Wasted almost a day, but finally found the reason of my problem

It was a really nerve racking experience I had since sometime last week: right click on any file takes forever (like a minutes) to bring up the menu under file explorer, and then Internet Explorer always take a long while to load up the first request page. And I thought it had something to do with winrar that I tried to install last week.

I even went so far and found several site talking about the issue of bad context issue handler, and lead me to download the tool Shell Extensions Manager. And to my surprise, NOTHING WORKED!

It was until a few minutes ago that I found out the real problem: there's an entry in "Open with" that reference to a application TextPad on a network location that DOES NOT EXIST ANYMORE. So the solution of the problem is simply go to system registry, fund all the reference of textpad, and delete them all.

Once done, everything back to normal! IE started up instantly, and there's zero delay on right clicking files. Problem solved.

But ... damn it ... along the way I upgraded my IE to IE7 :-I ...... Oh well.

False alarm by AVG Antivirus

AVG Antivirus free version treated Portable Firefox 2.0.0.8 as yesterday. The problem seems to be fixed today after I did a update.

SketchUp Pro 6 not a protable app

Even though it seem to be work as a portable app, Sketchup Pro 6 cannot be used as portable app mainly because of the license setting. Plus, it requires .net Framework 1.1 .

Transfer Podcast download setting form one machine to another,

Turns out it's just a matter of copying "iTunes Library.itl" and "iTunes Music Library.xml" to a new spot.

Overheat on iPhone

I recently found one reason no to get an iPod: Heat. I heard that there's are some issue when you intensively use it .. which I will. I hate device that generate excessive heat. My Think x60t is a prime example. A great device, but the heat Kept it from being useful. My Pocket PC x50v does have awesome user interface, but at least I can keep watching 3 hours a video and still doesn't generate too much heat.

將PDA橫向使用的好處

我發現將x50v和橫向使用時，手寫輸入的準確度會大幅提高。我相信原因是因為畫面的左下部份已經漸漸壞掉了。

Best way to rip music from Music CD

My idea of the best rip of music need to satisfy the following criteria:

- Preserve the most musical quality
- Capture and store track information (usually by retrieving data from Internet) based on the Music CD signature.
- Obtain as much add on information on the track itself, such as Lyrics, album art and so on.

Before I explain my solution, let me tell you some schemes which I used and did NOT work as good as I would like to:

- Using ITune to rip Music CD
At first I thought this was the best and most convenient way, but turns out this is probably the worst because:
- ITune's MP3 encode isn't up to par comparing with other encoding scheme, like LAME.
- ITune's album, which can be automatically retrieve from Apple site, are not stored in the file itself, but instead stores in ITune's own database. This is bad as you won't get to see the album art when playing the song in other player.

So instead, I use the following scheme:
- Use Mediamonkey to rip the musicCD. Before ripping, make sure that the album info has been retrieved. Otherwise the filename and directory will be blank. And remember to use FLAC format instead of MP3.
- After the ripping was completed, click "retrieve IDTag from Amazon" in order to get the album art. The album art will be stored in the same directory as the music file.
- Use MediaCoder to convert FLAC to MP3 if needed. When encoding, use LAME codec if possible.

This scheme still has some weakness:
- The album art provided by Amazon isn't as good as those from iTune (Apple)
- I Haven't found a service that can automatically store Lyrics in the ID3 tag of FLAC file. I was also told that the converting from FLAC to MP3 will loss Lyrics.

My solution is keeping two set of files, one in FLAC format and one set in MP3 format. And then use MP3 as the file for storing lyrics, as I use MP3 file more often.

By the way I tried quite a few of music played software. So far I haven't found one that does everything right.

EvilLyrics not working so well

Just downloaded EvilLyrics, installed, and seems like it wasn't able to retrieve any lyrics at all. Engine out busted by RIAA?

Album Art and Lyrics, oh my

I am in a process of ripping all my music CD just so that I can have album art and lyrics embedded in each mp3 songs I ripped.

At first I was struggling about whether I should use ripper other than iTune because I heard enough bashing about iTune's mp3 ripping song quality comparing with encoder like LAME. However, the one stop convinenet, including having all the ID3 tag set up right, and the file name be the same as the song's name, these advantage simple too tempting to resist. So here I am, still stick with iTune.

And then I found this awesome app called Lyricsnapper which grabs lyrics and stuff it in the lyrics segement of a song. This is awesome, since the lyrics embeded in the song itself, so I don't have to worry about the lyrics being lost. It also allows me to read the lyrics while I use iPod ...... only that I haven't got an iPod yet. (I wonder if RockBox support lyrics)

End-To-End tutorial: extracting audio from YouTube video

My friend asked me how to extract audio from a You Tube video, so here's the step by step instruction.

1. Find the YouTube video that you want to extract audio from.
2. Copy the URL of that page.
3. Paste that URL in the textbox of the page FLV Retriever . Click the button, and you will get the actual video link.
   
4. Copy that link and paste on the browser, and download the video file.
5. Once downloaded, add the .flv extension if the file doesn't have it.
6. Now download the tool FLV Extract . Run it, and then un-check all except the audio.
   
7. Drag and drop the .flv files on FLV Extract application.
8. the .mp3 should be created in the same directory as the .flv file.

Mission accomplished.

(Last update on May 19 2008) : The FLV Retriever doesn't seem to work anymore. Instead, use the Video Download tool at TechCrunch instead.

Best way to extract audio from .flv (Flash video) file

This app - FLV Extract - is totally awesome. You drop your .flv file on the ultra minimal interface, and it extract the audio in .mp3 format out of the flash video file. That's all. Clean and simple.

Power Flickr downloader

I tired out a tool called Downloadr and it was amazing. The tool is basically a .Net Framework WinForm application. It searches Flickr by tag and author and present you the search result, which you can use to download the photos. But the best of is that you can use it to download the original big size photo, instead of the trimmed version somtimes show on the site.

The tool was created by a German gentleman. Consider donation if you use the app a lot.

Also, you can read a bit about how to download Flickr photos the other ways, like using FlickrStorm.

Can't stand Rave

I am also need to embracing and trying out different kind of music. So for the spirit of experimenting, I downloaded a bunch of early day Rave music and listened to all of them. And guess what, I ... hate 98% of them. Comparing with Trance and Electronica, Rave is too mechanical, like machine just keep pounding and pounding. And then dense and stiff sounded to "simply" pattern to me. I like Electronica because music in that genre has a lot of twist and turn, a lot of syncopation and surprise along the arrangement. No so with Rave, as Rave seems do one thing only: to keep the pounding beat going.

越寫越好的手寫功能？

我的電子手帳的手寫功能有一種奇怪的情況，當系統Restart後，手寫的功能會 ....

(Oh, back home now, and it's much easier to use English on my desktop instead)

... become ultra sloppy. The pen stroke will get jumpy and the recognition result can be far from poor, but after writing it for a long while, like say 15 minutes, the system will be like it's being warmed up, and started to behave pretty well.

I start to have to feeling that it's the automated speed thing that cause the problem. Just my guessing.

RockBox Bookmark

RockBox 的確十分好用，所有原本 Firmware 的功能，RockBox 都提供了。其中最好用的就是 Bookmark 的功能，不過對書簽功能有一點點意見，希望書簽不要單以文件夾做單位，而是以一個文件做單位。不過這種以文件夾做單位的做法，也能夠做到迫我有規律地逐卷書完成，不要東聽一次西聽一次。

Battery life hasn't been suffered with RockBox

I used the iRiver iHP-140 with RockBox to do recording with external microphone today, just like what I did in every Sundy morning. The result? Pretty darn good. I set th gain level to 9.5db, and the recording was pretty good. In fact, I think I can turn the gain level to even higher than the 9.5 dB. Also Rockman remembers my audio recording setting too.

The battery life consumption , while recording, is pretty much the same as using the original firmware. So basically if I use my iRiver just like I used it before I installed Rockbox, the battery consumption is pretty much the same. It's just that Rockman gives me so many new ways to use it, and by using it more frequent and in more way, I used up more battery :-P .

FlashGet 1.73 better than 1.9

Sometime new stuff doesn't necessary better than the one old.

Take FlashGet for instance. The new version 1.9 seems to have all the right stuff: new Vista friendly user interface, more features. and so on. But somehow when it tries to work with my Flashgot Firefox extension on my Firefox 2.0 browser, it always end up crashing when I tries to grab stuff from some Japanese and mainland China sites.

Finally I got fed up with it, uninstalled it, and install FlashGet 1.73. Problem solved. Now the download works perfectly. There's still some minor ZoneAlarm firewall issue that I need to resolve but at these I can use the feature I need.

B-Movie kind of TV show

Chuck really is a bad show. All the technology related story lines are just pathetic. So tried-to-portrait-nerd but so-far-from-the-truth. Yet, as a cliché brainless entertainment, it's alright. But don't watch it twice. You may vomit if you are a real geek.

Annoying banner ad on TV

I wish I could just run a banner ad remover on the TV shows that I watch, cause all those reminded at the bottom of the screen that pops up while you are watching a show, trying to remind you to watch the next show and the show after, they really touch my nerve.

Properly use RockBox

There was a reason why the firmware writing of the iRiver iHP-140 didn't put in a lot of features that found cool with RockBox (a open source firmware running on iHP-140), like games, auto bookmarking, auto song catalog re indexing. That's because all these activities suck up battery life deal to the fact that they all involve spinning up and down the harddisk frequently. I experienced the problem first handed when I constantly use the device for various purpose yesterday, and saw the battery life went downhill in a tremendous way.

Still, if using the device as just the mp3 player, RockBox is still, well, rocking. And the dual boot environment really gives me the best of both world. I am still glad that I didn't brought iPod Classic 80Gb.

Rockbox for iRiver iHP-140

I didn't realize that my iRiver iHP-140 MP3 player is so hackable until I came across the FLAC page and it mentioned about RockBox for iHP-140 and I was like "what?"

And so I went to the Rock Box home page and found out that my player surely was being supported.

I also found forums that are dedicated to users of iHP-100 series. It's amazing that there are still quite some people continue using the product daily, like me.

And on the realted topic, I was trying to find the best way to convert FLAC to MP3. The winamp way (or this) seemed too clumsy to me. I guess I'll just go for MediaCoder.