Blogging Rock Star

Recover Tunes From Your Apple iPod

September 4th, 2008 by Blogging Rock Star

Someday the hard drive on your computer will crash, stranding thousands of songs on your Apple iPod. Here’s how to get them back onto your Windows or Mac based PC.

1. Reinstall iTunes. Launch the app and sign in to your itunes music Store account. Don’t plug in your iPod yet.

2. Install and launch a free trial of Music Rescue or PodUtil from KennettNet software. The app will sit there idling, displaying a Waiting-for-iPods message.

3. Plug in your iPod. Music Rescue will detect it and display a window that shows the files and playlists on your ipod. Click the “Choose” button at the bottom of Music Rescue and select your iTunes music folder.

Next, click the “Copy Settings” button. In the dialog box that appears, select both “Add Tracks to iTunes” and “Rebuild Playlists.” Click “OK.”

4. Read the Don’t-Steal-Music warning in the lower right corner of Music Rescue. Think carefully. Click the “Copy” button below it.

5. Watch as Music Rescue copies your songs, videos, playlists, and podcasts back to your computer and then loads them into iTunes. Reauthorize your iTunes music store tracks. Done!

6. Happy? Hit the “Register now” button and send the site 10 British Pounds (about $18 USD).

For another method, you can do this with a third party application called “iPod to PC transfer“.

When your computer crashed, just recover your iPod video music to your computer or itunes directly. It’s really easy to use!

With iPod to PC transfer, you can transfer iPod/iPhone music, videos to your Windows PC and iTunes.

iPod to iTunes transfer can also transfer between iPod and iPhone, or among several iPods are also supported.

For Mac users there is also a similar one iPod to Mac Transfer which can helps you transfer iPod video, iPod music, podcast and TV shows from your iPod or iPhone to Mac.

Apart from that, it can add all these files from your iPod or iPhone to iTunes library. On the other hand, it is also Mac to iPod transfer, Mac to iPhone transfer software.

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Ways to Minimize Bandwidth Consumption

June 13th, 2008 by Blogging Rock Star

When trying to figure out how much bandwidth your website needs, the rule of thumb is:

[total size of website] x [number of visitors/month] = monthly bandwidth consumption

So, based on this formula, there are only two ways to reduce bandwidth consumption, either by the total size of website or by the number of visitors.

Since the purpose of having a website is to be seen by more people, reducing the number of visitors will not be a good measure for minimizing bandwidth consumption. That leaves reducing total website size.

So what can you do to reduce the size of your website?

1. Keep pages simple, limit rich web content

Rich web content (ie. images, flash, audio, video) is a good way to make your website more attractive, but these files burn out bandwidth fast. If you need to include all those rich content on your website, consider offloading onto different servers (ie. third-party storage sites). Read the rest of this entry »

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Access Denied

January 13th, 2008 by Blogging Rock Star

Web browser not working properly anymore? Pop-up windows and ads popping up from nowhere? Your computer could be infected.

Safe web surfing on the Internet continues to get harder every day. Although you can’t eliminate all of the risks, there are ways you can reduce potential dangers.

Anything you download from the Internet could be a threat but a few software programs are known for including spyware and adware.

With these safe web surfing tips and common sense you can avoid a lot of common problems, ie. the problems mentioned above.

Any file-sharing program is a big problem because the files come from several computers.

The first safe web surfing tip is stay away from file-sharing programs all together because this is a major source of computer problems today.

Another good safe web surfing tip is to be cautious about products that claim to be free. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Security + Spyware & Adware + Technology | No Comments »

Better Living Through Open Source

December 28th, 2007 by Sean

Open Source Living is a recently-established directory of open-source software.

Basically it’s stuff you can use without having to pay for it and without worrying about proprietary software issues.

Most of the criteria for inclusion in the Open Source Living revolve around the nature of the licensing for the product — it has to be freely redistributable, not discriminatory in its licensing, with source code available, etc.

To that end, the programs already listed in the Open Source Living Directory are something of a “who’s who” of open-source success stories: Firefox, OpenOffice, 7-Zip, and so on.

A fair number of Mac-specific open-source programs are also featured: Camino, Vienna, and NeoOffice.

The layout and design of the site are friendly and clean; it doesn’t look like something that was thrown together in an afternoon.

Check it out today!

Posted in Open Source + Software + Technology | No Comments »

What’s With Auto Email Forwarding?

September 28th, 2007 by Blogging Rock Star

Setting up different email accounts to automatically forward your emails from to a centralized email account is quite convenient.

With this type of setup you would only need to check your emails at one single email address.

Sure sounds great, right? I would have to disagree.

There are actually a lot of problems with automatic email forwarding.

Automated email forwarding causes a lot of spam issues.

Because auto email forwarding will forward all emails sent to an email address, it will forward all of its spam emails as well.

The recipient mail server will think that you are spamming them, when in fact, you are just passing the spam emails around.

This spam problem has caused many innocent email service providers to have their mail servers wrongfully listed as spam servers. Read the rest of this entry »

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