I’m going to go a different way today than I normally do, and I’m going to post some news that I’ve been reading about in relation to the iPhone.  I know I usually post about tips and software, but I just can’t wait to get my hands on a new iPhone next week.  Today I’ve read about the new data plans that were announced by AT&T for the iPhone, and I wasn’t too surprised.  The cheapest plan is $69.99, which I expected, and that will be the one that I will be getting.  450 minutes a month is plenty for me.  I know I’m going to be using the internet and GPS functions of the iPhone more than what I’m going to be using the phone function.  The one thing that dissapoints me is that I would still have to pay money for text messages.  I’ve never been a texting person, but I was kind of thinking about starting to text with the iPhone.  It’s only an extra $5 a month for 200 text messages, which isn’t bad, but I’m not sure if I want to pay it.

The pricing of the iPhone was confusing at first when I read about it.  I had heard last month that the iPhone was going to be available for $199 for the 8GB version and $299 for the 16GB version.  Those prices are true, but if you are an existing AT&T customer and are not elligible for an upgrade yet, then you’ll have to pay $399 or $499 respectively.  I’m glad I just got a letter in the mail last week saying I was elligible for an upgrade.  Also, AT&T has announced that they will be selling the iPhone sometime in the future with a no-commitment option for $599 and $699 respectively.  I’m sure that is good news for those that don’t want to commit to a contract, but I’m not sure if I’d be willing to pay that price.

One last item of interest is a new guided tour that Apple has made available on their website.  It’s quite a long video, but it gives a very detailed tour of the new iPhone 3G.  If you’re interested in getting an iPhone, or if you are just curious about what it is, then I’d take a look at the video.  The video just makes me want to get one as soon as possible.

I’m hoping that where I live I will be able to get one on the day it comes out.  I will most likely not be able to get to the AT&T store until around closing time, but I’m hoping they will still have some in stock.  Is any one else out there planning on getting one?  If you have one of the current iPhones, how has it been?

I’ve been using VLC as an alternate media player for probably around a year now, but there is one feature that I had never noticed before, and that is the audio and video conversion feature.  Usually I use another program like Winff to convert my audio and video files, but if I happen to have VLC open, then I can just use that to do the conversion.  It’s really easy, and I’ll show you how to do it below.

1. First open your media file that you want to convert in VLC.
2. Now, pause the playback.
3. Click on File>Wizard…
4. A new window will open.  Make sure you select “Transcode/Save to file.”  Click Next.
   
5. Now, you will want to select “Existing playlist item” and it will show you your current media file in the box below.  Click Next.
   
6. Now, depending on if you are converting a video file or audio file you will need to select the correct option.  In the screenshot below, I’m showing the audio option with MP3 selected.  You can also choose to set the bitrate higher or lower.  Click Next.
   
7. You’ll now have to choose the Encapsulation format, which I just leave at the default, but if you know more about it then choose whatever you want.  Click Next.
   
8. Now, you’ll have to choose where to save the file.  Then when you are done, click finish.

Knowing this has really helped me to make quick media file conversions.  It’s a nice little feature of VLC that I don’t think is really well known.  If you have any questions, please post them in the comments below.

I thought now would be a good time to update my readers on the status of my blog.  A little while back I wrote that I was taking a break from blogging, and I would try to post every now and then.  Well, I have been trying to get myself to start blogging daily again, so expect to see at least one post a day Monday through Friday.  Something may happen that I won’t be able to post on a day because of how busy I am during the summer.

One of the reasons for me wanting to get back into blogging is because I am wanting to get one of the new iPhones coming out in two weeks.  I don’t have a lot of money being a college student, but I thought that I’d cash in on some of the money that I’ve made with my blog.  So I figured that I’d get back into blogging to help me make a little more money for a new iPhone.  Plus, I also am thinking about making a new blog dedicated to iPhone tips, or integrating it into this site.

I hope all of my readers are having a good summer.  I personally can’t wait to go back to college so I can have more time to write on my blog.  Remember to use the contact form to contact me with any questions or comments.

One option that I have missed in Firefox compared to Internet Explorer is the option to run a download instead of saving it to your hard drive.  This can be usefull if you are downloading a compressed file that you are going to uncompress anyways.  Then the left over compressed file that you downloaded is just taking up extra space.  It’s also usefull if you download an executable file that you are going to run right away.  The only problem is that Firefox doesn’t add this feature.

In order to get this feature in Firefox, you should download the OpenDownload addon.  This addon has not been updated for Firefox 3, but that is easily fixed by downloading the Nightly Tester Tools addon.  Once OpenDownload has been installed, it will add an option to your download dialogue.  When you try to download a file, you will be able to click on “Open with default Win32 application” to open the file.

Of course the files are downloaded to your temporary folder, but that can easily be cleaned out through a number of ways.  At least this way you won’t have files sitting around that you’ll probably end up forgetting about.  It’s definitely worth installing if you are a Firefox user.

I am constantly looking for ways to keep my harddrive clean so that I can always have space for new programs.  A lot of times I’ll just randomly download things, and I always forget to delete them.  I usually go through and delete a lot of things every few months, but I never check for duplicate files.  I noticed that a lot of space on my computer was actually being used by files that had been copied at least once.

Finding these duplicate files and deleting or moving them to another hard drive can save a lot of space.  Easy Duplicate File Finder makes it really easy to determine where these files are.  I ended up finding many gigs of space that were being taken up by duplicate files.  After deleting the duplicates, I had a lot more free space.

Using Easy Duplicate File Finder is easy.  All you have to do is add the locations that you want to scan, and it will do a number of tests on each file to determine if it is a duplicate.  It may take a while depending on how large your hard drive is, but it is definitely worth it if you are wanting to free up some space.

I’ve been looking around for a while for a desktop RSS reader that would synchronize with Google Reader.  I like being able to have all of my feeds accessible from anywhere with Google Reader, but I also like having my feeds downloaded into a client that I can check without having to visit a website.  Lately, I’ve been just subscribing to some of my more favorite feeds through Thunderbird so I can check them when I check my email.  I haven’t even been checking my Google Reader account for the past few weeks.  Now, I read about this desktop RSS reader called RSS Bandit over at Ghacks, which just released a new alpha version that synchronizes with Google Reader.

The RSS Bandit program looks like Outlook, which I’m not that familiar with, but it seems easy to use.  I’m not sure how often RSS Bandit synchronizes with Google Reader since I saw no option for it.  I had it do the initial synchronization, then I went through and marked my feeds as read.  Then I logged on to Google Reader, and it hadn’t been updated yet.  I’m assuming it will be updated in an hour or so.  I’m hoping that in the beta or the release version that it will have some way to change the rate at which it synchronizes with Google Reader.

Another feature worth noting is that you can share items with your Google Reader account by clicking on the share icon in the top left corner of each feed item.  However, I haven’t seen any way of starring an item, which I seem to use more than sharing.  Also, if you use the Newsgator online reader rather than Google Reader, it will also synchronize with that.

I’m definitely going to keep my eye on this program.  I’ll try it out to see how it works, but I’d definitely like to see some extra features added in.  I might just wait for a while until it is a little more stable to use it.

I haven’t taken the time yet to compile my own list of useful Firefox add-ons, but Online Education Database has made a nice article “100 Essential Firefox Add-Ons for Librarians.”  Now, I know there is probably a good chance that you aren’t a librarian, but the add-ons listed there could be used by anybody.  The list is sorted by category, so if you are looking for an organization add-on, then just head to the organization category.  I’m sure you’ll find something useful.  It’s better than weeding out the good and bad add-ons on the Firefox Add-on site.

Thanks to one of my readers for mentioning this.

If you have switched to Firefox 3 by now, which just released today, then you probably know about the new Awesome Bar.  The Awesome Bar is the term for the location bar in Firefox 3.  The Awesome Bar is great in my opinion.  I really like how you can search through bookmarks and history to find what you are looking for.  However, wouldn’t it be great if you could add Google search to it?

Searchery is a fairly new Firefox addon that is currently in experimental mode.  In order to download it, you must log in to the Firefox addon site.  Searchery adds the results from Google search and Amazon search to your Awesome Bar.  This really comes in handy when you are trying to remember the website address of a certain website.  If you start to type in a web address, it will list related addresses from Google search.  You could also perform searches through the Awesome Bar, and it will list the top results from Google and Amazon.

This is definitely one of my must have addons for Firefox 3.  I’ve been reading various articles about people not liking the Awesome Bar, but I’m not quite sure how it couldn’t be of use.  I think it is a great improvement over the old location bar.

Launchy has been my program launcher of choice for a long time now, and I really haven’t looked into the plugins that are available for it.  I decided to take a look around the forums of Launchy to see what plugins were available, and which ones looked interesting.  I came across a plugin called Yubby, which integrates the many commands from Yubnub into Launchy.

I had never bothered using Yubnub before since it seemed like a waste of time to me.  I still don’t use it that much, but some of the commands are interesting.  Yubnub has many commands that make it possible to make quick searches, or to convert files, etc.  This is all done through the internet.  You can think of it as a command line for the web.  Integrating this into Launchy really helps to give Launchy a much wider scale of interactivity with the internet.

The plugin is great, but I do have one issue that is quite a major one in my opinion.  The issue is when I type in a command that requires a URL, Launchy will think that the command is only a URL.  Therefore, Launchy will try to open the command as if it were a webpage.  I’ve started to look through the source code of Yubby, but I haven’t had much time to see if I can find the problem.  I’m thinking that it would be much easier to type the command, then press tab and type the URL.

If you are using Launchy, then I’d definitely recommend giving Yubby a try.  It would at least add to the possible commands that you have with Launchy, even if you wouldn’t use that many of them.

Recently, I have been having trouble with my right click context menu in Windows Vista.  It would take forever to load when I would right click on a file or folder.  The right click menu would work fine in other programs, but when right clicking a file or folder in Windows, it would take a lot longer than normal to load.  I figured that the reason for this was because many programs that I had installed had inserted their own entry into the context menu.  I didn’t want to have to go through and uninstall each of these programs since I still wanted them installed.

An easy way to take care of a slow right click context menu is to download and install ShellExView.  ShellExView will show you all kinds of different information, but the info that I was interested was just the “Context Menu” entries under Type.  If you go through each of these entries and disable them, you can figure out which one is causing the problem.  Don’t disable any that have to do with Microsoft or Windows.  I ended up disabling half of them first to see if that solved the problem.  In order to see the changes you’ll either have to restart Windows, or just restart explorer.exe.  Here is a great guide on restarting explorer.exe in Vista the easy way.

You may want to narrow it down to the one entry that is causing the problem and then re-enabling the rest of the entries, but I ended up just clearing out all of the entries that I didn’t need.  Now my right click menu is a lot faster.  There were a few entries that I couldn’t find in ShellExView to disable.  An example would be the RegToy entry, which I guess I could just uninstall since I don’t use it, but it would be nice to just disable it.  At least now I don’t have to wait for a minute to see my right click menu.