Instead of giving Apple money for ringtones on your iPhone for music you already own, here’s a simple set of steps for getting free iPhone ringtones from your MP3s:

1. Select your favorite MP3 from your music collection.
2. Open it in Audacity and trim it down to at most 30 seconds.
3. Import the edited song into iTunes and choose to convert it to M4A format. The file will then be something like yourRingtone.M4A in file explorer.
4. Copy the file and rename the extension to M4R in file explorer (e.g. yourRingtone.M4R).
5. Drag and drop the newly renamed file back into iTunes.
6. Delete the old M4A song to avoid the duplicate.

It’s surely not as simple as a one-click purchase through iTunes, but hey, save yourself a few bucks

The Windows Home Server (WHS)  team just announced that Power Pack 1 has gone RTM (Release To Manufacturing).  Power Pack 1 is not just a package of bug fixes, but instead, it’s a combination of bug fixes along with new features.  In addition to fixing the nasty data corruption bug, it adds the following new features:

• 64-bit Vista support
• Shared folder backup
• Improvements to remote access
• More efficient power consumption
• Improved performance

If you have been a participant in the PP1 beta and have a previous build installed, make sure you uninstall it first and reboot your machine before installing the RTM version.  You can download PP1 from the Microsoft Download Center.

If you have an HP MediaSmart machine, HP also released their version of PP1 which has all the above mentioned features as well as:

• DLNA compliant media streaming
• McAfee server side anti-virus (7 months free)
• Improvements to HP Photo Webshare
• iTunes Media aggregator

To install the update from HP, make sure you don’t have any of the beta releases of PP1 installed first, then go to the Windows Home Server console and select “check for updates”.

I’ve been a frequent user of OpenTable the past year or so, but the missing scenario has always been making reservations on the go.  They have finally launches their mobile site:

Avoid the hassle of calling around for a restaurant reservation or the panic of securing a last-minute table. With OpenTable Mobile, you can find a restaurant, choose an available table, and book your reservation - right on your mobile phone.

Check it out on your mobile phone at http://mobile.opentable.com/.

6 or 7 people have sent me a link to Wordle in the last couple of days, so I finally decided to check it out.  The site is simple, and pretty cool in how is visualizes text.  Basically you submit it a bunch of text and it creates a visual representation of it, using the words itself with the size of each word being proportional to its occurrence.  I thought it’d be neat to create some “Wordles” based on some of my most popular blog posts.  Clicking on each one will take you to the Wordle gallery where I saved them.

What to do if your mail gets stolen

Going All Digital with the Fujitsu ScanSnap S300

DVD and Analog Copy Protection on Vista

Great news from Greg about those nifty Sysinternals tools that I’ve been using for years:

The Sysinternals tools are a whole slew of great troubleshooting and analysis utilities for Windows. Microsoft acquired Sysinternals  some time ago. The tools are now available online for anyone that needs or wants to use them, via a web page (http://live.sysinternals.com/) or direct UNC link to each tool.

The simple web page lists the latest version of each tool, where you can click to execute. This is a terrific and eleganly simple resource. No more maintaining thumb drives or CDs of utilities necessary. I like it.
Ed Bott has the details on his Microsoft Report blog at ZDNet.