Coutinho.net

By Erez Zukerman, Download Squad – April 26, 2010 at 10:00AM

Filed under: Business, Productivity, VoIP

“I want you to know this call is being recorded.” Those were the first words I told the service rep who picked up the phone at my ISP’s large call center (012.net, to any Israelis who may be reading this). Having tried resolving a basic problem with the service for two months now, I was beyond frustrated; I was desperate, at my wits’ end. My requests were repeatedly shot down, ignored, altered, or simply brushed off.

Every time I called the ISP I had to describe my problem anew, to a new representative; and the most frustrating thing was that I could not tell them, “but the previous guy told me that …”, because I had no way to prove it!

MP3 Skype Recorder completely changed things for me. Having started the conversation with those magic words (and making sure to get the rep’s name), things went amazingly smoothly. Within 13 minutes, my issue was resolved, and I was even recompensed for some of the trouble I went through.

MP3 Skype Recorder is freeware, and does not impose any limits on the duration of the call. The MP3s are low-quality by default, which is fine for a phone call; the entire 13-minute calls takes up only 2.5MB of disk space. The interface is sparse, but it definitely does work. Lee covered the program a while back, but versions released since offer better compression, fix sound quality problems (clipping and distortion), and are compatible with Skype 2.4. Oh, and the name has been changed.

Use MP3 Skype Recorder to defend yourself against faceless corporations originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 26 Apr 2010 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Skype – Voice over Internet Protocol – Download Squad – MP3 – Business

By Jason Kottke, kottke.org – April 26, 2010 at 08:16AM

The view is from one of the cameras close to the engines. The narration is great; you really get a sense of how many things had to be considered to make it to the Moon (like the launch pad paint that burned and charred in order to protect the underlying materials). (via df)

Tags: Apollo   Apollo 11   NASA   space   video

By Kevin Purdy, Lifehacker – April 26, 2010 at 06:00AM

The fate of your house, car, and Action Comics collection after your death can be planned for in legal documents. Your Gmail and Facebook accounts? That’s a bit murky. New legacy service Entrustet aims to help create legally sound post-mortem password vaults.

Entrustet offers a free account that lets you set up three unlimited password-protected accounts to be transferred over to a trust person upon your passing. How does it know when you’re gone? You assign a trusted person to be your Digital Executor, who will notify Entrustet and then provide a death certificate scan to activate the password conveyance upon your death. You can also assign your estate attorney to execute your Entrustet transfer upon your death, and the site offers up a few attorneys officially on board with Entrustet—though we imagine any savvy attorney can be conscripted for the duty. Additional security and ease-of-use features (for the executor and recipients, at least) are included with paid plans.

It’s a bit like previously mentioned Legacy Locker—it’s a smart idea, but those interested enough in their post-mortem web accounts likely will have their own scheme set up, rather than pay for Entrustet’s extra accounts and features. Still, there are other features to come, like an Account Incinerator, that you might find convenient when you’re not exactly in a position to fine-tune things.

Entrustet is free to sign up for and try out with a few accounts. Tell us the (general) details of your own plans for your online life after your passing in the comments.

By (author unknown), Dilbert Daily Strip – April 26, 2010 at 03:00AM

By (author unknown), Gizmag Emerging Technology Magazine – April 26, 2010 at 01:28AM

Mazda’s innovative i-stop engine-idling-stop system has won yet another award, this time at the lchimura Industrial Awards. While idling stop systems are now becoming commonplace due to the approximate 10% fuel savings they offer, conventional engine stop systems rely on a motor to restart the engine, whereas Mazda’s i-stop restarts the engine through combustion: fuel is directly injected into a cylinder while the engine is stopped and ignited to generate downward piston force. Mazda’s use of principles unique to the direct injection spark ignition (DISI) engine restarts the engine in just 0.35 seconds, about half the time of most other competing systems, while minimizing noise and vibration and drain on the batteries…
Continue Reading Mazda i-stop engine-idling-stop system wins another major award

Tags: Automotive,
Awards,
Fuel efficiency,
Mazda,
Society of Automotive Engineers

Related Articles:

• Mazda’s Smart Idle Stop System uses Direct Injection Engine Technology
• Mazda3 iStop puts engine in pause mode
• Mazda to licence Toyota Prius hybrid technology
• Mazda’s plans for a greener future
• Mazda to debut Sports Concept, Hydrogen Rotary Engine
• Automotive accolades for Bentley, Mazda And Fiat

By Jason Fitzpatrick, Lifehacker – April 25, 2010 at 03:00PM

It’s yard sale season and it’s a great time to buy entertaining essentials for cheap. Why serve your company on disposable wares when for the same expense and some yard sale hunting you could use funky china and retro glassware?

It’s that yard-sales-galore time of year again and a perfect opportunity to stock up on supplies to help you entertain this summer and throughout the year. Over at the design-on-a-dime blog I Like Merchant Ships, they’ve put together a list highlighting some of the great essentials you can pick up by shopping around at yard sales. Among their suggestions:

Mix and match dishes allow you to set an extra place (or five) without resorting to paper.

This $10 Meakin set [seen above] encouraged me to pick up blue-and-white in every pattern. White, of course, is always classic.

Napkins make any meal feel nicer. White goes with everything, but prints add fun to a basic table.

I paid 5-cents each for these restaurant napkins. I also pick up unopened packages of paper napkins to tuck in food baskets and meal deliveries.

Check out the full blog entry for tips on everything from budget friendly-seating to stocking up on throwaway containers for events where you might not want the hassle of hunting them down again—house-warming parties, funerals, etc.

Make sure to check out some of the previous resources we’ve reviewed to help you maximize your yard sale bounty, like Yard Sale Treasure Map and Gsalr. Before heading out you might also want to take a peek at the archives of our #cleveruses and #reuse tags to help you see yard sale finds in new light, like turning a beer cooler into a sous-vide cooker or a box of old slides into a privacy screen.

By John Herrman, Gizmodo – April 24, 2010 at 02:02PM

This week, Giz saw no less than two (two!) hard drive casualties befall our staff. So, in honor of Matt and Wilson’s data, hit up Lifehacker’s definitive guide for fixing, protecting, backing up and preserving that spinning data destroyer that lives inside your computer. Heed. More »

By Kevin Purdy, Lifehacker – April 24, 2010 at 12:00PM

You should never feel like your hard drive is holding out on you. Anyone should be able to back up, recover files, boot multiple systems, upgrade, or otherwise improve their storage space. These tips explain the possibilities and procedures.

Photo by limaoscarjuliet.

10. Quiet It Down

Over time, the moving parts and powered pieces that move your magnetic disks around at lightning speed will wear, age, and get noisy. In a desktop computer (a Windows PC, generally), you can quiet the drive with rubber shock absorbers or elastic suspension. Toting a laptop? NotebookReview has a good starter guide to cleaning your laptop, which reduces noise, removes dust, lowers temperatures, and gives your drive a bit more life—never a bad thing. (Original posts: Rubber shocks, elastic).

9. Erase It Entirely, the Right Way

There’s a huge range of tools that offer spy-agency-level data wiping—some of them are complete overkill. What software actually wipes the slate clean? Jason ran through them and picked out the good stuff, along with the physical, take-no-prisoners means of data destruction, in his advice on how to properly erase your physical media. If you need to pass on or reuse a disk, those apps and boot CDs will get you there. When you just need to make sure your credit card numbers are hidden forever, there’s always a hammer. No, seriously. Photo by scragz.

8. Make a Complete Image

Backups keep your data safe, but a complete image of your system on an external drive ensures that everything—applications, data, settings, wallpaper choice, the whole shot—make it back onto your system if things go wrong. Windows users can image their hard drives with DriveImage XML, a great free tool. Another free tool, SuperDuper, makes it easy, if not exactly quick, to mirror your entire Mac onto an external drive.

7. Convert It to an External Drive

Whether it’s an old desktop with a surprisingly large drive, or a laptop that’s getting an upgrade, you can save that once built-in storage and turn it into an external drive, one you can just plug in with a USB cable and use for backup, media storage, or whatever you need.

6. Visualize Your Usage to Free Up Space

The strangest stuff ends up clogging up your hard drive unnecessarily. Leftover files from CD rips, huge data folders from games, backup files for apps you don’t have installed—the list goes on. We’ve previously shown how to visualize your usage, but we updated with a new look at more simple tools for analyzing and freeing up space on your hard drive. Once you know what’s there, and how big it is, you can start toward getting rid of some of it.

5. Recover Files and Rescue Your System

When things go wrong with your hard drive, they usually go really wrong—lost files, no booting, and general panic ensues. Adam’s rundown recovering deleted files with free software, with a focus on Windows utilities, with a few cross-platform goodies sprinkled in. When you can’t get into your system, we heartily recommend a live Ubuntu thumb drive to grab files and fix things up, though a system rescue CD session can work wonders, too. When we put the call out, the answer that came back for the best recovery tool was Recuva, a Windows utility that can save files from hard drives, SD cards, iPods, and much more.

4. Install a Drive Yourself

Tech shops and laptop sellers will charge you a good bit over the parts cost to install a new, likely larger hard drive in a computer. Whether it’s a desktop, a MacBook, or an SSD drive, you can likely take an hour and tackle it yourself. Adam explained the desktop hard drive installation, while tech blogger Dwight Silverman has explained a MacBook hard drive upgrade. Each laptop is built differently, but if a solid-state drive is in your future, this tutorial on MacBook installation should give you some general guidance on the job. It’s a good skill to have, in general, because as Silverman writes, “Whatever you have now, it’s not enough. And when you add more, that won’t be enough, either.” (Original post: MacBook hard drive).

3. Dual-Boot Windows, Mac, and/or Linux

Just because your computer only came with one operating system doesn’t mean it has to stay that way. If you’re a Mac owner who’d like a little Windows time now and again, read up on Gina’s guide to setting up Boot Camp for Mac and Windows. If Windows 7 looks appealing, and a virtualized XP Mode isn’t quite enough oomph, you can still boot Windows 7 with XP or Vista, and just choose your Windows flavor at start-up. And if you’re keen on giving Linux a real go, why not dual boot it with Windows 7 in a way that makes it easy on both systems? It’s so nice when everybody at the (partition) table just gets along.

2. Upgrade It Without Re-Installing

Maybe you’ve settled on a spacious new hard drive for your laptop, a solid-state drive for durability, or just need to rescue your stuff before your drive goes. Time to re-install Windows, right? Not so much. Using the Clonezilla Live CD, it’s possible to upgrade to a spacious new hard drive without having to completely re-arrange your operating system and applications, and tediously transfer all your media over. It’s a step-by-step process, it’s fairly straightforward, and you get to trick Windows, somewhat, into believing that nothing ever happened, which can be its own reward.

1. Automatically Back It Up

Don’t sell your computer data short—even if your documents don’t seem all that important, the time you spent installing applications and putting everything in order is definitely worth saving. If you’ve got a good spare hard drive or a web space you can FTP into, you can set up automatic hard drive backup through Windows. Most folks, though, will want to go with one or both of two routes: online backup, for the entire-house-burns-down security, and/or offline backup, for speedy backups and convenient restoring. The best tools for doing so, when we asked, were Dropbox for online syncing—even though it’s not exactly proper backup—and Time Machine for external hard drive backups. For two solutions that make the process mostly painless and care-free, try web-based, automated systems like Mozy or Carbonite. Photo by miss karen.

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What’s the hard drive tool you’d rather not live without? What blog posts or tutorials showed you something new about your hard drive? Share the good stuff in the comments.

By Erica Ho, Lifehacker – April 23, 2010 at 06:00PM

The U.S. Foreign Service Institute teaches foreign languages to government diplomats and personnel for duties abroad—and its courses are available online, for free. Which means you can access audio, texts, and tests in 41 different languages.

The FSI Language Courses web site isn’t actually maintained by the U.S. government itself, but the materials developed before 1989 are within the public domain (whether all of these materials came before then is not clear). Some languages contain more materials—for instance, the three texts on Sinhala isn’t going to beat the giant course on French anytime soon. For the most part, most major languages have student texts in PDF format, and audio in MP3 format which you can later put onto your music player. The courses also feature tests to see how well you’ve covered the material. In some cases, “headstart” courses for certain regions in the world are also available.

The only major language not covered is English, which makes sense. The site is a little reminiscent of old-school language learning, but the resources are ridiculously extensive. As a native Vietnamese speaker, I didn’t find the section archaic at all. Adios, Rosetta Stone.

By Rich Whittle, Business Opportunities Weblog – April 23, 2010 at 03:31PM

Sometimes inventions just need a little push, a little publicity to get them noticed by the public or investors.

That’s why last year Inventors Digest launched Under the Radar, a section in the print version that features new and nascent inventions that have yet to take hold in the market. Precious few publications offer inventors of all stripes this type of opportunity.

Under the Radar has proved so popular that Inventors Digest is going to experiment and expand it, both online and in the print edition.

So here’s the deal – if you’re an inventor with a new product or prototype and want some international exposure, send a description and an image to info@inventorsdigest.com and they’ll see what they can do.

Note: disclosing your idea in public starts the clock on when you can file for a U.S. patent, and can derail foreign patent applications. When in doubt, check with your local inventor club or your patent attorney.

Photo by Photofunia.

From Business Opportunities Weblog.