[Download Squad] 4 New Entries: Help! Some idiot partitioned my giant hard drive!

Help! Some idiot partitioned my giant hard drive!

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Steve, a loyal DS reader, left this comment on my listing of five apps to clone hard drives:

"Some idiot (my friend) partitioned my 1TB drive @ 10gb just to start me off and I can't do anything. I have partitioned/formatted the rest of my drive and cloned onto the new partition but I can't get rid of my C drive to use my new partition as my main drive. Any suggestions? Please help."

Ah, yes. The well-meaning friend with just enough computer knowledge to be dangerous. While it's certainly a good idea to partition a large drive, ten gigs may have been a bit on the miserly side - and it sounds like our reader didn't really want his new drive partitioned in the first place.

Now what? Fortunately, there are a number of good, free apps that will allow him to combine the two partitions into a single large one, or resize them to more reasonable capacities.

Continue reading Help! Some idiot partitioned my giant hard drive!

Help! Some idiot partitioned my giant hard drive! originally appeared on Download Squad on Sun, 16 Nov 2008 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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MiniTask - light task manager for Adobe Air

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MiniTaskMiniTask is a basic cross-platform organization app built on Adobe Air. The learning curve on this app is basically nil, and you'll soon be adding, checking off, and setting alarms for to-do items with ease. There aren't a ton of features, so it's not the greatest for the completely neurotic among us, but if you just need a simple, unfussy to-do list, give it a look.

Let's a take a quick look at what MiniTask can do (fortunately, it's not much!). There's just one window, and you can right-click (CTRL-click on a Mac) to add new tasks and new dividers. You can use the dividers however you like, for different days or different categories of tasks. To-do items have three modes: checked off, not checked off, and alarm. Double-click a task to change the name, and double-click an alarm icon to change the time on an alarm. Seriously, that's all there is to it!

MiniTask - light task manager for Adobe Air originally appeared on Download Squad on Sun, 16 Nov 2008 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Asinine lawsuit from French music interests targets Sourceforge

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Torrent Freak reported yesterday that the SPFF -- think of it as the French RIAA -- filed lawsuits against the developers of P2P clients Vuze, Limewire, and Morpheus. There is also a fourth target, and I'll get to that particular bit of insanity later.

The SPFF's beef is with the fact that these programs don't provide a system to block copyright protected materials from being shared. Because the programs don't prevent files from being shared, the SPFF argues that the programs are complicit in the act itself.

It's the same flawed P2P argument that agencies have been making for the last decade. This "making available" argument has failed to hold up in US court cases against individual users.

To claim that the developers of these programs are responsible for what their users decide to do with it is pure idiocy. If someone were to author a subversive plot to overthrow the French government using OpenOffice Writer, would there be a lawsuit filed against Sun? OK, don't answer that...

The kicker: Rather than actually going after those who develop the fourth app (Shareaza), the SPFF decided to sue SourceForge - who merely provide hosting for Shareaza's project files. SourceForge has absolutely nothing to do with the actual development of the program.

When I read this, I started having visions of the SPFF headquarters looking like something out of Bizarro World from the old Superfriends cartoon. Clearly the only people that could hatch a scheme like this would be badly animated super villains.

I'm sure there's no possible way this fiasco could backfire on the French music industry. After all, I think we can all agree that the P2P community is usually very good about knuckling under to threats from coporate interests.

In an unrelated note, I have to check uTorrent to see if my downloads are finished.

Asinine lawsuit from French music interests targets Sourceforge originally appeared on Download Squad on Sat, 15 Nov 2008 15:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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How to embed high quality YouTube videos

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A lot of people don't know that YouTube has high quality videos, as well as the generally poor-quality standard versions. The links to the better (not HD, but still pretty good) versions are easy to miss, but there are a few steps you can take to make sure you're watching (and even embedding) the good stuff. Jason Kottke ran through a few of them recently on kottke.org.

First, make high-quality your default setting. You can do this in the Account menu, under "Playback Setup." That takes care of playback, but what if you want to link to the high-quality version of a video? Just paste "&fmt=18" or "&fmt=22" at the end of the URL. 18 is the 480x360 version, and 22 is the 720p version. Some videos will have one, but not the other, so try both if you need to.

When it comes to embedding, you can make a quick change to the embed code to get better video quality. Just add "&ap=%2526fmt%3D18" to the end of the URLs in your embed code. Here's an example:

<object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/oHg5SJYRHA0&hl=en&fs=1&ap=%2526fmt%3D18"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/oHg5SJYRHA0&hl=en&fs=1&ap=%2526fmt%3D18" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>

[via Kottke]

How to embed high quality YouTube videos originally appeared on Download Squad on Sat, 15 Nov 2008 14:59:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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