I recently got an iPhone and was very unhappy to discover I couldn’t use one of my own mp3s as a ringtone. I thought this was very strange until I discovered Apple wants you to pay again for the right to make a ringtone. So you pay $.99 for the song on itunes, then they want you to pay another $.99 to make it a ring tone. Ok that doesn’t sound right to me. I have already paid for the song once, why should I have to pay for it again? Well I remembered that if you ripped an audio book, you had to rename the file to get it to be in the audio book category. That got me thinking maybe you could do the same thing with a ringtone. So I did a search and found they had an extension of m4r. I tried renaming an mp3 to that but it did not work. Then i converted an mp3 to aac and renamed it, still did not work. Then I discovered that ringtones are normally around 30 sec long. So I converted 30 sec of an mp3 to aac (made it an m4p for some reason) and then renamed it to m4r. That worked, so now you can make any song you have into a ring tone.

Here is what I did to make my ringtone.

1. In Itunes right click on an mp3 and click properties.
2. Go to the options tab.
3. Put the start and end times for your ring tone.
4. Click ok
5. Now right click on the mp3 and select convert to aac.
6. Right click on the file and click show in folder.
7. You should now have a 30 sec file with an extension of m4p or m4a.
8. Change the extension to m4r.
9 Itunes will not be able to find the file because it is named different so you will have to drag it into your library again.
10. Put the file on your iPhone.
Update: You have to use itunes to sync the file onto your iPhone. You can re-add it to your library or just drag it directly onto your iPhone.

Congratulations you have just made yourself a ringtone.

A few things to watch out for. I converted “It’s all about the Pentiums” by Weird Al and it would not work well with other ring tones. To solve this problem, just remove the apostrophe in the name of the file and in the id tag of the song.

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Today, I am going to be telling you about the Archos 705 WiFi. I received mine as a gift for my birthday in June and have been playing with it ever since. The first thing I noticed about the player was the size of it. It is larger than you would expect. My wife has an Archos 605 WiFi but the 705 dwarfs it at 7.05″ x 4.96″ x .775″. The entire 605 is the size of the screen on the 705.

The 705 also comes with a remote that works without having the dock. Surprisingly, I used it more than I thought I would. The ability to skip 30 sec was my favorite feature of the remote. I was also surprised that it worked from across a room.

The screen of the 705 is 7″ with a resolution of 800×480, which is roughly the resolution of a DVD (720×480). I have watched many videos on the 705 at different resolutions and bit rates, and the 705 handles them very well. It has a zoom feature so you can make a full screen movie wide screen, but i do not recommend it. The screen is crisp and has a fast refresh rate with little artifacts during fast action scenes. The biggest problem I have with the screen is that it does not show up in bright sunlight very well.

Let me start talking about the audio quality of the 705 by saying I am not an audiophile, but I believe it is on par if not better then my 60 gig ipod video. I hate the headphones that come with the ipod and the 705 so I used a pair from Sony, the MDR-EX51 to be exact. The sound was crisp and clear.

I was lucky enough to get the 160 gig version so space wasn’t an issue. I was able to put all my videos and photos on the 705 and still have room left over for more. I thought I would fill it up easily but I had to search for things to put on it.

Finding something that I could use to convert my videos with was easy. I used a program called media encoder. It will convert almost anything into the proper codec. I found xvid with mp3 audio and a MP4 wrapper worked best for me. I am still toying with the settings so I may find something better.

The 705 has the ability to read pdf files, but it is hit or miss. If the pdf is mostly text then their are very little problems. On the other hand, if the pdf file has a lot of graphics in it, then you are going to wait about 30 sec for each page to load.

Battery life was surprising to me. Watching videos it would vary depending on the bit rate and resolution of the video, but i would get roughly 3 to 4 hours with DVD resolution video. With audio I never ran the battery down completely before watching a video. I did have it playing for almost 10 hours straight on a trip and the battery indicator only dropped to its half way mark.

I didn’t try any of the plug-ins so I don’t know if they are worth picking up or not. I can convert any video podcast easily with media encoder to xvid and the web browser isn’t very useful to me because the 705 is a little big to be carrying around with you everywhere. Any audio podcasts i download are normally in mp3 format so no need for the aac codec. I also don’t have Dish Network so I couldn’t even try out the free one.

A few issues that I have with the player are that you need a proprietary cable to play it on your TV. To record a show you need to have the doc. The lack of buttons leads to lots of fingerprints on the screen (I can never the styli when I need it). It will not charge from the usb port. You have to plug it in or it drains the battery even though it is plugged into the computer so you always have to carry around the charger.

Overall, I really like the 705. It has a large crisp screen that is easy on the eyes, the audio is very good, and for the same price as an 80 gig ipod I think it is well worth it. If you are looking for a good player with a lot of features, I would highly recommend this player. If the screen is a little big for you then get the 605.

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We have been hearing about the benefits of hydrogen full cells for many years now. Well finally a car manufacturer is going to start releasing them. Honda is the first to start with their FXC Clarity. It is a four seater that is they claim is three times more fuel efficient then a gas powered car. Honda plains on producing 200 of these cars over the next 3 years. The biggest obstacle that I can see is the lack of fueling stations, currently they are only in California. With the Soaring gas prices that we have here in America these cars look to be a good alternative.

Honda’s official sire for the FCX Clarity
If you would like to read more on hydrogen fuel cell wikipedia has a very good article on their webpage here.

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Many times you will have a thumb drive that you want to keep private. Here is an easy way to hide it in the open. This will probably void any warranty you have on the drive. Here is a pic of the finished product.
Link to the DIY article.

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Super Mario Bros. is arguably the best and most famous video game ever made. There is something about that simple little game that keeps Geeks’ fascination and attention for all of these years.

There have been many tributes to this game over the years. From costumes to spin-off games to artwork, there is always someone finding a new way to immortalize this game. Today I have come across a tribute to this game that I can’t figure out what to think about it.

Instead of describing it, I will just let you watch the video…
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Most “computer-minded” individuals have a certain knack for programming. For some it may be websites, for others networking applications, for others yet, microprocessors. I’ll admit, my passions are web applications and to a lesser degree stand alone desktop applications. But each end goal has it’s own means of allowing the adventurous programmer to reach that goal. Herein lies the question, is it fair to compare usefulness and therefore quality, of programming languages?

I am most proficient in .NET languages, C# and VB to be more specific. I recently got into a heated debate with a friend of mine over the use of PHP and Ruby on Rails. I brought up ease of use with the Visual Studio IDE, and the great ability for .NET developers to use the built in “intellisense”. His retort was
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