Romey has a question for us:

Hi Matt. I have some teaching CDs I want to make a copy of. When I copy them my computer won't play them as it asks for the original disc. Is there a program that will override this problem? Thanks if you can help.

Copying game or program CDs and DVDs is more complicated than copying music CDs as you need an exact copy not just a rewrite of the data
Some commercial discs have copy protection built in so if the burned copy isn't an exact replica the burned disc might not work correctly – I suspect this is what is happening to you.

Obviously there are copyright issues to consider here
Some people make back-up copies of discs they own to protect the originals from scratches and damage and that seems fair to me

Do you have access to the originals discs?
So to copy them successfully you need to do so in a particular way that makes a bit by bit copy of the disc
Usually the easy way is to make an exact ‘image’ of the disc and then burn that image to another disc. This is similar to the discussion we have had about using Acronis True Image and other ways to Back-up your system

There are specialised programs for making images. I Like ImgBurn and Daemon Tools

According to their website:

ImgBurn is a lightweight CD / DVD / HD DVD / Blu-ray burning application that everyone should have in their toolkit!

 

It has several 'Modes', each one for performing a different task:

• Read - Read a disc to an image file
• Build - Create an image file from files on your computer or network - or you can write the files directly to a disc
• Write - Write an image file to a disc

So you can use this free program to copy a disc to your computer as an image file and then write the image to another disc as a backup. It is a very powerful program and the ‘deep geeks’ swear by it. But is is easy enough to use for beginners and the help and user forums are available too. Did I mention ImgBurn is small to download an free!

Here is tutorial on how to make an image using ImgBurn copied from www.ehow.com 
How to Build an Image File With ImgBurn

Step1 - Download and install ImgBurn from its official website. You can choose from a variety of download sites, and the installation file's relatively small, so it shouldn't take long to save.

Step2 - Launch ImgBurn. Unless you changed its installation settings, you can find ImgBurn shortcuts on your desktop, in its Start Menu "Programs" folder or in the Quick Launch menu.

Step3 - Choose either "Create Image File from Disc" or "Create Image File from Files and Folders" from the opening screen of options. Pick the first if you're building an image from a DVD and the second if you're building one from video files on your hard drive.

Step4 - Pick the drive holding your DVD from the "Source" drop-down menu. ImgBurn automatically chooses what it thinks is the right one, but if you've got more than one, you may need to manually pick the drive.

Step5 - Click the folder icon next to the "Destination" field and choose where ImgBurn will save the finished image file.

Step6 - Press the big button showing two DVD discs to read the DVD and begin building the image file.

Burning an image file to disc is just as easy. For more tutorials & guides refer to the  ImgBurn Forum

The only thing that ImgBurn doesn’t do is ‘mount’ an image to your PC. Mounting an image is basically a way to ‘trick’ your PC with software into thinking that the image file is actually a physical Disc in an extra CD/DVD drive. The extra drive with a new drive letter will pop up and interact with Windows in the same way your physical CD/DVD drive does. Using images and mounting them is actually a good way to store Discs you access regularly as it is much faster than waiting for the CD to spin in your physical drive.

I have recently started using Daemon Tools lite which is very good and free
http://www.daemon-tools.cc
Download
http://www.daemon-tools.cc/downloads

 

You can use Daemon Tools to make an image file, or you can stick with ImgBurn for creation. Once you have an image file use Daemon Tools to mount the image. Basically just run the program and click File-Open and select your image file. If you open My Computer you will find your ‘new’ drive ready to go.

So hopefully that answers Romey’s question. Does anyone use the programs above or some alternatives. Have you had any success making image files in the past? Would you like to know more? Then leave us a comment on the site using our brand new comment section. Thanks :)

I like Twitter and I follow quite a few people on it. I was explaining quickly to Janelle how it works and here’s what I wrote

Twitter is like Facebook status messages and Instant Messaging rolled into one
You can post what you are doing and see what others are doing

If you want to send a message particularly to someone's attention you type their name in preceded by the @
So to send to me or notify me particularly you type @noblejoker in your message
You can do that with anyone - you don't have to be 'following' them to send the tweet message.
I see though that you are following me and I am following you so whatever you write to anyone (@someone) or to no one I should see

You will also see people retweet
That is usually done as rt @name where the rt stands for retweet.
So lets say I write "something cool" and you want everyone following you to see it you then retweet my tweet like this:
”rt @noblejoker something cool”

Do you Twitter?if so send me a message and feel free to follow me

Matt aka Noblejoker on Twitter

From Pogue’s Posts. He discussed Mobile phone manufacturers unifying their power chargers. I hope they unify the other jacks too – earphones specifically. And why does it take till 2012? Anyway – a good move.

Who wants to bet Apple doesn’t change real quick? A safe bet I reckon

It’s also going to change. The GSM Association (a cellphone-company trade group) announced this week that its members have agreed to settle on a single, standard charger design for all cellphones—MicroUSB—and will aim for January 1, 2012 as the deadline (http://bit.ly/f9xqG).

So far, companies like AT&T, LG, Motorola, Nokia, Orange, Qualcomm, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, T-Mobile and Vodafone have signed the agreement. (It’s not clear to me whether non-GSM carriers like Verizon and Sprint will be part of this deal.)

But when you contemplate all the pointless, duplicated manufacturing, shipping, packaging and discarding of all those 51,000 tons of crummy black power bricks every year, this is the best news we gadget freaks have heard in a long time.

Hi all

Just a quick post to tell you I have updated the website. If you receive these notes via email only then I encourage you to click the link and go through to the webpage for a look.

www.mulligrubs.miltonulladulla.com

I have simplified the page style/theme quite a bit and given us a new header logo – the style probably looks a little familiar :)

The cool thing I added is called a revolving Tag Cloud. It’s on the top right hand side and it’s hard to describe so just go to the website and see. If you move your mouse over the ‘jumble’ of words they spin around. Click on any word to read the articles we have written on that topic/subject.

I have also tweaked a few settings for things like the commenting. You can read any article on the page and then click to leave a comment. Comments can be anonymous or you can leave details. If you use Facebook the comments system can even access your details and link it to your Facebook account and the comment will then show up as an action/activity on your Facebook profile.

And last but not least the Chat gadget is back too. If you are ever stuck on a problem then just go to the homepage and scroll down on the right hand side to the ‘Ask For Help’ section. If I am online the green light will be on and you can send me an Instant Message immediately. If I am awake I will reply immediately – well probably.

So check out the new page and please leave me a comment on what you think of it. Even if you don’t like something or you think it is too complicated or loads too slowly or whatever – fire away I want to know. Thanks

I found a site offering free Training Manuals and Reference guides for Microsoft Office.

MS Office Training at MouseTraining.co.uk

Just click the link to go to their site. You can download training manuals for all the programs in Office including Word and Excel for all versions from Office 2000, XP, 2003. For the most current Office 2007 there are manuals for Excel and PowerPoint and Reference Guides for the other programs – I guess they had to hold something back to make money out of!

I haven’t examined them closely but they seem to be ok and you can’t argue with Free!

In case they ever remove them I have archived a copy of the 2003 & 2007 files. They are stored at Box.net – see below:

Here is a follow up to a few things discussed at the January Mullies meeting

Broadband Pricing and Plans available in Ulladulla area

As always the Whirlpool Broadband Choice site is the place to compare your options. As discussed ADSL 2 plans are available now from Telstra and companies reselling Telstra services. The really competitive prices available in Metro areas aren’t here yet though.

Blu-Ray Disc Players/Burners

Someone asked about Blu-Ray discs. Blu-Ray discs (BD) are the new format of discs that can hold a lot more data than DVDs. Here’s the comparison:

	Single Layer	Dual Layer
CD	700mb	n/a
DVD	4.7gb	8.5gb
Blu-Ray	25gb	50gb

More details at Wikipedia 

So as you can see the capacity of Blu-Ray discs is 10 times that of DVD. The extra capacity is needed for true High Definition pictures and sound on your home theatre and is also useful for backing up a computer where the extra storage means more per disc.

Just like when DVD tech first came out the prices of the machines and media (discs) started out ridiculously high. Burners were over $1,000. Last night I suggested they were still $300 plus but got an ad email today offering BD/DVD burners (for desktop not laptop PC) for about $220 delivered. Laptop burners would be much more expensive. And note the actual discs are pretty dear too – Individual 25gb discs are over $10 each. 5 DVD discs are similar capacity for less than half this price but not as handy as having all in one. Like everything else in tech BD will rapidly become cheaper and more common, or is that more common and therefore cheaper :)

Downloading YouTube videos & Saving the Audio

Stan asked how to save the audio from YouTube videos. A quick search took me to the Digital Inspiration website – a great blog written by Amit. I am subscribed to his RSS feed and you might like to check it out. His post on how to accomplish Stan’s task is here: How To Rip Audio from YouTube Videos

He suggests using the Vixy.net website to save the audio directly from YouTube. You simply input the URL, wait for conversion (it takes a while), then click to download. just like the site we found the other night ListenToYouTube I found this a process a bit flaky.

Much easier to just download the video (as a FLV) and convert it to MP3. To download I use a FireFox extension called Video DownloadHelper. But there are any number of free download programs and extensions available.

As mentioned at Mullies over a year ago you can use KissYoutube to download right in your browser – basically you just type KISS into the YouTube Address url and it takes you to their site to download the video.

 

Once you have the video on your PC I recommend Format Factory to convert it. You can convert the FLV (Flash Video) file to another video format or to MP3 to capture the audio only. The Format Factory is free and is great for ripping DVD’s to video files, converting pictures to other formats, or converting videos for use on portable players, ipods or phones.

 

Portable Music/Video players

As discussed with Romey it can be very frustrating with dealing with portable devices. Some manufacturers insist on making you use their software to load songs/videos onto a device. Then the software they give you wants to take over, duplicates your whole song library and clogs up your PC. Some players of course do not do this which makes life much easier. You can just drag and drop files like it was a USB flash drive.

Apple and Samsung (Romey had a Samsung T9 player) are difficult culprits but with iPods being so common a number of programs can interact with them. The choices for Romey’s Samsung are a bit more limited. But I believe that MediaMonkey should do the trick. It is a far more user friendly and very powerful music player and manager. If you don’t need to deal with video (it doesn’t do video very well) then I highly recommend it over Windows Media Player or other proprietary players. It handles Podcasts and Internet radio too. Because of the extra functions like syncing contacts etc on my Apple iPhone I still use iTunes and am quite happy with it but that won’t help Romey. I recommend downloading MediaMonkey and giving it a try. it shouldn’t duplicate your song library and hopefully will make creating playlists and syncing them with the player much simpler.

As always if anyone needs a bit more help with anything we discussed on the night or mentioned here then fire back a question and we will do our best to sort you out.

Seems there was a small slip up with the Spam filters at Gmail HQ today.
More info at the Gmail Blog

I like the tone of these notes – sort of first person, friendly and helpful. Not what you expect as an official correspondence from a big company.

if you are a Gmail user like me then you should check your spam folder to make sure no ‘good’ messages went in due to the error. If you use Gmail through a desktop client (like Thunderbird) this means logging into the Gmail website to check. Probably not a bad idea to do that regularly anyway. Spam is deleted every 30 days so a quick check twice a month ought to keep you safe. Unless you are expecting something important that didn’t arrive!
No spam filter is perfect but in my experience Gmail doesn’t get many wrong either way. Not only is it the best spam filter I have ever used but it is also the best email system I have found – and it’s free! Even my custom email addresses are free using Google Apps for Your Domain.

If you do use Gmail online through your browser (and not through a desktop client) did you know that offline access is now available using Google Gears? It allows your email to work right in the browser (IE, Firefox, Chrome) even when you aren’t connected to the internet. It’s very handy and makes giving up Thunderbird or Outlook very easy now.

More details: Gmail Blog explains how it works and Lifehacker explains How Offline Gmail Decides Which Messages to Download