Legitimate Free Chinese Music Downloads!

So a few years ago while in Hong Kong I discovered a website called http://www.top100.cn/ this place is amazing!!

With this site you can download unlimited amounts of Chinese and other popular music for free... legally! No way right? Yes way son! However there is a catch, the site only allows ip-address from china to actually download and listen to the music. What if you are not in china but want to use this wonderful resource? Just use a proxy that is based in china!
It may be troublesome to find a good proxy that is in china since a lot of the Chinese actually want proxies outside of china to bypass government censorship...but don't lose hope there are still proxies in china that we can use :)

What you have to do:
(I recommend doing all this with firefox because it is easy to turn the proxy on and off)
Get latest version of firefox here: download

1. Find a China based http proxy - http://www.xroxy.com/proxy-country-CN.htm
2. Configure your browser (see below).
3. Navigate to http://www.top100.cn/
4. Download away!

Configuring your browser to use the http proxy (assuming firefox):

1. Tools>Options>Advanced>Network tab
2. Under connection choose "Settings"
3. Choose "Manual Proxy Configuration"
4. In the http box paste/type in the proxy ip you want to use
5. In the port box enter the proxy's port.
6. Press "OK"
7. Done :)

Now when you choose to download some music at top100.cn the site will think that your accessing the site in the country of china.

Have fun!

Tangy Lime Steak Yaki Recipie

So I was at my friends house and was hungry like a beast. We looked in the fridge and harvested some steak! Except we didn't know how to make yummy steak...So, we made up something that ended up tasting like bliss!! So what does bliss taste like?

Lets get started! (amounts are not done yet)
Things you need:

• Oyster sauce
• Water
• Sugar
• Black pepper
• 2-3 red peppers
• Some steak meat
• 1.5 Limes
• Veggie oil 
• Ms.Dash salt-free seasoning blend
• Steakhouse seasoning grinder

1. Preheat oven to 450 degrees F
2. Mix together water, oyster sause, sugar, black pepper and 1 lime worth of juice.
3. Poke many holes in the steak meat.
4. Put a little bit of veggie oil in a frying pan and throw the steak on there. Pour some of the sause mixture into the frying pan, until about it is 2cm up the side of the steak.
5. cook here for 7mins, flip to other side for 7min.
6. Put tin foil on a cooking sheet for the oven. Instead of wrapping the cooking sheet just lay a sheet of tin foil on it (we need to use the excess later).
7. Position the steaks in the middle of the cooking sheet close together.
8. Cut the last half of the lime into slices and place it on top of the steaks.
9. Slice up the peppers and place them on top of the steaks. (put all the seeds on the steak too)
10. Bend up the sides of the tin foil sheet around the steak creating a "bowl".
11. Pour the sauce left in the frying pan and the rest of the sauce mixture into the bowl so the steak basks in the sauce.
12. Put the steak on center rack of oven and bake on 450 for 10min.
13. Now broil for 5mins
14. Check meat (for desired rare-ness)
15. And Bake again for another 10min. (if it isn't cooked enough)
16. Done.

 

Reversing Rhapsody.

So I read somewhere theroizing that the wma's downloaded using the Rhapsody client come through DRM-free which is then wrapped with DRM when it is downloaded.

I plan on investigating this theory. Will update.

Update 2/11/10:1:37AM :
The rhapsody client:

•  is not packed
• does not implement any drastic anti-debugger techniques

Update 2/11/10:10:31PM :
A quick Process Monitor 2.8 dump yielded that rhapsody downloads the audio file to a temp directory:

C:\Documents and Settings\Username\Local Settings\Temp\rhapdownloads\#########.rax*

before it moves it to your destination directory. I hopefully it wraps the audio before it moves to your destination directory.

A partial sample of .rax file streamed by rhapsody: 196607054.rax


*.rax file type is rhapsody's streaming/download format.

Blogger wants your Flickr ID

When creating this blog I wanted to use the slideshow gadget to use my flickr photostream but I couldn't figure out what blogger wanted as my flickr username.

What blogger doesn't want as a username:

• The screen name you chose during flickr account creation (the name following "Signed in as")
• The email you used for your account.

What blogger does want as a username:

• Your Flickr ID

How do you find out what your Flickr ID is?
When you log into flickr right click one of the photos in your photostream and select "Copy link location". When you paste the link you copied you should have something that looks like this:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/########@N##/##########/

(Let # represent numbers)

Your Flickr ID is the bold part of that URL. i.e.: ########@N## 

OR:

You can use this nifty tool by Adam Lewis that uses Flickr's API to find your Flickr ID
http://www.adamwlewis.com/articles/what-is-my-flickr-id

Yahoo mail on Android

For a while now the android mail client has not supported Yahoo mail by default. So we have to use these custom values to configure Yahoo mail to work with our phone.

1. Enter your username & password.
2. Selected manual setup.
3. Choose IMAP.
4. In incoming settings for IMAP server enter in: imap.mail.yahoo.com
5. For port: 143
6. Next.
7. In outgoing settings for SMTP Server enter in: smtp.mobile.mail.yahoo.com
8. For port: 25
9. Next.
10 Done.

If all goes well you should now have yahoo mail access on your android phone!

VLC: Setting up a default directory.

So i was experimenting with the vlc remote app in the android market today and found it to be quite entertaining. Mind you i have never messed with a vlc remote before on any platform, so this was a new experience for me :]

Youtube video I created for this tutorial: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kim5QM0nKfQ

I found it nice to control my whole media library during a party while lounging on my deck enjoying company from other party guests (yep...). However with this vlc remote it's quite tedious to always browse your computer on the phone in search of a particular file.

Solution 1 - Playlist method:
Put together a playlist of all your media and have it vlc load it by default at start up.

Disadvantages to solution 1:
1. Its a static list of your media which means you have to recreate the playlist every time you get some new stuff.
2. If you have 50,000+ song...making a playlist is not really efficent..not efficent at all. It also seems that vlc is buggy with playlist making and large number of files.

Solution 2 - Loading entire directorys semi-dynamicly:
This is semi-dynamic because it only updates. When vlc starts. To do this we actually need to make a custom playlist file that points to your desired directory and have it load when vlc starts.

The custom playlist file:
Fortunatly vlc uses the xspf format for it's playlist standard which is pretty straight forward. Here is what our custom playlist is basically going to look like

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<playlist version="1" xmlns="http://xspf.org/ns/0/" xmlns:vlc="http://www.videolan.org/vlc/playlist/ns/0/">
    <title>Playlist</title>
    <trackList>
        <track>
            <location>K:\</location>
        </track>
    </trackList>
</playlist>

So create a new text file and paste that into it. Replace "K:\" with whatever directory you want it to point to (can also be a folder) and save it as "playlistname.xspf"

Now once out playlist file is made we can now open up VLC - I'm using v1.0.3 (download latest) and configure VLC to automatically load this playlist when it starts.

Auto-load playlist:
1. Tools>Preferences (or simply CTRL-P)
2. Choose to show all settings (bottom left)
3. Playlist>"Default stream" textbox
4. Type the full location of the playlist file here. (i.e. C:\Program Files (x86)\VideoLAN\VLC\playlistname.xspf )
5. Save
6. Exit and reopen VLC and your directory should be queued in the VLC's playlist.

Ideas for using this:
1. Auto-load preinserted CD/DVD's
2. Semi-dynamic listing of contents of a folder, partition, memory card.

My VLC set up:
Auto-start VLC+http interface with windows>Auto-scan the DVD drive and queue found music>Auto-scan my media HDD and queue found media>control it via VLC remote on my phone>uploads recently played track's data to my last.fm account (so people at the party can check out my last.fm if they want to know what songs played). So my media library is ready to go basically right after logging into windows.

Perfect party solution!  :]