foobar2000: A lightweight music player

I have searched everywhere for a decent music player that does not completely stall my computer just to play music. I first started out with Sonique. It was good, but the interface was not intuitive for some reason. I found it difficult to switch to different playlists because they were located in the wrong place; and it still was resource consuming.

The next option was Winamp. This was a very advanced player with so many features, that I figured that it was too complicated for me. Updating the player was like installing an operating system; and it would consume so much of memory that my computer would literally hang every time it switched to the next song. I couldn't do any other stuff if I had winamp running. I don't recommend Winamp for daily song playing although I do believe that their Shoutcast TV, Shoutcast radio and other online streaming services are very good.

Tired of the problems with the audio players that I had, I finally googled for a lightweight audio player and came across foobar2000.

foobar2000 is the least resource consuming music player on the web. It has a clean, simple, uncomplicated interface with all the functions other music players have. Although people can argue that Winamp is better because it has all the audio enhancing facilities; I say that your audio is only as good as your mp3 file and your physical speakers. The simple fact is, you just need a software to convert your mp3 files to data that can be interpreted by your speakers. Therefore, your output will only be as good as your input. Which means that if you have a 128kbps mp3 file, no matter the software you use, you will still get crappy sound.




Incidentally, foobar2000 is open source, free and is completely customizable. The original foobar2000 did not look like it does on my computer. I did some basic customization and rearranged some of the items to my preference. You can change the location of everything in the player. Although, I highly recommend reading the forums before making the changes yourself. There are also lots of downloadable customizations and plugins if you prefer. I myself feel that I have all I need with the basic player and don't feel the necessity for other plugins or skins. Try this player and I will guarantee that you will make it your basic player for all your audio files.

EDIT: foobar2000 is not open source as I mentioned in the article. The SDK is open source though. Strange! Thanks to Steve for the heads up.

How to Embed images in Gmail

Gmail is perhaps the most elegant and advanced free email services on the internet today. Google labs has made it even more flexible by allowing unbelievable customization. But the one thing that I was not able to do in Gmail was to embed images into my email messages. It's frustrating because an embedded image positioned in the right place in the body of the text has a significantly bigger impact than sending the images as attachments.

The suggestion on the internet by many people is to upload the image to a web hosting site and copy the image from there like text by dragging and highlighting the image. And then pasting it into your gmail message. But the process of selecting and copying the image is messy and very unreliable. You have to make sure not to copy any background text, tables, hyperlinks or any other doodles. If the image is the only item in the page, then it is difficult to select the image because it's difficult to know where to start dragging especially if it's an image that is bigger than the size of your screen. Also, I find that even after I have successfully copied the image, when I paste it in Gmail, the image still does not appear in the message most of the time; and I have to go back and repeat the steps until I get it right. Then I discovered a more simple and elegant solution that ALWAYS works.

You will need:
1. Google toolbar
2. An image on the internet.

I'm sure almost everyone who uses the internet has the Google toolbar. If you don't, you can stop reading this because you came to this post by accident. For the people who use the toolbar, lots of them do not activate the "Send to" button in the toolbar. Go to the Google toolbar Settings-->Click Options-->Click More-->Click Send to. That's it. You are done!



Now you need an image. If the image is not on the internet, you have to get it up there using photobucket or flickr or any image hosting site. Once you get it up, just go to that image url (see sample), click the "Send to" button and select Gmail. This will automatically embed the image into a new Gmail message. From there, you can copy it to another message or just use that message to send your email.

It's far simpler and less complicated than trying to highlight the image because this just works. This is a picture I took which has been uploaded to photobucket. Just go to this link and click the "Send to" Gmail to test this out.

http://i3.photobucket.com/albums/y56/irfan_mailme/DSCF0421.jpg

Ta-daa!


Incidentally, the "Send to" button will add any highlighted text with images on any web page (you can highlight this post- images and all and "Send to" Gmail to see this work). It's a very cool function that I use a lot. I hope this solves the image embedding problem for all Gmail users.

Add Google dictionary to your Firefox browser

Add the dictionary search to your firefox browser simply by typing a keyword and the search item.

To add the google dictionary to your firefox browser, search for the definition of a random word (Eg: Ameliorate) using google's "define: " function.


Now, simply copy the url (Eg:http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rlz=1B3GGGL_en___
SG215&sa=X&oi=spell&resnum=0&ct=result&cd=1&q=define%3A+ameliorate&spell=1), go to bookmarks, click organize bookmarks, click new bookmark, and paste the url under "location".






Then search the url you just pasted for the word that you typed previously (ameliorate) and replace it with %s. (Eg: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rlz=1B3GGGL_en
___SG215&sa=X&oi=spell&resnum=0&ct=result&cd=1&q=define%3A+%s&spell=1). For the keyword, add a letter or word such as "d" or "dictionary" or "define"; or whatever you are comfortable with.



Click "ok" and go back to your firefox address bar to test the simple programming that you have just done.

If you typed "d" as your keyword, in your address bar, type "d ameliorate" and hit the Enter key to get the definitions of ameliorate.

By this way, you can apply it for any search you want to save for later use. All you will need is the url where you simply replace the item you searched before with %s.