I just got an iPhone and switched to AT&T after five years on Verizon Wireless. Don’t get me wrong - I really liked Verizon. It’s just that I left my previous employer several months ago, and I knew that resigning a contract meant they’d validate my employment status, realize I was no longer employed there, and cancel my 20% discount.

Fortunately, I discovered that Purdue has a deal with AT&T, so I was able to get 20% off both the voice and data portions of my wireless plan. I knew I wanted a smartphone, and after playing around with the options, there was no denying that the iPhone beat the competition in usability, speed, and general awesomeness.

After I bought my 60GB iPod Photo in 2004, I swore up and down that it was the last Apple product I would buy new - yet here I am, with a shiny new iPhone. So sue me…things change.

Anyhow, I’m big on hacking and tweaking my stuff. My last Verizon phone was a Motorola V325, and I hacked the hell out of it to make it work how I wanted. Naturally, I jailbroke my iPhone within 24 hours of my purchase, so that I could better customize stuff like sounds and the UI.

I’ve been using one of the themes from Super Mario World for the past five years on each of my phones, so I knew I wanted to upload it to my iPhone. Turns out that adding ringtones takes a little work, but it can be done - for free, and with free software. iTunes will only let you create ringtones from songs you’ve downloaded from the iTunes Store. I’m going to show you how to create ringtones from any audio file, whether it’s WAV, MP3, AAC, or anything else.

First off, you need Audacity. This is a free, open-source sound editor that’s been around for awhile. You want to make sure to get the latest beta version, as it includes support for exporting to AAC (.m4a) format. Once you have Audacity, you also need to get the ffmpeg libraries, which will support exporting to multiple formats (including AAC). If this link is dead, try the version here.

You’ll notice that the file format of the downloaded libraries is a little odd (the second link will take you to a .7z version) - if you don’t already have it, 7-Zip will allow you to extract the files. Once you have the files extracted, copy them into the Plugins directory of your Audacity program folder - it should be something like C:\Program Files\Audacity 1.3 Beta (Unicode)\Plug-Ins.

If you want to make MP3 ringtones for phones other than the iPhone, you need the LAME libraries, available here.

Now you can load up Audacity (it’s in your Start Menu once you’ve installed it). The first thing you need to do is tell it where the ffmpeg libraries reside. Click the Edit menu, and select Preferences. Go down to Import/Export, where you’ll see a box about ffmpeg in the top left corner:

Click Find Library, and browse to the Plugins folder where you extracted the files. You’ll see that a single dll appears - click it, and click Open. You’ll now see something like this:

Now that Audacity is set up for exporting to AAC, we can start making our ringtones. It’s pretty screenshot-heavy, so click the jump to see the rest.

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I have friends all over the world. Once in awhile, I make use of the various webcams I own and do a little video chatting. Getting video chat to work well will be for another day - something I learned recently, however, was how to setup a live stream on a webpage. It was surprisingly easy, and works in both Windows Vista and Windows XP.

You need three things : a webcam, a decent high-speed internet connection (the lowest end DSL might not have enough bandwidth to support this well), and Windows Media Encoder, which is available for free from Microsoft. If you’re running Vista, there’s a hotfix you might need (it’s linked on the main WME page), but I have yet to have any problems myself.

You might also want to get a dynamic IP service, like dyndns or no-ip. I used no-ip.org, although they seem to be really big on sending me frequent emails advertising their paid services - I’m not a big fan of free services spamming me about their commerical options. If you don’t use a dynamic IP service with the computer running the webcam, you’ll have to manually update the webpage every time your IP changes.

We’ll walk through how to get setup and going. It’s a bit screenshot heavy, so click the jump to see the rest.

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You know, for all the flak our friends in Redmond get, I’ve seen Microsoft release some pretty decent stuff lately.

I sometimes wonder (ok, so I wonder a lot…) if people have a habit of immediately discounting anything from the hands of Microsoft because, well, it’s from Microsoft. Perish the thought!

Anyhow, I’ve more recently become a regular user of two well-known Microsoft products: Windows Vista and an 8GB Zune. I can still remember when the Zune first came out - it was mercilessly destroyed by critics everywhere as a pathetic attempt to compete with Apple’s flagship iPod products. At this point, anything that plays movies and music is going to be an iPod competitor, period. It’s hard to create something that can validly stand up against the number one digital music player on the merket.

At any rate, I’ve been writing reviews for Julie Strietelmeier over at The Gadgeteer for a few months now. She asked me to review the 8GB Zune, and I’ve been using it ever since. I’ve even gone so far as to mention to her several times how much I like the thing.

You can read the full review here - it’s a bit long, but it’ll be easier than me repeating myself in this post. Why do I really like the Zune? It just works. Seriously. I turn it on, and it works. There’s almost zero learning curve. The up-and-down motion of the touch-sensitive D-pad (wow, that was a lot of hyphens) is easier on my thumb than the scroll wheel on my fourth generation 60GB iPod photo. It fits in my back pocket. Battery life is phenomenal - I only charge it about once a week, and I use it every day. It looks sexy as hell.

The software leaves a little (or a crapload) to be desired, but the latest revision (2.5) fixed several of my top complaints about the usability of it. I’d like to see MS give us Windows Media Player compatibility. Overall, though, what can I say? I really, really love my Zune. When my iPod finally dies on me, I’m pretty sure I’m going to be replacing it with a Zune. Of course, this means my iPod alarm clock will no longer be very useful, so I may have to keep around an iPod just for that.

Epiphany - now I know why people are against buying products specific to a single device. I mean, everyone was thrilled when all the major cell phone manufacturers announced they were going to a single standard for charging (micro-USB), right? It’s too bad that all these music devices can’t use a single standard for docking, remote controls, alarm clocks, video output, etc. I’ve got too much iPod hardware as it is. I’ve looked into how difficult it would be to create an adapter to use my iPod stuff with my Zune - it doesn’t look overly complex, but would require some more knowledge about the Zune’s pinouts (what’s available now is far from solid data). Getting charging and syncing to work is one thing, but getting other signals to work - remote controls and other docks, specifically - is another beast. I’ll add that to my ever-growing list of summer projects.

I’ll save my commentary on Vista for another day. Right now, I’m more interested in figuring out how to add timestamps to WordPress posts.