Hi Folks! This page is where older GeekStuff tips go to die: tips for older programs that are not longer useful or relevant, tips for things that would only interest two or three people at best, and tips I've just grown sick of looking at. Feel free to enjoy these tips, no matter how useless they may be today.

Changing The Internet Explorer Window Title -  Removing the Adverts from AIM
Outputting Command-Line Output To Text - Making Seamless Audio CDs
My Wireless Network - Ending Pop-Ups

Back to the main GeekStuff page

Return to article list here.

If you're an AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) user, you're probably all too aware of the nasty ads that appear in the main AIM window. To get rid of them, do the following:

1) Make sure that AIM is not running.

2) Using Windows Explorer, go to wherever you installed AIM (typically this is c:\program files\aim\)

3) Delete the file "advert.ocm"

4) Make a copy of "admin.ocm"

5) Rename the copy of "admin.ocm" to "advert.ocm"

Note that after this tweak you will still have the ad space, but you will no longer have the flashing ads distracting you and hogging up your bandwidth. Also note that you will need to reapply this tweak every time you upgrade AIM.

There is a FREE program called DeadAIM that removes the ads and also adds Windows Messenger-style pop-up notifications and transparency to AIM 4.8.x and 5.0.x.  (See pic of DeadAIM running on left) I think it's a really neat little app! You may download it from here. 

UPDATE!!  Sadly, DeadAIM is no longer free. It's only $4.99 though, so you might want to just ante up and pay for it. If not, you can download a earlier version that's still free from oldversion.com by clicking here. Also, if you'd like to kill the sounds AIM makes while keeping the rest of your PC's sounds, check out my free SilentAIM program on the Downloads page.

Return to article list here.

Outputting Command-Line Output To Text

All versions of Windows NT (that includes NT, 2000 and XP) have a handy built-in tool called a "shell". It is also known as a "command-prompt" and is sometimes mistakenly referred to as a "DOS prompt" (while there are DOS underpinnings to Windows 9x, there is no DOS whatsoever in Windows NT).

The shell can used for many things, but the average home user is most likely to use it when troubleshooting a network connection. Certain functions like finding your IP address, pinging a remote server or running a trace route can only be done from a command-prompt in NT. So for example, let's say that you are having trouble reaching this web site and decide to call your ISP to find out what might be wrong. The help desk technician might ask you to run a trace route, which is a where your computer sends a packet of information to a remote server; much like tracing a phone call, each step (hop) is recorded along the way. By finding out where the trace route is failing, you and the technician can figure out what the problem is. If you're using a flavor of Windows NT, try it for yourself

Click on Start > Run and type CMD in the "Run" box and press ENTER.  You will see something like this in the command-prompt window:

Microsoft Windows XP [Version 5.1.2600]
(C) Copyright 1985-2001 Microsoft Corp.

D:\Documents and Settings\Username\Desktop>

At the prompt, type the following: tracert www.jimcofer.com and press ENTER. You will see something like this on your screen when the trace route is complete:

Tracing route to jimcofer.com [209.120.179.223]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1    69 ms   149 ms    36 ms 10.238.128.1
2    133 ms   56 ms   147 ms c-66-56-67-106.atl.client2.attbi.com [66.56.67.106]
3    196 ms   90 ms   130 ms c-66-56-23-46.atl.client2.attbi.com [66.56.23.46]
4    116 ms   25 ms    34 ms c-66-56-23-38.atl.client2.attbi.com [66.56.23.38]
5    91 ms    99 ms    16 ms c-66-56-22-146.atl.client2.attbi.com [66.56.22.146]
6    130 ms   153 ms   57 ms 12.244.72.90
7    151 ms   141 ms  219 ms gbr2-p70.attga.ip.att.net [12.123.21.6]
8    98 ms    145 ms  125 ms tbr2-p013502.attga.ip.att.net [12.122.12.33]
9    238 ms   118 ms  164 ms tbr2-p013801.wswdc.ip.att.net [12.122.10.69]
10   151 ms   132 ms  148 ms ggr1-p3100.wswdc.ip.att.net [12.122.11.238]
11   155 ms   229 ms  182 ms att-gw.dc.genuity.net [192.205.32.114]
12   198 ms   180 ms   46 ms so-3-1-0.washdc3-nbr2.bbnplanet.net [4.24.8.121]
13   231 ms   168 ms   32 ms p9-0.phlapa1-br2.bbnplanet.net [4.24.10.186]
14   77 ms    247 ms  135 ms p15-0.phlapa1-br1.bbnplanet.net [4.24.10.89]
15   105 ms   155 ms  170 ms p2-0.iplvin1-br2.bbnplanet.net [4.24.10.182]
16   161 ms   129 ms   91 ms p9-0.crtntx1-br1.bbnplanet.net [4.24.10.213]
17   137 ms   135 ms  131 ms p1-0.dllstx1-cr1.bbnplanet.net [4.24.5.82]
18   123 ms   129 ms  194 ms p1-0.dllstx1-cr3.bbnplanet.net [4.24.5.74]
19   125 ms   251 ms  119 ms gigabitethernet0.yipes10.bbnplanet.net [4.25.58.198]
20   102 ms   212 ms  170 ms o0-2jp1.dfw002bd01.yipes.com [66.7.141.233]
21   180 ms   103 ms  149 ms o0-2bd1.dfw001bd01.yipes.com [66.7.141.157]
22   62 ms    114 ms   62 ms o1-1bd1.dfw017ap01.yipes.com [66.54.195.129]
23   145 ms    58 ms   56 ms 66.54.148.10
24   166 ms    85 ms  129 ms 209.120.179.223

Trace complete.

All that junk above is like a "map" of all the "roads" I have to "drive on" to get from my computer at home to my website. But that's not really all that important right now. What *is* important is that you notice that there's no easy way for you to copy this text into an email to send to your friendly help desk technician. As far as you know, you have to manually retype every single word above into an email. But that would be silly. By adding a simple switch to your shell command, you can have Windows export this data to a text file. Try it again, but this time type:

tracert www.jimcofer.com > C:\sample.txt

Note that now you will not have any screen output. But once the cursor returns to the screen you can open My Computer and look in the root of your C: drive. There you'll see a text file called sample.txt. If you open it up, you will see almost exactly same output you had as before, but now it's in a handy form that you can either cut and pasted into an email or added as an attachment to an email. Neat, huh? This is hardly new or revolutionary, but I've noticed that few people know about it. As far as I know, this trick works with just about any shell command in Windows NT, although since you won't get any screen output, you probably wouldn't want to use it for anything that requires keyboard input on your part.

Return to article list here.

Making Seamless Audio CDs

Most people make audio CDs by dragging and dropping MP3s into the layouts of their favorite CD burning program like Nero or Easy CD Creator. This works fine for most discs, but not for "seamless" CDs - discs without pauses between tracks, such as you might find with "live" or "mix" CDs. This is because every burning program puts a 2 second pause in between the tracks; this is required by the Red Book - the official specs for making audio CDs. Just about every burning program I've ever used allows you to remove the 2 second pause between tracks; for example, in Nero, you would simply highlight all but the first track and do a right-click > Properties and change the value of "Seconds Pause Between Tracks" from 2 to 0 (the Red Book specs absolutely require a 2 second "intro pause" at the beginning of the first track).

You might find that this works well for you. However, chances are highly likely that you will find that a tiny pause still remains - in fact, the pause is so short that it might actually sound like a "click" or "pop" between tracks. This is caused by the way CD burning software writes audio CDs from MP3s. Because MP3s are compressed audio files, they must be decoded when played or written to disc. Because the decoder must start and stop between tracks, more often than not a tiny (1/100 second) pause ends up getting written to the disc. If you find this happening to you, you will need to convert the MP3 files into WAV files before burning the CD. To do this, you will need either WinAMP or a utility to convert MP3s to WAV. Directions for how to do this in WinAMP follow; note that you will (temporarily) need 650 - 700MB of free space on your hard drive for the conversion:  

1) In WinAMP,  drag and drop the files you want to burn onto the CD into a WinAMP playlist. Make sure they are in the order you want them on the audio CD, as WinAMP will append a track number to the beginning of the WAV's filename.

2) Make sure that WinAMP is the active window and press CTRL+K.  The "Visualization Options Screen" appears. 

3) Click the "Output" header in the left-hand column.

4) In the right-hand column, select "Nullsoft Disk Writer plug-in".

5) Click "Configure" to select an output directory. Do not mess with any other options.

6) Click "Close". Make sure that WinAMP's "shuffle" and "repeat" buttons are NOT selected and that the equalizer is OFF.

7) Double-click on the first track in the playlist to begin converting the files to WAVs.

8) Once WinAMP has converted your entire playlist, don't forget to go back to the output options screen and return the output to "WinAMP waveOut".

At this point, you should have a directory full of WAV files. Drag these into your burning program's audio CD layout and remove the 2 second pause between tracks. The resulting CD should now have "seamless" transitions between tracks with no pauses, clicks or pops at all. This is because WAV files are essentially the same format as audio CDs: PCM audio. No decoding is required. Don't forget to delete the WAV files when done!

Return to article list here.

My Wireless Network

Once upon a time, most households had only one computer. But with hardware prices constantly falling and laptop computers slowly taking over the workplace, it's now become common for most homes to have two, three or maybe even more computers lying around. Combine this with the adoption of broadband in most of these types of homes and you can see why network hardware like switches and routers - once confined only to corporate or collegiate networks - have begun finding their way into the average American home.

As you probably know, I recently moved, and the situation I found myself in lent itself to a wireless network. There are any number of reasons why you might want to "go wireless" with your home network, but the most common include:

•  It's prettier. There are no wires running around everywhere.

•  It's convenient. Moving a PC from one room to the other doesn't require re-wiring anything. And of course you can take laptops and PDAs anywhere you want to work, be it on the bed or in front of the TV.

•  It's cheaper (sort of). Although the required hardware is more expensive, it's cheaper than having your existing home wired for data, and it's probably cheaper than wiring a home under construction as well.

So - speaking of hardware - what will you need to have a wireless network? Well, first of all, you'll need a broadband connection like cable or DSL. Secondly, you'll need a wireless router. Lastly, you'll need a wireless network card for each device that connects to the network. This means PCI or USB cards for PCs, PCMCIA cards for laptops and Compact Flash (CF) or PCMCIA cards for PDAs. 

My wireless network consists of three PCs - a 3.06GHz P4 PC (with a traditional on-board NIC wired to the router's switch), a 933MHz Pentium III PC (with a Linksys wireless NIC), a Dell P2-300MHZ laptop and a Compaq iPaq PDA with a wireless Pretec CF NIC and the required Linksys wireless router.

Let me be honest – setting up the whole thing was kind of sketchy.

The fella from Time-Warner Carolina came out to install the cable modem and much to my chagrin, he absolutely refused to touch the router. After he figured out that I was a fellow techie, he even ragged on me a bit: "Come on man, you know I can't touch that router!" But as soon as he left, I of course went to work. 

Setting up the router on my PC was a piece of cake - I simply unplugged the CAT5 cable from the modem and put it into the router, then ran a new piece of cable from the cable modem to the router. Instantly, I was connected through the router and was getting speeds up to 2.5Mbps (that's about 44 times faster than the fastest possible 56k modem connection). It was all good.

And then I tried hooking up the wireless stuff. Installing the software on Lisa's P3 was a breeze, and she almost instantly had a 1.0 Mbps connection to the Internet on her PC. But getting connectivity between her PC and mine proved more difficult. Despite having identical network settings, I could ping her PC but could not do the same from her PC to mine. After seemingly endless tweaking, I gave up and tried the built-in XP "Home Networking Wizard". This didn't work either, but for some reason after I changed the network settings BACK to what I initially had them, it all worked. Go figure. 

Getting the iPaq to work with the wireless network was a relative breeze. I simply docked the iPaq and ran the setup program. The required files were then copied over to my iPaq, so then all I had to do was enter some settings and tell it to access the network.

Which brings me to my biggest beef with the Linksys router. The enclosed documentation was rather thin and only explained the options for each setting. It did not explain at all what each setting was for. I had to spend a few minutes online learning about the WEP protocol and how 64-bit and 128-bit keys differ with regards to network performance. Linksys could have spent an extra two cents and enclosed a sheet outlining the basics of how to actually set up the router for basic connectivity and security. Compared to the 200 page manual that came with my new Nextel phone for work, the Linksys documentation is pathetic. I also didn't appreciate the sneaky sales job they (tried) to do with ZoneAlarm. You see, just about every router has a built-in firewall. Yet the router's security settings advise you to download ZoneAlarm Pro (which costs money). Only when you click on a couple of "Why Do I Need This?" links do you get to a page on the Linksys website that says (basically) that while your router indeed has a firewall to protect against hackers, it cannot protect you against email and internal viruses. Which I knew already. In a sense it's like a automobile manufacturer "strongly advising" you to use a certain brand of gasoline, then saying that the car "cannot protect you if you put diesel or kerosene in the gas tank".  Well, duh!   

Having ranted about this, let me say that the benefits greatly outweigh the setup hassles. I mapped my app and MP3 drives to Lisa's PC, so she can listen to any of the 11,000 songs on my PC any time she wants or install any of the software I have on my (rather large) apps share. We both have printers that are shared to each other, so I can print to her color printer and she can print to my laser as the desire strikes us. Also, since her PC is closest to a phone line, I installed WinFAX as a server on her system. With WinFAX as a client on my box, I can send faxes through her PC and not have to have a modem on my computer.

But while this is all fun, the genius of the wireless network is only truly apparent with my iPaq. With the wireless CF card I am able to surf the Internet, send email and chat on AIM, MSN Messenger or Yahoo Messenger on my PDA anywhere in or around my townhome. With the PocketPC 2002 Terminal Services Client I can work on my main PC wirelessly from bed, bath or kitchen. Microsoft's ActiveSync tool works over a network as well as when my iPaq is cradled to my PC directly, so I can check my email while sitting in the living room watching TV - in fact, I am writing this article in the living room while watching the AFC Championship. I've sent and received a couple of emails, chatted on MSN Messenger with a friend from Ars Technica and checked on the status of a trouble ticket with my web host via the Internet - all without getting up from the coffee table and missing a big play. 

If you are looking in to sharing a broadband connection, consider wireless! Once you get it up and running, it's very easy to use and looks and works well. But be sure to read up on it beforehand to know what you're getting into. 

UPDATE: 10/04/05 - It's been a long time since I updated this, so allow me to do so now:

I don't use my iPaq any more, as its battery is dead. Replacement batteries are slightly too expensive to justify replacing in a 5-year old piece of kit; new iPaqs are too expensive for me at the moment, especially since I have a phone that does 99% of what my iPaq used to do. I rarely (if ever) use my laptop either, as it's a P2-300 and is sooooo slow. What this means regarding my wireless network is that I only have to replace the PCI card in Lisa's desktop and the router itself, instead of buying three new adapters and a router, which would be somewhat expensive.

And replace things I have. Microsoft used to make a line of wireless gear, which was a somewhat strange marketing decision. Early in 2004, MS came to its senses and decided to exit this business, and the day they made that announcement prices on their gear dropped accordingly. I was able to buy their MN-700 54Mbps Wireless Router and accompanying PCI card from Amazon for around $40 - or less than just the PCI card alone had been selling for the day before. The Microsoft products were nice - they were built well, came with good documentation and were easy to configure. But the router suffered from a "bug" that many SOHO routers have: it drops the wireless connection once a certain level of TCP\IP connections have been reached. For most people, this is not a problem; for people running Bittirrent clients, it's a HUGE problem.

Although the MS stuff was decent (but flawed for my application), I junked it for a 108Mbps "all-in-one" kit (router + PCI card) from Gigabyte - yes, the same Gigabyte that is known for making motherboards. It doesn't seem to have any of the "TCP\IP connection limit" problems that the MS router does and is twice as fast to boot. It's been rock-solid for me and has tweakable firewall features that once were limited to "true SOHO" (i.e., SonicWALL) level routers. 

Return to article list here.

Ending Pop-Ups

Everyone hates pop-ups ads. There are fewer things more annoying than typing in a web address and having 15 windows pop-up on your screen. And if you're still accessing the web via dial-up, the pop-ups can really cut into your bandwidth and make the actual pages you wanted to see take forever to download. Now most folks are aware of "pop-up killer" programs, but these are of varying quality. Some just plain suck, while others work well but require a master's degree in TCP/IP to configure. Allow me to take the guesswork out of it and recommend Ad Muncher. The app is tiny, but effective. It removes ads not only from web browsers, but also "Internet-enabled" programs like ICQ, Morpheus, LimeWire and more. And Ad Muncher doesn't stop there - it can also be configured to stop other web annoyances like background music, status bar tinkering and mouse restrictions. If you've ever wanted to save a picture and right-clicked on the pic to save it, only to have a box pop up that says "Sorry, right-clicking on this page has been disabled" - this app is for you!   Lastly, Ad Muncher can help you retain your privacy online. It includes an option to remove identifying fields from page requests and an "IP Scramble" feature which allows you to hide where you are connecting from; bouncing web page requests off dozens of anonymous proxy servers sequentially, keeping your address hidden and cached requests scattered.

If you install Ad Muncher and go to the Help > About box, you can see exactly how much bandwidth Ad Mucher is saving. I installed the app on October 19th and after just one week of surfing - I was out of town for three days, so the "counter" is actually for ten days - Ad Muncher has saved me almost 50MB of bandwidth and has blocked an astounding 6,000+ ads:

Ad Muncher Usage Statistics: v4.4
Adverts removed by Ad Muncher: 6,372
Approximate bandwidth saved: 49 Mb
Counter started: October 19, 2002

If you have been looking for a great pop-up killer, I wholeheartedly recommend Ad Muncher! It's a tiny download, does its job well, and doesn't use a lot of RAM. And with dial-up access, it should actually speed-up your web surfing!

UPDATE! I'm not knocking Ad Muncher, but there are other options available to the beleaguered surfer these days. Google has its own Google Toolbar. Not only does the toolbar offer a quick and easy way to search Google from any Internet Explorer window, but it offers its own built-in pop-up blocker. Unlike Ad Muncher, the Google Toolbar is not a third-party program - it's a plug-in to IE - if you have IE running, Google's pop-up blocker is running! Another option for you just down the road comes from Windows itself. Service Pack 2 for Windows XP upgrades IE to include its very own pop-up blocker. I've been using it for a couple of months now and can report that it works as advertised. This will be released to the general public sometime late this summer. You can go ahead and download the beta (testing) version of the Service Pack right now at the SP2 link I provided. It's a pretty decent build - I have only a couple of beefs with the test version - but you might want to wait until the final version is released. If you're using Windows 98 or 2000, go with the Google Toolbar.

UPDATE: 11/10/05 -  It's been a while since I addressed the issue of pop-up ads, and that is mainly because they don't bother me at all any more. That's because I'm using the apparently unbeatable combination of Firefox, AdBlock and Filterset.G. You've probably heard of Firefox before; it's a popular open-source web browser based off the old Netscape code. While it's true that Firefox (and Internet Explorer on XP SP2) both have built-in pop-up blockers, the installation bases for both of those browsers are so huge that it didn't take very long for web developers to come up with ways around their pop-up blocking schemes. This is where AdBlock comes in. It's a free Firefox extension that can block just about any type of ad out there. And not only can AdBlock stop pop-ups, it can also remove just about any type of ad in any type of web page out there; you even have the choice of whether AdBlock should remove the ad entirely or put a placeholder on the page instead (so you'll know what the actual page looks like to everyone else, just without the ads).  But AdBlock can't do it all. Blocking ads takes updated rules and definitions - just like anti-virus software - and that's where Filterset.G enters the picture. Just download the latest version of the filter and install into AdBlock... and never be bothered by ads again! 

Return to article list here.