Did you ever plug in a headphone? Then the same happens like on the iPhone: The Computer is muted and the headphone makes the music. I hate that! Why? Because I am so fussy and want to spare my hardware. Especially jacks are sensitive and easily getting loose. So it would be so much better having a headphone connected, put it aside and still enjoy the iMac’s speaker sound as well. There is no option anywhere in the preferences, so I have to accept this. The only solution I know is getting an external sound card.

Phase change

So I did, and I am the proud owner of the external Terratec Phase X24 Firewire audio card. Really great device, and you know what? I can connect a headphone with still having sound everywhere. YES!

Record

I love making music and hopefully you have subscribed my audio podcast. To create my sounds I mainly use software like Record in combination with Reason. Record is so great in connecting audio hardware with multiple inputs and outputs.

Combine in, combine out

For my latest song I needed to record my voice while playing the music inside Record. That masterpiece software is able to do that, but my USB microphone was not in there. Checking out all the devices, I noticed for the first time, that Record combines audio devices with inputs and outputs.

Shit happens, my PhaseX24 and the Samson GoMic was not listed up in combination.

Got a Mac? Do it yourself!

Damn, yeah! I am a Mac user, so that’s no big deal. I will create my own device!

I have just opened the Audio and MIDI settings, and voila, there is the add button. Give it a name and click all devices I want to have in there. Made a check on PhaseX24 and one Samson USB GoMic, that’s it! Restarting Record, running to preferences and there it is: my PhaseX24+GoMic device.

In my eyes, in the twitter terminology “friend” should be only called a “friend” if you follow him and he or she follows you – so that there is a direct relationship.

Watch out the friendorfollow.com website which shows you all that relationships in a customizable order and organized by a good terminology, grouped in tabs called “Following” showing people you are following. “Fans” are people following you and “Friends” are people you follow and they follow you.

That tools is great to clean up your profile from people you probably should not follow.

The greatest feature I like is to make screenshots of Safari. You can specify a screen resolution and it is rendered with the Safari engine and stored as an image.

This is nice to have all your links pictures or thumbnails. Unfortunately you can only either add a URL or take the active one from Safari.

LittleSnapperBatch

But I want to have all open tabs as websnapshots. And to solve that I wrote my first Mac Application called LittleSnapperBatch.zip using the powerful AppleScript. I hope you find it useful, too.

Speedport’s original firmware has some bad properties. After login it resizes the browsers window, the interface is ugly and some items seem to be misplaced in my opinion. But, all in one it is ok.

Due to I am having T-Home, I am forced to use the Speedport router because of the built in Modem. I just wanted to use my TimeCapsule only, but that did not work, because I do not get any internet connection then.

In former times I already a had FritzBox and was impressed how far it succeeded with useful options. It was even possible in those days to connect a USB capable printer and to print wireless via WLAN. But now, AVM has implemented state of the art features which are really useful for home users or small networks. It provides now USB-support for harddrives and memory sticks and even sharing them with FTP and SMB, VPN tunneling, call answer machine, fax sending/receiving and many more.

Refering to that article mentioned above, I began some research and found some solutions how to get the AVM firmware to the Speedport.

It is not working by just uploading it the normal way! You need to somewhat compile your own thing out of both firmwares. See my steps, and it will work really easy.

Here is my installation guide for Mac users, but with some fantasy you may adapt it for your own purpose:

Disclaimer! YOU ARE DOING ALL THAT AT YOUR OWN RISK! YOUR HARDWARE MAY GET DAMAGED. Read carefully and make sure to understand before doing anything.

First of all, get the Debian businesscard edition (36 MB). The compiling scripts do require some apt libraries which are not available on OS X by default. The stable CD/DVD of Debian 5 crashed during my installation within Parallels Desktop 4.

Begin to create a virtual machine with Parallels by running the assistant. Set the just downloaded Debian 5 ISO file as the CD/DVD drive. Parallels will automatically detect everything what is needed. When the machine starts for the first time and asks you for the installation method, I recommend you to go to the options and select the graphical unattended one. The installation will download everything what is required.

When done, log in as a normal user, because no root access is required. Use the browser icon from the menu bar to download the master script doing all the nasty work for you. For the ease of use, I have created a short URL to type less. You can use the samehttp://kURL.de/opupiin your address bar. If you get a hint, that you have no internet, have a look at the top right corner of your menubar left next to the clock and calendar. There should be a tiny icon and if you click it, you can select a cable network connection. Then reload the script and you should see it’s source text. Store it with menu file, save as. Change the download folder to Desktop!

Open a root terminal window via the menu bar applications, then tools. Go the Desktop directory where the downloaded shell script is located by typingcd DesktopPay attention to the letter case on unix systems! Start the script by typing sh ./download_speed-to-fritz.shThis will do some downloads and may take some time. Now, we change to the new files and run the first script, which will install some needed libraries to continue.cd trunk/speed-to-fritzsh ./install-start

Follow the instructions and read carefully. If everything is done it will start the module configurator which has a nice interface where you can use the cursor keys to change options. Then it downloads the needed firmwares and will re-image them. When you are prompted to reset the router, turn it off! Wait 10 seconds and power it on again. Then the firmware will be installed. Do not interrupt until it is complete!

Then you can access the router over same IP as before or just with http://fritz.boxAll the settings are still kept.

If you made a mistake, you can re-run the last script and restore to the original firmware or just customize other things.

Now I am so happy beeing able to receive faxes and missed calls running on my answering machine by mail to my iPhone!

And guess, what they sanctimoniously promise you: Those bunnies are just waiting only for you! So register with your credit card and go to meet her.

Below the persuasive photo you see her age, just over 18 and still below 30. That’s a match and the username is below, so there is no reason not to contact her directly.

Did you really find any of those shills?

Reload. Reload. Reload. Reload. Reload.

Meet these girls from your area

What?!

They got you fooled, because of course these girls are fakes. Reload the ad containing site several times, until your browser releases cache or something else, and then have a look at the details.

The pictures are the same, the girls are same. Really? Not really! The blonde 24 year old Bleustar77 renamed to Gemini0669 and is now 20 years old. My brain says: Stop, she is now 4 years younger. Damn! How is she doing that?!

But next, lets have a look at the usernames and the pictures, again. We have already noticed, they have changed. Clever, so far.

Anne14388 is one advert two times! Two different looking girls and two different ages, but both do have the same username?

Please, dear Adultfriendfinder network, stop fooling us with bad coded random generators and sniffing our geo locations by IP-Adresses!

Fake a call

When you have to take part in a meeting and really do need an important excuse to leave, then take advantage of a fake call.

With your iPhone in the pocket or on the table, it will save you, like your best friend anytime. Even that unintimate situation.

The freeware application Fake a Call does what it’s name already says, it generates a call, but no one is calling for real.

You have plenty of options available, how a fake call can reach you.

Use a quick countdown timer or set an alarm time and let the show begin.

You even are able to select who is calling you.

MacOSaiX

So often I have seen picture mosaics and I wanted to do one by myself, because I find them so amazing and fantastic.

A picture mosaic is one picture which is made of other pictures as like a screenshot is made with pixels.

Searching a short while lead me to the freeware tool MacOSaiX which does exactly that thing. In the screenshot I used a photo from a friend’s marriage. I have a collection of 500 pictures of this event and all of them are included to build this single one. If you zoom in you really can see every single photo clearly!

The program has many options and the export function lets you define really high resolution for professional poster printings.

Using gravatar to display icons

An avatar is somewhat like a symbolic identification of your online presence like companies having their own logos in the real life.

In forums it is normal to have your very own user profile with a nick name altering to the real name. You may attach a photo or some other graphics which will be shown on every of your posts. Because those tiny little icons are easier to recognize than any texts, it helps you quickly to identify a poster without first reading the username.

Even the comments in a blog do containt the icon and the name of the poster below. Why not having icons there, too?

The website gravatar.com provides a great and simple solution for this issue called “globally recognized avatars“. You just sign up with your email address. Then you add a picture to it. It also offers you the possibility to rate your avatar, so that you have different versions for the same account, like adult and non-adult.

To display those pictures, you can use gravatar.com‘s free API. You can use the HTML’s image source tag to the gravatar.com and give just three arguments. The first one is a MD5 hash of the email address, the second one is the rating and the thirst and last one is the image size.

Some blog systems like WordPress are using this. It works so well, because to register a forum or to leave a comment, you will need a valid email address. And exactly this is used to identify your icon picture.

To add some security against spammers, the MD5 hashkey of the email address instead of the plain text is used.

Long URL Firefox add on

In the internet nothing will work without URLs. Everybody has at least heard once about the “http://” – thing and is often called just a link.

It links to a special recource like HTTP, FTP or local installed applications using a internet connection for example

• Skype (callto://dj_n4cer)

• Edkonkey (ed2k://%7Cfile%7CSUSE.LiNUX.10.0-retail-boxed-dvd-duallayer.part1.Nhipcau.net.rar%7C4030000000%7CAA6 1774DDD0E6B233BBBA46923C0DF04%7C/)

URL is a short term for Uniform Recource Locator. They are following a standardized formatting rule so that they will work everywhere at anytime.

But URLs can get very long, because it directs the server to a special path if a slash is following. If there are more slashes, then it goes into a deeper level, i. e.

• http://www.server.com/userblog/blog/archive/articles/2008/12/01/this-is-an-article-about-long-and-short-urls.

This is convinient to read, but not convinient to type, especially on a mobile device. For that reason there are numerous services providing you short URLs like

• http://kurl.de/abc342

which is definitely easier and faster to hack into a phone keyboard. In real, if you open this URL, it redirects you to the original one.

It is often used at Twitter, where you have a limited available amount of characters. Some free suppliers are:

• TinyUrl.com
• Kurl.de
• metaMark.net

But the big disadvantage is, that you do not know where it leads to before you open it.

If want to know the truth in time you may use the Firefox Plugin Long URL please.

Password generator options

There are several ways to make new passwords. Of course they should follow some rules to have them quite secure. In one my recent articles “Secure passwords” you may read some basics and tips.

In addition to that article I just found a cute website by PC Tools which gives many varieties to create passwords.

They do have a free online password generator which should match and overtake all your needs.

iphone password generator

Passwords never should be easy, because the lighter they are, the faster they can be cracked. In those days there are several possibilities to get them in clear text with a brute force attack, rainbow tables and other techniques.

Espacially when they are easy like “hello1975″ or something like that it is no big deal. If you own the right tools, you even do not need to have deep knowledge of that algorithms.

Make sure to combine numbers, letters in upper and lower case and if possible special signs like question marks, exclamation marks, dashes, dots and more.

Even the rule, the longer the better is still true.

For the iPhone is a cute and free password generator available which allows you to determine the complexity and length.

Also make sure, never to have the same password at several places.

Imagine, you have one password for each platform. If that is known, a intruder can get anywhere in and cause damage or misuse your privacy.