Geeky Ninja

How to add Facebook chat to iChat on Mac OS X

Sharninder — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 18:47:38 +0000

Facebook is the social media giant that is showing no signs of stopping. Apart from being a regular social media website for people to interact with their friends (and strangers, in some cases), Facebook has also been trying to get into the instant messaging game which has till now been dominated by Google’s GTalk and Yahoo’s Messenger.

Even though GTalk is relatively new compared to Yahoo messenger, it has quickly become the favorite instant messaging client of a lot of people because of two main reasons, in my opinion. The first reason is that the GTalk client itself is extremely light and efficient and the second reason, and I think this is the major one, is that the GTalk protocol is based on open standards, which allows users to log in to google’s instant messaging network using many of the excellent free and open source clients available such as Pidgin, Adium and the like, and not depend only on Google’s official client which as of this writing is only available for Windows.

Facebook has also now taken a similar approach in their quest for IM domination. They have recently launched an XMPP compatible gateway for their chat protocol, which basically means that you can now connect to and chat with your facebook buddies via any IM client that supports XMPP including the friendly iChat.

To add Facebook chat to iChat, go to the Preferences menu and click the ‘+’ button to add a new account to iChat.

Select Jabber as the account type, type your Facebook username (which you can get from your Facebook Account Settings page) in the form username@chat.facebook.com, enter your Facebook password and under Server Options enter ‘chat.facebook.com‘ as the Server address and 5222 as the port. Keep the ‘Use ssl’ tick box unchecked.

That’s it. You can now login to facebook chat and chat with all your facebook buddies right from iChat without having to login to the Facebook site.

How To Get Music Off your iPhone

Sharninder — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 17:03:58 +0000

A couple of months back I wrote a post about how the iPod stores music internally and how you could use that knowledge to retrieve music stored on your iPod without using any external tools. This is made possible because of the fact that the iPod identifies itself as a USB connected external disk and let’s a user browse the contents of it’s filesystem using almost any operating system.

An iPhone on the other hand is an even more closed system than the iPod. While Apple atleast has opened the filesystem of an iPod, the iPhone doesn’t even let a user browse it’s filesystem contents. The only way then to manage the music on your iPhone is using a compatible version of iTunes. Right ?

Well, yes and no. While it is true that the only official method to manage music on the iPhone is using iTunes, a lot of enterprising hackers have been able to decrypt the protocol that iTunes uses to communicate with the iPhone and have created standalone utilities that let a user do stuff that Apple never wanted iTunes to do, like copy music off an iPhone.

One such utility is expod.

expod is a Mac OS X application that lets you copy all the music off your iPhone without using iTunes. expod works not only with iPhones but can be used to recover music from iPods and iPod touch’es too. It recognizes playlists that you might have created on the phone and also recognizes the metadata, i.e., the Artist and Album information, if any, embedded in the music files.

To get started, just download the expod DMG file, open it and copy the expod binary to your Mac’s Applications folder.

Connect your iPhone/iPod to your computer and launch expod.

If you see the above screen when you first launch expod with your iPod plugged in, don’t worry ! Expod will take a couple of seconds to scan your device and will present you a list of all the songs on your device.

expod displays a list of the playlists on your player on the left sidebar and a list of all the songs on the right hand side of the window. Select a playlist from the sidebar and the songs in that list will be displayed on the right.

To copy a song to your computer, just select it and press the Extract button. If you want to copy multiple songs in one go, hold down the Apple key while selecting the songs using the mouse. Or you can just shift-select to select consecutive songs. Once, you’ve selected the songs that you want to copy, Press the Extract button.

That’s it. Specify the location that you want to copy the music to, and expod will extract all the music from your iPhone/iPod and copy it to your computer.

Monitor your websites for free using WasitUp?

Sharninder — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 03:06:33 +0000

Even though datacenter technologies have come a long way, downtimes are still a reality that most of us bloggers have to face at one point or another. Your web host may offer a 99.999 % uptime guarantee but the fact that no host gives a 100% uptime guarantee proves the point that as there is no such thing as a free lunch, there is also no perfect webhost.

So, what do you do when your website inevitably goes down ? Inform your webhost about it ? Open a support ticket sit in one corner of your house sulking ?

While it is true that you can’t do much to bring your website up once it’s down, you can definitely reduce the downtime by informing your webhost about it as soon as you come to know about it.

Wasitup makes the process of monitoring your website as easy as letting them know the URL of your website and the email address to contact when the website goes down.

You can monitor upto 10 websites for free and WasitUp checks each of those websites every 5 minutes to see if they’re responding or not.

If you’ve filled up your quota of 10 websites, you can go to the Manage Monitorings link and remove some URLs from the list to make room for some more.

While website monitoring services are dime-a-dozen and some of them offer a lot many features, WasitUp distinguishes itself from the crowd by being the simplest service possible for the task. And it gets my vote for exactly the same reason.

Do you guys use any service to monitor your website for uptime ? Which are your favorites services for the purpose ?

Random Posts

Grooveshark: Listen to unlimited music online for Free

Sharninder — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 18:08:54 +0000

Streaming music over the Internet has always been a legal gray area. Most streaming music sites tend to call themselves radio stations but the music industry thinks of them as independent media consumers and that is the reason that while radio stations get bulk deals for playing content, online streaming stations have to pay for each song streamed on a per user basis.

This, as you can imagine, doesn’t really bode well for sites that rely solely on advertising to cover their costs as advertising spots for all but the biggest sites are usually pretty low.

A lot of streaming sites have gone under trying to perfect a monetization strategy for online music and only a few have managed to survive. Among them Pandora is the most famous and while it is one of the few sites making any money, it is only accessible to people living the United States.

For people outside the US, Grooveshark is an excellent alternative to Pandora.

Grooveshark is an online music search engine as well as a music streaming service that lets users upload their music collection to their servers and then listen to it from any computer anywhere in the world.

Visitors to Grooveshark can also just search for their favorite music from the homepage and listen to songs without even registering.

Hop on to Grooveshark, type in the name of your favorite artist or favorite song and click search. Grooveshark will display a list of the songs from it’s catalogue that match your query. Select a song (or two) and either click Play to play the song(s) directly or Add to add the song(s) to a playlist.

If you don’t want to create a complete playlist and would rather just trust Grooveshark to do that for you, click the big Radio button on the player. Grooveshark will now automatically populate your playlist with songs based on the type of songs that you’ve already selected. How cool is that ?

And getting all this done without even having to register !

Of course, if you register and login, Grooveshark will also let you save playlists and mark songs as favorites so that you can come back to them later.

My favorite feature of Grooveshark, though, is the Popular songs Smart Playlist which is (I presume) a dynamically generated playlist with the most popular songs being played on the service at any time.

If there is a song that you really like and would like to purchase, Grooveshark lets you do that via Amazon or iTunes. They earn a small commission on that, of course, and if you’re really a fan, I’d suggest that you buy the music anyway.

Grooveshark is, in my opinion, a very worthy alternative to services like Pandora and for people living outside the United States, probably the only decent alternative.

Give it a try and let me know what you guys think of it.

Glide OS – A web based free operating system

Sharninder — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 18:33:37 +0000

Cloud computing is the latest buzzword that seems to have taken over the Internet. Everyone seems to be talking about it, yet no one seems to have absolutely any idea what it actually means !

Cloud computing from a user’s perspective is simply the process of taking one’s computing needs online. What that means is that the web based email solutions that we use, or the calendering applications that we rely on are examples of cloud computing. And by that definition, every one from Google to Microsoft to Yahoo is in the cloud computing business.

Google recently announced that they’re working on an operating system called Chrome OS which will be based on Linux and the users using it will store all their data on Google’s servers. So, even if the actual operating system resides on the user’s machine, the data resides in the Cloud. This is Google’s vision of a Cloud OS.

While Google’s Chrome OS hasn’t yet hit the market officially, Transmedia’s Glide OS is here and it goes one up on Chrome OS by storing the complete operating system in the cloud.

Glide OS runs as a flash based application within your operating system and provides the user with applications that mimic the functionality of their desktop counterparts like Word processing, emailing and even photo editing.

Glide OS comes with 30 GB of free space for users to store their personal files. There is a premium subscription option that costs $50/year and gives you even more storage at 250GB.

The best part about Glide OS is the awesome compatibility and near ubiquitous access to your data. Glide OS works with Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Google Chrome and almost any mobile phone. So, it doesn’t really matter which part of the world you’re in or which operating system or web browser you’re using – You’ll always have access to your data.

Applications

Applications are what makes or breaks a platform. So, how does Glide OS stacks up on that front ?

I tried the presentation application called Present that comes with Glide OS and, in my humble opinion, it probably does 80% of the tasks that people use Microsoft Powerpoint for, and that’s saying quite a lot.

Another very useful application bundled with Glide OS is Write which is a very simple word processor with support for HTML output. Frankly speaking, compared to the presentation application, this one was a letdown. It might compete with Wordpad but doesn’t even come close to touching Microsoft Word. But, then if you really want Microsoft Word, you wouldn’t be using Glide OS and if all you want is to type up some notes and refer to them later, Write serves the purpose.

In my opinion, Glide OS is a revolutionary idea that holds a lot of promise. I absolutely can’t wait to see where they take it from here.

December Roundup – Best of the Web

Sharninder — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 17:24:10 +0000

Happy New Year !

Apologies for the lack of any updates for the last couple of weeks.

This blog has been silent for a while now and I blame the holiday season for it. Christmas, new year and then the hangover from the holidays ensured that I hardly had time for anything but, well, holidaying :-)

Now on to the news.

The new year brings a lot of promise for those of us interested in mobile technology. Google finally launched their highly anticipated mobile phone called the Nexus One. Initial reviews show a lot of promise and I’m really looking forward to more such innovations from Google.

Palm also released updates to their two handsets, the Pre Plus and the Pixi Plus. I don’t know about you but I think if there is a platform that can challenge the iPhone right now, it is the WebOS. And with the new devices Palm showed that they’re still very much in the game.

December was a pretty nice month for us at the Geeky Ninja and I hope you guys found our articles informative and useful. If you missed some of our posts, here is a short list of some our best posts from December.

How To Install RockBox on your iPod

Record a Screencast on OS X using the built-in Quicktime X

3 ways to archive your tweets

4 video sharing sites that are better than YouTube

We’ve got much more stuff lined up for you in January. So, hang on, and we hope you enjoy the ride.

HowTo install RockBox on your iPod

Sharninder — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 17:49:18 +0000

Apple’s iPod music player is the most popular music player on the planet. The iPod along with the iTunes store has revolutionized not only the music industry but also the complete music distribution business. It is this music business that has brought back Apple, the company, from the brink of bankruptcy and made it into the household name that it is today.

Even though there are many fans of the iPod’s simple and clean interface, there are many who would like their iPods to do still more. And for them the RockBox open source project brings hope.

RockBox is an alternative open source firmware for a lot of different music players including Apple’s iPod and today we’ll show you how you can also install RockBox on your iPod and make it do much more than what Apple ever intended.

Before starting the install make sure your iPod is connected to your computer and that iTunes is not running.

The fabulous guys at RockBox have made installing the firmware a breeze using the Automatic Install Utility. Download the installer for your operating system and execute it.

If this is the first time you’re running the installer, you’ll be prompted to choose the type of player you have. If you’re not sure, just let the Installer AutoDetect it for you.

Once your iPod has been identified, just click on either the Complete Installation or the Minimal Installation button.

RockBox comes with a lot of extra games, fonts and artwork. If you’re not interested in all of that, select the Minimal Installation or if, like me, you don’t want to miss out on anything, just click the Complete Installation button.

The installer will then go ahead and download the actual firmware files, fonts and other required files from the Internet.

Once the installer has finished downloading all the files it needs, you’ll be asked to choose the default theme that RockBox will use. The theme list is quite extensive and like everything else, you can change the default theme later, so just choose one which you like and click the Install button.

The installer will then go ahead and install the RockBox firmware on your iPod.

If the iPod doesn’t restart on it’s own, safely eject and disconnect it from your computer and restart it manually. The iPod will now boot up with the awesome RockBox using the theme that you selected.

The first time you boot into RockBox, you will not see your music on it. Don’t worry the music is still there, just that RockBox hasn’t added it to it’s database yet.

Select the Database option and select Yes to let RockBox initialize it’s database. RockBox will scan your iPod and find out all the tracks that you had there and add them to it’s database. Restart your iPod and voila, all your music is back !

Play around with RockBox and if you like it, keep it around and if not, Uninstallation is easy too. Just run the same utility that you used to install RockBox and under the Uninstallation tab, you’ll be able to choose between removing just the bootloader or the complete firmware.

If you want to completely remove all traces of RockBox, click the Remove the bootloader button followed by the second button to Uninstall Rockbox. This will remove both components of the RockBox firmware from your iPod.

Once you start using RockBox, I’m sure uninstalling it would be out of the question, though.

Want to see what the Google Wave Hype is all about ? We’ve got invites for you

Sharninder — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 18:16:38 +0000

Google has managed to create an amazing hype around their new product, Wave. Almost everyone who saw the demo of Google Wave at the company’s developer conference a couple of months back went back impressed, but well, it was disappointing for most people when they found out that wave is still in beta and Google is only going to give out a small number of invites for people to check it out.

Not much has changed since that first Demo and Wave is still an invite-only product and if you still don’t have an invite, I’ve got some good news for you.

I have 25 Google Wave invites to give away to readers of this blog. Read on to find out how you can get your hands one.

What is Google Wave ?

First things first, go see the demo video of Google Wave that I linked to above. If you still don’t have an idea of what Google Wave is, here’s the skinny on it.

Google Wave is a real-time collaborative communication platform.

Well, that’s it. That didn’t take too long to explain. Did it ?

The concept behind Google Wave is actually pretty simple and it aims to mimic, as closely as possible, real life conversations that humans have.

Unlike email, real conversations between human beings take place in real-time and that is what Google Wave brings to the table. A user creates a new Wave, add a recipient/user to the wave and the two of them can then have a conversation with each other in real-time.

In that sense, Google Wave is somewhat like instant messaging. Only this is more social, you can have multiple participants in a wave with all participants being able to edit messages and also share things like pictures, maps, videos etc. from right within the Wave.

Google wave is an instant messenger plus a wiki and that still doesn’t exactly describe it completely.

Want to try out Google Wave for yourself ?

We’ve got 25 Wave invites to give away and to get one, all you have to do is tweet this post out on Twitter adding the hashtag #geekyninja and once you’ve done that come back to this post and leave a comment telling us why do you think Google Wave is exciting ?

That’s all ! Really ! This has to be the easiest give away you’ve entered, right ?

Well, what are you waiting for ? Tweet this post like crazy. You’ve got till the 25th of December to do so. I’ll collect all the tweets and randomly choose 25 of you who’ll get the Wave invites.

Please use your real email address while commenting as that is the address we’ll be sending out the invites to.

Find the cheapest books on Amazon using CheapRiver

Sharninder — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 19:04:02 +0000

Amazon is the single largest online bookstore in the world. It operates in seven countries including the US, Germany, Japan, UK, China, Canada and France.

If you live in a country like India, though, where Amazon doesn’t have a local store, Amazon offers to ship goods internationally but even then ordering books from the Amazon book store is always a painful affair. Firstly, not all items can be shipped to India. Of those that can be shipped, the cost including shipping is usually prohibitive.

For most people in India ordering books from Amazon, the US store is the most convenient since, well, they have the easiest to remember website and the rates at the US bookstore are usually among the best, but have you ever tried adding up shipping from the US to India and then thinking about the cost ? Wouldn’t it be cheaper to get a book shipped from the UK store since shipping from the UK would be cheaper ?

Cheapriver is an Amazon mashup that answers those questions for you.

Just go to Cheapriver.com and type in the name of the book that you want to purchase and Cheapriver will search the US, UK, Germany, France and Canada Amazon stores and show you the cheapest price it is available for with and without shipping.

Cheapriver displays all prices in Euros so it is pretty easy to look at the neat table at a glance and see which option is the cheapest. Of course, as you can see in the image above, they also highlight the cheapest option for you in green.

Cheapriver does one thing and does it well. It doesn’t yet search all the stores and only works well for English titles but it is a good concept and if you’re anyway going to order that elusive title not available anywhere in India, give Cheapriver a try and you might just save yourself some money.

http://www.cheapriver.com/

Random Posts

Manipulate and Manage PDF files using Preview – Mac

Sharninder — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 17:41:16 +0000

The PDF file format has always been an integral part of the Mac OS X user interface because of the fact that the underlying technology behind the graphical interface, Quartz, is based on PDF.

That is why, while other operating systems needed third party tools to enable things like printing a file to a PDF printer, OS X has this feature built-in.

OS X also ships with a lightweight PDF viewer application called Preview that also doubles up as an image viewer. If your PDF editing requirements are as simple as mine, show some love to Preview and make use of some of it’s cool features that we’re going to walk you through today .

Combine Two PDF Files

Combining two PDF files in Preview is a simple matter of opening both the file side by side and dragging pages from one document’s sidebar to the other’s. You can even change the order of the pages by dragging them around in the sidebar.

The horizontal bar shows the position at which the new PDF will be inserted.

The cool thing about PDF is that you can use it to combine different types of files too. So, for example, you can open a number of image files using Preview and then combine them all into one single PDF which is much easier to distribute than a hundred images.

Copy Individual Pages from a multi page PDF file

Suppose you have a 100 page PDF document and you want to send pages 48-56 to a friend over email. With Preview you can just select the pages that you want and drag them out of the Preview window to a folder in the Finder or the Desktop and Preview will create a seperate PDF file with just those selected pages.

Delete pages from a PDF file

PDF also lets you delete pages from a PDF file. I often use this feature to trip long ebooks down to just the pages that I’m inserted in. To delete a page, just open the PDF and highlight the page that you want to delete, press the delete button and save the file.

Encrypt a PDF

If you have a PDF document that you’d like to password protect, you can do that too using Preview. Just open the document and Select the Save As option from the File menu. Give a new name to the document and tick the checkbox that says Encrypt. Enter a password in the text-box and click Save.

Those were some of my favorite Preview tricks. Do you know of any other ? Let me know in the comments.

Geeky Ninja

How to add Facebook chat to iChat on Mac OS X

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How To Get Music Off your iPhone

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Grooveshark: Listen to unlimited music online for Free

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December Roundup – Best of the Web

How To Install RockBox on your iPod

Record a Screencast on OS X using the built-in Quicktime X

3 ways to archive your tweets

4 video sharing sites that are better than YouTube

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HowTo install RockBox on your iPod

Related Posts

Want to see what the Google Wave Hype is all about ? We’ve got invites for you

Related Posts

Find the cheapest books on Amazon using CheapRiver

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Manipulate and Manage PDF files using Preview – Mac

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