The Four-eyed Journal » software

MediaMonkey or WinAmp?

jhay — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 14:11:04 +0000

For the past two weeks, I’ve been using Media Monkey to manage my digital music both on my laptop and my SE K800i. So far, MediaMonkey has performed well.

It’s light on system resources, quite simple and intuitive interface yet this program is packs in quite a lot of features. And I haven’t paid for a premium license to unlock all of its features and functionality.

Before trying out MediaMonkey, I’ve been a loyal user of WinAmp. Even though the buzz and fanfare has toned down for this nimble and pioneering media player, I’ve stuck with it all throughout the years simply because it works and works well in giving justice to my digital music collection.

Among my most loved feature about WinAmp is the ability to skin it. I’ve downloaded a skin maker years ago and created skins inspired by my favorite Japanese mecha-anime, Gundam Wing. In fact, I still use the same skins up to now.

Going back to MediaMonkey, I’ve decided to give it a try just to see how the media player works since I’ve read some great reviews about it. Here’s a very good one by Max Limpag and just recently, I’ve come across a list of the top media players out there, MediaMonkey is in the top 5.

What I liked about MediaMonkey is how it makes managing music files and playlists on my hard drive and on my portable media players like the Sony Ericsson K800i and the Creative Zen Stone Plus. MediaMonkey detected both devices the instant I connected each to my laptop. It really saved me from a lot of pain as the default software suite for the K800i, which I used to managed music with before, has been screwing itself up for the past few weeks.

The only gripes I have with MediaMonkey is the lack of built-in presets for the equalizer. I’m no sound technician nor expert in tweaking equalizer, call it laziness but wouldn’t it be grand if MediaMonkey came with built-in presets just like in WinAmp? That way, I wouldn’t have to spend so much time tweaking the way MediaMonkey delivers my mp3′s.

Because of this, I was back to using WinAmp as my default music player. Don’t get me wrong though, MediaMonkey is still on my laptop and it’s now my default music management app. You could say I’m enjoying two of the best media players out there, and both are for free – the basic versions that is. Eventually I’ll learn how to skin MediaMonkey and tweak its equalizer to my liking, but I’m just too lazy for that right now.

So now it’s up to you on which media player to go for, I’d recommend both as it all boils down to personal preferences. Though I’m sure Windows Media Player won’t be among the top of your list.

Now running Firefox 3 – is this the right version?

jhay — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 00:09:08 +0000

So today, June 18, on our side of the planet is the actual Firefox 3 Download day. The geek in me had lost its brain yesterday because I woke up very early in the morning just to download Firefox 3 and be part of some awesome world record – for geeks.

But lo and behold, all I found was that “coming soon” graphic on the Firefox 3 Download day website. After blurting, “WTF?!” it then occurred to me that I was on a different time zone than where the Mozilla folks are so I had to wait for some 10 hours and more before the sun has shined on their part of the globe turning their calendars into June 17, 2008.

Being the genius that I am, I did some timezone computations using complex algorithms and found out from friends on Twitter that Download day would actually be June 18, 1:00am here on Philippine soil.

That was some 6 hours ago and right now I’m running Firefox 3 and officially part of that world record – for geeks. I sure am glad I did not wait up until 1am earlier for Firefox 3 to be officially available for download because one; I was really wrestling against my tired-from-school, skinny-ass body who has taken sides with the Sandman, in his futile attempt to prevent me from becoming part of that awesome world record – for geeks, and second; I had a feeling that once Firefox 3 does become available for download, those 1 Million-strong fans who pledged to join the quest for that world record download – for geeks, the Mozilla servers would be swamped DDoS-style. And it did, as Yuga puts it succinctly, Firefox 3 Download Day goes kaput!.

Well for a couple of hours, after which everything went down smoothly and the Mozilla servers are now up, running and serving up Firefox 3 to the masses. Holding back and taking some sleep really proved to be a good choice as I did not suffer the frustration of some who weren’t able to download Firefox 3 right away after staying up and waiting that long. Patience does have its rewards.

But wait, what’s this?

I did download the correct installer right? And this is the final version of Firefox 3 not some Release Candidate Beta version right? Then how come that was the page I saw after running Firefox 3 for the very first time? Guys any ideas?

Anyways, so far, I’m happy with Firefox 3. It’s got some refreshing look and feel, it loads pages a lot faster than before, most of plugins work well with it and it does take up less system memory though the new “Awesome bar” annoys me a little because it doesn’t throw back the exact right URLs I’m looking for but hey, over all, Firefox 3 is awesome! Go download it now, retake the web with the best browser today and be part of that world record for – geeks.

Cleaning up my digital world: saving myself from e-junk & clutter

jhay — Mon, 26 May 2008 09:20:33 +0000

Today, I’m starting on a long journey of cleaning up my digital world. What do I mean by this? Ever since I got mobile with my awesome Four-eyed Notebook, a realization dawned upon me: my presence in the digital world/cyberspace/blogosphere/web 2.0 dimension is getting bigger it’s getting too much for me to handle.

It all began when I sat down to setup my notebook: installing the OS, my suite of computer protection softwares, the core set of programs I need to get my work done, migrating my digital media collection and again installing all the media players and editors I need and have grown accustomed to using over the years.

At first I thought my notebook would end up almost the same as the way my desktop PC is, in terms of the kind of applications installed, the way the file system was organized etc. It turned out completely different. As of now, only half of the total number of programs and applications I had installed on my desktop PC have made it into my notebook’s hard drive.

Removing the e-junk & clutter

On the dekstop, I had OpenOffice and Microsoft Office XP running side by side. Now on my notebook, there’s only the MS Office 2007 edition handling my core productivity needs. OpenOffice was a good alternative but after giving it much thought and looking back on my work flow, I only installed it to export documents and spreadsheets into PDF files. But there are plenty of free online services that do just that so OpenOffice was left on my desktop which in effect now belongs to my younger sister.

Also on the desktop PC, I had eight (8) applications for doing the same thing: record/edit audio files from .AAC to .WMA formats. Now on my notebook, I only use two: Audacity and Nero’s WaveEditor. Saved me a lot of HD space and puts less strain on my notebook’s processor.

There are plenty of other stories, but the overall effect is that my notebook is lighter in terms of the amount of applications installed in it. It’s more responsive, runs much much faster and now my work flow has become much smoother because there’s only not more than two programs that could do a task that I want unlike in my desktop wherein I had to choose from a wide selection of apps which eats up time and creates serious compatibility issues with file formats, drives etc. In other words, my working environment on my notebook is less cluttered.

Extending it to my online world

Because of its positive effects on myself, it has greatly improved the output of my offline work: research, writing concept papers and project proposals, reports and other mostly non-blogging stuff, I’ve decided to do the same thing on my online world: my blogs and blogging, my social network accounts and the blogs and websites that I manage.

I plan to do the digital clean-up in four major areas:

Email, subscriptions and RSS

Email is at the core of my online world and everything revolves around in it. I use it to communicate, send and receive work information, keep vital information about all my online accounts and connections and the subscriptions I use as sources for my work. Unfortunately, my inbox is a mess. It currently has over 2000 messages that need to be tagged and archived to be organized so that it will no longer be a distraction to me.

Next would be doing an audit of the subscriptions and newsletters that arrive and nearly fill my inbox daily. I would unsubscribe from the ones that I really don’t read anymore or the ones that have lost value for me. The ones I’m going to keep would then be tagged and archived so that I could come back to them at a time I would set aside.

Lastly, would be my RSS reading list. An audit would be put in place, group them according to topic and look for new feeds that would be good for me.

Blogs and blogging

This would be the easiest part, me thinks. I’d just upgrade the blogs I maintain to the latest version of WordPress and check them for hacks and security vulnerabilities. Redesign a few maybe but I just want to be reacquainted with all of them. Plus, review and prune the long lists of draft posts in each and get things moving.

My social networking accounts

I actually plan to set aside a day in my work week to do nothing but immerse my self in all the social networking sites I have accounts in. Send messages to my contacts, clean up my public profiles, update the photos basically spread some social networking love around. First and biggest on my list is overhauling my Facebook account. Honestly, I’m not only getting bored of Facebook, I’m starting to be annoyed by it because of all the apps that I really don’t use and the email notices that drown me in an avalanche of information.

The blogs and websites I manage

Friends and colleagues are well aware of this and I would like to extend my apologies to all of you who have been waiting on me to upgrade your site, fix a few issues and update your designs. I figure once my digital world has been de-cluttered, cleaned up and organized, our collaboration would be a lot smoother.

So once again I’ve taken on another huge assignment. I would be prowling the web and your blogs for some tips and how-tos on how to accomplish these tasks. If you have them, do give me the heads up so that I could learn from you and perhaps build on what you’ve started, it would be awesome. Blogging and documenting this process would be a good and fun exercise as well. Wish me luck, I’m going to need it.

A patch to a patch – What?! No thanks I’m on Ubuntu

jhay — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 22:57:34 +0000

Micro$oft has just released the the “release candidate” version of its SP3 or Service Pack 3 for Windows XP. Some of my friends have already downloaded it and while I still use Windows XP, I’m not even bothered by this yet again, another patch from M$.

Speaking confidently like this is made possible by one solution, having an alternative OS to run my PC. Sure I can’t get a hold of Apple’s new OS X Leopard, but I have what could possibly be better than XP, and that is Ubuntu!

Ever since I returned to using Ubuntu last month, dual-booting it with XP to be more precise, life has been quite easier, peaceful and more productive for me. Before the dual-boot setup, I was stuck with using my 4-year-old installation of Windows XP Home patched with SP2. The patch was awful! It hogged up lots of HD space and made my system considerably slower to startup, to run and to shut it self down (the shut down process takes an average of 20 mins!).

I cannot help but think that these patches are nothing but bloatware and even annoyance-ware. As they do nothing but to simply bloat-up my XP installation and force me to upgrade unnecessarily my other programs, like firewall, audio editing etc. Upgrading software is a good thing, and a routine I have followed diligently ever since I got my first PC. But somehow, upgrading Windows has never been an exciting task for me to do, all because of the reasons I’ve mentioned earlier. Which kind of defeats the purpose, upgrades are supposed to make improvements to the software not ‘dumb-down’ the software. What’s even ridiculous and plainly stupid is when M$ started issuing patches FOR patches! I mean, wtf?!

So why not upgrade to Vista instead? No thanks, well not yet. Perhaps next year. Or the next. Because so far, I’m content with the way XP is setup in my old HD and I’m happy with Gutsy on the new HD. Ubuntu may issue upgrades or patches from time to time, but I welcome them for they work! Unlike those of M$ which is just…oh nevermind, we all know what it’s like.

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I know this post is a rant but I can’t help it. Haven’t been able to post regularly here so I suppose getting something off my chest would ease my return to normal blogging. Be back with more useful posts later on as today’s the last day of school for this 2007! Woot!

Rant: AVG Free is cool, the way it updates is annoying

jhay — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 15:57:10 +0000

Hopefully, the first word on the title could’ve been a fair warning that this post is rant-off, of sorts. However, so that it won’t be a complete waste of time I’ll try to be objective and fair as much as I can. Ready?

So here we go, the very first anti-virus software I used was then PC-Cillin 2002 by TrendMicro. It came bundled for free when I got first got this PC back in 2003. Being the OC geek that I am, paranoia dominated my attitude towards keeping my PC clean and free of those nasty viruses, trojans, spywares, worms and malware. So it helped me maste the habit of scanning every floppy disk, which was then replaced by thumb drives, downloaded archives or files from the internet with PC-Cillin.

God bless the team from TrendMicro for I loved the PC-Cillin. It simply worked and worked wonderfully it did. My friends and classmates would cry out whenever a virus or trojan slips past their AV software and wreak havoc in their systems. I on the other hand remained a happy malware-free PC user.

It detected, cleaned and stopped every malware that attempted to break or sneak into my PC, worked smoothly in the background and updated itself automatically and notifying me of its successful update via a small unobtrusive bubble in the system tray. Life was good back then.

The happy days ended when my complimentary license expired and I was being nagged to fork over some $60.00 or more in order to get the newest version of PC-Cillin back then, complete with a year’s worth of monthly virus database updates. No effin way!

So I began to search for alternatives to the PC-Cillin brand. Something that would be as tough and powerful on nasty viruses, worms and other malware but not on my empty pockets. The world of free anti-virus softwares was introduced to me, and very much to my delight if I may add!

The first free anti-virus software I used was aVast from ALWIL software. It was effective and powerful to keep my PC clean and safe plus it’s totally for free. Unfortunately, one issue I discovered about it is that it doesn’t delete the old anti-virus database files. The updates were installed and stored in its installation folder. This was something relevant and made a lot of sense. However, as the months went by, I noticed that the free hardisk space was shrinking. After some snooping around, I found out that it was aVast’s virus database files that were what’s hogging up my free hardisk space. Whenever it downloads new updates, the files are installed and stored in the hardisk. The older files are stored as well. Eating up hardisk space and burdening my PC.

So aVast went out the windowS XP. (No pun intended ) It was replaced by Grisoft’s AVG Free Anti-virus. It worked like the others before it, robust, powerful and quite reliable in keeping nasty malwares out of my PC. The anti-virus database files have been regularly installed while the older files were deleted or over written so it doesn’t eat up that much server space. I loved AVG Free and continues to do so today. Well most of the time.

Everything seemed so ‘perfect’ until something popped-up. Literally. Everytime AVG Free would update itself over the internet, a window would pop-up, download the files needed and install them later on – in another window that pops out.

And that is what’s really annoying. Regardless of whether you’re blog-hopping, creating threads in online forums or even if you’re an ordinary student just typing out his project, a pop-up window will appear and notify you with the update process which is mandatory of course if I ever wanted to keep my PC clean. Which is why there’s only one button clickable on that pop-up window, the ‘Cancel’ button. Again, why would I cancel updating my AVG Free? This is really annoying for it disturbs work sessions, creative processes and blog-hopping.

Why the Grisoft team used a pop-up window instead of a small, unobtrusive bubble in the sytem tray is beyond me. But guys!?! Why a pop-up? Why?