Welcome to GuruNews
Brought to you each week by the PC Gurus, a loose collection of volunteers from around the Kentuckiana region.
You can interact with the PC Guru team via our Web site, located at http://www.thepcgurus.com. On our site you can post your computer questions, comments and rants on the forums, e-mail the PC Guru
team members and chat one on one in our nightly IRC chat beginning around 8:00 PM EST. You can also subscribe to our RSS feeds so you can get the latest news and forum updates from the PC Guru Web site directly on your computer.
If you're new to the Newsletter you can read back issues at Team member JP Durbin's website at http://www.jpdurbin.net. There are links to all the old 84 Online issues as well as the new GuruNews missives.
The WHAS Crusade for Children provides year round support for needy children throughout the Kentuckiana region. Visit http://www.whascrusade.org to make donations online.
To subscribe to this newsletter just drop by www.thepcgurus.com and sign up!
Vol. 6, No. 25
6-15-06
1 Ripping Part 2
2 IT worship
3 Blu-ray shipping, Google.gov, Frosh Macs, music link
4 Troubleshooting and email etiquette
5 Fix your pics in the camera
6 Ad Blocking
7 Registry cleaning
Before we start ripping our CD collection to digital form lets get organized. The first mistake many people make is to just rip everything to a single folder and that leads to a real mess. Who wants to root through 400 files to find a single one?
Decide which disks you’re going to rip, then open My Documents on your PC. There should already exist a sub folder called My Music. If you haven’t been into that folder you’ll immediately see a Sample Music folder, which you can safely delete.
Now drop your first CD into the drive, wait for Auto play to kick in and ask you what you want to do with it, and close the window. If you have a preset to automatically start playing audio CDs just stop playback.
For the first part of this project I’m using Windows Media Player 10 (WiMP from this point on). If your playback program is different go ahead and close it and open WiMP.
If this program is your default player the list of tracks should already be open. If not click File and CDs and Devices and then Rip Audio CD. Most media players, including WiMP, will read the table of contents of an audio CD and pull information from online databases for the track names, length, composer etc. This results in an easy list of songs to work with rather than names like Track 1, Track 2 etc.
In WiMP every song is selected by default so you’ll want to uncheck everything you wish to skip, leaving just your selections. For this part of the project I’m using “Flood” by They Might Be Giants. I’m going to choose track 2, “Birdhouse in Your Soul”, track 4, “Istanbul (Not Constantinople)” and track 10, “Someone Keeps Moving My Chair”. Once you’ve isolated your choices click the Rip Music button. If this is the first time you’ve used the software to rip you’ll be presented with some options.
If you stay with the defaults, which are 128Kb and .wma as the output, you’ll be fine as long as you’re just burning audio CD compilations and listening to the ripped songs from your computer. If you want to load the music onto a portable player you should change the output file type to MP3 for maximum compatibility.
You’ll also notice the default destination folder is simply My Music. Leave that alone since WiMP automatically creates a new folder for the artist and a subfolder for the album. Some players will ask for a destination folder, in which case you’ll need to manually create a main folder and subfolders.
WiMP also automatically pulls the album art from the online databases so you can even print CD covers if you’re copying entire CDs.
As usual I ran long so we’ll pick up next week with doing the same thing in MusicMatch Jukebox and, as long as we’re at it we may as well continue the project by actually burning some CDs.
Why do I always get carried away with these things?
Kevin Mefford, Editor
Terry Wise
Tech News of the Week
Blu-ray on the
way---Samsung Electronics said it has shipped the
industry's first Blue-ray
optical disk player to U.S. retailers for
sale starting June 25:
http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=189401595&subSection=Product+Reviews
Google
wants to be your one-stop shop for information about the U.S.
government, the
company announced Thursday. To accomplish that, Google
launched a new online
tool, Google U.S. Government Search:
http://news.tmcnet.com/news/2006/06/15/1684475.htm
For
the first time, BusinessWeek is recommending Macs for college
freshmen:
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jun2006/tc20060614_650605.htm?chan=topStories_ssi_5
Finally,
team member Dan Dennison sends in a great link from the chatroom
for you
music fans. You're going to love this:
http://www.pandora.com/
Copy us on the
stuff ;-)
Matthew Dattilo
MailScanner has
detected a possible fraud attempt from "www.thepcgurus.com" claiming to
be MailScanner has detected a possible fraud
attempt from "www.thepcgurus.com" claiming to be thepcgurus@gmail.com
www.mattstodayinhistory.com
Download of the Week (and more)
Is your PC acting flaky? This tool can help you find out what's causing the problems. FileMon gives you a real-time view of every running program, and lets you know what it's doing. The tool records and time-stamps the actions of each open application--say, opening other files or loading helper programs. Watch for a specific program's behavior just before a system freezes. It’s free and you can get it here:
http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/Filemon.html
Here are some useful email tips worth repeating.
Chris Pirillo, “the Lockergnome”, had this in his newsletter and consented to its reprint here. Thanks, Chris.
“Over the years of receiving messages from readers and listeners, here are the most commonly broken email rules:
1. TYPING THE MESSAGE IN ALL CAPS!!! This is the Internet equivalent of shouting at the person. It also means I AM LAZY!!!
2. Spelling, Punctuation and capitalization (or lack thereof). Just as in the analog world, these basic components of communication are critical for getting your point across. (i am amazid by how many messages i get that make a mokery of the engilish langage!!!)
3. Long-winded messages. E-mail is meant to be short and sweet. Get to the point, as many people get dozens, if not hundreds of messages a day.
4. Refrain from attaching large files (over 50k) to an e-mail message unless the recipient is aware that it is coming. Sending a picture of "Muffy with Santa" may seem fun to you, but your recipient may not be amused when they see what a 20-minute download produces!
5. Don't leave the subject line blank. Many people will simply delete any message that has no subject line. Make it short and descriptive so the recipient can make a quick decision about the message without having to open it.
6. Read over your e-mail before you send it, especially if it is an inflammatory message. E-mail is a permanent record and is being used in many legal battles. (Just ask Bill Gates!)
7. Use acronyms and emoticons :-) sparingly. They do help to make a message shorter and to the point, but can often be overused.
8. Don't believe everything that you read and don't forward it to everyone you know! E-mail hoaxes are getting worse because of all of the gullible users that mindlessly send the message without doing any research. If a message contains the line "Send this to everyone you know" it is almost always a hoax. Some good resources to check before succumbing to such hoaxes are Hoaxbusters, About.com's list of current Netlore, and Snopes.
9. Don't repeatedly send jokes to anyone without first getting their permission. I receive the same joke dozens of times from dozens of well meaning people, but it is more of a nuisance than it is worth.
10. Learn how to cut and paste items to put into a new message instead of just forwarding the original message. This will keep you from having the long list of previous addresses from appearing at the top of the message that you send.”
Number 10 is especially important, folks.
I hope this information is useful to you and your friends and family.
Art Maley
Contest of the Week
If you, like me, suffer from off-center under-lit digital photos riddled
with redeye the Nikon L-Series is for you. These cameras have the
ability to edit your pictures within the camera before you transfer them to
the PC and go through a laborious effort with Photoshop or something
similar.
You can enter daily through July 13th to win one of these little babies at http://www.popphoto.com/aboutus/2451/nikon-coolpix-l4-giveaway.html.
Firefox Extension of the Week
Hi
again folks! This week we have a pair of old tips combined and
updated
to help out the readers that happened to miss this series last
summer.
Even if you were here for the original pair take the time to
go through and
update your extensions, because they're very much
new and improved since
last year.
For those that have never seen this column before, here's the
general
format. I'll give you the link or links to this week’s
extensions in
order of which to install. Click on the link, and then
click on the
"Install Now" link in the green box. Another box will
come up and will
count down 5 seconds until you install. Wait the 5
seconds, and then click
the Install button. If I've provided a second
link, do the same. Next,
restart Firefox. Then I'll usually dive
into further instructions.
This week's extensions deal with blocking ads
on almost all web pages.
For this week:
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/1136/
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/1865/
You'll
get two extra windows that pop up on the first
restart; one says
"Updated Versions". Put the check mark in the "Don't
show me this
after automatic updates", and then click the close button.
Then on the
Adblock Filterset.G Updater Options, click the OK button.
You're all
done!
Now, if certain websites you go to don't work they way they used
to,
here's what to do. When you are at the site that is not working
right,
click on the button next to your "Home" button that looks like a bug
with the No Entry mark over it, more specifically, the black down arrow
part of that button. When you do you'll see an option to “Disable on
<website name>” Click that, then refresh the page, and it should
be
back to normal.
Now you don't have all those ads all over the
place, and you can see the
Internet in a much less cluttered
light.
Hope you can take something away from this, and please feel free
to
e-mail me with any questions or problems you have.
Daniel A.
Williams
daniel@thepcgurus.com
Email Question of the Week
Q: What registry cleaner is the best to use?
A:
Give "CCleaner" a try. It removes lots of old files, partial
files
and other extraneous junk. It also prompts if a registry issue
may
result. It's a pretty safe way to get this job done.
You'll
find it here: http://www.ccleaner.com/
Good
Luck,
Art Maley
Contact info and legal stuff
If you have tech support questions or ideas and/or submissions for our newsletter please submit them by visiting www.thepcgurus.com and click on the “Email the Team” icon.
Copyright 2001-2006 The PC Gurus, all rights reserved. Publication, rebroadcast or storage is prohibited without prior consent, however you may freely forward this publication to friends as long as A) it is forwarded in its entirety and B) no fee is charged.
Information provided in this publication is provided "as is" without warranty of any kind, either expressed or implied. Although the information provided is known to work on most systems, it may not work on ALL systems. Make use of any information supplied at your own risk.
The PC Gurus are a group of volunteers who provide support for the PC, Mac and Linux users in the Kentuckiana region.
To unsubscribe from this newsletter send an email to microdome@seidata.com with the words “unsubscribe newsletter” (without the quotes) at the top of the body of the message.