Computer Tips -Tech Info

Month: November 2008

  • Capturing Realmedia RM Streams to a file on Disk

    There is a lot of software out there that can capture realmedia online streams for a fee. I’ve found a way in linux to do the same without buying third party software.

    The main motivation for this is I discovered SBS (an Australian broadcaster) provides audio news programs (1 hour length) in a variety of different languages. And if you didn’t know studying languages is yet another hobby of mine.

    The problem is their streams are realmedia and meant to be listened to online. I’d rather listen to them using my portable mp3 player. I’ve talked about converting rm to mp3 in a previous post… now let’s look at capturing the rm stream.

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  • MPlayer Video Stream Lagging Audio

    On my (somewhat older) laptop, I’ve noticed that MPlayer sometimes gets the audio and video out of sync. The audio is moving faster than the video. I’ve noticed this in octoshape streaming as well as in playing standalone videos.

    I discovered a quick fix to this is to use the d hotkey on the keyboard. This toggles between frame dropping modes. By default mplayer tries to draw every frame it receives, but toggling to either framedropping enabled or framedropping hard can help keep the video up with the audio track. I’ve found this has made my octoshape streams usable again! (Usually I just make use of the framedropping enabled instead of the hard setting. (I haven’t investigated the difference between the two.)

  • Ever Heard of alphainventions.com?

    I noticed a lot of traffic from alphainventions.com to one of my sites today and took a look to see what it was.
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  • Huge Spam Operation Shut Down Thanks to TheSecurityFix

    Thank you Brian Krebs of the Security Fix. He has just made the internet a little better place. He’s worked for several months investigating a group that is believed to have been hosting provider for up to 75% of the Internet’s junk email as well as child porn websites, rogue anti-virus software and who knows what other slime. Great work Brian. He essentially contacted the service providers of the group in question and presented them with the evidence that he and others uncovered.

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  • Grisoft AVG Antivirus 7.5 on Windows XP False Positive that HURTS

    This looks like a REALLY bad false positive. It appears that AVG 7.5 for a short period of time detected user32.dll as a trojan horse. (trojan horse psw banker4). It looks as though update to the virus database VDB 270.9.0/1778 fixes the problem.

    Unfortunately if you have been bitten by this, you’ll need to boot into a Rescue or Repair Console and do the following (from the Link above)…

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  • Down for me or everyone?

    Ever had to determine if a site was really down or if it was just you that couldn’t reach it? If you have access to multiple computer networks you already have some ways to determine if it’s a problem with the site or just your connection, but…. there is a good online tool for that.

    Down for everyone or just me

  • Black Friday Deals at BlackFriday.info

    When I was browsing through Google trends the other day I ran across the phrase BlackFriday.info as a hot search term and my first thought was related to the stock market (historic drops in stock prices have been given the names “Black Tuesday” etc….) So, I was wondering if there were forecasts of YET another plummet of the markets. But as I started looking into it more it dawned on me they were talking about the OTHER Black Friday – the one the day after Thanksgiving. In the United States we celebrate Thanksgiving on the 4th Thursday of November and it creates a relatively long weekend. This long weekend has been seen as the start of the Christmas shopping season and they say that many retailers started considering the day after Thanksgiving as “black Friday” because it put their businesses in the black for the year.

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  • Google Analytics Feature Tease

    I just logged into my analytics account over at google and had a strange new view. It showed all the sites in my account with a summary of the code working, traffic up or down and percentage. It looked quite nice, so I tried changing the view so I could see all of my sites and …. it went away. I’m back to the old view. So, I started looking around and found this analytics blog post that talked about new features being rolled into the accounts. The new features include that new account management dashboard. I hope that returns soon to my account because I would LOVE to have a nice “at a glance” view of all my sites.

    I figured out what I was seeing – I have two google logins, both of which have access to my analytics account. One can see the new beta features, the other can’t.

  • Making a 1000BT crossover cable

    I’ve been using 1000BT switches here for a year or more now, but just today have I run across the need to make a crossover cable. Many 1000BT (*gigabit ethernet) devices support “auto-mdix” which basically means a direct interconnect no longer needs a crossover cable. However, some devices don’t do this and it looks as though the crossover style is a bit different than that of the older 10/100 cables. (Since all 4 pairs are used, all four pairs have to be reversed…)

    Anyway, here is the page I used as a model.

    Essentially one end of the cable is white-orange/orange white-green/blue white-blue/green white-brown/brown and the other end is white-green/green white-orange/white-brown brown/orange blue/white-blue (I haven’t tested this yet – will update when that’s done.) Although – that seems to be backed up by this wikipedia page.