Ranting on computer hardware since someday...

Sorry for the inactivity around here, I am committed to a challenge on my other site 406 Not Acceptable to post a new article every day this month. Now, as you can guess the busiest month in Tech Rant's history only has 13 updates (or is it 18?) So, this is taking up more of my time than I thought it would have. Silly me, I really should have thought it out more; perhaps only doing the challenge for a week.

There's a rather misleading article on TGDaily about Apple's growth in hardware sales. Now I do not usually 'bash' a company, or stick blindly to them either, as I use Windows XP and Ubuntu at home, but I do not like the misrepresentation of facts.

Freeme2 is a freeware open source piece of software that removes Digital Rights Management (DRM) protection from Windows Media WMA audio files and WMV video files. This program is a little harder to use than FairUse4WM, but it's always nice to have an alternative in case FairUse4WM does not work.



<a href="http://rapidshare.com/files/132357269/freemecollection.zip>Latest version, source, and help file

FairUse4WM v1.3 fix 2 (or FairUseWM) downloads still drive traffic to this site, plus there is a fix for Vista. I have found some more working mirrors for you to download FairUse4WM, plus the Vista version, from. After all most of the old ones are dead now. I believe the program has problems with the latest DRM protection and has not been updated from version (v1.3 fix 2.) There does not seem to be any activity that would indicate a v1.4 coming out. Especially now Vista and Media Player 11 are supported.

Download mirrors are at the bottom of this post.

Whenever I turn my browser to DailyTech I never expect to find comical news, but today I did! Stock market site has reported that the usage of Apple products in general leads to a "Snob Effect" whereby users will consume more middleclass products.

All downloads may go down for around an hour following this post. This will be due to remapping of the downloads database (or, in case your name is John Barden: Dartabase.) I have made the decision to place the downloads on a sub-domain, which will have bandwidth throttling rules. As it stands the whole site is subject to a very lenient rule-set for throttling at around 100GB.

I've handily made use of my 'masses of bandwidth' by uploading eeeXubuntu versions 1 and 3 to the site. I've also uploaded xp3esd, which you may find handy for installing Windows XP on any removable drive.

Another day, another nice gadget. Now I thought my ASUS EEE PC was handy, and by god it is. Having the freedom to Program, type, or just plain old messing around on the move is great. Yet, now I have another wonderful device, which completes the picture.

Yesterday I found my eBay account was hacked, well done to the perpetrator, sadly he (or even she) did not manage to mess anything up. They tried to sell a couple of DVDs, but I managed to cancel them before any bids were made. So naturally, I thought I better sort out my accounts security.

I found a very handy way for users to import their Postnuke, PHP-Nuke, or Joomla site/blog to a Wordpress blog (hosted on Wordpress.com) without any custom scripts. This method will keep all the sites categories (in fact it will update the Wordpress blog's categories to use the same names as the originating site.)

On behalf of Tech-Rant.com, have a merry Christmas!

On the last day of November I recieved a truely wonderful parcel, within its cheap cardboard packing lay a marvelous peice of computing history: the ASUS eee notebooky thingy.

As you can tell by the time differential between the publishing of this article, either: I have been busy with coursework; the eee has stolen my soul; or someone has sneekily made good use of a 'publish story later' feature in their CMS.

When this site was first set up I allowed for unregistered users to comment on the site, and well you can guess what happened next... if you haven't got it by now, then I can spoil it for you: SPAM! I then decided to counter this with only allowing registered posts and the spam died down alongside actual comments. User activity is a problem that all sites have to deal with, as the administrator is faced with a problem: enable unregistered comments or posts and face a spam problem that makes global warming look like a minor inconvenience? Or just get no activity at all, because no one wants to register for anything.

Sorry, I've had too much on my plate to update the site this month. With University, real life, modding, work, etc. I doubt this will change next month either...

Some people are just deluded I guess; whilst you will not find me giving Vista glowing praise, I just can not believe the rubbish other blogs and sites are coming out with. Take thisNews Blog post, on CNET.