Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on September 16, 2008 by CyberNet.

There have been a few different radio applications that have come around, but one frequent complaint is that none of them offer a way to stream music in the background. This is a limitation that Apple has placed on third-party programs, but the native iPod app has this ability.

There’s a new program on the block, and it’s called FlyCast (iTunes link). It’s 100% free (at least for now), and has all of the features I expected from an excellent radio streaming application.

There are over 1,000 stations available for the picking, which you can browse by genre or find by performing a quick search. Tapping on a radio station will start to stream it within the program just as you would expect. In the settings you can even choose to conserve battery power so that the program will stream in chunks, and won’t keep a constant connection with the server.

So how do you play music in the background? First off you need to disable the “Quick Play” option in the settings. What this will do is open the stream in Safari, which will then play the stream in the QuickTime app from within the browser. After that you can use any other program on your iPhone, and the music will continue streaming. The whole process of opening a radio station using this method takes about 15-seconds, but it’s tough to complain when there’s really no other solution for streaming music in the background.

Get FlyCast from iTunes

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This article was written on August 13, 2008 by CyberNet.

Windows; Linux
I’ve been a big fan of the open source 7-Zip application, and it has served me well over the last few years. Today, however, I came across a new program called PeaZip that looks like it is just as nice, and the great news is that it works on both Windows and Linux.

As you would expect it supports all of the major file formats that the competition does including:

• Create & extract: 7Z, ARC, BZ2, GZ, PAQ/LPAQ, PEA, QUAD/BALZ, TAR, UPX, ZIP
• Extract only: ACE, ARJ, CAB, DEB, ISO, LHA, RAR, RPM, XPI

When it comes to file extraction utilities it’s hard for each of them to distinguish themselves. They always seem to have the same features, and support all of the same formats. For the most part PeaZip falls within that category, but it does one thing that I really like. During the setup process it asks you which commands you’d like to have added directly to the Context menu, and which ones you’d like placed in the Send To menu:

The option(s) you choose to put in the Context menu will be available without needing to navigate into a menu, which means you should only place the commands you’ll use the most there. The ones you won’t use as frequently can be put in the Send To menu where it won’t clutter up the Context menu:

If you like customizing the file extraction options in the Context menu I’d highly recommend checking out PeaZip. There’s also a portable version available for those of you who just want to try it out, but you must use the installable version if you want to add the context menu entries.

Get PeaZip for Windows or Linux

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This article was written on May 14, 2008 by CyberNet.

I can’t say that I was expecting this today, but I’m happy to report that Mozilla Thunderbird 3.0 Alpha 1 (codenamed Shredder) has been released. This version does of course have tabs, and as seen in the screenshot above you can open new messages in tabs for easy navigation. That’s definitely a feature I’ve been waiting for, but now I wish you could actually compose a message in a new tab as well.

Mozilla Links also pointed out that this version uses Gecko 1.9, which means you’ll get the same performance improvements that can already be found in pre-release versions of Firefox 3. That is definitely some great news because Firefox 3’s memory usage and performance are much better than any previous release.

Here are some of the other things that are new in Thunderbird 3 Alpha 1:

• The new Add-ons Manager (Tools > Add-ons) can now be used to download and install a Thunderbird customization from the hundreds of Add-ons available from our community add-ons website. When you first open the Add-ons Manager, a list of recommended Add-ons is shown.
• The address book can now read data from Mac OS X’s system Address Book, but that feature is currently disabled by default. To enable it, see this blog entry
• New Crash Reporter (Breakpad) to report crashes in Thunderbird.
• Searching bodies of messages no longer produces as many false positives and has become more accurate in some multilingual situations.
• Improvements to our JavaScript engine have resulted in continued improvements in performance.
• On the Mac, Thunderbird is now a native Cocoa application.

One thing I was shocked to see was that the Lightning calendar add-on hasn’t been integrated yet, which is something they are planning to do. I’m sure a future version will incorporate it, and it will make the email client even more valuable for those who don’t go hunting around for add-ons. I’ll keep my fingers crossed that this doesn’t get yanked from their to-do list.

Now it’s full steam ahead for Thunderbird 3.0 Alpha 2, which is slated for release in July 2008.

Note: If you plan on setting up a Gmail account you should know that the “Gmail account type” in Thunderbird 3 uses POP, not IMAP. If you want Gmail IMAP access you’ll need to manually configure it.

Thunderbird 3.0 Alpha 1: Windows | Mac OS X | Linux
Thunderbird 3.0 Alpha 1 Release Notes

Copyright © 2009 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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This article was written on May 23, 2007 by CyberNet.

Web Browser Wednesday

I’m one of those people who doesn’t know what they would do if their Web browser didn’t have tabs. The problem is that I am a tabaholic and always seem to have 20+ Tabs open at any one given time. As you can imagine, I am often left with very little room for each tab, andfind myself clicking through them all when I’m looking for something. Well, that’s how it was until I decided to put my tabs on the side of my browser.

All of the monitors that I have on both my desktops and laptops are widescreen, giving me extra screen space in the horizontal direction. Because of this extra space I have started to place things like my Windows Taskbar on the side, and that’s when I thought to put my tabs on the side as well.

It’s actually pretty easy to do…

—Firefox—

There is no option in Firefox to move the tab-bar to the side, so the first place I turned was to the extensions. It took a little bit of work but I was able to find an extension called Vertigo which was recently updated to work with Firefox 2. By default the extension is designed to place the tabs on the left side of the screen while still allowing normal operations, such as the rearranging of tabs:

I also noticed that the extension had a few options, including one to adjust the width of the bar:

Then I saw that the developer commented saying that the problems with TabMixPlus were also fixed, so I decided to try that out as well. One of the cool things that I stumbled across when playing with various tab-bar settings was that changing the tab-bar position to “bottom” in TabMixPlus would position the tab-bar on the right-side of the browser if Vertigo was installed:

I also noticed that TabMixPlus took control of the width, but that could easily be changed in the settings:

Personally, I prefer to have it on the right-side because I keep by bookmarks open in a sidebar on the left-side. It just feels weird if you have two sidebars immediately next to each other.

I also tried having TabMixPlus put close buttons on each of the tabs, but that didn’t work out so well. If having a close button on each tab is an important feature for you then you probably shouldn’t try this out.

—Opera—

Opera is a slightly different story because it already has this feature built-in. All you have to do is right-click on any of your open tabs and click the Customize option. You should now see a screen where you can select the positioning from the Placement drop-down list:

After you click the OK button, the tab-bar should be in its new position:

—Overview—

If you don’t have a widescreen monitor this might not be as beneficial to you since it can take up some valuable screen space. Feel free to checkout our other post on reducing tab clutter if you’re looking for more space-saving techniques.

Copyright © 2009 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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This article was written on May 22, 2007 by CyberNet.

Time Saving Tuesday

We’ve already shown you how to setup an FTP server in less than 30 seconds, but now I thought I would show you how to retrieve your IP address when you’re not at home. After all, you do need to know the IP address of your computer before you can remotely access it, and if you have an Internet Service Provider (ISP) that is always changing your IP, it can be hard to keep track of.

There are many tools that will tell you what your IP address is when you request it, such as my favorite this-ip.com which tells you the information you want to know without a bunch of clutter. However, it could pose a problem if you’re not in front of the computer you want to know the IP address for. That’s where these tools will come in handy.

I wanted to write about this because a reader emailed me asking if I knew any utility that would let them know when their IP address changes. Luckily my ISP never changes my IP address so I haven’t had to worry about it, but I started looking around to see what kind of freeware solutions I could find.

The first application that I found is called IP Observer and it is essentially a zero-configuration solution. All you have to do is download the program (download mirror for version 0.8.4), unzip the folder, and run it. Then you can optionally enter in your email address(es) for it to send the notifications to. Click on this screenshot to see just how easy it is:

Most software applications (even the ones you pay for) require that you take the time to setup your mail account in order to send the emails. Not with this one! They do offer the option to use your own mail account, but I like being able to just enter in my email address and let it do its work. Here is what the email notification looks like that you’ll receive each time your IP changes:

You can let IP Observer check for IP address changes every 10 minutes, 30 minutes, 1 hour, 2 hours, or 6 hours. It will even show you the computer’s local IP address (in case you’re behind a router) and MAC address, which is something many of us are always searching for.

There is, however, a small downside to this program and it’s that it lacks the ability to minimize itself to the System Tray. Normally I would say that is a big downside, but there are plenty of applications (examples: DM2 and TrayDevil) that most people will already have installed which makes doing this possible.

While I really like that application, there is something that I’m a little more partial to because of how useful it is…LogMeIn! I’ve written about the service before because it lets you remotely control any computer using just a Web browser, and it also needs no configuration. It is a free service, but there is a feature that let’s you view the IP address of the computer as well. When you’re on the “My Computers” screen (which you’re taken to after logging in) just click on the Edit link of the computer who’s IP you want to view:

Then you’ll be taken to the screen where you will see the IP address of that computer:

LogMeIn is also nice to have because you can always connect to the computer that you’re having troubles with. It’s a nice service to have and I use it all the time, but if you’re looking for something a little more straightforward (and something that doesn’t require installation) then IP Observer (Download Mirror) might be the better solution.

If you know of any other great freeware tools that will email a user their IP address feel free to post them below in the comments.

Copyright © 2009 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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