David.R.Gilson

Tip of the week – 30th March 2009

Mar 30

How-To Guides David No Comments
id3, mp3, mp3tag, tag

[Windows Freeware]

If you need to edit the metadata on a large amount of audio files (e.g. ID3 tags on MP3 files), then try MP3TAG.

It will allow mass edits of meta tags, and even try to find what you need from online databases (“Freedb” or Amazon) to save you typing at all!

Tip of the week – 27th March 2009

Mar 27

How-To Guides David 1 Comment
security, wifi, windows, xp

[Windows Wi-Fi]

If you are experiencing regular disconnects on your Wi-Fi signal, it might be because of an intended feature of Windows XP.

Windows has a service called “Wireless Zero Configuration”. The function of this is to regularly disconnect your wirless signal and look for stronger wireless sources to connect to. This totally disregards modern applications which suffer from disconnections from the internet, such as streaming media, instant messaging, and VOIP.

One way of dealing with this is to disable the service in Windows settings. Although that may not be attractive or “safe” for non-techies. Well, help is at hand from a simple little program called “Wizmo“, which does more than just switch off your WiFi Zero config.

For more added wireless security take a look at these notes on Radio Silence in Windows.

Thinking about bookmarking the web

Mar 16

Editorial David No Comments
bookmarking, firefox, public, shared, social, tagging, tags

Over the past few months I have been on journey with how I manage my bookmarks. Most of the time that I ran Firefox 2, I came up with the idea of having all of my bookmarks on the bookmark toolbar, via hierarchy of folders. This was fine, everything was well categorised and filed, but there were enclaves of bookmarks that I simply never dared delve into. Just for good measure, I had all my bookmarks backed up with the Foxmarks extension.

Delicious

Then two things happened; Firefox 3 came out with its tagging facility for bookmarks, and I started to use Delicious for social media reasons, namely supporting additional content for this blog.

Eventually, I succumbed to the tagging method in Firefox 3. This lead to me having less, but still lots, of bookmarks filed on my toolbar, but then an much larger amount of tagged bookmarks inside Firefox’s “Unsorted Bookmarks” folder. Although, I was also building up a healthy repository of bookmarks in Delicious too.

Over the past few months, I have been chipping away at tagging my filed bookmarks and dumping more and more of them into the unsorted folder. The idea being to forget about a hierachial structure and just use Firefox’s “Awesome Bar” to search for tags.

I have also been trying to work out how to bring in my Delicious account, and how to bring together my two sets of bookmarks. Also, the last time I had tried the Delicious plugin for Firefox, it totally took over all of Firefox’s bookmarking system. I didn’t want this as I like to have a few folders on my toolbar.

I gave the Delicious plugin another go a few days ago, and I’m pleased to say that it now happily works in parallel with Firefox’s on bookmarking system.

In the end, what I came up with, was to do a mass import of all my “unsorted” (but tagged) Firefox bookmarks into Delicious, and then delete them locally. So now, the only bookmarks I have locally in Firefox are my quick access toolbar folders. Such as, links to my social networking profiles, frequently visited forums, etc. Everything else that I’ve bookmarked for a rainy day, now resides in Delicious. Delicious has become my bookmark archive, and with it I’m contributing to a public well of knowledge of the web too. And, I have a nice and tidy bookmark toolbar to boot!

You can visit my Delicious bookmarks by clicking this:

Tip of the week – 13th March 2009

Mar 13

How-To Guides David No Comments
netmeter, networking, windows

[Windows Application]

If you are a bit of a system stats nerd, or you just want to keep an eye on how much data you’ve consumed in over a given period of time, then I give you NetMeter.

This tiny application can sit on your desktop and give you a graphical display of the network traffic going in and out of your computer. It will also keep a log of your data transfer. Also, if you give it the bandwidth cap set by your ISP, it will project how much data you’ll use in a month and let you know if your current trend of data consumption is going to send you over your limit.

Best of all, it’s free (only of cost, it’s not open source).

NetMeter

P.S.
I’ve been using this for years, so it gets my utmost approval.

Update on strange laptop behaviour

Mar 12

Personal David No Comments
bios, rock, xct

Just in case anyone was following this. I was directed to this forum post from a few years ago, by someone with the same model of laptop as myself.

It appears that the issue was connected to ane experimental bios update we all were all given, so that we switch our touchpads on and off, and increase the fan speed, with a Fn key combination.

Simply reflashing with that same bios image cured the problem.