Album art grabber

Yamo is an album art grabber for those people who love to have the album art for their mp3's its a simple wizard that grabs album art based off of id3 tag.

Great ID3 tag grabber

This is for all of you who have horrible id3 tags on your mp3's I know I'm one of them but this will go through your mp3 collection and by analyzing each song get the id3 tag info for it and update it automatically.

Free Tools

I decided to put together a list of free useful tools you can find online:
AnalogX
Run Scripts w/o a Console
Firewall Leak Tester
Multi Distro
The PC De-Crapifier
w.Blogger (used to make this post)
450+ Problems solved using Freeware
Sysinternals (now owned by Microsoft)
Kelly's Korner
Doug Knox's Tools
IntelliAdmin

Watching Online TV

While skimming Krust Dogg's diggs I noticed a great post on Jegg Pulver's blog on online tv. In addition to all the sites he listed, here are some other online tv/video sites:
PeekVid
YouTube
Channel King
Channel Chooser

Hak5 DVD: 0-Day patch

If you've already downloaded and tried to extract the DVD you would notice you get CRC errors during extraction. Thankfully Hak.5 has already posted a fix for this on their website.

Tweak Azureus for better download speed

If you ever used torrents your propbably going to want to get the best download speed possible. The easiest way to do this is to following the following guides from the Azureus wiki: Good Settings, increase your download speed, Average Swarm Speed, Availability, and Good Torrents. If you do what theses guides say you should be able to maximize the download speed you receive with your current connection. Also I like to install the AutoSpeed plugin to maximize my upload speed @ all times. I prefer to set the minimum upload speed of this plugin to 80% of my maximum upload speed. And the maximum to 95% of my maximum upload speed. Also don't forget to set the Download speed within this plugin. I personally have it set to 20 * Up. Speed. You also might want to consider encrypting your traffic and running the Saferpeer plugin (Note these last to tips won't help your download speed, but will help your privacy).

Hak.5 best of DVD for Season one torrent

Here is the link for the dvd torrent

Hak.5 best of DVD for Season one

Hak.5 is coming out with a new dvd for all their best season one episodes. The dvd should be released in iso format and ready for bit torrent sometime today. This is going to be the first podcast that I know of to release all of their best stuff on a dvd.

Hak.5 Season 2 Aug 5

This is going to be great. I've been wait for a couple of months now and they finally got the new episodes coming out. This is one of the best shows on the net. I will recomend this to anyone interested in anything tech.

Public DNS servers

This list is every public DNS server I know of. It's useful if the dns servers of the wifi hotspot your "borrowing" isnt working. I recently experience such an issue while on vaction in St. Louis.

OpenDNS (this is cool)
208.67.222.222
208.67.220.220

Verizon (Level3) Nameservers
4.2.2.1
4.2.2.2
4.2.2.3
4.2.2.4
4.2.2.5
4.2.2.6

SpeakEasy Nameservers
66.93.87.2
216.231.41.2
216.254.95.2
64.81.45.2
64.81.111.2
64.81.127.2
64.81.79.2
64.81.159.2
66.92.64.2
66.92.224.2
66.92.159.2
216.27.175.2

ORSC Public Access DNS Nameservers
199.166.24.253
199.166.27.253
199.166.28.10
199.166.29.3
199.166.31.3
195.117.6.25
204.57.55.100

Sprintlink General DNS
204.117.214.10
199.2.252.10
204.97.212.10

Cisco
128.107.241.185
192.135.250.69

MonitorOff

I prefer leave my computers running @ all times, yet in still like to keep my electric bills low. Now you could manually turn your monitors off but there are three reasons not to do this:
1. You're lazy (Yeah!)
2. Constantly turning monitors on & off cause a large pull of electricity (meaning bigger bills)
3. Everytime you turn a monitor on it deguasses. Constant deguassing is bad for the monitor.
My solution: MonitorOff
This program sets your monitor into suspend mode which saves you from all these conditions and still cuts your electric bills.

Change Firefox's Throbber

Want to change the url Firefox's Throbber links to? Click more info for detials. Personally I have mine set to http://starpc.googlepages.com/hk.htm. Also you can change the appearance of the throbber by using the guide @ this site.

Fun Google Tools

here our links to cool tools offered by google:
Google Analytics & Gmail 4 Domains

NEWSARAMA.COM: SDCC '06 - MARVEL ULTIMATE ALLIANCE PANEL

Stan Lee and an original “Beverly Hills: 90210” cast member? It’s either the new season of “The Surreal Life” or the panel on Activision’s latest Marvel video game, Ultimate Alliance (following on the heels of the wildly successful X-Men Legends and X-Men Legends 2), opening a busy-as-usual Saturday at the San Diego Comic-Con.

Make a Windows Command Prompt look like a linux terminal

If your @ all like me you prefer the clean look of the linux terminal to that of the Windows Command Prompt. So I decide to see if I couldn't clone the linux terminal using standard windows tools. This was surprisingly easy.

All you need is Regedit, PROMPT, and some basic knowledge of scripting. Using the PROMPT command you can temporarily alter the way the command prompt looks. But I wanted a more permanent solution. This is were our old friend Regedit comes in. First you need to make a script (my favorite tools for this is Notepad2) which contains the following code:

echo off
prompt [%username%.%USERDOMAIN%@%computername%$S$P]$$$S
cdcls

Save this file as cmd.cmd somewhere on your hard drive. (you can download a premade copy of this script here). Next open up Regedit and navigate to the following path: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Command Processor

Create or edit the string value AutoRun and set it to the full path of where you save the script. For example my AutoRun value is set to "G:\scripts\cmd.cmd" (minus the quotes). Now open up a command prompt to look @ your new command prompt.

The other advantage of this script it automatically navigates to the root of the drive when you open a new command promt windows. Normally Windows will open to the following usless path "c:\Documents and Settings\Username".

More info on the PROMPT command can be found here. More info on the AutoRun setting can be found here.

digg this story

Small Talk

Krust Dogg found this video on digg. It's funny but very wrong.

Digg Site Overload

Tired of going to a link on digg only to find out the site has crashed? If you use Greasemonkey you will never have this problem. All you have to do is install Greasemonkey only with theses two scripts 1, 2. The first script adds a link to duggmirror to each post, while the second script adds links to Coral, MirrorDot and the Google Cache. Why it links to MirrorDot I don't know since MirrorDot doesn't backup any stories posted on digg. There's also a similar script if you use Slashdot as your source for tech news.

UPDATE: it appears the script for Slashdot no longer works. If anyone know of a working version of this script please let us know.

UPDATE 2: Thanks to a tip we've found there's a new version of the digg - add mirrors script available here. It removes the mirror dot link and replaces with a duggmirror link. This means you know only need to use 1 script instead of 2 to add caching to digg.

Torrents

The following is for educational purposes only. Piatech does not condone piracy.

Open Source:
SolidZ
ibiblio.org
Linux Mirror Project
http://linuxtracker.org/

Multiple Types:
Demonoid
isohunt
The Pirate Bay
mininova
Tracker 3

Search Engines:
TorrentScan
bitoogle
Torrent Finder
Torretz

TV:
CFH Tracker
MySpleen
TvTorrents
EZTV
tvRSS

Comics:
ZCFM - Tracker B
ZCFM - Tracker N
ZCFM - Tracker X

Color Scheme (CSS)

We're looking for a new look for our website. Please feel free to play around with our CSS template and come up with a new design. The winning design will be givin invites to Demonoid and TvTorrents. I know it's not much but we are such a new site it all we have to give away. Send you custom CSS redesigns to css@piatech.net

Blogger Help : What is BlogThis! ?

BlogThis! is the quickest way I've found to make a post to a blooger blog. See the above link for more info

SprintHelp

I know some of you use verizon but if you have sprint here is a site with lots of info about other plans and tips and tricks for your phone.

I will be doing more research on this of other carriers as well so look for updates.

Members be sure to send me your digg user name so I can post you digg feed in the sidebar.

This place is a centralized blog for me and my tech freinds to post links and stories that would interest the group.

Hiding Blogger Navbar

Using the following code you can hide the blogger navbar.

<style type="text/css">
#b-navbar {
  height:0px;
  visibility:hidden;
  display:none
}

body
{
  margin-top:0px;
  position: relative;
  top: -50px; 
}
style>