Rohit Mordani’s Blog

I know there are a lot of people out there who want have wanted a certain piece of music as a ringtone for their phones but they just dont know how to get that. This blog post is for those people ! Well – you do know how to use the computer ! So here goes. I use this process all the time and have created some awesome ringtones ! My friends all ask me to make them a ringtone now !

STEP 1: The source

YOUTUBE + DownloadHelper plugin

YouTube has a ton of shit and it probably has exactly what you are looking for ! Be it a commercial that you liked that had a certain piece of music (you probably dont even know the name of the music at this point) or something that is in a movie ! You will find it in Youtube. So head over and find that piece !

Now, the next part – Downloading the video that has the music piece.  You need to have Firefox for this step. If you already do then head over to http://www.downloadhelper.net/ and download and install the DownloadHelper add-on for firefox. Once you have done this, go back to YouTube and load the video you want. On the top left hand corner of the video you will notice a little 3 ball icon. Clicking on this will give you an option to download the video. Download it – It will be a file with the .flv as the extension which stands for Flash Video. Save the file to your computer. We will need this for the next step.

If you already have an MP3 that you want to start with to create the ringtone then you can skip directly to STEP 3.

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I couldn’t believe that the Motorola Q9h doesn’t have an option to turn off the shutter sound while clicking a photo ! I knew this had to be a stupid  registry setting and so I fired up my Registry editor and made the necessary changes and voila !

First of all, you need to download a registry editor for Windows Smartphone. There are a couple of registry editors such as PHM registry Editor, Resco Explorer and Total Commander. I used PHM Registry Editor which is a free tool. Download the CAB file, transfer it to the Q9h using ActiveSync or a memory card and install it using the file manager application on the Q9h. Once installed, run the PHM Editor and navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE –>System–>Pictures–>Camera–>OEM. Click on “Values” which is the left soft key. This will bring up another screen with 3 list items:

• ForceShutterSound
• ShutterSoundVolume
• SoundFile

Select SoundFile (center select) and change the Value Data field value to \windows\*none*\. Click on the Done (the right soft key).  Thats it ! You’re done – no more shutter sound ! You can quit the PHM Registry editor. Now, you can set a ringtone of any size !

A few weeks back my Motorola Q9h display died on me and wouldn’t come back. After searching the net and not finding anything I was wondering if I could open it to see if the display connector was loose, since, at times it would come on and go off again. I searched the net again for directions on how to disassemble a Motorola Q9. Unfortunately there was no site that explained how to to do that. I know there was one for the Motorola RAZR (which I found) but there wasn’t one for the Q9h.

So I went ahead and started to disassemble on my own with a lot of uncertainty. I have broken electronic gadgets (while opening it) in the past that I meant to repair. When I started doing this I realised how nice it would be to actually know what I was doing and refer to some guide with pictures like I did when my RAZR died on me ! I thought to myself at that moment – “Why don’t I do one guide which will benefit others !”. o here it is – in the least possible words:

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I finally got a Motorola Q9h and I like it. I am getting used to it and there are some things really nice about it. I love the fact that it is a 3G phone – I can do so many things with it. There are a couple of things that I don’t like about it (as usual) but I can live with those things. For one, the GPS doesnt really work that well and when it does, it drains the power ! Another thing I don’t like, and I know that AT&T is doing this, is that there is a size limit on the ringtone. The ringtone can be only 299Kb. I understand that the ringtones shouldn’t be that large but I do have some ringtones that are just barely over that size. Luckily, there is a way to overcome this problem and here’s how…

First of all, you need to download a registry editor for Windows Smartphone. There are a couple of registry editors such as PHM registry Editor, Resco Explorer and Total Commander. I used PHM Registry Editor which is a free tool. Download the CAB file, transfer it to the Q9h using ActiveSync or a memory card and install it using the file manager application on the Q9h. Once installed, run the PHM Editor and navigate to HKEY_CurrentUser –> ControlPanel –> Sounds. Click on “Values” which is the left soft key. This will bring up another screen with 3 list items:

• AllSounds
• Ringtones
• FileSizeLimit

Highlight FileSizeLimit and click on “Menus” which is the right soft key. From the menu select “Delete” to delete that key. Thats it ! You’re done. You can quit the PHM Registry editor. Now, you can set a ringtone of any size !

Well – everyone, including my wife, thinks I spend wayyy tooo much time at my computer and they always wonder what the hell is it that I do ! Well over the years the technology has improved so much that now I can do pretty much anything using my computer. Be it watching TV, writing a blog, reading news, seeing a gallery of photos, planning a trip, checking mail or just listening to music. Here are the tools that I use – I bet there are more, but here is what I use.

Watching TV/Videos

• NFL : I use SOPCast to watch those games that aren’t aired in my area. As I write this blog entry, I am watching the Colts vs. Bucaneers game. Want to know where I find the appropriate channel addresses to watch the games? Here is a link to the page that has links to all the games – This is updated weekly.
• Bollywood Stuff :Want to watch Zee TV, Sony and other hindi movies? Check out muft.tv
• Joost : Ye, I do have a Joost account. A friend of mine invited me to it and I have been using it for a while. It is a great software tool and I really like it, though it does have a long way to go where content is concerned. The quality is really good. I think Joost is now open to anyone who wants to use it – they can download the software from the official site
• YouTube : YouTube of course is the tool that I use to search for all the videos that I might have missed over the week. It is awesome though not as awesome after Google bought it out – They had better content before that !! Nevertheless – they still do have some good stuff. For example they have an official page for clips from late night shows like Conan and Jay Leno.
• Online shows : ABC, Fox, CBS and all others now host their recent past shows on their websites. So if you missed the last Desperate housewives episode or Heroes or Lost episodes then check out the respective channels – though they are put up online a day later

Photography Tools

• Adobe Photoshop CS2 : A Graphic Designers best friend ! This is by far the best softwareI have ever used ! Read my blog entry about Adobe Photoshop here
• Panoramas : I take a lot of photographs and I use the best stitching tool that I have come across so far – Autostitch. I love this tool and the guys over at University of British Columbia have done an awesome job ! There is no other tool that I consider better than Autostitch
• HDR Composition : Recently I started taking a lot of HDR photos and to compose them I use Photomatix. There are a lot of other tools there including Adobe Photoshop, however I think Photomatix does a good job – it has some presets for noobs.
• Online Hosting : My brother hosts a web server at his house and we run Gallery. We have been using Gallery from a very early version and we have a lot of photos now ! I also use Flickr and Picasaweb.

Downloader/Conversion Tools

• SUPER : SUPER is an awesome tool that I found a little while ago. You can convert a lot of media from one format to another. The biggest plus – its FREE – woo hoo ! I love these guys who make awesome software and distribute it free of charge !
• flvconvert : flvconvert is another great tool based on an open source tool called ffmpeg that allows you to convert flash videos (flv videos used by nearly ALL online video sites like YouTube etc.) to mpeg or avi files. You can then transfer these to your iPod or any other PMP.
• Audacity + lame encoder : Audacity is another free tool that I use. I love ringtones and Audacity is what I use to create my own ringtones from the mp3 files that I own.  lame is the encoder that is used to export the snipped songs as mp3s. You can then transfer these to your phone. Someday soon I shall write an entry about how to create ringtones.
• AVI MPEG RM WMV Joiner/Splitter : Join or split the video files. Sad to say its a paid utility.
• SDP Downloader: Some time ago, I wanted to download some wma and wmv files and I couldn’t. I grabbed this tool and voila !
  
• Firefox +DownloadHelper add-on : Download all those flv videos from any site using the DownloadHelper add-on with Firefox 2.0

There are ton of other tools that I use. I shall update this blog entry whenever I find out about them and use them !

This is probably going to be my shortest HOW-TO. Go to the following DMV website and fill in your details. This comes really handy during Tax-Time when you can’t find that damn registration letter that DMV had sent you

https://mv.dmv.ca.gov/FeeCalculatorWeb/vlfForm.do

I was looking through the web and couldn’t find a plugin that would pull my GamerCard information and add it to the Sidebar widget so I got creative. Here is how I did it :

1. Go to Presentation > Sidebar widgets (This assumes you have the Sidebar plugin installed)
2. Drag the ‘Text 1′ widget from the pool in the bottom and add it to Sidebar 1. If you don’t have a Text widget or are already using one then in the ‘Text Widgets’ section add increase the number by 1
3. Click on the ‘Text 1′ (or Text # – where # is some number corresponding to the text widget number) and add the following :

<a href=”http://profile.mygamercard.net/[yourgamertag]“>
<img src=”http://card.mygamercard.net/gel/[yourgamertag].png” border=”0″>
</a>

Make sure you replace [yourgamertag] with your actual gamer tag. Here is what my code looks like this :

<a href=”http://profile.mygamercard.net/mordani”>
<img src=”http://card.mygamercard.net/gel/mordani.png” border=”0″>
</a>

You can also generate the above code from http://www.mygamercard.net/

Click on the thumbnail below to see what the text widget looks like (during setup)

And the final result is… (Yes – your gamer card)

Moving to using a new computer is like moving your house ! You need to take backups of everything in your old computer (like packing all the stuff in your house) and then reinstalling and restoring it on your new computer (like unpackaging everything in your new house) !! Except that there are no moving costs involved here – well for the most part

As part of my last move, I had to move all my work email (stored in Outlook) to my new machines. I also had rules that ran on my inbox. I thought it would be a daunting process of exporting all the personal local email folders and importing them in the new computer. I was surprised to find out that all that you needed was to copy over 1 file to the new machine and import it in Outlook !

Here is how I did it…
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Recently I had a task at hand while switching from one computer to another. I had to move all of my ~10GB of music from one computer to another ! That was not the “tough” part though ! The tough part was – How to maintain the ~310 playlists that I had set up ! I have no idea why I have those many playlists ! I guess I am a little over-organised at times !

Anyways, here is the way I did it ! It was pretty simple eventually…
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Panography – and yes that is NOT a spelling mistake… Panography is a technique that uses a lot of photographs “put” together manually (in photoshop or whatever) to form a composite photo. Its a little different that Panoramas, since images are not “stitched” but just placed together, but it is really exciting if done well.

The technique is to reduce the opacity of the images to about 50% or so and use an image editing tool such as Photoshop to rotate and align the images appropriately.

It is an innovative concept and I really like it…Maybe I shall make a few of my own

Till then here are few examples…

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