Tutorials

How to Copy Your iPod/iPhone Music To Your PC with SharePod

SharePod ~ Newbtech.com

While ITunes as an application makes it easy to move music from your computer to your iPod or iPhone, Apple has made it intentionally difficult to move the other way back.

There are many reasons why you may wish to copy the contents of your iPhone across to your PC. I recently installed Windows 7 on my main machine and am now facing the possibility of having my music collection wiped and restarting from fresh. This is a daunting task as I always keep my music library as tidy as possible so that I can locate and play my music quickly and easily.

Thankfully, there are many third party products out there that can back up your music collection straight from your iPod/iPhone to your PC. I ended up using SharePod because it was simple to use, uncomplicated and best of all FREE.

In order to back up all or selected songs, follow the steps below:

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Tuesday, September 8th, 2009 IPhone, Productivity, Test Drive Apps, Tutorials 2 Comments

How to Prevent Ads on Windows Live Messenger

Newbtech - Prevent Ads on Windows Live MessengerI don’t know about you, but I find the mouse over ad’s on Windows Live Messenger extremely annoying. Every time I accidently move the mouse over the ad, it keeps popping up forcing me to move my mouse all the way to the top to close it.

As you can see on the left, it can get quite annoying and almost made me stop using Windows Live Messenger. To top it off, the ad’s appear OVER other applications if they are on top of (and overlap) Messenger.

While I don’t condone removing advertising from free products, this was one exception I had to make simply to save bandwidth as well as stop me from uninstalling an otherwise excellent application.

In order to remove the ads follow the steps below:

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Tuesday, August 25th, 2009 Microsoft, Productivity, Tips 1 Comment

Windows Live Writer Tips: How to Refresh Your Theme

image10 Windows Live Writer Tips: How to Refresh Your Theme From time to time, all bloggers like to tune their blog via a new theme or style sheet etc. Windows Live Writer has an excellent functionality to allow a blogger to preview what their post will look like before they publish their article. This is done by clicking on the Preview tab in Windows Live Writer.

When a blog is set up first in Windows Live Writer, the theme and style sheet is automatically downloaded from the blog to provide this preview functionality.

If the theme or style sheet is changed, you will need to manually refresh in Windows Live Writer to get the latest version to ensure that the preview remains accurate. Its a few simple steps to do this…

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Saturday, August 8th, 2009 Microsoft, Productivity, Tips, Tutorials 1 Comment

How To Configure Windows Live Writer for WordPress Blogs

image5 How To Configure Windows Live Writer for WordPress Blogs Windows Live Writer is currently one of the most popular applications for blogging. It is an easy to use application that allows anyone to quickly post articles to their blogs in a WYSIWYG fashion. With live previews, its possible to see exactly how your post will look like before you publish the article.

This article will show you how to configure Windows Live Writer to work with your WordPress blog.

Prerequisites

The requirements before you start is that you have downloaded Windows Liver Writer and have it installed on your machine and also that you have a hosted WordPress installation somewhere. It doesn’t matter if the blog is a self-hosted one or one that is hosted on wordpress.com, the steps are the same…

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Friday, August 7th, 2009 Productivity, Tips, Tutorials 2 Comments

How To Get IPhone/IPod Working With Windows Server 2003

image4 How To Get IPhone/IPod Working With Windows Server 2003 If you try and install iTunes 8.2 or above on Windows Server 2003, you will most likely get an issue during the install where it complains during installation of one of the components (namely, Apple Mobile Device Support). The error looks like “Apple mobile device support requires that your computer is running Windows XP SP2 or newer”.

iTunes will complete its install, but when you plug in your iPhone or iPod, it will not get recognized and as such, won’t allow you to synch.

If you are having difficulty getting your IPhone or IPod recognized by Windows Server 2003, try the following:

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Wednesday, August 5th, 2009 IPhone, Productivity, Tips, Tutorials 15 Comments

How to Add Chrome like New Tab and Home Page to Firefox

Firefox Logo I use both Google Chrome and Firefox for my main personal browsing. I love both browsers and think each of them does some things better than the other, so I tend to switch between the two depending on my requirements.

I love the development add-on’s that I can get for Firefox so most of my design type browsing is performed on there. However, there is one thing that I would love to have seen on Firefox that Chrome does really well. The New Tab functionality in Chrome results in a webpage dashboard that lays out my most common websites, recent book marks and recently closed web pages all in an easy to read manner. I miss that the most in Firefox.

Well, obviously someone else did too, and there is now an experimental add-on called JumpStart for Firefox that does exactly that!

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Wednesday, June 10th, 2009 Productivity, Tips, Tutorials, Web Browsers 3 Comments

How to Install SkyDrive as a Network Drive via Gladinet (updated)

Recently I created a post (turned out to be one of the most popular on this site) to show how to install Live SkyDrive as a Network Drive using Gladinet.

At that time, Gladinet was still a Beta Program. Recently, they released Version 1 and there has been some significant changes to the instructions. I’ve now updated the post to properly reflect these changes.

I’m now using the free edition of Gladinet to connect to my SkyDrive, Google Apps and Google Picasa albums all via My Computer

Gladinet Live SkyDrive Folder

You can find the article here: Set Up Live SkyDrive as a Network Drive via Gladinet

Hope this helps everyone!

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How To Create Your Own Twitter Background

Sites such as Twitter and Facebook make it easy for everyday people to quickly get an online presence and start networking. The newest case is Twitter where practically everybody is micro-blogging.

Your profile page is like a shop window to others viewing you and people can spend hours perfecting their profile pages. Twitter, while having a nice set of clean templates built in already, also gives you the opportunity to personalize it.

There are a number of sites that has additional pre-made templates, but the fun of personalizing is giving you the choice to design your very own.

Online Designers

http://www.freetwitterdesigner.com

Design your own Twitter Background One of the best flash based Twitter background designers I’ve found so far. It has a limited selection of backgrounds templates, but that shouldn’t stop you from creating your own.

Supports adding shapes, images and texts and as each item is an “object”, these can be edited further to rotate and resize. It even has image filters to allow you to blend your images into your background easily.

Once the background is created, its a simple process to save the image and upload into Twitter. I love the preview feature and the ease of creating your own professional looking Twitter backgrounds.

http://www.twitbacks.com/

twitbacks.com Similar to FreeTwitterDesigner, Twitbacks allows you to choose from a wide range of pre-made backgrounds and apply your own personalization on them.

Twitbacks has a wizard type approach that asks you some questions to help fill out the profile area in the background. This is preferred by people who cannot work with a blank canvas.

The only gripe I had when playing with this site was the fact that you need to create an “account” where your backgrounds will be saved to.

Offline Designers

Spoon Graphics

Spoon Graphics Link For the more graphically skilled in us, I would recommend Chris Spooner’s blog which has (amongst some excellent Photoshop tutorials) how to make you very own Twitter background using Adobe Photoshop.

This post also has some excellent design practices that you can follow when creating your own Twitter background.

Chris includes a PSD document that you can open in Photoshop as a starting point and offers step by step instructions on how he created his own Twitter background. As always, his tutorials are excellent and easily followed. It certainly gave me a lot of ideas on how to structure our designs so that they stand out from others.

Conclusion

I haven’t had a chance to design my Twitter page (http://www.twitter.com/newbtech) yet, but it will be on my list of things to do :) Feel free to link your twitter pages as comments so i can view your efforts!

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Monday, April 20th, 2009 Productivity, Tips, Tutorials, Twitter No Comments

Live SkyDrive – How To Set Up As Network Drive via Gladinet

SkyDrive and Gladinet

Updated: 3rd June 2009 – to cater for Gladinet moving out of Beta and changed instructions to use the free version with updated screenshots and instructions.

Recently I talked about Windows Live SkyDrive, a facility that allows you up to 25gigs of storage space for free. The storage space is available anywhere and while its an excellent facility, it can get cumbersome dealing with uploading files and working through the web based interface.

Ideally, you want to have a folder structure set up on your computer so that you can just navigate through your SkyDrive just like you do any of your other hard drives. Gladinet is a cloud based service that does just that. It brings online applications and storage to your local machine.

Gladinet is a fully featured service that allows for (amongst others):

  • Drive “mounting” (act of setting up an online storage like SkyDrive or Picasa or Google Docs as local hard drives)
  • A Cloud based desktop that enables users to use online applications to work on local files.
  • Task schedulers to cater for scheduled transfers of data (eg as backup)
  • Smart file transfers that allows for encryption, compression and reliability.
  • It allows you to upload images without resizing!! (If you use the web interface to upload images, they get resized automatically – this way it treats image files as data, so SkyDrive doesn’t resize or constrain the image in any way).

What we will do today is use Gladinet to “mount” our SkyDrive so that it is available on My Computer.

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Vixy.net – Download Videos From YouTube Easily

vixy.net - download videos from youtube easyVixy.net has been around for a number of years now and has been an excellent way to download youtube videos for offline viewing (or for viewing on portable devices such as your iPods).

It has a simple user interface and in a few simple steps, the user can grab a video, convert it to a number of formats and download onto their computer.

It supports conversions to the following formats:

  • AVI (Divx)
  • MOV
  • MP4 (for iPods and Sony PSP’s)
  • 3GP (for Mobiles)

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