Music and Videos

There are quite a few applications out there which claim to allow you to ‘backup your iPod’ but most of them (like Yet Another iPod Manager AKA Yamipod and SharePod) haven’t been updated in a while and either didn’t work for me, or didn’t work with the later versions of the iPod (e.g. 3rd gen Nanos).

In the end, the easiest solution I’ve found is to use a copy of WinAmp.  You only need the free version, you shouldn’t need any plugins.  Just download, run, connect your iPod, select the tracks, right-click and select ‘copy to local media’ and voila, job done.  Note that you can set the location is copies to in the preferences (it defaults to your My Music folder).

Quick, simple and fairly painless.

Photos

Photos are another matter, for two reasons.  One, I haven’t found a free solution to copy them, all the software I’ve seen is shareware.  Second, unless you selected the option to copy the originals over, you’ve probably only got thumbnails (small versions) of the images that are designed to be displayed on the small iPod screen and therefore don’t need to be very big, so you may only get postage-stamp-size images even if you do retrieve them.

Conclusion

The main points are that you can copy your music and videos easily, but photos you’ll need to pay for.  Perhaps the best recommendation is it’s much easier just to back up your music, videos, photos and anything else before you need to rely on your iPod.  External hard drives are pretty cheap and you can get a few GB of storage online for free from a number of different providers, so make use of it and save yourself the agro.

There are a number of different options for connecting your PC depending on what ports you have available.  Listed below are the most common options for picture and sound.

It’s also worth noting that if your PC doesn’t come with one of these connections you can buy after-market cards to fit to your PC which have the relevant port.

Picture

Some connections include both video and audio signals so you get pictures and sound, but two of the most common options don’t, and you may still want to have separate connections to allow things like digital audio into a separate device, such as an amplifier (not covered here).

VGA

The VGA port is probably the most popular type of display connector that is available on PCs.  The quality is inferior to DVI, so if you have both, use the DVI port, and fewer TVs are likely to have a connector, but it’s likely to be the port present on any older PCs.

Assuming you have a port on your TV (it’s usually used for a PC source) you just need a standard VGA cable to connect to your TV.  This port does not carry sound so you’ll need a separate cable to carry sound depending on what your PC and TV offer.  See the Sound section below.

DVI

DVI is the replacement for the older VGA connector and is typically present on most new PCs.  This is a digital connection so offers higher quality than VGA, so use this one if you have both.

Few TVs have a DVI port to plug in to, but DVI-to-HDMI cables, which have a DVI connector on one end and an HDMI connector on the other, are readily available.

DVI ports don’t carry sound, so you’ll need a separate cable to carry the audio signal.  See the Sound section below.

HDMI

HDMI is the replacement for the older SCART connection used to connect most entertainment devices to modern TVs.  It’s the primary cable used for high definition signals.  HDMI ports are slowly becoming commonplace on newer PCs and are the best way to connect to your TV if available.

Aside from a good range of compatibility with modern TVs, HDMI also carries sound so you don’t need two cables.  HDMI is capable of carrying multi-channel surround sound signals.  Having said that, not all graphics cards support sound output via HDMI, so, as you can see above, sometimes you need to use an RCA (or more commonly a headphone-to-RCA) cable to connect the sound separately.

Other Options

There are a a couple of other options, although they’re typically older formats or specialist and are unlikely to be fitted to your PC as standard, these include composite video and S-Video.

Sound

Depending on your video connection you may require a separate cable to carry sound, most commonly this means one of the two options below, which don’t support multi-channel surround sound. There are also a few other options, such as S/PDIF.

TRS (3.5 mm headphone jack)

The standard 3.5 mm headphone socket is more accurately called a TRS socket.  On your PC it’s what your speaker/headphone socket is.  TVs often use this to carry sound for DVI or VGA, all you need is a male-to-male cable (sometimes included with the speakers on your PC) plugged into your speaker socket on the PC and the socket that accompanies whichever video connector socket your are using on your TV.

RCA

RCA connections are the white and red connections commonly found on stereo equipment.  They’re often teamed with a yellow composite video connector.  Typically you won’t have RCA connections on your PC, but you can get 3.5 mm headphone (TRS) to RCA cables which will then plug in to your TV.

I thought I would highlight them in case they benefit others.

Text Editing

Notepad has been a great servant and is useful for jotting down quick ideas, using as a visual clipboard, using as a middle-man when trying to remove formatting on text the Windows seems determined to hang on to for no reason but you either have to have multiple copies open or end up with a really large document. 

There are plenty of alternatives out there and I’ve tried various applications but my (current) favourite is the awesome Notepad++.

Aside from a tabbed interface that means you can have multiple documents open it has line numbering, syntax highlighting, useful find and replace functions and host of other nifty features.  I use it every day.

Shortcuts

I used to use AutoHotKey for everything, it’s very powerful, you can use it to do almost anything.  I had shortcuts to launch applications, replace text, open my optical drive, control iTunes and you can even build applications with it.

The only issue is that it means coding all of it by putting in the relevant commands in a script file and that gets old.  So, recently I have switch to two applications: Texter (for text replacement) and HotKeyz (for application launching, etc).

Ironically, Texter is written using AutoHotKey, but it adds a nice front end, some management and generally makes AHK easier to use for text replacement.  From email signatures to email addresses I use it so I can use small keywords to fill in often-used text.

HotKeyz allows you to assign hotkeys to trigger specific events (I mainly use it for launching applications, for example, I have Win + C to open Calculator).  Setup quick hotkey combinations for often used applications and save searching for them in the start menu.

Desktop Control

I like having my applications in a certain order on my taskbar, it means I find them faster when I’m switching between them, and being able to reorder at any time means that, if you’re switching between applications for some reason, you can just drag them to be next to each other.  For that reason, I use Taskbar Shuffle.

Password Management

We’re all getting bombarded with more and more passwords to remember.  Even if you can set them all to be the same (unlikely and not recommended) you have to remember the usernames, which is where the excellent KeePass comes in.  It’ll store all that info, and more, securely and there’s plenty of options for easily using them again.

Web Browser

IE has come on with version 8, but it’s still behind and Chrome is still lacking extension support so, for the time being at least, Firefox with add-ons rules the roost.

The add-ons I use are:

• Tab Mix Plus – all the options that should be included in FF with regards to how tabs behave.
• Context Search – Select a word or phrase on the page, right-click and pick any of the search options from the quick search box to use to search for the work.
• Download Statusbar – a much better download manager.
• Fetch Text URL – highlight an unlinked plain text URL and select to open in a new/same tab, which saves copying and pasting into the address bar.
• Firebug (probably only for web developers) – web development helper.
• Web Developer (again, probably only for web developers) – various tools for web development.

I’m also a big fan of Smart keywords, which are a quick way to search sites from the address bar (so I type ‘w my search phrase’ and it searches Wikipedia, no need to change to the quick search box and pick the right site from the dropdown).

Portable Versions

If you’re unable to install applications (at work, for example) then all of these have versions or options that allow them to be run without being installed so you could run them off a USB stick.  If they’re not available from the developer’s site you can usually find them at sites like PortableApps.com and Pendriveapps.com.

cat /proc/bus/input/devices

in a terminal window.

After a lot of searching I found a post that indicated removing and ‘finding’ the mouse made it display as the ALPS touchpad that it is:

sudo rmmod psmouse
sudo modprobe psmouse

The only problem was it meant doing this each time.

I couldn’t find anywhere to add this as an automated solution, but some suggestions made me check my BIOS and I found an option to disable legacy support for USB devices and voila, the touchpad was recognised on boot (so presumably the legacy support meant it was treating it is a normal mouse, or was cutting in before the USB drivers).

So, quick tip in case it comes in useful, if removing and installing the mouse works, check your BIOS and switch off legacy and PS/2 support and see if that solves it.

I’d also add it’s worth checking if your company has any deals. Microsoft, for example, often offers deals to employees of companies on some of its schemes.

Some simple tips that should be easy to implement are:

• CSS: Using every declaration just once
• Properly include stylesheets and scripts
• Reducing the file size of HTML documents
• HTTP caching

In fact, I’m contemplating going back to HTML after having been an XHTML convert for many years (a growing trend it seems, not XHTML 2 seems to be dead and HTML 5 looks like the future king).

In the end, my problem came down to me using a SATA hard disk and a PATA/IDE DVD-RW drive. Changing the setup in the BIOS from AHCI to SATA didn’t make any difference, and the DVD-RW drive was found in the BIOS no problem, but no matter what I used I couldn’t get past the driver request, I couldn’t load it from any of the OS disks I had.

In the end, simply swapping over to use a SATA DVD-RW drive worked and I was able to install it, so it looks like it might have been an issue using PATA and SATA together.

By that I mean open two explorer windows next to each other, one with the source directory, the other with the target directory and simple drag the files/folders from the source to the target.

Seemed to work for me when all else failed (mind you, up to them I did toggle UAC back on — some have said switching it on or off, basically reverse what you have — and I also made myself the owner with Full Control of the folder, these may also have played a part).

In the end comments from this forum post helped me, essentially I went with:

• WAN connection type: Dynamic/Fixed IP (1483 Bridge)
• IP asigned by ISP: yes
• VPI: 0 and VCI: 101
• Encapsulation: LLC

This doesn’t require a username and password and connected OK.

Note: You may need to leave it 20/40 mins for the DHCP lease to run out (if you have just switched from another router that was connected) and assign an IP address, but I didn’t.