Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on April 29, 2008 by CyberNet.

Mac only
Breakaway is a nifty little free application that makes your Mac computer stop playing music in iTunes anytime you unplug the headphones. Some of you might already be familiar with this feature because it’s something that most iPods do. I would imagine that this would be especially handy if you’re in a quiet office, and don’t want your music to play through the speakers when you unplug your headphones.

If you don’t use iTunes on your Mac this can still serve a rather useful purpose. With a little AppleScript programming you can essentially have the app do anything you want when the headphones are unplugged or plugged-in. By default Breakaway comes with several different scripts that you can setup under the Triggers tab in the preferences. They will do things like set your iChat status to away, play/pause VLC, start your screensaver, and more:

• awayiChat.scpt – Sets iChat’s status to away
• availableiChat.scpt – Sets iChat’s status to available
• awayAdium.scpt – Sets Adium’s status to away
• availableAdium.scpt – Sets Adium’s status to available
• awaySkype.scpt – Sets Skype’s status to away
• availableSkype.scpt – Sets Skype’s status to available
• fastLogout.scpt – Fast user switches (logs out) the current user
• startScreensaver.scpt – Starts the screensaver (useful if the screensaver locks your computer)
• vlcPlayPause.scpt – Toggles the playing state of VLC

I could be missing something, but even after quite a bit of searching I couldn’t find anything comparable for Windows users. Maybe it’s not possible to detect when headphones are unplugged in Windows? If you know of any applications or add-ons that will do this in Windows or Linux please shoot us a comment below!

Download Breakaway

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This article was written on January 03, 2008 by CyberNet.

Donation Coder is working some of their programmers to the bone lately with all of the apps that are being developed! Just a month ago they released a dozen or so free programs, and this time around there are 16 new ones. Here are a few of them that really peaked my interest:

• WTF Music Info – This creates a chart of your music based upon genre, artist, or year. It really gives a cool perspective on the music you listen to.
  
• Point Motivator – At first when I saw this program I was kinda like, huh? It’s a reward system that you setup where you get points for completing tasks. Then you can “cash in” your points for rewards that you’ve created for yourself.

  It’s not something that I would really use, but this would be great for anyone who has kids. You can assign points to things like ice cream or video games which they have to earn by completing tasks.

  You can also use this to help lose weight. For example, you can say that for every 30 minutes of exercise is equal to enough points for one cookie.
  

• Coin Jar – This is completely web based, and it is used to estimate how much money you have in a coin jar. The estimate is calculated according to the weight of the jar and the fraction of coins collected in one handful. Just make sure you don’t grab a handful of quarters when most of the jar is pennies, otherwise it will throw off the estimates.
  

Don’t forget to checkout out the rest of the New Apps for the New Year from Donation Coder. If you use Find and Run Robot (another Donation Coder creation) there are several plugins that were created by users for this challenge, including Del.icio.us integration and iTunes control.

Copyright © 2009 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

Related Posts:

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This article was written on January 03, 2008 by CyberNet.

Tutorial Thursday

The tool that I used for a long time for extracting and compressing archives is 7-Zip. It’s free, open-source, and has a powerful set of command line options that is perfect for performing backups. And today that’s exactly what we’re going to use it for.

We’re going to use a special version of 7-Zip that has no user interface whatsoever. It has to be used via the command line, and one of the benefits for using this version is that the entire application is self-contained in one single executable file. That makes it a great tool to carry around with you on a USB drive, and extremely easy to work with.

Here’s how to use the 7-Zip command line options to create backups at the click of a mouse:

1. The first thing you’ll want to do is go download the command line version of 7-zip. After you extract the contents you’ll notice that there are five files available. All we need is the 7za.exe, so you can delete the rest if you wish.
   
2. Open up Notepad, and now we’re going to create a batch file that will backup a folder location of our choosing. I’ve decided to backup everything on my desktop this time around, but it will work for any location as long as you know the path.

   7za.exe a cybernet.7z "C:\Users\Ryan\Desktop"

   Be sure to include quotation marks around any paths that have spaces in them. For this example I didn’t have to put quotation marks around my path, but it never hurts to include them.

   This will archive the documents in the 7-Zip format, which means you’ll need to have 7-Zip to extract it. It’s good because the compression ratio is very high, which means the backup file will be rather small compared to the other compression formats. If you were going to send this to someone they may have troubles opening it, but you can choose save the file as a ZIP by replacing “7z” with “zip” in that line of code.

   

3. Now we need to save the batch file in the same place where the 7za.exe is located. In Notepad go to File -> Save As, and choose any filename. The only thing you need to make sure of is that at the end of the filename you include the .BAT extension:
   
4. Now all you have left to do is double-click on the batch file that you just created to run it. The resulting backup file will be located in the same place as the 7za.exe and the batch file, unless you’ve specified an alternate location in Step 2.
5. Extra Credit: You can always create a scheduled task that will run your batch file automatically at a time/date that you specify. That can be done by using the built-in Windows Scheduled Tasks wizard, which can be found in the Control Panel.

One other tip that I wanted to provide is how to automatically insert the current year, month, and day into the resulting filename. This would be useful for anyone looking to schedule backups, without wanting to overwrite the previous backup. In Step 2 from our example above you would want to replace:

cybernet.7z

with:

%DATE:~-4%-%DATE:~4,2%-%DATE:~7,2%_cybernet.7z

which for today would give a result of:

2008-01-03_cybernet.7z

Now every backup will remain in tact, assuming that you create no more than one backup per day.

For those of you who want to dive a little deeper in to the 7-Zip command line options, here are the different things that the “a” can be replaced with in Step 2:

• a: Add to an existing archive, or create a new one
• d: Delete files from an archive
• e: Extract files from an archive
• t: Test the integrity of an archive
• u: Update the files in an archive

Copyright © 2009 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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This article was written on July 31, 2008 by CyberNet.

Mac only
AOL has retired the older version of their radio application for the Mac OS X operating system in favor of the new AOL Radio 2.0. The application is powered by CBS Radio, and includes over 200 radio stations including 150+ CBS Radio stations that are spread out across the United States.

The interface isn’t overly fancy, but it has some nice features including:

• Save your favorite stations to presets.
• Browse through stations according to genre.
• When a new song starts playing a transparent overlay appears in the middle of the screen notifying you of the artist, song title, and displays the album cover. There are no preferences in the app yet, which means this feature can’t be turned off. The notification is fast so it’s not too annoying.
• The dock icon for AOL Radio changes from song to song to show you what the album looks like. This is pretty sweet.

I had never actually used the AOL Radio service until the iPhone application came out, and then I found several stations that I really liked. So when I saw that they released a compact application for the Mac I was pretty excited.

With that being said there are still some things they need to work out. Particularly the fact that they don’t have any preferences implemented yet, which means you can’t turn off things like the on-screen notifications. Plus there’s no way to search through the available radio stations. This is just the first Beta, so I’ll cut them some slack.

If you want access to AOL Radio without using an application you can jump over to the online version. You’ll need to have Flash installed, but it works on any operating system that way. Plus with the web interface you can actually skip the songs you don’t want to listen to.

Note: I’m not sure if the entire AOL Radio service is for the United States only. The iPhone app is only available for U.S. residents though.

Download AOL Radio 2 for Mac

Copyright © 2009 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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We’ve been hearing rumors about a non-game app store for the PSP since the launch of the PSP Go, and it sounds like the wheels are turning — in an interview with CNET, Sony’s Al De Leon said that while PSP content “will mostly be games, there’s an opportunity to look at non-gaming applications.” Sure, that’s not exactly a hard confirmation, but it’s certainly suggestive — maybe we’ll see something at Gamescom in August after all. Video after the break.

[Via Joystiq]

Continue reading Sony hints at “non-game apps” for PSP

Filed under: Gaming

Sony hints at “non-game apps” for PSP originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 25 Jun 2009 14:02:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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