Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on September 29, 2009 by CyberNet.

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Looking for a way to back up your old DVDs onto your hard drive? Want to watch your purchased DVD movies on your iPod? You’re certainly not the only one. For some reason however, developers are not very keen on developing tools that do this. Luckily, HandBrake has stepped up to the plate with a free tool that lets you take control of your media.

When starting HandBrake for the first time, you might get a little overwhelmed by all the knobs and buttons, especially if you’re not familiar with the audio/video codec lingo. Don’t worry, HandBrake has got your back. It comes with a truckload of presets, each of which with its own purpose. By using these, you don’t have to mess with video settings as long as you know what you want to do with your video. For example, you can convert your DVD to video formats that work with gaming consoles (Xbox 360, PS3 and PSP), the Apple TV and the iPod/iPhone. There’s also a “Classic” preset in case you have no idea which preset you should pick. Keep an eye on your hard drive though, because some of these presets can quickly make your videos take up a lot of space. In my test, the Classic preset used about 40MB for a five-minute video.

HandBrake also gives you the option to rip the DVD subtitles (if available) and embed them into your video. If you’re in the market for this feature, check the Audio/Subtitles tab.

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There’s one more thing you want to pay close attention to: the aspect ratio. Unless you know for sure that the DVD you want to rip is entirely in widescreen (16:9), you have to intervene before you let HandBrake have a go at your DVD. Otherwise, it will cut off the top and bottom border of the screen when encountering 4:3 video. Depending on your OS, you have to take a different approach to tackle this issue.

• Windows users – On the Picture Settings tab, look for the section called Crop and set the Top and Bottom to 0.
• Linux users – Click on the preview image at the bottom of the window. In the window that opens, look for the cropping options and set Top and Bottom to 0.
• Mac users – Same as with Linux, but instead of clicking a preview image you have to look for a ‘Picture settings’ button.

Once you get that out of the way, you can hit the Start button and go grab a cup of coffee. The ripping process may take a while depending on the speed of your DVD player and the horsepower in your PC/Mac.

Also, remember that you should only use HandBrake for backup purposes or to exercise your personal use rights. Keep it legal, kids.

HandBrake Homepage (Windows, Mac, Linux; Freeware)

Copyright © 2010 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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This article was written on February 16, 2007 by CyberNet.

I was just over at the FFExtensionGuru’s blog and noticed that Spread Firefox started a promotional contest for people who have written reviews of extensions. It is actually a really great idea, but only seems to be on a small scale right now.

All you have to do is write a review of a Firefox extension. All reviews published after February 1st, 2007 will count so I went ahead and submitted the three that we have posted. The contest will last for two months (which puts the deadline at early April) which means you’ll have plenty of time to write your review(s). I do, however, recommend getting it in early because the whole process is done by users voting, and the sooner you get your review done the better chance you have to get more votes.

UPDATE: I didn’t realize it but the 4 judges are actually the ones who pick the winners, so I guess the voting thing is kinda just for fun.

The prizes for first, second, and third place are as follows:

1. A Firefox T-shirt.
2. 24 USD of music downloads from magnatune.com.
3. A 1-year registration of a .info domain name.

The rules are posted in the images at the beginning of this article, and to submit your review(s) you have to leave a comment on the Spread Firefox post. They will then go ahead and add your extension to the Squidoo page so that other users can read and vote on it (you have to be registered to vote) put your extension on this page for users to vote.

One thing that I was really hoping for as a prize was a round Firefox sticker to put on the outside of your laptop. It sounds so simple but I have looked all over the place for these, and have always failed to find anyone selling or giving them away. The one place that I did find was on the Spread Firefox site and they were giving 1,000 of these away! I, however, was too late…and the Mozilla Store doesn’t even sell them.  Someday I will have one of these on the outside of my laptop. *walks away sulking*

Copyright © 2010 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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You may have gifts for every family member under your Yuletide tree, but we’re willing to bet you haven’t given much thought to your trusty media center PC. Thankfully, the open-source community once again has a ready-made present, ready to be loaded right now — the 10.0 release of XBMC, filled with goodies and toys. It’s available for Windows, Linux, Mac and even the original Apple TV, and brings a brand-new add-on manager that lets you extend functionality and improve appearance right from the UI. There’s also hardware acceleration for every platform, including special consideration for nettops sporting NVIDIA ION 2 or Broadcom Crystal HD chips, and even the underpinnings of support for Windows 7 touchscreens, ARM processors and OpenGL ES 2.0. The catalog of improvements is honestly rather staggering, so rather than read them all here, you can follow our source links to the full changelog and download pages, while we try to spread the Christmahanukwanzaakah cheer.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

XBMC 10.0 ‘Dharma’ now available to download with improvements galore, add-on manager and Apple TV support originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 19 Dec 2010 13:08:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This article was written on April 01, 2009 by CyberNet.

Adobe posted a page about 35 minutes ago allowing consumers to submit a request for a free Photoshop CS4 serial number, and I’ve been able to successfully use it activate the trial version of the app. They supposedly have a press release that will be posted soon, but the rumor is that they are only providing free product keys to the first 25,000 people that request them. I submitted my request for a key and received the email about 2-minutes later.

The site Adobe currently has up doesn’t give any specifics as to why they are actually giving the software away to consumers, and doesn’t say anything about how they will verify that you’ll be using it for personal use. Heck, with how fast I got my key there has to be little to no verification done (maybe they’re making sure your email isn’t coming from a corporate domain). I used my Gmail account, and if I were you I’d use some generic account, too (Hotmail, Yahoo, etc…).

At this point I’m not quite sure what will happen if you try to use the serial number with the Creative Suite, but I’ll probably give it a whirl a little later. My guess is that it will only activate Photoshop though, and the other apps will still need to be activated.

You can download the trial version of Photoshop CS4 here, and you can register for your free product key here. Don’t get greedy and register for multiple serial numbers either, otherwise it might come back to bite you in the butt.

Copyright © 2010 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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This article was written on June 24, 2008 by CyberNet.

Time Saving Tuesday

Sure you might be a geek, but there’s a good chance that you don’t conform to the geek-code of ordering a pizza for dinner every night. If that’s the case then it might be time to trade-in your recipe box for a digital alternative. To help you make the switch we scoured around looking for a few recipe management applications for both Windows and Macs. We managed to find two free solutions that can both simplify your recipe management.

You might be wondering what kind of benefits there are for having an application store your recipes. The most notable feature in each of the applications is probably the fast search capabilities. With them you can actually pull up recipes that deal with, for example, chicken, within seconds. No more flipping through a recipe box looking for a specific index card… these apps will do the digging for you!

–Recipe Center (Homepage)–

Windows only
This is one of the most powerful recipe managers out there, and the best part is that it will get your recipe collection rolling by giving you 200 different recipes to start off with. One of the really nice features is being able to copy and paste ingredients from a recipe on a website into the application. With some quick reformatting you can have it automatically parse the text, and insert the ingredients accordingly into the application.

Here’s a list of Recipe Center’s best features:

• Advanced Recipe Encoder: You can copy and paste ingredients into the special recipe encoder so that it doesn’t take so long to enter in your favorite recipes

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• Create New Recipes: Quickly add new recipes thanks to the IntelliSense that suggests ingredients as you type
• Recipe Download: Recipe Center can import thousands of recipes from various compatible recipe websites
• Recipe Resizing: Type in how many people you need to serve, and it will adjust the amount needed of each ingredient accordingly
• Advanced Search Filters: Search by recipe name, ingredients, or keywords
• Recipe Card Printing: Print out recipes, with the option to attach pictures
• Recipe Exchange: Send recipes to your friends by email (PDF format, Text format and Recipe Center format)
• Shopping List: Print your shopping lists based on ingredients of selected recipes
• Unit Conversion Tool: Convert between an extensive list of units for cooking
• Spell Checker: Spell check your recipe ingredients, procedures, and shopping list

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Note: This app does display an advertisement in the bottom-right corner.

–Yum (Homepage)–

Mac only
Yum isn’t quite as extensive as Recipe Center for Windows, but I’ve found that entering in recipes is a faster process with Yum. The reason for that is it includes a “paste ingredients” option that doesn’t even compare to how Recipe Center makes you enter in ingredients. All you have to do is copy the ingredients to your clipboard, and click the Paste Ingredients button. Yum will automatically parse what you have on the clipboard, and pull out all of the ingredients along with their corresponding measurements. In the few tests I ran this worked flawlessly.

Some of the other features are:

• Instantly search through all of your recipes
• Create as many categories as you would like, and you can even place recipes in multiple categories
• Print a single recipe, all recipes, selected recipes, recipes in a certain category, or recipes from your search results
• Customize the appearance of recipe directions including fonts, styles, paragraph settings, graphics (copy and paste, or drag and drop) — a few different themes are included by default
• Ingredients are recommended as you type

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Note: This program will display a popup window every 10 times you run it, but you can get a registration code to eliminate the “nag” screen by donating to the developer. There’s no mention as to a recommended donation amount, so that is up to you.

–Overview–

I can definitely see how any recipe manager would be tedious if you’re trying to convert your handwritten collection into a digital format. What I recommend doing is performing some quick searches online to see if someone has digital copies of your recipes, because it will be much faster in both applications if you can just copy and paste.

How do you store your recipes? Whether it be an application like one of these, or a simple text file, we want to hear what you use to manage your recipes.

Copyright © 2010 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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