Monthly Archive for October, 2006

IE7 add-ons

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 26/10/2006
in Browsers, Microsoft and Technology
. 5 Comments

Via Rob Burke, I saw a blog post on the IE blog listing add-ons which are available for IE7 and pointing out a site listing over 400 add-ons.

It is cool that there are now add-ons for IE7 which now give me functionality similar to that I already have in Firefox 2 (in many cases added with add-ons as well).

Unfortunately I couldn’t find an equivalent to my all-time favourite Firefox plugin, AdBlock and even more disconcerting is the fact that many of the IE plugins are commercial (i.e. not free!). Why would people pay for plugins for IE7 when similar plugins are available free for Firefox? Is it simply ignorance?

Google get asinine

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 26/10/2006
in Search Engines
. 11 Comments

I see Google are now telling us when we can and when we can’t use the word Google in our everyday speech!

we do have a brand to protect, so we’d like to make clear that you should please only use “Google” when you’re actually referring to Google Inc. and our services

I actually think they are serious too - if this were April 1st, I’d understand why the post was put out there but as it is not, I am bemused by the company’s trying to stop people using its name (use of its name, even as a verb, instead of a noun, by definition increases its brand awareness).

Plonkers.

Audacity aiff import problems

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 26/10/2006
in Audio, IT@Cork, Interviews, PodLeaders, Podcast and Podcasting
. 3 Comments

Audacity is an open source, cross-platform sound editing application. It is the sound editor I use for producing the PodLeaders and it@cork podcasts.

The process I use for producing the podcasts was:

  1. Record the interview using Skype and Wiretap Pro (with Wiretap Pro set to save as mp3)
  2. Import the mp3 file to Audacity and edit
  3. Export as mp3 and publish

After a recent conversation with Doug Kaye, I decided to try his Levelator application to get the levels on the recordings the same. This meant I had to change Wiretap Pro to output to aiff ( a lossless format) instead of mp3.

I did this and recorded a number of interviews successfully, saving the interviews as aiff. However, yesterday, when I went to edit the first of those interviews, I was disappointed that the Levelator couldn’t work with the files (gave an error and stopped trying to level them).

However, I was horrified when I tried importing the files into Audacity only to find that the imported files had massive echo problems, echo problems (!). No matter what I tried I couldn’t get rid of the echo and it made the audio useless.

Finally, I hit on a solution:

  1. Import the aiff files into iTunes
  2. Export from iTunes as mp3
  3. Import the mp3 file into Audacity - no echo (phew!)

I should have hit on this solution sooner but it had been a long day!

OPML autodiscovery

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 25/10/2006
in RSS, Web 2.0 and opml
. 16 Comments

OPML is a file format which is used to save lists of RSS feeds. Very handy, for instance, for copying your list of RSS feeds from one feed reader to another. I uploaded a list of my RSS subscriptions to an OPML file on this server so the Grazr plugin in the sidebar on the right can display them similar to a blogroll.

James Corbett, Ireland’s OPML ambassador, recently advised me to add autodiscovery of OPML to this site. Adding OPML is as simple as adding the following line to the head section of the site’s code:

<link rel="outline" type="text/xml+opml" href="http://tomrafteryit.net/Subscriptions.opml" />

Why would you want to add OPML autodiscovery to your page code? Frankly, apart from making finding your OPML file easier, I’m not entirely sure!

There’s a Firefox plugin, which lights up a blue icon in the Status bar when you browse to a site which has added the autodiscover code allowing you to view the site owners subscriptions.

Firefox OPML Autodiscovery plugin

There’s a bit of work involved in the management of OPML files. I’m always updating the RSS feeds in my reader adding new feeds and deleting old ones so any OPML file I upload is almost immediately out of date. If there were some way I could have my RSS reader synch with the remote OPML file, that would reduce a lot of the overhead.

Then again, I don’t want to publish all my RSS subscriptions (some are client sensitive) so I’d need some way of synching a subset of my feeds to my OPML file to ensure that the OPML file I’m publishing is an accurate reflection of my current reading.

FairPlay cracked

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 24/10/2006
in iPod
. 13 Comments

According to an article on CNN Money, Jon Johansen, the hacker who cracked the DVD encryption, (aka DVD Jon) has now broken the ironically named FairPlay. FairPlay is the Digital Rights Management (DRM) software which Apple puts on songs sold through its iTunes store - this DRM stops songs bought through iTunes playing on devices other than an iPod.

DRM is an evil, market restricting, anti-consumer device (why shouldn’t I be able to play DVDs bought in the US on my DVD player in Ireland?).
Any and all cracking of DRM should be applauded.

Way to go Jon.

Can anyone get Jajah working on mobiles?

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 23/10/2006
in Telecoms and voip
. 6 Comments

I have been using Jajah’s service to make cheap calls from my landline (15c per minute from Ireland to Spanish mobiles) but I have failed to get it working on my mobile.

I have a Nokia N70 and I downloaded the software for Jajah onto my mobile. The Jajah software is supposed to detect when a call is being made from your mobile to an international number and take over the call transparently to you, saving you a fortune in mobile call costs.

However, on my N70, anytime I tried to make an international call, they never connected. This caused me considerable hassle recently when I was in the UK and couldn’t make any calls to people I was supposed to be meeting in London as they were on “international” numbers.

I had to figure out how to disable Jajah to get any work done.

The service sounds promising, but if it causes a technophile this amount of hassle, how will non tech people get it working?

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