tech tips

the aim of this page is to offer up some tech tips that i find quite useful. it's always good to share your information with your friends. if you have any special tips that you want to share, let me know and i'll put 'em up here.

cd mastering software

with the advent of the cd burner and now the dvd burner, creating your own compilation cd has never been easier. i'm a big fan of ripping and mixing my own music. here are the tools i use and recomend for the task:

• Roxio's Easy CD Creator 5 Platinum
- by far the most popular cd mastering software available.
• Ahead Software's Nero Burning Rom
- very powerful cd mastering software. gives you greater control on the burn than easy cd creator.
• Jackie Franck's Audiograbber
- my favourite cd ripper. couple this with the lame encoder and you'll be creating high quality mp3's.
• Exact Audio Copy
- simply the best audio extractor for the windows platform.
• Elaborate Bytes Clone CD
- by far the best software to create perfect copy's of your cd's for backup purposes of course.
• LAME MP3 encoder
- the fastest and best mp3 encoder available on the net when it comes to high bit rate rips.
• WinAmp MP3 Player
- the best and easiest to use mp3 player available. highly skinnable as well.
• Plextor PlexWriter W4012TA
- my burner of choice. plextor is the undisputed champion of cd-r/cd-rw hardware. and man this puppy is fast.
• Gnotella file sharing client for the Gnutella network - how else are you going to find those 'hard to find' mps on the 'net?

pop-up ads on the internet

these are my worst enemy. there is nothing worse then these stupid pop ups when you hit a web site. some of them pop on top of the browser, some of them under, some of them when you leave the site or close down your browser. it's a hell of a pain in the ass. one solution is to turn off javascript entirely but this usually means you can't surf anywhere since most sites heavily use javascript. the best solution i've found so far is to use a combination of the following three applications:

• PopUp Killer by xFX JumpStart
• NoAds by WinMeta
• Ad-Aware by LavaSoft

these are all FREE applications which is always nice.

popup killer is very good at destroying pop up ads. it can also learn in a smart mode which pop ups you don't like. their web site maintains a list of known pop up ads that you can download to be used by the software. noads can also kill pop ups, but not as well as popup killer. noads is very good at stopping flash ads inside your browser. you know those ones that appear in-line in the web page. very annoying. ad-aware is an excellent software program to clean your system of ad-tracking software and cookies that are placed on your system while you browse (yes this does happen). the combination of these three applications will keep your system pretty damn clean.

it's a nasty world out there - let's do our part to clean it up. if you have any questions about how i use these products, feel free to drop me a line.

go a suggestion?

do you have any great tips to suggest? let me know and i'll put them up here for everyone to read about. feel free to give me tips on any tech subject from browsing the internet all the way to cleaning the ball on your mouse. anything helpful is great material.
drop me a line