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

Copyright © 2009 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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This article was written on January 30, 2007 by CyberNet.

Bloggers are waving the victory flag after a California Court placed Apple responsible for paying all legal fees that resulted from a lawsuit which they issued. This brings up First Amendment rights among other things, but also brings to light the fact that bloggers have the same rights as journalists.

You really don’t hear much about lawsuits against bloggers, but they happen more than you think. Robert Scoble offers some insight as to why this is:

Unfortunately you don’t read about most of this kind of stuff — most bloggers who’ve talked with me have already been given a gag order. Break the gag order and they’ll increase their legal exposure and demonstrate that they aren’t operating in good faith. Remember, libel gets worse if there’s malice. So, if there’s a potential you’ve libeled someone, then going public about legal instruments can be used against you.

This lawsuit came after bloggers and other online journalists reported about an audio/video product which was code-named ‘Asteroid’(it’s under development). Apple claimed that this violated a California state trade secret law. After the legal battle, Apple was ordered to pay $700,000 in legal fees. Bloggers win, Apple loses.

There are several different sites talking about this (here, here, and here), and the number one thing that most people are saying is that hopefully this teaches some of the larger companies to think twice about going after bloggers and other online journalists. The court decided that bloggers and online journalists she be given the same Constitutional and state law protections as the traditional journalists, and as a blogger, I agree.

Apple has not appealed the decision, and paid the bloggers in full.

Copyright © 2009 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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This article was written on May 28, 2007 by CyberNet.

Microsoft’s original goal was to sell one million Zunes by June 2007. It’s mid-May and they have already sold one million Zunes which shows they’re right on track with where they expected they’d be nine months after launch.

As their first entry into the portable media market, I’d say that the Zune has done fairly well. Especially considering that the iPod already had such a massive portion of the media market to begin with.Certainly, the Zune hasn’t turned into the “iPod Killer” that it was once dubbed, but it’s doing good. Not great, but good.

I am surprised however, that I have yet to see anyone using a Zune. I live in a college town and have seen iPod after iPod in the hands of college students but have yet to see anyone with a Zune. I guess when put into perspective, one million Zunes really isn’t THAT much in the grand scheme of things. I’ve of course seen them on the shelves at various stores, but that’s as close as I’ve gotten to seeing one in public.

So, have any of you seen a Zune making a public appearance?

(Photo above is the latest color: Watermelon Red which joins the pink, white, black, and brown colors, or of course the Halo 3 special edition.)

Source:Zune-Online.com

Copyright © 2009 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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

Since the release of Firefox 3 is right around the corner it comes as no surprise that Mozilla is trying to rally the troops community. Back in 2006 they celebrated World Firefox Day by getting people to invite their friends to try Firefox, and right about the time Firefox 2 launched Mozilla gave the much deserved acknowledgements. This is just one of the several campaigns Mozilla has come up with to help spread the Firefox browser, and it’s obvious that they know how to harness the power of the people.

This year they are doing things a little differently, and they are hoping to set a Guinness World Record for the number of downloads in 24 hours. As I sit here writing this they have over 125,000 people who have pledged to download Firefox 3 in the first 24 hours, which Mozilla says will happen sometime in June 2008. It shouldn’t be hard for them to crush the record… mostly because the record is currently non-existent. They are shooting for 5 million downloads, which is possible since Firefox 2 received 1.6 million downloads on the first day back in 2006. But they will essentially be making it in the record books no matter what.

If you are participating there is one thing you should know if you want your download to count. You actually have to download the full installation, and the download must complete. Updating the browser will not count towards the record, but then again they probably won’t release the automatic update on the first day. They’ll be using a cookie system to try and weed out any duplicate downloads.

You can help spread the word about the Download Day by placing any of these banners on your own site, or in the signature section of your emails. Oh, and there will be a certificate the you can print on Download Day to commemorate the event.

Firefox World Record Homepage
Thanks to Natmaster and Max for the tips!

Copyright © 2009 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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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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