Converting your old cassettes into digital audio

Sick of handling your old and stale and so outdated cassettes containing all your favourite titles. So ever thought of converting them into digital audio like transferring them to your computer or copying it to a CD. Here's how I did it:-

If you want you might want to buy a cable that converts the two Audio RCA Jacks from the stereo and then skip directly to the end of the post.

But, why waste money on something you can easily make right at home. You just require two old headphone jacks. Rip them up from the headphones leaving some wire to connect the two. 

Now, comes a little not so difficult step. Connecting the wires can be done in two ways. It can either be a single channel connection(in case one of the jacks you took is a microphone jack) or a dual channel connection(for stereo output, ofcourse you want tht!! You would need two headphone jacks). 

Single channel connection is easy. First, bare the top of the wires from both the jacks. From the headphone jack you would get four wires coming out. Connect the similar coloured wires together. If the wires are not coloured(just like mine) then also you can easily make out the difference between the two kinds of wires. Now, connect the previously connected wires with the wires of the microphone jack. Make sure to insulate the connections. Once done you need to connect one of the ends to the computer's line in or microphone jack. Connect the other end to your cassette players headphone jack. 

Now, recording the audio requires a software like Audacity(It's free). Press the play button on your tape(keep the sound at moderate level) and press the record button in audacity. All your music gets transferred. This kind of a connection however, would give mono quality sound.

For stereophonic sound output you require two headphone jacks with four wires each.

Connect them separately and its ready.

OOOHhhhhh that was a long post.

autorun.inf virus

Recently my computer got infected with this autorun.inf virus which was preventing me from opening any of my hard disk partitions by normally double clicking them or by clicking on open.

After a scan by my Norton Antivirus 2007 the virus was detected but, could not remove it as the drives were inaccessible. I tried deleting them manually but could not find any autorun.inf file, not even in the hidden files. So one day while just going through my friend's December 2008 PC Quest magazine I found a solution to the problem in the magazine.

Here's how it is supposed to be done:-

1. Click on start|run and type regedit

2. Scroll down to the key        'HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer'.

3. Double click 'NoDriveTypeAutoRun' on the right panel and change the 'Value data' to 'ff'.

4. Then again scroll down to 'HKEY-USERS\DEFAULT\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer'.

5. Here again change the 'Value data' of 'NoDriveTypeAutoRun' to 'ff'.

6. Now, reboot the computer in safemode and then manually remove the autorun.inf files or you could simply get a virus scan done and the virus gets removed.

9. Optionally, you could go to msconfig from Start|Run and in the startup tab uncheck any suspiscious looking program.

Best budget touchscreen phones

By now we have a lot of touchscreen phones flooding the market but most of them come with a steep price tag which prevents most people from buying them.

So here's a list of the best budget touchscreen phones.

1. Motorola A810(Rs.7500):-

A great touchscreen phone with a 2.2" 240X320 pixel screen. It has all the multimedia features including a 2 megapixel camera, music player with great sound output supporting MP4, AAC, AMR, MP3, MIDI, WMA formats, bluetooth, upto 2GB micro sd card support etc. The camera qaulity is not great but still alright. The phone can be a eyeturner although the phone does not look very great.

Verdict: A good phone with great multimedia features, comes at an affordable price.

2. HTC P3400i(Rs.9849):-

This one's from HTC and the only PDA phone that comes at this price. It runs on windows mobile 5.0 and so obviously is for those whop mean business. Coming to the specs it has a 2.8" 240X320 touch display, a 2 MP camera, a 1250 mAh Li-ion battery. Sound quality is good at low volumes but at full volume it gets distorted. The bundled headsets are pretty good however. The camera is totally an average one. Being a business phone it supports microsoft's push mail, e-mail, internet but no wifi.

Verdict: Go for it if you mean business. 

3. Motorola E6(Rs.9129):-

Another motorola phone that's making into this list. Although the phone does not look that good but, still manges to perform well. This phone was the first from motorola's Rokr series stable. Being a music phone it performs really well in this aspect but, what it fails is in the camera quality. This one too has 2 megapixel camera, still the camera lacks that extra edge which result in very dull pictures. The display is a touchscreen one (240X320) and runs on the same OS that the other motorola phones run on(Linux). 

Verdict: This phone from motorola is probably the best among the other music phone's that come in this range. So, go for it!!

Intro

Hi!!!

Welcome to my blog...

This is my first post on this blog