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Archive for November, 2008

How to use old interface in Vuze

November 23rd, 2008 by Connor McBrine-Ellis | 10 Comments | Filed in How Tos, Offline, Tech

Are you sick of the new interface in Vuze as many people are?  Here’s how to use the familiar old interface that Azureus had.

 

  1. Open Vuze
    (Right now it will still be in the Vuze interface as shown)
  2. Go to the Tools menu
  3. Click on Options
  4. A new window will appear
  5. Look in the item list on the left for “Interface” and click on the plus arrow beside it
  6. Click on “Start” in the list that appeared
  7. Click on the “Show” button beside “Display Vuze UI Chooser”
     
  8. The window that will come up has the option for “Classic Interface”, so just click on that and click OK.
  9. Click on restart, and you’re all set!
     
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Western Digital My Book Review

November 18th, 2008 by Connor McBrine-Ellis | 2 Comments | Filed in Offline, Reviews, Tech
Front View

Front View of Drive

The My Book is Western Digital’s flagship harddrive for desktop use.

It looks like a book, hence the name. It is a nice little drive, and the “morse code holes” as advertised on the website, do a good job of keeping the thing cool.

If you have a recent OS, like Windows XP or Vista, the drivers will install automatically (same goes for Mac OS X and Linux – just plug the thing in and it’s detected).

Inside the package there is a power brick, the drive, and 1 USB cable and 1 FireWire Cable.

Performance Specifications
Serial Transfer Rate
eSATA
Serial Bus Transfer Rate (eSATA) 3 Gb/s (Max)
FireWire 400
Serial Bus Transfer Rate (1394a) 400 Mbits/s (Max)
USB 2.0
Serial Bus Transfer Rate (USB 2.0) 480 Mbits/s (Max)
Physical Specifications
Capacity 500 GB
Interface Triple Interface
Physical Dimensions
English
Height 6.5 Inches (Max)
Length 5.4 Inches (Max)
Width 2.1 Inches
Weight 2.5 Pounds
Metric
Height 166 mm (Max)
Length 137 mm (Max)
Width 54 mm
Weight 1.15 kg
Environmental Specifications
Temperature (English)
Operating 41° F to 95° F
Non-operating -4° F to 149° F
Temperature (Metric)
Operating 5° C to 35° C
Non-operating -20° C to 65° C
Electrical Specifications
Current Requirements
Power Dissipation
AC Input Voltage 100-240 VAC
AC Input Frequency 47-63

One thing I found was that the USB and FireWire cables were a bit short if you have your drive on the ground. You might need to buy longer ones. Also, the drive is a bit heavy.

It is a good drive and will not crash on you, it is also so simple to use and the “amount of space left” meters are excellent! Just plug it into the wall and you’re set to go.

It’s a sturdy drive and I recommend it. The pricing is right too! It’s only around 100-150 dollars at Costco in Canada (the prices are changing all the time).

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How to run Spore on Linux

November 15th, 2008 by Connor McBrine-Ellis | 15 Comments | Filed in How Tos, Offline, Tech
Spore on Linux

Spore on Linux

Before we install, we need to be sure your system can really handle this kind of graphics.  You should have a decent graphics card, and you should have the drivers installed.  If not, check out this post.

The first step to installing Spore on linux is to download Wine.  Obviously Spore is not a windows program so you’re going to have to emulate windows which is what wine does.  If you’re on Ubuntu just go to the terminal and type in the following commands in this order:

sudo apt-get install wine alsa-oss

On other operating systems you can do likewise using your various package managers.

Then, after Wine is done installing, then you can pop your Spore CD into your CD drive and then it should install (if you’ve already installed spore on the same computer but in windows and you’re in a dual boot, at this point you can just browse to the folder where you already installed it in windows and run SporeApp.exe since wine is installed with all the other required packages).

After installing, get the no-cd crack from gamecopyworld here, install that into the program folder, and you’re all set!

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Nvidia and ATI drivers for Linux

November 15th, 2008 by Connor McBrine-Ellis | No Comments | Filed in How Tos

Some programs in Linux (including the ultra-cool Desktop Effects) need graphics accelleration, so they need to use your card to the full.  You need to install your graphics drivers if you want to play 3d games.

Here’s how.

First open the terminal (Applications, Accessories, Terminal)

If you have a recent card type this and hit enter:

sudo apt-get install nvidia-glx-new

-or-

sudo apt-get install nvidia-glx

If you have an older card (only for TNT, TNT2, TNT Ultra, [old] GeForce, and GeForce2 chipsets):

sudo apt-get install nvidia-glx-legacy

For ATI, enter this in the terminal and hit enter:

sudo apt-get install xorg-driver-fglrx

After your graphics card is all set up you’re set to have fun.

Play around with desktop effects by installing this package:

sudo aptitude install compizconfig-settings-manager

Then go to the System menu, click on Preferences, and then click on Advanced Desktop Effects Settings, and have fun!

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How to import from Blogger to WordPress

November 12th, 2008 by Connor McBrine-Ellis | No Comments | Filed in How Tos, Online

When I started this website, I had a lot of trouble importing from my old blogger blog to this new hosted WordPress blog. There seems to be a problem with hosted WordPress in the fact that lots of people have trouble importing Blogger blogs into it – here’s a solution (this will probably work with importing from other platforms other than blogger too). Go to www.wordpress.com and sign up for an account. Then go to Manage and then click on Import, and then follow the steps to import your old blog onto that blog, and then go to Export, and export as an XML file for your other hosted WordPress account. Then head back to your hosted wordpress and then import that xml file. Voila – you’re back again!!!

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How to get ASIO drivers for any Sound Card

November 12th, 2008 by Connor McBrine-Ellis | 2 Comments | Filed in How Tos, Offline, Tech

I recently installed Guitar Rig onto my computer and when I plugged in my guitar, I couldn’t really hear anything but a whole bunch of crackling. I adjusted the settings and I could hear my guitar but there was a lot of latency (time between when I hit the string and when I could actually hear it on the computer). There was still a lot of crackling when I was playing, and the latency was really bad, so I did a bit of research and I found out that in order to get rid of the crackling when you play (and the huge latency issue) you need to use ASIO drivers with your sound card.

Guitar Rig 3 with ASIO

If you click on the file menu, and then go to audio setup, then you should get this dialog box (or do the equivalent in whatever software you are using). Here, in the interface menu on the soundcard tab, you probably won’t have the option for ASIO (if you’re having these problems). If you do have it, select it as the Interface. If you don’t then go to ASIO4ALL, download it, and install it, and then voila, problem solved! (Don’t forget to go back and change the interface to AISO).

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Palm TX Review

November 11th, 2008 by Connor McBrine-Ellis | 5 Comments | Filed in Offline, Reviews
TX image
Palm TX

System Specs

Processor: 312MHz ARM-based Processor
Operating System: Palm OS software version Garnet v5.4.9
Memory: Total 128 MB (100MB accessible to user)
Display: TFT color display with backlight, 320 x 480, 65,000 colors
Audio: Speaker and standard 3.5mm stereo headphone jack
Interface: USB (for HotSync operation), Infrared, Bluetooth 1.1, Wi-Fi 802.11b
Dimensions and Weight: 4.76 x 3.08 x 0.61in, 5 oz. (including stylus and SD card)
Power: 108-32VAC, 60Hz, 100mA (US and Canada only AC Adapter)
Battery: 1250mHa Lithium-ion polymer rechargeable battery (internal – non user removable)
Expansion: SD card slot (Secure Digital), supports MMC and SD cards.

Review

The latest Handheld from Palm is very similar in design to the T5, except for it has a nice sleek blue look instead of the old silver chassis color. Other than that, it is the same, shape and weight.

The device is nice and sturdy, and would probably be pretty tough to break by accident. The case looks like metal, but it is probably just plastic. One problem about this device is that lots of people have trouble with the power button. There is a program you can download here that can reassign your powerbutton to say, the home button, because the main thing that people find with the power button (and that I found too) is that it is very unresponsive and you have to push twice or sometimes just hold it down for a long time.

One of the things you will love about this device is the bright screen. It is perfect for watching movies and videos. What’s also nice is that fingerprints don’t really show up too much on this screen.

The memory is not volatile – meaning everything will not be erased if you run out of juice.

One thing you will be disappointed about with the TX is the fact that the built-in video player cannot play most formats of video you get. What you can do to fix this is to download a very good freeware player called TCPMP and install it onto your palm. When you get it – you don’t have to sync videos (or even music) onto your palm anymore – just put your SD card loaded up with all sorts of DivX or Xvid( yes TCPMP does support these codecs) into your palm, fire up TCPMP, select some files, and then hit play and you’re all set.

There are quite a few games available for Palm OS – including many PC favorites like bookworm. Check out Astraware for lots of games. Also, if you like old games, check out LJP – a multisystem emulator that can emulate NES, SNES, GEN, GB/GBC and more! To use the more recent consoles like SNES and Genesis you may need to overclock with warpSpeed, and free up more memory with UDMH.

Hope you enjoyed my review!

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How to download torrents (for ABSOLUTE beginners!)

November 11th, 2008 by Connor McBrine-Ellis | 4 Comments | Filed in Tech

If you really like music and you just don’t want to buy it, in Canada you can download it for free (note that this can be illegal in some places).  To download music using BitTorrent, you need a “torrent client”, and a good one is uTorrent available at http://www.utorrent.com/, and it is probably the most secure one available. Download it and install it. Once you have it, you can download torrent files such as the ones available at my favourite torrent website, http://www.isohunt.com/. When you search on the website, it comes up with results like the ones displayed at this link: http://isohunt.com/torrents/?ihq=klezmer.
In the picture above, you can see three things circled from the search – Size column, S (seeds), and L (Leechers/Peers).
Size is how big the file is – you don’t want to download something too big because that might fill up all your space. S or seeds, is definitely the most important column. It tells you how fast your download will be. If there are more seeds than leechers (or L in this picture), then your download will be a lot faster. The circled download would probably be a good choice out of all the results. Still, don’t be scared to download something with only 4 or 5 seeds because it could be a good download too – just keep this a standard rule of thumb to pick the best one.

When you’ve picked one, click on its title. This page will come up:

In the above picture, you can see the download .torrent button. Just click on that, and internet explorer or firefox will want to download the file – press “open” instead of “save”, and if it prompts you for what program top open with with, open the file you download with uTorrent. Then choose some or all of the files you want to download and a spot to save them to and then press ok.

While it’s downloading (it can take overnight or longer sometimes), you can minimize utorrent and it will disappear to the lower right section of your screen the “system tray” where the clock is. The icon is a U and you can click it any time (double click) and it will bring it back up (to check your download’s progress).

Wait a while until it’s done and “seeding”, and when it starts seeding that means the download’s done, so you can right click it and click “stop”. To stop it from seeding (I highly recommend you do that) Right click the torrent in the main window and click “Open Containing Folder”, and then it will bring up the folder with all your files in it.

As another final note, Mininova is an excellent site for your purposes if you really just want to download music and may even be better than Isohunt. http://www.mininova.org/cat/. For music, just click the music category.

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