player for your device. It also features tag editing, a playlist editor, and the ability to export them to iTunes.
Seems to me if this were recognized as an external drive by Windows, would Windows Media Player, WinAmp or MediaMonkey sync to it?
Again, I don't have an iPod, but this application would make me very, very happy if I did - Especially if I were getting a new computer, and wanted to move my library without the extra hassle.

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Fix Desynchronized Video and Audio with VLC [How To]
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Tuesday, March 11, 2008
Make an XP Install CD with Every Patch Since SP2 [Updates]
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Tuesday, March 04, 2008
Effortlessly Document Your Party with Simple Photo Projects [Feature]
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Sunday, March 02, 2008
Create Electronic Greeting Cards from Flickr with Phreetings [Ecards]
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Saturday, March 01, 2008
Plan your next big get-together with disposableWebPage
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