This is very annoying because if you are listening to a random selection of music, you have to constantly adjust your speakers either up or down because of the variation in sound level between the MP3 files. So can anything do done?

MP3Gain is a great freeware program that will analyze and adjust a collection of MP3 files so that they all have the same volume! This is one of my favorite freeware programs because I can now listen to all my music without worrying about one song blowing out my speakers.

Note that MP3Gain can adjust how loud each song sounds without any quality loss. The program has two modes, Track and Album. Track mode will correct the volume on a group of unrelated songs to a particular target volume that you specify. It corrects each song individually.

Album mode corrects a collections of related songs (like a group of songs on a CD album) relative to other collections of songs. Applying the Album gain is like adjusting the volume knob once for each CD you play in your CD player. The overall volume of the album is adjusted, but the volume difference between songs in the album are preserved.

If you are a music lover, this probably all makes sense, otherwise it may not. Either way, if you have lots of albums in your collection, then use Album gain, otherwise just use Track gain if there are lots of unrelated songs in your MP3 collection.

To get started, add some files or folders where all of your MP3 files are located.

Once all the files are in the list box, you need to let MP3Gain analyze them so that it can determine how to adjust the files. From the Analysis menu, you can choose Track Analysis, Album Analysis, or Max No-Clip Analysis. Track and Album analysis are like what we talked about before, either a single file or a group of files.

The program will give you some basic information about the files, such as the volume, track gain, and more.

Finally, once the analysis is complete, you can adjust the actual volume (gain) of all the MP3 files. Again, you can choose from Album gain or Track gain. Make sure to first set the target volume to the desired value. By default it is set at 89 dB. Now from the Modify Gain menu, choose the gain you want to use to normalize the volume of all the MP3 files.

And that’s it! Now all of your MP3 files will have the same volume across the board! Have fun listening to your music!

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Normalize volume on MP3 audio files using MP3Gain

Earlier I wrote about Dymo DisPainter, a cool inkjet CD/DVD label maker that allows you to burn your designs directly onto a CD, however, it costs quite a bit of money. If you want to create CD labels for free, read on!

To start making your own CD labels,  click the Windows Start button and choose Windows Digital Enhancements > Windows CD Label Maker:

A wizard interface will guide you through the process.  The first screen will introduce you the list of steps to follow.  Click Next button on the lower right portion of this screen after reading the details:

The next screen will make you choose any of your CDs (if loaded on your CD ROMs) or your existing Media Player playlists.  On the example below you can see two of my loaded CD/DVDs and 3 existing playlists (this will be different from your computer so make sure to choose the appropriate playlist or CD):

The next screen will be choosing what specific type of label, index card or booklet you want to create:

You can also change the paper section where you want to position the physical CD.  It depends on what type of CD cover you will put the CD on.  The provided templates are very generous and should be sufficient enough to make your own DVD covers of any size or type.

There are also templates for 2 in one and 3 in one CD cases.  Choose this carefully as this might not match your specialized paper.  Look for the brand of the CD label paper and also it’s size so you can match it with the template on this window.

The third and most important screen is the designing step.  Here you can set the title and footer along with their font styles and sizes.  You can also change the background image and preview the final output.  Make sure to review your label (using the preview button) before printing it to avoid any typographical or design mistakes:

Lastly, the print window will appear so you can choose which printer to print the document.  The thumbnail preview is also available along with the button to open the preview on a bigger window. Click print to print the label:

That’s it! In four easy steps we were able to make a CD label in no time.  You can follow this Wizard again for other templates like index, inserts, and covers.  Just make sure you choose the right template to match your paper or cover type.

Ben Carigtan shows you how it’s done!

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Print your own CD labels using Windows CD Label Maker

Here is an actual example of a chart created using Google Chart API:

You can see that the chart was generated using a simple URL parameter manipulation:

There are at least 3 parameters (cht, chd and chl)  to set to be able to generate a chart.  Below are the steps to make those parameters:

Step 1: Define the Chart Type: cht

First you will need to define what type of chart you want.  A listing of all available chart types are located here: http://code.google.com/apis/chart/types.html

In the example that we will create, we will use cht=p3 which is a pie chart.  To make other types of charts like bar or line charts, just browse the types of charts and put in the corresponding cht parameter value.

Step 2: Define the parameter for data and labels: chd and chl

For example, we want to chart the distribution of each of the four brands below:

1. BrandX=40
2. BrandY=30
3. BrandZ=20
4. BrandA=10

The data (chd) parameter will be:  chd=t:40,30,20,10

Note: In the example I chose to use Text Encoding.  To use other types of encoding click on the link below: http://code.google.com/apis/chart/formats.html

The label parameter (chl) is chl=BrandX,BrandY,BrandZ,BrandA

The label parameter values are comma delimited and should have the same number of values as the data parameter.

Step 3: Define the size of the chart in pixel

The format is a simple chs=<width in pixels>x<height in pixels>, so if we want to have a 250X100 chart, we put it like this: chs=250X100

Step 4: Put the parameters together

Append the parameters to the main URL: http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?

+ parameter from step 1 + “&” + parameter from step 2 + “&” parameter from step 3

Note that the order of parameters in web services is not important as long as you separate them with the ampersand character “&”.  See example below:

http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=p3&chd=t:40,30,20,10&chs=250×100&chl=BrandX|BrandY|BrandZ|BrandA

It is clear that users can easily create dynamic charts using Google Chart API.  This is ideal for users who don’t want to buy complex charting solutions for their web projects.

Ben Carigtan shows you how it’s done.

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Make charts online using the Google Chart API

If you are constantly copying, moving or deleting large files on computer, such as videos or movies, then you should probably read my article on how to automatically defragment your hard drive.

But all of the above methods will defragment your entire hard  drive, which is great every once in a while, but may be a pain for someone who works with large files on a daily basis. A lot of time could be saved by just defragmenting an individual file rather than an entire hard disk.

FragExt is a freeware program that will allow you to defragment single files rather than entire volumes. It adds an option to your right-click menu so that instantly defragment files.

The program also has a file property extension for displaying all kinds of detailed information about a file or folders level of fragmentation on the system. You can also save this information as reports to the clipboard or to a file.

You can even view fragment information about individual files. It’s very easy to quickly see how fragmented a file is on the hard disk.

This program is really only best for defragmenting individual files and not entire drives. It does not have the optimization features that some of the other defrag programs like SmartDefrag mentioned above have. The main problem with this program is that if you defragment a folder, it will not defragment the sub-directories automatically. That’s why it’s best to use it for files only. Enjoy! Source: gHacks

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Defragment a single file using FragExt

Considering this simple fact, you’ll need to take a few precautions to safeguard information that’s important to you. Most experts suggest backing up information stored on your computer’s hard drive on a regular basis.

Having a backup copy will save you from tons of unwanted grief and tears. For local email clients, you can read my previous post on how to backup Outlook email using a free program called Amic Email Backup. With web based emails, you may forget that it’s possible for it to be lost as well. A large company like Google can occasionally experience a loss of customer data.

GMail Backup may be the perfect tool for preventing your personal or professional emails from getting lost in oblivion. It can provide you with a little more security than just hoping that nothing happens. Within a few short minutes, all of your messages will be saved to a private location that you choose. Instead of worrying about waking up to an empty spot where your emails used to reside, you’ll know for sure that there’s a copy tucked safely away.

Printing each email individually wouldn’t be an option that most tech savvy computer users would choose. It would cost too much money and take too long to complete. GMail Backup takes the hard work out of saving your emails in an alternate location.

No matter how large Google may be, it’s still susceptible to periodic outages that will totally erase customer emails. Taking a few minutes out of your day to backup your GMail account will be the best thing you can do for yourself.

Navigate to the GMail Backup homepage to download the program to your computer. It’s completely free to use and won’t require a monthly fee like other backup programs. After the program has been downloaded, launch it to begin the process of backing up your email messages. Log into your GMail account with a full email address and password, choose a directory to save the emails to, and select the dates you’d like to begin working with.

GMail Backup will start backing up your emails to a location for future access. The saved files will be saved in an .eml format. In order to successfully open them, you’ll need a program like Microsoft Outlook or Mozilla Thunderbird. As you receive new emails in your GMail account, back them up by choosing the “newest email only” option.

This will prevent you from going through another long backup process. Although GMail Backup is an easy program to work with, it has to be done manually each time. There’s no automatic scheduler to make it even easier.

When you get a chance, try GMail Backup to keep your emails secure. The application is being offered free of charge and won’t cost you anything. Within a couple of minutes, your web based emails will be saved onto your computer system and ready to be restored when necessary.

Ms Yokum
Tech Enthusiast & Blogger

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The changes in the interface are easily noticeable.  The purple glass interface is in trend with current glass window interfaces.  The avatars of each contact got bigger to easily see the customized avatars of your contacts.  This maybe good for most users but for users who has a lot of contacts, this means they will have to scroll longer to find contacts.

To remedy this problem, a contact search bar is now available.  Status messages are also easily changeable as the GUI provides editable status message textbox on the main window. The Pingbox visitors on your Pingbox appear as groups on your contact panel.  (We have a separate article for Yahoo! Pingbox here)

Another cool feature is the “Address Book” group where you can see all of your offline contacts:

The avatar acts like a quick shortcut to access the actions available for your contacts:

The actual chat window interface has not changed that much but the new capabilities are actually good.  When you paste a Youtube or other popular video site link or URL of a photo, the actual video or photo will appear on the chat box:

Under the hood there are some new notable features.  You will be able to chat and swap files real time to other contacts using other networks like Windows Live Messenger.   You can share pictures from your Flickr photos too and not just pictures from your computer.

Here are other new features based on the Yahoo! Messenger Wikipedia entry:

• New skins
• Return of the (original) emoticons
• Ignore list enhancements
• New emoticons inspired by our users
• Import Contacts wizard
• Yahoo! Updates
• Call forwarding & new voicemail delivery
• Yahoo! Games are back

Yahoo! Messenger 9 is a necessary upgrade for users inside private firewalls.  If you receive a message from Yahoo! every time you login that says your current version will not work on current version, an upgrade is required. Lots of users also documented bugs on version 8 that were fixed on version 9 (i.e. broken file transfers).  The new features and the bug fixes are enough reasons for me to drop the old version.

To get the new version, download the installer from this official Yahoo! Messenger website: http://messenger.yahoo.com/

Ben Carigtan shows you how it’s done.

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What’s new in Yahoo! Messenger 9?

However, I just ran across a service called Mail2Web, which is a service that allows you to check any POP3 or IMAP4 email account online using Outlook Web Access (OWA). If you don’t know what OWA is, it’s the version of Microsoft Outlook that runs in your browser rather than the desktop.

Without creating an account, you can retrieve your POP3 (Gmail, Yahoo, etc) email from anywhere by just typing in your email address and password. Now personally, I find this pretty useless because I may as well just go to Gmail and check my email rather than go through Mail2Web. The only advantage to checking email via Mail2Web without creating an account is if you want to check email anonymously.

The useful aspect of Mail2Web is if you register for an account, then you can actually add several email accounts to the service and check all of them from one interface. On top of that, you can also use their Outlook Web Access interface, which looks really good and works just like Outlook on the desktop.

Note that if you want to use the Outlook Web Access interface and add more POP3 accounts, you will have to upgrade to the Personal Exchange service, which is $4.95 a month.

You can check individual POP3 emails accounts using Email Retrieve, but you don’t get the OWA interface and can only check that one account. If you have a lot of email accounts and want to be able to view them online in one place using the Outlook web interface, then this service will be well worth the money.

The other great thing about Mail2Web is that it supports BlackBerry devices and it supports ActiveSync, so you can sync your Mail2Web account with a Pocket PC. Also, it supports Outlook Mobile Access, so you can access your account directly from a smartphone.

Overall, it’s a pretty good service for business and corporate users, but some consumers may also be inclined because of the convenience and features. Enjoy!

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The Cisco IP Communicator looks like the real thing.  The interface completely resembles the real IP Phone:

Since it is a virtual phone it has all the features of a real phone, you could get more from than the real thing.  The best benefit will be mobility, you won’t have to depend on physically having an IP Phone – just open it on your computer and start dialing.  Once it is open you can receive and make calls.

A complimentary Audio Tuning Wizard is included in the package.  It allows you to calibrate your soundcard properties (i.e. output volume and mic) using a step by step guide:

Any working mic and headphone equipment will do to capture your voice and then hear what the other person on the line is saying.  I use a cheap but high quality A4 headset with a mic connected to the sound card’s audio out and mic ports.  That should be the ports with the green and pink color:

Directory searching is also very easy, it can connect directly to your LDAP directory.  Accessing the directory is just a button away:

Here are some more of the advertised features of this software:

• Easy access to your User Options web pages and phone services – this is a clear advantage over the physical IP phone.

• Changing the look of Cisco IP Communicator – in theory, this software is skin-able.  There are at least 2 predefined looks that you can play with on my package.  I will look out for more skins in the future but now I want it to look like my real IP phone.

• Drag-and drop and cut-and-paste dialing – this is great since you are leveraging your OS’s clipboard ability to easily use numbers coming in from other applications like Outlook or messenger.

• Pop-up incoming call notification – helps a lot to see if someone is calling you even when IP communicator is minimized.

Overall I think IP Communicator is a great corporate tool.  It can easily be configured to use your own corporate phone policy and you won’t have to maintain any physical LAN cables (and power) for the phones.  It is listed as about $60+ on Google for a single software license.   New features are deployed via automatic software updates.  This easily beats the price per unit of the real phone which lists at a range of $200 to $600.

If you are looking for a serious phone alternative or even a cost effective primary phone, the Cisco IP Communicator is worth considering.

Ben Carigtan writes about software, computers, technology and how to get the best out of them.

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The basic Media Player functionality is there like choosing tracks, volume adjustment, play, forward, rewind, stop and pause.  If you turn the privacy option on, your guests will not be able to access your personal files.  Quitting Party Mode will also bring you back to the Windows login screen so unless they know your login name and password, your personal stuff is not accessible to them.

If you turn-on the Party mode with privacy options you will get a full screen interface like the one below:

During this mode the Windows task bar and explorer is not accessible.  You will not be able to access your documents or any other programs during this mode.  

To start using the Windows Party Mode, go to Start menu of Windows, click Windows Digital Media Enhancements then choose Windows Party Mode:

This will open the Windows Party Mode settings window.  Enable the privacy mode by checking the Privacy Option which will block access to desktop and other programs:

The Now Playing options will let you set the cross fading, visualization, track information and default music content settings.  Check “guests can access my library” if you want them to be able to choose the songs to add in your play list:

The Marquee options will let you turn on/off the marquee during the Party Mode.  With Marquee turned on, your guests will be able to see and/or add comments that will display on the moving marquee:

The Skin option will let you choose the skin you prefer.  A preview is displayed so you can instantly see what it will look like on full screen mode:

Click the Start Party button to enter the Party Mode:

Here is the map of the Party Mode screen using the Nature skin:

The Marquee controls will let you edit the text being displayed on the scrolling Marquee.  The Media Player controls work like the standard play, stop and directional buttons.  Some of the themes have built in capability to change the background or visualization.  In the Nature skin for example, clicking the top-left button will change the scenery of the entire screen’s skin:

Exiting the Party Mode will prompt with a confirmation window:

If you enabled the Privacy options on the first step, it will exit the Party mode and bring you to your Windows login screen.  This way quests will not be able to access your PC’s data after quitting Party Mode.  A great way to prevent nosy guests from seeing your personal files and folders. 

I hope you have as much fun as I did with Windows Party Mode for Media Player.  Give it a try to liven up media listening with your guests!

Ben Carigtan shows you how it’s done.

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Another site I just came across called Thumbizy is a simple and fast website thumbnail generator. If you need to create a thumbnail quickly, then check out this site.

Type in the URL of the site you want to capture a snapshot of and then choose from the two sets of options, size and capture area.

You can choose from Very Small (100 px) to Big (360 px). You can also choose to capture just the visible area of the website or the full page.

Click GO and you should see your thumbnail generated in less than 30 seconds.

You will also see a link at the bottom of the image where the thumbnail is permanently viewable. You can then share this link or you can right click and choose Save As to download the image as a JPG file.

Though the service is very simplistic, it gets the job done well. It unfortunately does not have any option for batch creation of website thumbnails. If you are looking for more advanced or professional uses for creating website thumbnails, such as for your own website, then you will have to check out the premium services from Thumbalizr and WebSnapr. Enjoy!

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This allows web developers to provide instantly downloaded themes without installing the theme.  With Firefox Personas you have to follow steps to change themes (compared to traditional downloadable themes).  Personas is a plugin currently being tested on Mozilla Labs. Although in its testing stage, it amused me enough because it works fine with Firefox 3. 

To install Personas, click the install now link (make sure you use Firefox as browser when doing this step):

http://labs.mozilla.com/2007/12/personas-for-firefox/

After downloading, you will see a software installation prompt.  Click Install Now to install the plugin.  (Note: this will install as a plugin in Firefox)

Close Firefox and open it again to activate the plug-in.  The Personas can be accessed on the bottom left part of the Firefox window.  Click the cute baby fox icon to see the categories from most popular, recent, new, to all.  Click any theme to apply that theme on your browser:

In this example I chose “Groovy Orange” under the “Most Popular” category.  It looks like a concentric image of different shades of orange:

My favorite theme as of now is “Suede” which I found on the “Most Popular” themes.  These themes could change over time depending on the availability and popularity of new themes.

Bonus tip: To install downloadable themes manually go to the website below:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/browse/type:2

Choose from any themes available and the click “Add to Firefox” button. It will install like an ordinary plugin:

Click restart Firefox to have the template loaded.  You should see your Firefox window using the installed theme:

The installed themes could change the overall look of your Firefox browser. The buttons, scrollbars, background picture etc are skinned.  You can combine an installed theme with a Personas theme to achieve more variation.  Below is a sample combination of Aeon Jumbo installed theme and Personas Suede:

Have fun tweaking your Firefox browser themes using Personas!

Ben Carigtan writes about websites, computers, technology, and how to get the best out of them.

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ToyCon is another program that lets you convert multiple image formats to ICO format and also lets you convert ICO files to PNG image files. So if this does the same thing as ImagIcon, then why even mention it right?

Well, there are a few advantages of ToyCon over ImagIcon for converting a picture into an icon. Firstly, it doesn’t require any installation! Just run the executable file and you’re good to go. This means you can easily carry it with you on a USB stick.

Secondly, it supports the new Vista ICO format, which supports 256x 256 high resolution icons in PNG format. Finally, it’s more powerful and has more features than ImagIcon.

Once you run it, you’ll see a box pop up with a green arrow pointing into it. If you right-click, you can set the options for the conversion.

Firstly, choose what type of conversion you want to perform, i.e. PNG to ICO, BMP to ICO, JPG to ICO, TGA to ICO, or GIF to ICO. Then you can go to size and choose from small (64×64), medium (128×128) and large (256×256).

You can also go to Choose Formats and pick the exact format for the icon, including 4 bits, 8 bits, 32 bits, and Vista.

Finally, click on Options and select Choose Destination so that once the program has finished converting the image to an icon, you can save it to your desired location.

Now in order to convert an image to ICO format, just drap and drop the image onto the box. That’s it!

Overall, it’s a nice program for quick conversion to Windows icons. It’s portable and doesn’t require an install. You have a huge range of sizes and formats to choose from for icon sizes and colors. Plus you can batch convert many images to icons by just dragging multiple image onto the box at once. Enjoy! Source: FreewareGenius

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Convert GIF, JPEG picture to icon for free

I’ve actually needed test data when writing Excel macros because unless you use a real set of large test data, you simple won’t be able to anticipate all problems that can possibly arise. If you’re a coder, you know how important it is to test as many inputs as possible.

GenerateData is an online service that you can use to generate random data for populating databases, spreadsheets, etc. You can generate data for all kinds of fields including names, phone numbers, email addresses, cities, states, counties, dates, street addresses, lorem ipsum text, number ranges, alphanumeric strings, auto-increment, and more.

To start generating test data, click on the Generator tab and starting typing in field names and then choosing the field type. On some fields, you will have options you can set and others will not.

You can choose to generate the data in several formats, including HTML, Excel, XML, CSV, or SQL. You can also pick which country you want the data to resemble: US, UK, Netherlands, or Canada.

Type in the number of results you want and then click Generate. You can also click the Rows button if you want to add more columns to your table. Note that the online generator from their website only allows you to generate 200 rows of data.

If you want more, you either have to download the full Data Generator script by click on the Download tab and installing on your web server or you have to donate $20, which will get you a username to login into the site and generate data sets of up to 5,000 rows.

The script is free and pretty easy to install if you know a little SQL and understand how to setup a web server. This is obviously for people who know what they are doing. If you just need a lot of test data and can’t install it yourself, then just donate $20 and you’ll be able to generate larger datasets.

However, unless you need to generate thousands and thousands of rows, 200 should be good enough. If not, you can keep generating 200 rows of data, download the file and then combine them to get to the desired number of rows.

If you do end up donating, you will also have the option of saving your forms, so that you can quickly regenerate datasets without having to re-type everything.

Overall, it’s a great service for anyone who has to generate a lot of test data for programs they may be writing. Enjoy!

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If you have multiple proxy servers, switching between them would be a great hassle since you will need to type in the server names every time you change it.  These server names are not persistently saved on a drop down list so there is no other way but to type them in.  If your HTTP proxy is different from your FTP proxy or other protocols, it could get messier and harder to maintain.

FoxyProxy, from http://foxyproxy.mozdev.org/, let’s you solve this problem by providing you a quick way to make a list of proxies and then easily change your proxy by a selecting an item from a list.  Below is an actual example of a FoxyProxy setup:

The list of proxies are editable by the user and you can also make smart rules on which specific proxy to use for a URL pattern.  For example, you can set your workplace’s proxy server for all URLs ending on your workplace domain.

The tool is also integrated on the anonymity proxy service called “Tor”.  To learn more about Tor, visit it’s website here: http://www.torproject.org

FoxyProxy’s interface consists of a dropdown list of all available modes and a proxy list editor:

You can set the priority of which proxy servers to use using the Move Up/Down button:

To get more control, you can set a URL pattern to allow or block any website with that pattern.  This is a good way to make sure you will not visit a website that you don’t want your proxy server to track.  On the example below I want to block anything with an “idol.com” in the URL:

As you can see FoxyProxy is an excellent FireFox plugin to manage your proxies.  Instead of having to edit individual proxy servers for each Internet service provider or website, this tool lets you automatically activate a proxy setting depending on its priority level and URL pattern.  If changing proxies on the fly makes you lose time and patience, give FoxyProxy a try.

Ben Carigtan shows you how it’s done.

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Manage Firefox proxies easily with FoxyProxy