Guest Blogger

MP3tag is a great tool for editing your music’s metadata (also known as ‘tags’). Despite the name, MP3tag can tag more than just MP3s, such as FLAC, AAC, OGG, and much more. The site gives a great short description of the program.

Mp3tag is a powerful and yet easy-to-use tool to edit metadata (ID3, Vorbis Comments and APE) of common audio formats. It can rename files based on the tag information, replace characters or words from tags and filenames, import/export tag information, create playlists and more. The program supports online freedb database lookups for selected files, allowing you to automatically gather proper tag information for select files or CDs.

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Have you ever forgotten your MySQL root password? It’s one of those things that just happens despite the numerous precautions one might take. As a result, you are locked out of your database server. You can’t create new databases and are left with little control over the state of your database server. In such situations knowing how to regain root access to your database server comes in handy. So here’s what you can do to reset the password for the root user in MySQL on both Windows and Linux. [click to continue...]

This guide provides some background info on Ajax, and then jumps right in and gets you started with examples. [click to continue...]

This tutorial will guide you through the steps required to set up everything in Windows XP to allow you to connect to an office (or other) VPN server. [click to continue...]

WinDirStat (short for Windows Directory Statistics) is a “disk usage viewer” that can help you visualize your used hard drive space. This allows you to track down which directories and file types are taking up the most space. Also, it’s a fun thing to see! You can download it here. WinDirStat runs on “all current variants” of Windows. [click to continue...]

SmartCam turns a Symbian Series 60 phone with bluetooth and camera into a webcam ready to use with your PC. It is open source software, licenced under the GPLv2 and will run on Linux or Windows. There are commercial applications that will do the same thing, but I believe in using and supporting free, open source software whenever possible. [click to continue...]

“A stitch in time saves nine”, goes an old saying. In the world of computers we refer to that stitch as backups. When running a production IT infrastructure, it is imperative that we achieve an uptime on our servers and applications of as close to a hundred percent as possible. While there are a number of ways to make an IT infrastructure solid, it is impossible to make it failure proof. So we make a plan B.

Servers are made of three broad layers - the hardware, the operating system and applications, and the data. In case of a hardware failure it is rather simple to replace the machine with a new one. Installing the operating system and applications too are relatively simple. The part that is hard to replace is the data and configuration that your applications use. In case of failure this is the part that can not be replaced. So we backup that data on a regular basis. We back it up in such a way that it becomes easy to retrieve in case of emergency. [click to continue...]

Apart from video games one of the great advantages of using computers is that they don’t seem to mind doing boring and repetitive tasks that we would rather not do. For monotonous tasks such as running daily backups we are better off scheduling them to run at a certain time every day, and do more interesting stuff with our time. Linux and UNIX usually come with the utility “crontab” by default. This very useful command allows you to schedule tasks to run at a specified time and repeat as configured. A task scheduled using “crontab” is called a “cron job”. [click to continue...]

Have you ever came across a .cbr or .cbz file? Well, these are basically .rar and .zip files that are meant to be used with comic reading programs. My favorite comic book reading program is CdisplayEX. It is an open source clone of an older program, CDisplay. [click to continue...]

If you have a Linux server running at your office or at a data center for which you are responsible, you want to maintain an uptime of as close to a hundred percent. In such a case you want to make sure you keep an eye on how the system is running. To be precise you want to monitor all the system resources that contribute to the system running fine which then results in a high uptime. Memory, CPU, disk usage… are some of the things you want to observe. We would usually use a combination of the tools that come with a Linux or UNIX installation, such as “free”, “top”, “vmstat”… I’ll introduce you to a tool that gives you just about all the info that the other tools combined give you, all under one roof - Dstat. The developer of this command line tool, Dag Wieers, calls it “a versatile replacement for vmstat, iostat, netstat and ifstat”. He adds that “Dstat overcomes some of their limitations and adds some extra features…” To me Dstat is the mother of all command line system monitoring tools. It’s simple to install, easy to use, can be tweaked with ease, and it generates reports that you can plot as a graph to impress your boss. [click to continue...]

TrueCrypt is a free, open source, system for establishing and maintaining an on-the-fly-encrypted filesystem. TrueCrypt is available for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X. Encrypted volumes can be used with any supported OS regardless of which OS they were created on. [click to continue...]

This tutorial will guide you through turning your N95 into a pedometer using the Nokia Step Counter. [click to continue...]

I recently made the switch from 32 bit Vista to 64 bit. Mostly everything went just as smoothly as my old 32 bit OS, but there were a few hiccups. For example, previously mentioned WinSecret no longer had the option for hiding shortcut arrows! This may seem like a small thing, but Vista’s shortcut arrows take up about 3/4th of the actual icon sometimes. [click to continue...]

I covered making your own ringtones from MP3s in a previous article, but for a truly unique ringtone, you can use Open Source (free) audio editor Audacity to record your own homemade ringtones. If you phone allows each contact to have its own ringtone then you can have your kids or friends record their own special ringtone for you and know who is calling without looking at your phone. [click to continue...]