The Apple blog published a nice article explaining how to create free ringtones using only the Apple iTunes software. The only restriction of that method is that the song needs to reside on the hard drive of the user so that a ringtone can be created from it.

The method is pretty straightforward but requires a bit of manual work. Start by right-clicking the song in iTunes that you want to create a ringtone from and select Get Info from the context menu. Click on the Options tab in the new window and pick a start and stop time for the ringer. It has to be exactly 30 seconds or less so consider this. Click Ok when you are done.

Now right-click the song and select Convert Selection to AAC from the menu. Now open your iTunes music library and drag and drop the newly created song to another location on the hard drive and delete the song in the iTunes library.

continue reading "Create Free Ringtones In iTunes"

It’s been a good week with some great tips and tech articles around the place. Here where my favourites:

Take Back Control Over Your Right Click Menus

An article over on Make Use Of which I particularly  liked as I’ve been looking around for a application to do this for a while.

Philipp Lenssen’s Top Google Apps Tips

Some great tips for using Google’s applications and services like Google Docs, Gmail and search. 

continue reading "A Collection of Tips (Week 2)"

It seems that Lifehacker is having Ghacks week which I personally do not mind but the amount of articles that they referred to is stunning. I found reference to another blog that had a tutorial on how to change the default save format in Word 2007 from Docx to Doc.

I had some problems in the past when I saved documents in Word 2007 in docx format only to get cries for help of users who could not open the document because they were using a previous version of Word. I had the option to explain to them how they could open it (convert online or download the compatibility pack) or convert it to doc and send it to them again.

This happened several times and I finally decided to look for an option to change the default save format in Word. The article at Technix Update reminded me of that and I thought it would be nice to post the quick tutorial as well.

continue reading "Default To Doc in Word 2007"

A Flickr user can decided to protect the photos that he uploads to Flickr which has the effect that the a user who is trying to download a protected photo will end up with a gif called spaceball.gif instead of the real image. I’ve already shown how it is possible to avoid saving spaceball.gif images at Flickr. The method made use of the fact that the real location of the photo is referenced in the source code.

It’s not everyone’s favorite to crawl through source codes and I would like to introduce an easier way to achieve the same effect. I only tested it with Firefox 2 and Firefox 3, can’t really comment about the other browsers.

All you need to do is make use of the Page Info menu that can be accessed by right-clicking on the page with the image. Page Info has a media tab that lists all media files on that page including, yes you guessed that one right, the image that is being displayed on that page.

continue reading "Easier Way To Download Protected Photos At Flickr"

Experienced users love choice. I’m talking about the choice to turn on or off certain features that come with a product. It does not really matter if we are talking about software or hardware, choice can become important almost everywhere.

Most companies do not seem to think that giving the user choice is a wise thing to do. If you have ever installed a Windows operating system you probably know what I mean. But this article is less about Windows but about the general lack of choice in consumer products and one of the best examples that is affecting me day in day out is the blue blinking light of my Nokia N73 mobile phone.

The phone is starting to blink blue every five seconds or so if it is in sleep mode. Sleep mode has the advantage that the phone is using less battery. It is only possible to turn off the blue light if sleep mode is turned off which would mean that the battery of the phone would drain faster.

continue reading "Bad Choice: Giving The User No Choice"