M4B is just an AAC encoded file but meant for audio books instead of music. AAC is another highly compressed sound file format similar to MP3 but have better file compression than MP3 at the same quality.

I didn’t really want to buy a program to do this as I think that some of the well regarded freeware players/converters such as mplayer, ffmpeg and vlc should be able to do this (and I did find some instructions for ffmpeg). The few commercial programs that I did have only converted 3 hours out of 20.

But before I went with that, I remembered that AAC is not such an obscure format anymore and many players can play them now. So, I renamed the audio book by changing the file extension from M4B to AAC and voila! My Android phone was able to read the file without any issues. BTW, I was using the MortPlayer Audiobook app, which is an excellent podcast and audio book player for Android because it remembers my position in every audio file.

I considered a Home Plug but those are expensive. A bridging router would work too. Fortunately, I already have a home theatre PC (HTPC) running Windows 7 sitting next to the TV. The HTPC has both wireless (USB) and wired network adapters. It uses the wireless one to connect to the LAN. I decided to connect the blu-ray player and the HTPC via their ethernet ports.

I initially tried using the Internet Connection Sharing feature of Windows 7, hence the title. I’m supposed to go to the Properties of the wireless network adapter of my HTPC, click on the Sharing tab and enable the Allow other network users to connect through this computer’s Internet connection option. However, my blu-ray player still could not get access to the internet this way.

What did work was bridging. I select both my wireless and wired adapters in the Network Connections window, right-click and select Bridge Connections. The blu-ray player can now see the net, albeit only when the HTPC is also turned on. Oh  well, beggars can’t be choosers. A bridging router could still be on the cards to remove this dependency on the HTPC.

Yes, of course, I can just use the HTPC for streaming internet media, but for the less technically savvy people in the household, the blu-ray player may be the better option. One thing I have noticed is that the blu-ray player does not cache data. Maybe I can run a caching proxy on the HTPC. I hope it will work with the bridging setup that I have.

I use TV Scheduler Pro to record TV shows on my home theatre PC. This is on a Windows 7 system. Unfortunately, TV Scheduler Pro will not warn you if you try to put the computer on hibernate while a show is being recorded. This is where this utility comes in. Instead of going through the shutdown procedure and selecting Hibernate, this utility gives you a program to click on that will first try to check that the NowRunning.xml file in the TV Scheduler Pro program folder contains a running show. If it does not, it initiates a hibernate. If it does, it displays what is being recorded, its end time and the channel. It has buttons to continue the hibernate or close the utility. Double-clicking on the details of the recordings will bring up the TV Scheduler Pro web dashboard on your default browser.

Prerequisites:

• .Net Framework 4

To install:

1. Unzip the WhatsRecording.zip file to a folder in your computer.
2. Edit the set_env.cmd file to set the environment variables to let the program know the path to the NowRunning.xml file and the web address of the TV Scheduler Pro dashboard. This uses the setx command to set the environment variables. The setx command is available by default in Vista and Windows 7. It allows the environment variable settings to be made permanent. For people on Windows XP or earlier, read this as Windows XP does not have setx by default.
3. Run set_env.cmd.
4. If you don’t want your computer hibernating right after installation, make sure TV Scheduler Pro is recording something as the next step will install *and run* the utility. Wait a few moments (e.g. make sure the recording symbol shows up on the TV Scheduler Pro tray icon) as the NowRunning.xml file does not seem to get updated instantly.
5. Run setup.exe.
6. Create a copy of the program icon from your Start menu onto your Start bar and Desktop.

Since I’m still quite a newbie on VB.Net programming, I won’t be surprised if this utility doesn’t work for you. I did not put enough error-checking in the code so if it doesn’t work for you, it’s most likely that the set_env.cmd file is not yet customised for your system, and make sure that it is run so that the expected environment variables are available. Let me know of any issues and I’ll try to make it work.

Click here to download the What’s Recording? utility.

So, if you have a similar mouse pad, don’t use the wrist rest. Replace it or rotate the pad so the wrist rest is on the same side as your thumb to minimise its interference as you mouse around.

Apple has a lot of patents but even they are working off the efforts of many others that have come before them. One example of innovation attributed to Apple was touch gestures used in the iphone. That was pioneered by another company but was copied by Apple. As great marketers, Apple has copied as much as any other company has copied from Apple and from each other, but have not suffered for being branded a copy-cat. One reason I think this is so is because they copy early enough and add their own flair and improvements that they gain the mindshare of the public.

You may have heard of the ‘Innovator’s Dilemma’, where the first to innovate are often worse off than those that copy them later. Patents are supposed to make this better for the innovator, however, at least in software, what gets to be patentable is too broad that it is stifling innovation instead. There is a case where one company (EOLAS) is suing other companies (including Apple) for the use of plugins in a web browser. Embedding has been a part of web standards and this is akin to patenting the use of paragraphs in a document (as mentioned by Gina Trapani in a recent episode of TWiT).

So be careful what you wish for. If you can’t use a gesture of flicking a page on your next touchscreen device because some company patented it, you may regret that wish.

Disclaimer: I’m an early adopter of Vista and Win7 but have been working with computers since DOS 4.

PS, I also posted this here.

As the solution requires a bootable USB flash drive, I believe the following is a way that will let you convert any ordinary USB flash drive to a bootable one. This technique works with Windows 7 Beta and RC. I’m not sure about XP or Vista, though. I got it from a blog that shows how to put Windows 7 on a netbook. You can find it here.

I looked for websites to back up my opinion and found this: Here, “Mr. Electricity” shows the typical energy consumption of some common computer models. He also has a question and answer page here where he recommends using a kill-a-watt meter to see for yourself that no, “it doesn’t take extra energy to start up a computer”. I think the kill-a-watt meter is not fine-grained enough to show it but other sites have shown that starting up a computer does require slightly more electricity i.e. up to about 70 more watts than their idle load, but remember that this only happens for a few seconds while the computer is starting up. A typical computer uses less than 300 watts while idle.

I’m reminded of the Mythbusters episode where the show tried to find out if “the energy to turn on lights exceeds the savings of turning them off”. They found that with a 90 watt incandescent bulb, leaving the light on instead of turning it off would only pay off if you were going to turn it back on within 0.36 seconds! When extrapolated to computers, this figure should be only a few seconds worth, so it is still not worth leaving your computer on.

There is also the argument that the life of the computer will shorten with the higher amount of power cycling. Mr. Electricity says that computers are not that fragile and will easily pass into obsolescence (about 2 years) before it fails from power cycling. I can confirm this as I have been shutting down my computer frequently and they have lasted me for years.

Some argue that Windows start too slowly and they don’t want to wait for the booting to finish so they don’t turn their computers off. With the faster computers these days, Windows usually starts within two minutes, and with the use of hibernation (where the computer saves its state so that the next time you start the computer, it returns to the same state as when you hibernated), you should be able to have Windows ready within 30 seconds, or at worst, within 1 minute.

The thing is, there are so much urban myths and “common knowledge” out there and it takes a bit of analysis to realise that, sometimes, what you thought was true may have no basis in reality.

I really should make a few more posts like this. My colleague was using his phone until it was almost dead because of the “memory effect” in rechargeable batteries. Actually, the memory effect only affected Ni-Cad (Nickel Cadmium) batteries. Most phones these days use Lithium-polymer batteries and somewhat older ones use NiMH (nickle metal hydride), both of which do not suffer from the memory effect.

Update 2011-09-29:

I came across this article, and I really like this point: “Besides, a computer that’s off is a computer that can’t be infected with malware or behave under orders from afar if it’s already infected.”

The commenters there made a few more points that I find very relevant:

• A running computer can catch fire
• The computer has moving parts, such as fans and hard drives, that would experience wear the longer they are used
• A running computer would be generating heat, which can be bad for it
• The computer may be on the receiving end of an electrical surge from lightning strikes

For the PC, I use mplayer. There are optimised versions for particular CPUs here and here. You will also need to drop this file in your mplayer folder. Mplayer is a media player that supports Windows, Linux, Mac OSX, etc. There is a GUI version but the one I use is command-line-based. In Windows Vista, I just make a shortcut with the commands I prefer and then drag media files to that shortcut. The command-line options that I use are: -vo gl2 -idx This basically says, use OpenGL to display the movie and generate an index if it is missing to allow jumping backward and forward through the media. I use the OpenGL switch so that Vista does not switch to Aero Basic mode whenever I play a media file. The following are the keystrokes that I use the most:

For my PDA, I use The Core Pocket Media Player (TCPMP). There is a mplayer version for the PocketPC but it doesn’t work on my HP iPaq.

Update: I have “rediscovered” that Windows Media Player has the ability to speed up the playback of media files. Unlike mplayer, the audio retains the original pitch, so voices don’t sound like chipmunks on caffeine. I think this will now be my preferred player for podcasts.