Gadget Wisdom

Some time ago, we wrote a quick post on the subject of digitizing your cassettes. We’re once again back on the digitization trail, adding more old tapes to our digital music collection and freeing up storage space and have more thoughts.

There are simple economics in this conversion. If you were to repurchase an album on CD or through an online music store, you’d pay at least $10 for it. If you have 10 albums, that is $100. Might as well invest the money in a good system to convert them, which will work for much more than 10. If you are a real audiophile, you may have hundreds of LPs or Audio Cassettes. Decide if any are not worth converting, or are worth investing in a new copy.

Make sure you have a decent sound card and a good quality record or cassette player. Also invest in cleaners. You want to capture the best quality for your digital copy. Get a head cleaner for your cassette player, and record cleaners and a good stylus for your record player.

For a middle of the road solution, you may wish to go with something from Ion Audio. This company has made a name for itself for its PC converters…record players, VCRS, and tape decks with built in digital converters that hook into your computer via a USB connection. They even have one with an iPod connection now. There are several other companies of varying quality.

Our software of choice for audio capture remains the open-source program Audacity, available for most operating systems. The Audacity wiki outlines the steps to convert from analog sources.

The basic steps for turning a cassette or record(LP) album into a multi-track CD or a series of digital music files are as follows:

1. Connect the output of your analog player into the line input of your sound capture device, ie sound card, etc. If you have an integrated unit, plug the USB port into the computer. It will act like a sound card.
2. Start recording in Audacity and record the entire album into the system.
3. Save it in a temporary file. We learned that you should backup the file before you play with it the hard way.
4. Highlight each song and select “Project -> Add Label at Selection” and type in a name for that track.
5. Once you have separated the tracks, select “File -> Export Multiple” to export each selection as a separate file. Select your output format and output.
6. We recommend you create two copies. One in the digital music format of your choice, and another that you burn as a standard CD as an archival copy. If you plan on chucking the tape, you want this for redundancy. You can also use a lossless file format on a DVD for your archival copy, such as FLAC. The goal is for the archival copy to have the best possible quality.
7. Audacity allows you to enter metadata while exporting files. We recommend you do this. Metadata includes such thing as Album name, track name, artist, etc. This is essential in proper digital playback. Audacity only offers the basic categories. You may wish to use another program to add more tags to your files later(More on this in a future post).
8. Add it to your music player or program and enjoy.

What do you think? Is this worth the effort, or should we just shell out for new albums? Bear in mind that playing a tape into a computer can be done while concentrating on something. Track marking and metadata does take some work, but it is negligible compared to the wonder of rediscovering your favorite lost albums.

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• Bring your Vinyl Records back to Life!
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Image via Wikipedia

We recently received a file by email from someone with the extension .docx, which is the new Word 2007 format. They redid everything, probably to make us shell out more money. We had to email our friend and ask them to save the file in a different format and send it back to us. It is easier to find ways to do it ourselves.

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• Major League Baseball claims that Slingbox, the device that allows people to watch their home TV feed remotely over the internet, is illegal. Legal experts say users are not breaking any laws by using the device. The Slingbox, essentially…allows people to watch cable they’ve already paid for from another location. Cable or satellite prices can be high enough, especially when we have to buy 800 channels to get the three we actually want…now we have to pay because we want to see it when we aren’t at home?
• This spring, the XPower Powerpack Solar, a 10-amp battery with a 5-watt solar panel will hit shelves. The $169 device can run a laptop for 3 hours and a TV for 45 minutes. It takes 40 hours of sunshine to charge it…so it may not take off as much as the company hopes…although they expect people will charge it at home and top it off on the road…Green is in…is that green?
• Scientists at the University of Utah have succeeded in building small devices to turn heat into sound and then electricity. The devices could be used to produce electricity from waste heat in various industries. For the home, it could cool electronics, specifically the cooling of computers…it would also make them more energy efficient. A thermo-acoustic cooling device could cost about $100-200.
• The Free Software foundation has launched Playogg.com to promote awareness of the open-source multimedia format OGG as an alternative to MP3 and AAC, which are proprietary. Support for OGG on desktops is fully mature, with a variety of programs….hardware players are limited, although various ones do and several others can be hacked. We use OGG on some of our systems…

We recently started experimenting with QEMU. QEMU is a generic and open source machine emulator and virtualizer.

As an emulator, it can run operating systems and programs made for one machine on another. It currently can emulate the ARM processor(used in routers and other embedded network hardware), SPARC, PowerPC, MIPS, and more are coming.

As a virtualizer, it can create a virtual computer than can run a complete operating system on it. There is an optional drive available to enhance speed.

QEMU runs on the command-line under Windows and Linux-based computers, but pops up a window or a full-screen display for the operating system it is virtualizing. We have used QEMU to experiment and test bootable CDs. These CDs boot a complete operating system and are often used for diagnostic testing on computers.

You can find the latest version of QEMU for Windows here.

To try QEMU out, get a CD image of a bootable CD in iso format, and run the following command:

qemu -cdrom [iso filename] -boot d

That will boot whatever iso you want in a virtualized window.

We’ll have more on QEMU in the future, but it is a great way to experiment with Linux and other operating systems, if you want to try them without major alterations to your system. For more information, try the QEMU on Windows wiki.

We recently pulled out the Linksys Network Storage Link USB 2.0, aka the NSLU2, affectionately nicknamed the SLUG by enthusiasts. The NSLU2 is actually a Linux-based device, which runs SAMBA, a version of Windows file sharing and has been hacked to run other things.

The NSLU2 is not your only choice for hacking in this manner. You can use the Synology DS101, the Iomega NAS100D, the D-Link DSMG600, or any device that uses the ixp4xxx chipset with attached storage. However, the NSLU2 has the most following, having had an established community for a long time.

There are several options for replacement firmware for the NSLU2. There is Unslung, which allows you to expand the ffunctionality of the NSLU2 without using the original product functionality and compatibility with the original Linksys firmware. However, unlike the stock firmware, Unslung contains support for NTFS(The formatting used for Windows drives), card readers, USB hubs to add extra devices, and other enhancements. Other packages can be installed to a drive hooked into the Slug as it has limited memory and run, for example, a streaming media server.

Alternatives to Unslung include OpenSlug and Debian for the NSLU2, which remove the Linksys functionality in favor of a complete Linux system, and thus are not for the neophyte.

For more information on the various aspects of the NSLU2, visit its unofficial homepage/wiki. We just set one up as a file server at a remote location. It will, as soon as we finish setting up the software, not only backup files from the main server, but allow users at the second site to access local copies of their documents.

Lifehacker has a great feature on how to encrypt your web browsing with an SSH Socks Proxy.

1. You’ll need an SSH server. If you don’t have access or can’t get access through a web host, many of which allow this access, you can always run your own.
2. You’ll also need a client. The most popular one for Windows computer is Putty. It is simple to use.
3. Set up your SSH client to establish a tunnel between a local port and a port on the server.
4. Set up your Internet browser to use a Socks proxy.

Now, that seems a bit hard for some people. There are alternatives.

• Tor – Tor is a toolset for those who want to anonymize their internet usage.
• Routers – Various routers can run SSH and even a SOCKS proxy. Most of these are Linux-based routers running custom firmware. More information…

This question was put to us recently by an educator who wants to show certain Youtube videos in her classes but cannot rely on a working internet connection. These simple instructions are courtesy of Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

Try vixy.net – it will allow you to download Youtube videos directly as a standard video file or even audio-only. It is somewhat limited in the formats though. We’d prefer an Xvid option. Xvid is an open-source alternative to DivX. 

For a free program you can install on a computer and run…try Super…

Finally, if you want to put them on a DVD, Amit offers a bit more advice(Although we generally go the Linux route) and instruction.

Ask Meta Filter provided some advice on legitimate ways to boost cellphone reception indoors. We thought we’d expound on it.

• The first and easiest solution is…if your cell phone doesn’t work where you want it to…perhaps a new provider is in order.
• Second of course is a passive antenna and some low-loss antenna cable. Of course, it does limit your mobility, as you want the antenna to not move and you want to move. You can also tie two antennas together via a low-loss antenna cable…which is a passive repeater
• Slate.com covered amplified repeaters, which can be prohibitively expensive for the frugal techie, costing several hundred dollars at least. However, if your cell phone is your primary phone, you might think it worth it.

With the recent decision stating that cell phone companies have to provide unlock codes for their phones, allowing all the functionality they’ve restricted to be restored, as well as transfer to another network, we thought it would be a good idea to give people a place to start.

PC Magazine presented this article on How to Unlock Your Phone. This includes a series of unlocking services, sites, etc. For free options, try Howardforums.com, a good forum for all things mobile phone…including hacks, reviews, advice, etc.

Of course, most of the unlocking services mentioned only work for GSM phone…the ones used on networks such as Cingular and T-Mobile. CDMA Phones, used by Sprint, Verizon, Alltel, etc, have to be individually authenticated by their networks. So, even if your existing provider lets you unlock the phone, your new provider will not add it to the list of approved phones on its network.

Most providers sell different versions of the same phones, using their own custom firmware(the software that operates the phone) which could be changed to the specific firmware for a different carrier. The carriers refuse to cooperate.

For those of you who use GSM phones, check out this ABC News article on the Best Unlocked Phones. Just bear in mind that without contract you will be paying more to secure them. Of course, that means no contract, which may be to your advantage.

The people at Crunchgear have a simple way of downloading YouTube videos for an Ipod or other non-internet connected device. Here is their advice.