Most of my music on my iPod is Country Music. Unfortunately there is no default setting on the iPod Touch for country music, so I spent quite a bit of time experimenting with the EQ to find the best setting.

Country Music comes in many different flavours from traditional country, to rocking country to country pop. Depending on what style of country music you subscribe to will affect your choice of EQ setting. Most of music leans toward traditional country music and I found that the best EQ setting for me was accoustic.

Usually I find the best setting for country music to be rock, it was the case on my last MP3 player, an iRiver, but that setting on my iPod Touch was too muffled for my liking.

Your own preference may vary, but try the accoustic setting and see how you go, then let us know your own results below in the comments. I’m curious to know if my results are typical or not.

Here is one way that you can do that quite easily:

1. Get the address for your Facebook Status RSS feed. To do that you can click on this link, http://www.new.facebook.com/minifeed.php?filter=11, when you are logged into Facebook. Then scroll down the page and on the right side you will see “Subscribe to these Stories” with a link to “My Status” under it. Right click on “My Status” and copy the URL or Link. (UPDATE May 3, 2009) Facebook changed things on us, so check out here to find out how to get your RSS feed from your Facebook Updates. Then come back here to follow the rest of the tutorial.
2. Go to www.twitterfeed.com and set-up an account there.
3. Once you have set-up an account click on “go to my twitter feeds (or create a new one)
4. Click on “Create new feed”
5. Fill out your relevant Twitter account details and then paste the URL that you copied above into the “RSS Feed URL:” box.
6. Select the update frequency (depends on how much you update Facebook.
7. In the “Include” select the option “title only” and remove the check mark next to “Include item link” (unless you want people to link to your Facebook profile with every update, in which case you will want to leave it checked).
8. Leave the next option set to “pubDate”.
9. Select a Prefix like “FB Status: ” or something similar. Keep it short.
10. Leave the other options and click on the “Create” button.

Be aware that Twitter only allows updates that are 140 characters, including the prefix that you selected in step 9. This means that you will need to keep your FaceBook status updates short, or twitterfeed will cut the end off the update.

… do you think ifreames effect the indexing of other pages on the site?

While a bot is crawling the page will it see the iframe first and crawl to it rather then crawl the rest of the page? More over, won’t this be harmful on large scale sites while trying to index inner pages?

Please any one let us know your thoughts …

Although I have not had any experience with iFrames on a site containing real content (I have used iFrames to display advertisements, but that’s about it) I got busy doing a bit of research and found that iFrames may not be indexed and displayed in the Google Search Results.

You can read what Google says about here below:

IFrames are sometimes used to display content on web pages. Content displayed via iFrames may not be indexed and available to appear in Google’s search results. We recommend that you avoid the use of iFrames to display content. If you do include iFrames, make sure to provide additional text-based links to the content they display, so that Googlebot can crawl and index this content.

That content is part of the the free help that Google offers to webmasters at their Webmaster Help Centre. You can read that answer, and more about using rich media files on your web-site here.

It’s been taking much longer than I had originally planned to finally be in a place to get a new laptop. Recently though my wife’s Dell Inspiron 2650 finally died after over 5-years of service. This has left us in the undesirable situation of only having one computer (that sounds a bit greedy after reading it, but I need one for work and she needs one for communications and support raising).

I’ve been looking at what Dell was planning to replace the Inspiron 1420 with and it looks like the Dell Inspiron 13 is it.

I reckon that the Inspiron 13 looks like a handy little laptop, and the reviews of it seem to say that for the price it’s a good value.

For the last few weeks I have been waiting for the Dell web-site in Australia to update their pages with the Dell Inspiron 13. They have had a fixed model up since the global launch of the laptop, but I don’t want their standard configuration.

Unfortunately it looks like for some stupid reason Dell Australia will not be offering customisation of the Dell Inspiron 13! According to comment #34 on this forum post they will not be offering customization on the laptop in Australia.

I tried to get confirmation of this by talking to a Dell rep, but all I was told was that I can’t customize the laptop at this time. They didn’t know if it would be possible in the future.

So now it looks like I will be waiting another 4 – 6 months and I will purchase a new Dell laptop when I get to Canada. The thing that I like the most about the Dell laptops is the International Warranties that you get with them. Because of that warranty I can purchase the laptop in Canada and get it serviced pretty much anywhere.

Gametrainer.com provides training for anyone wanting to improve their gaming skills. They will work with anyone from first time “newbies”, to “professional” gamers. They provide training for these games:

• Battlefield: Bad Company
• Call of Duty 4
• Grand Theft Auto IV
• Guitar Hero III
• Halo 2
• Halo 3
• Madden NFL 09
• Rainbow Six: Vegas
• Rainbow Six: Vegas 2
• Rock Band
• World of Warcraft

There are featured tips on the site, as well as on-line guides for the games. They even provide hourly lessons for the games by their “Gamertrainers”. There are trainers specialising in the above games, and there is even opportunity to apply to be a trainer yourself.

The pricing for the hourly lessons are quite reasonable at $30.00 per hour, $80.00 for 3-hours or $130.00 for 5-hours.

If, unlike me, you have time to play games, but are not all that brilliant at them, this might be a service to look into.

As for me, I’ll stick with my once a month game of SimCity 4 (also available for the Mac) …

Here is a short, 2-minute video tutorial showing you how to set-up e-mail to be automatically forwarded using the Rules feature of Microsoft Outlook:

If you are running Outlook connecting to a Microsoft Exchange server then this rule should work even when you are not logged into Outlook. If you are on a standard e-mail account then you will need to have Outlook running for the rule to work.

The easiest way that I have found to upload a file to Ning is to create a comment on the Ning Social Network site that you are working on, and attach a file to that comment. You can even delete the comment after making it, and still have the file on the server.

Below is a video tutorial showing you how to do it:

Let us know if you have any other ideas with working with Ning Social Networks below in the comments.

Good luck playing with your Ning …

Technorati Tags: ning file upload, ning

We got Error Code -1712 when we tried to run Microsoft Remote Desktop Connection on one of our staff’s Macbook.

To diagnose this error in more detail we opened up the “Force Quit Applications” with command + option + esc. The program that I was trying to open was already open (RDC), so I force quit it in the list.

After force quitting the offending application I was then able to start it again, without coming up against the “Error code -1712″ error again.

Technorati Tags: error code 1712, mac, rdc

To save myself having to show people all the time, here is a video tutorial on creating an e-mail alert in Microsoft SharePoint Services:

And here are the simple step by step instructions on creating the alert:

1. Open the survey or announcement page that you wish to be alerted for.
2. Click on the “Action” bottom and the click on the “Alert Me” link that appears.
3. Fill in the title and other requested information.
4. Click on the “OK” button.

There you go, you have now set-up an e-mail alert to be sent to you when someone fills in a survey or places an announcement on your Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) Intranet.

Technorati Tags: wss, sharepoint services, sharepoint, alerts

Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently

…

PERM_FAILURE: Google tried to deliver your message, but it was rejected by the recipient domain. We recommend contacting the other email provider for further information about the cause of this error. The error that the other server returned was: 552 552-5.2.2 The email account that you tried to reach is over quota.

That is definitely not a very friendly error for people to have come back to them after and e-mail comes to them.

Our problem stems from the fact that we have been archiving our e-mails instead of deleting them after we download them to our Microsoft Exchange Server. We had amassed 6.8GB of archived e-mails since we started this, which was massive, so I had to clear out our older e-mails.

Here are the steps to delete the old archived e-mails in Gmail.

1. Click on “Show search options”
2. Leave all the fields blank except for the date field
3. Next to “Date within” choose “1 Year” and then for date select a date 1 year and 1 month ago (13-months ago). So if it is June 13th, 2008 you would select May 13th, 2008 by typing in “13/05/2007″.
4. Click on the “Search Mail” button and check your results below. Make sure that the first e-mail listed is a month old.
5. Click on the Select “All” link above the the e-mail list, then click on the “Select all conversations that match this search” that comes up above the e-mail list.
6. Click on “Delete” and then confirm the deletion.

After that process is complete you will need to empty the trash / bin folder to completely remove the e-mails.

After doing that we were back to only having 161MB of e-mails archived in our account, which allowed e-mails to be received by our Gmail account, and again pulled down to our Microsoft Exchange Server.

* Please note that this will delete all older e-mails, not just those in the Archive folder.