Kill -myspace

I wish there was a command like this! I really hate Myspace social networking service. I have an account on myspace which I created ages ago because I had some friends on it at the time. I have never really used it because it wasn’t fun at all, but if you want to view other people profiles, you have to be logged in. Over the years, myspace has become more popular with teenagers who were enjoying (and still do) decorating their myspace profiles with all the things that are considered a big no-no in the world of web design. That includes bulky animated backgrounds of 2+ MB photos, background music that plays automatically when the page loads up, unreadable fonts and screaming colours. Apart from the fact that a page looks incredibly ugly for the eyes that are sore from all the colours and flashing, it also takes ages for a page like that to load even on the high-speed Internet connection.Finally, I’ve decided to delete my myspace account. I did not want to use the service anymore and I wanted to remove all the profile information that I had on it. Every social networking site that allows you to create an account on it also has an option for a user to delete it if one do not want to use it anymore. The procedure is very simple. All that has to be done is to enter an e-mail address that the account was registered with and when you get a return e-mail, you need to click on the link to confirm account termination. Guess what, myspace has it too! Does it work? No! I have gone through the procedure of terminating the account over and over, but I can still log in to myspace with my username or password. Here is how myspace describes the whole procedure of how to delete your account:

How do I delete my account?If you wish to permanently terminate your MySpace account, start by clicking “Home” in the top navigation menu from any MySpace web page. From your personal home page, click the “Account Settings” next to your default picture. From your “Change Account Settings” page, click the “Cancel Account” link, found just above the “My Account Settings”. On the “Cancel My Account” page, click the “Cancel My Account” button. Check the email account that you used to create your account. Follow the instructions in that email to delete your account. Keep in mind, cancelling your MySpace account will PERMANENTLY REMOVE all of your profile information from MySpace, including your photographs, comments, blogs, and your personal network of friends. This information cannot be restored. You may re-register with your current email address after canceling, but you will need to rebuild your personal network from scratch.

It looks straightforward when you read it but in reality it wont work. I did everything as written above not once but more then ten times, and I still have an active myspace account. I thought maybe I need to give it some time (say 48 hrs.) for the system to terminate my account, but that hasn’t happened. Some services would automatically delete your account if you are not using it for a long time. As I am a Mac user, I thought that I might try the same procedure on my Windows PC. I’ve tried it from Firefox and IE 7 but no avail.Considering all this, it turns out that myspace is abusing their own users by not allowing them to cancel their account in any way. How legal is this I wonder? If you have any workaround of how to delete myspace account, please, post a comment. For the record, News corp. sucks!

Magazines & manuals

 Magazines and manuals on the bed. via Flickr  -  I was powncing about geek magazines nowadays and decided to take a photo of some of my magazines and manuals. What kind of magazines do you read?

The Wii has arrived!

Wiimote and nunchuck controllers

How To: Creating a music DVD with Roxio Toast 8

Modern CD / DVD burners and software allow you to create flashy DVD music discs. Music DVD can contain many hours of music, it has navigation menus and it displays album artworks. Once you create a music DVD, hook it up to your home theatre system to experience Dolby digital. You can use regular DVD + /- R or RW discs to create music DVD, but it’s even better if you use HD-DVD (15GB) recordable disc. Recordable HD-DVD’s can be bought from Amazon for around US$ 17.00 depending on manufacturer. In this tutorial I am going to explain how to easily create music DVD using HD-DVD format that provides superb image and sound quality. Optionally, you can use regular DVD-R, DVD R DL or even DVD RW. I highly recommend HD-DVD! Before you begin, take a look at the checklist to make sure you have everything you need.

Checklist:

- Mac Book or a MacBook Pro of newer generation.

– Roxio Toast 8 *

- Blank (recordable) HD-DVD disc

- Lots of patience

Now when you are sure that you have everything you need, we can begin the tutorial.

1. First you need to carefully choose music from your CD collection that you want to use. If you don’t have that many CD’s, you can make an audio DVD of your entire collection if you like. The more, the merrier! On your Mac or your external hard drive, create a new folder where you will copy music from your CD’s to. You name it say “My audio”. Please only use CD’s that you have bought, otherwise it could violate copyright laws in your country. CD audio music is easy to copy to your hard drive using simple drag and drop. The music is in AIFF (uncompressed format). Make sure you have enough storage space. It is also important to say that some music CD’s are copy protected which means that music can not be digitally copied or extracted. The good news is that most of the copy protection systems have been developed for Windows OS, and do not work (or they can be disabled easily) on the Mac. If you need more help about digital music extraction, remember, Google is your friend!

2. After you have ripped and sorted all your music in folders, run Roxio Toast 8, click on “Audio” and select “Music DVD” from sub-menu. Click on “More” button then click on “Encoding” tab, check “Custom radio button ” and set it as pictured below:

You can also choose the menu style that you want. Roxio has a few menu styles but they are rather boring. I’d recommend downloading additional menu styles to make your design more unique. Keep in mind that when you are dragging music, do not drag the whole folder then open it, select all files and then drag over the burning window.

3. When you are sure that you’ve done everything right and your files are being imported, hit “Record disc” button to start recording process. While recording is in progress, you can make a coffee, do some groceries, because encoding and burning will take time (this is where lots of patience kicks in). Burning and encoding speed will vary depends on how fast your Mac is.

Tips:

- Always use uncompressed music.

- Never download album artworks off the Internet. Instead scan your own album artwork at higher resolution.

- You will get best performance if using HD TV set.

If you have additional questions, leave a comment or contact me.

Copying and distribution of copyrighted material is illegal!

This article is also available in PDF and can be found here.