Kinda Lame » hack

Not Lame: Restoring Your Winamp Back After An Upgrade or Recovery

admin — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 02:42:15 +0000

If you were anything like me you once managed your music collection with something other than iTunes in Windows (Windows XP specifically). Personally my favorite music tool was Winamp – I had plug-ins of all types and a giant history of played songs that I didn’t want to lose. Too long have I used iTunes because I had to sync my library with my iPhone – it’s way too limiting to use under Windows.

Recently I upgraded to a new machine with Windows 7. Before my last crash I made a copy of my Winamp folder (from C:\Program Files\) onto my media drive. I’ve been using iTunes now for months and have decided that Winamp needs to return to my desktop. As my machine is the home theater machine you sometimes just need a program that works and one that makes it easy to control the flow of music and the Winamp developers have always understood this concept. You can use the Jump to File to plan your next few songs, the visualizer to just black out the TV to hide the player controls (and wow some), but I digress.

This method of restoring your Winamp folder is pretty simple and will restore your media library, top played songs, custom playlists and more. You can restore to higer versions within the version 5 series of Winamp if that was your last backup version as well. The trick to a seamless upgrade/restore is to keep your media in the drive tree (My Computer) at the same location. If you have all or most of your media on a separate drive then this should be easy – as on either an upgrade or a fresh install – you can easily make that drive have the same letter (unless you’ve somehow had a media drive on C:\ ?). After installing Windows 7 on my fresh machine I simply put my media drive back at S:\ by going to Computer Management and then Disk Management (as with Windows XP, 2000, Vista).

So now we’re assuming you have backed up your old Winamp folder, somewhere, on a thumb drive, separate drive, or in Windows Backup somewhere to media.

*Get a copy of Winamp (stay in the same version series, try upgrading from there – this written for version 5 series).

*Install Winamp (from Website) – On Windows 7 64-bit Winamp wants to install to the x86 version of the Program Files Folder. I changed this to the default (C:\Program Files\) folder that Winamp might expect from my previous install on Windows XP. I installed everything, but we’ll do it again so skip the Winamp Remote program on this round should you desire to download and install it. Do not run Winamp on exit of the install process.

* Navigate Windows Explorer (Win+E) to the Winamp install folder (C:\Program Files\Winamp) and delete all the files.

* Restore your copy of the Winamp folder to the Winamp install folder. You can copy the contents into this folder or the Winamp folder into the Program Files directory. If you have backed the program directory up on a backup media and can selectively install or extract that folder try to get it to land here or move it here.

* Launch Winamp. Don’t use any desktop or other icons – navigate directly to the Winamp install folder.
Install Winamp – Install the latest version again to the folder we have installed to, deleted and pasted into.
Launch Winamp.

* ???

* Profit

Now you have the current version with your existing media library. If you have migrated over to iTunes and want to move to or restore a old Winamp install like I did you can import your media library over from iTunes in Winamp 5.56, the current version as of this writing, by using the menu option once you have the media library window open. I went to my top played and clicked on the number one song and it instantly played (rather was queued and then played as that was my default for parties).

Hack: Cleaning Up Your Gmail Account In A Few Simple Steps

admin — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 19:17:25 +0000

It seems that over time I’ve collected over 20,000 Gmail “conversations” and until today had 1,800 unread e-mails in my inbox. Who knows how many “read” e-mails I might have had. When I first opened the account in 2004 I was very diligent when it came to cleaning the inbox up, archiving, staring, and so forth. I rarely deleted e-mails as there seems to be no reason to with Gmail (The footer reads: You are currently using 976 MB (13%) of your 7367 MB). Alas what started as a dedicated mail trap has moved on to become the catch-all mailbox. And why not? It is so easy to search and manage that there is no reason to continually archive and delete. Something had to be done though when I linked Gmail to my iPhone.

I was rarely checking e-mail, up until a year ago, as it wasn’t a source of communication for me. I was e-mailing assignments to teachers (before I graduated from the diploma mill) and getting newsletters and so forth when I started this account. Now everyone is using e-mail and I get quite a few important updates such as Facebook notifications, etc. But that was just coming in too fast, and I wasn’t good about “deleting” stuff. If you click a link an in e-mail on the iPhone you are taken right to Safari and will likely not go back an archive the message when you get the next chance to do so.

The problem I had was that I like to use the “unread” status, rather keeping things unread, to know that I need to follow up on an item (notorious one at this point is the reminder to file my tax returns!). This works for Outlook at work as you can create a search folder that displays just those unread e-mails – I don’t see a way to do that with Gmail on the iPhone (though I have an idea for how to do so with labels!).

So I needed to clean everything up. Turns out it was an easy process. I started by searching for things that seem to flood my “inbox” but that would have taken hours to find each Crate and Barrel, The Onion, Border Rewards and Facebook e-mail that was ever sent to me.

Instead I did the following:

Searched using the following: label:inbox label:read

Selected all (using the Select: All, None, Read, Unread, Starred, Unstarred shortcuts). Then continuted to select more using the “Select all conversations that match this search” option.

Hit the archive button, confirming I wanted to archive each and every one of those suckers.

Profit!
(Though you’ll notice there is an extra step in there – it can be done differently, but it wasn’t allowing me to archive every one using Select: Unread.)

Then to clean up my unread e-mails:

Starred those 10 e-mails that are sitting there as reminders.

Searched: label:inbox -is:starred
(Notice the minus sign in front of the “is:starred”, this will perform an inverse selection)
“Select all conversations that match this search”

Hit the archive button, confirming I wanted to archive each and every one of those suckers.

Profit!

Now I have 10 e-mails sitting in my inbox that I can easily scan over and the unread reminders are no longer spread out with 25 read pieces of junk in between. Very much for the win. Now I just have to keep up on it. But using the above steps I can just go back maybe once a month and perform some clean up when needed, in just a few minutes (if even a whole minute).

UPDATE: Check out this nifty list of Gmail search terms that could make your (e-mail) life easier.

Lame: After Updating to Firmware 3.0 You’ll See iPhone sync error 13019

admin — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 03:09:02 +0000

If you recently updated to the iPhone 3.0 firmware you may find that you can’t sync your iPhone in Windows (reports coming in from Windows 7, Vista and XP) without receiving an error. The sync is automatic after the update, and the lame part is that when it fails it will make all your media invisible to you in the iPod app.

Luckily there is a solution to this fail other than restoring from a backup (lengthy) or just throwing your Jesus Phone away:

Heres how to fix.

Unsync your music/videos or whatever isnt going onto your iphone/itouch by plugging in your device and unchecking the sync box within each multimedia tab then click apply. Let the device sync then once completed reconnect your device check all your sync tabs that you want and sync again. This should resolve the problems and sync your files.

It should only be your music and videos and some podcast that dont sync at the start but this description should fix the error 13019.

via Apple – Support – Discussions – Iphone sync error 13019? ….