Getting custom ringtones on the iPhone has always been a process that requires some amount of hardwork. Sure there are jailbreak and third party apps that will you help get custom ringtones on the iPhone for free rather than buying from iTunes.

But the catch is that these softwares either cost a bit or require a jailbreak which can be risky for your precious iPhone.

There has to be a easier way right? Thankfully there is a easy, fast and most importantly legal way to get custom ringtones on your iPhone in less than a minute.

Well am referring to a service called Audiko, that allows you to put ringtones on any mobile device and not only the iPhone.

Audiko is a simple service which helps you to make a ringtone of your favorite song! Audiko is an amazing service. It allows you to upload any song, cut up to 40 seconds of it, and put it right into your iTunes Ringtones folder for quick and easy syncing.

Best of all Audiko is a free service and doesn’t require any registration..

Let’s get started with the process..

• To start off visit Audiko.net and search for the song whose ringtone you are looking for.

• And choose an appropriate search result…
• Click "Download Ringtone for iPhone"

• Once you’ve saved the ringtone to a folder on your computer, double click the file to add the file to your iTunes Ringtones library.

• Now whenever you sync your iPhone next you will find the ringtone in your iPhone’s Settings >> Sounds >> Ringtones menu.

What’s more Audiko even allows you to upload a song and cut any part of it (up to 40 seconds).

You can also enter the URL for any YouTube video and Audiko automatically extracts the sound. Just like when uploading a song, you can cut any part of the audio.

Adding custom ringtones on your iPhone could’ve never been easier. No more SSH, no more jailbreaking, and no more useless utilities.

photo credit: ryoichitanaka’s

DVD movies are the best way to pass time while you are at home and have nothing else to do. There are times though when the DVD you rented at the local DVD store has to be returned within 24 hours and you want to watch the movie again and again. In such situations ripping the DVD’s is the best way to go.

If you have been a P2P torrents user for any length of time, I’m sure you’ve heard of aXXo. A lot of people are in love with him and his releases on the internet (including me as well). The quality of his rips are always spot on, and many people have asked me to how he creates such wonderful rips at 700mb which is insanely small.

Sometime in the past aXXo had stopped releasing new movies, and many users were angry. Well you can’t blame him, because he had his own reasons. The purpose of this Hack Attack though is to reduce your dependency on guys like aXXo.

Its as simple as going to a DVD rental store or site, getting the DVD and creating a perfect 700mb DVD rip for the rest of us to enjoy. You don’t need to depend on guys like aXXo anymore.

Without further delay, lets get started with the process, of creating your super small high quality DVD Rip. Here are the tools you will require to get started…

• DVD Decrypter
• Auto GK
• K-lite Codec Pack (if you already have a codec pack installed you can leave this one out)

Install the above softwares, just like you would install any other software, and then grab yourself a cup of caffeine before you proceed. I am going to split this guide into two parts. Lets get started with the first part.

PART 1 : Ripping the DVD to your Hard Disk

Step 1

Fire up DVD Decrypter. It should like the screenshot above. Insert your DVD in your DVD drive and select the appropriate drive as Source, and a folder on your hard disk as the destination with atleast 3-4GB of free space.

Step 2

As you can see in my screenshot, my DVD doesn’t have any region protection, copy protection and RCE protection. It might not be the same with your DVD, and you need to get rid of the protection schemes.

To get rid of the protection schemes, click tools from the menu bar and select settings. The settings dialog should now appear. Now tick the “Remove Macrovision Protection” check box, this will remove the Macrovision flag of the VOB files on the disc. RCE
Protection Region should be set to the region your drive (or standalone DVD player) has.

You can find the regions below :

• Region 1 – 1: U.S., Canada, U.S. Territories
• Region 2 – Japan, Europe, South Africa, and Middle East (including Egypt)
• Region 3 – Southeast Asia and East Asia (including Hong Kong)
• Region 4 – Australia, New Zealand, Pacific Islands, Central America, Mexico, South America, and the Caribbean
• Region 5 – Eastern Europe (Former Soviet Union), Indian subcontinent, Africa, North Korea, and Mongolia
• Region 6 – Peoples Republic of China
• Region 7 – Reserved
• Region 8 – Special international venues (airplanes, cruise ships, etc.)

See the following screenshot for a clearer picture of what you are supposed to do.

Step 3

Now that you are done with everything, you are ready to rip the DVD to your disk. Make sure the drive containing your destination folder has enough free space on it. Select all the files on the right column if they aren’t already selected and hit the Start button as highlighted in the screenshot below.

It should complete ripping after a while and you should see something like this…

Yup that is it, you are done with the first part. Now that you have the ripped files on your disk, you can test them on your media player and when you are satisfied you can eject the DVD. Now lets proceed with part 2 of this guide…

Part 2 : Compressing the DVD to AVI format

Open up Auto GK. It should like the one shown above. Basically this is where all the action happens. I’ll guide you through the process of choosing the best settings through to the last step where you can watch your 700MB rip.

Lets continue then…

Step 4

(Click on the screenshots to enlarge)

Locate the input file from the folder you used to store the rips in DVD Decrypter… Here’s how you select the file. In the Open dialog box, select the details view. The input file that we are going to select is an *.IFO file.

As you can see from my screenshot VTS_00_0.IFO has three .VOB files under it with the maximum size, which means this is the movie we’re looking for. Select the IFO to proceed.

Now give the output file, whatever name you need to give by clicking the Output file field.

Step 5

As you can see from the screenshot above, the program lists the available subtitles and Audio tracks. On my DVD there are no subtitles, and there is only one Audio track, so I will select that.

On most DVD’s you have 2 Channel Sound (2ch), Surround Sound (6ch). I’d prefer Surround sound over normal 2 channel if available simply because they sound much better.

Now select the Target (Output) Size. I have selected 700MB here. Generally speaking, higher the size you select, the more clearer the picture is on the DVD will be.

Now click Advanced Settings button to show the Advanced Options window as shown.

Configure the settings as shown in the Screenshot. Choose XviD over DivX because it gives you higher compression for same quality compared to DivX.

Step 6

Now that you have finished configuring everything, just click the Add Job button and the Start button to start the conversion/compression process.

Just grab yourself some coffee, if you have finished the one you took before getting started. The compression process will take quite a while, so you could even have a nice nap meanwhile.

Note : You won’t much activity in Auto GK itself. A lot of programs will load including a couple of command prompt windows, do their jobs and exit. This is completely normal so don’t bother messing around with anything.

That’s it guys! You have made your first aXXo like DVD Rip!

Please share with is in the comments how the process went. I’ll be gald to hear your opinions out.

P.S : I am trying out a variety of settings, so I will write a follow up post sometime in the future detailing them as well.

If you have any ideas or suggestions please share with us in the comments …

photo credit: jpctalbot

I’m not a Windows Vista fan, but even then everyone at my home uses Windows Vista, while I dual boot with OSX on my Hackintosh.. I’ve used XP before and for some reason I always felt that Internet speeds on Vista were comparably slower than on OSX, and more so even Windows XP.

Considering it was quite slower than what I used to get on XP, I realized that Vista was doing something extra that made my internet connection slow down. After a bit of investigation and a bit of googling I found the solution.

Before I give the solution, let me explain the problem in a bit more detail… It all comes down to Vista’s “Auto Tuning” feature. Turns out that this feature isn’t compatible with many routers and networking devices(including mine). Means the feature that was supposed to be a boon turned itself into some sort of a bane.

Anyways here’s what you need to do turn off the Auto Tuning feature on Vista..

At the Start menu type command, but don’t launch the command prompt immediately. Instead, right-click it and choose Run As Administrator. Once the prompt is open enter the following command.

netsh interface tcp show global

If the line Receive Window Auto-Tuning Level does not say “disabled,” enter this command:

netsh interface tcp set global autotuning=restricted

If this doesn’t help, substitute this command and see if it works

netsh interface tcp set global autotuning=disabled

At this moment, you should notice considerable improvements in your browsing speeds, or rather you should be cruising now. If it works, you should notice the difference in browsing speeds immediately. If it doesn’t work for you, and you feel the need to put things back the way they were, you can type this command:

netsh interface tcp set global autotuning=normal

Here are screenshots showing the whole process, incase you feel the need for it..

Good luck, hope this works for you.. Please let us know if this worked for you or not..

If you are a Windows user, and your favorite browser happens to have a name Firefox 3, here is neat hack which you can use to tweak your Firefox install for maximum speeds and improved efficiency.. Don’t fret because this hack is really simple and doesn’t involve anything more than a couple of minutes of your time. Well I’m going to discuss about a freeware called FireTune, from Totalidea Software, which can give your Firefox browser some shots of adrenaline.

As you might already know most Firefox hacks involve messy fiddling up with options in about:config and there are a gazillion things than can go wrong and mess up with your Firefox install. Instead of dealing with all that mess, Firetune simply asks you a few questions about your computer and connection speed, then automatically configures Firefox for optimal performance—in seconds (No, Seriously!!).

FireTune does not muck up with Firefox executable file, or any other binary file, so you don’t have to worry that it’s going to turn the browser to a toast.

To get started download Firetune from here. Shut down all instances of Firefox and then fire up Firetune. It would be a good idea to back up your original configuration before you make any changes…

Now that you have backed up the configuration, select whether you have a fast Internet connection and a fast computer, or not. If you have at least a 1.5-GHz processor, 512MB or more of memory, and a reasonably fast broadband connection, select Fast Computer/Fast Connection.

Now click on the tab that says, “Other Optimizations”. Check the checkbox that says “Enable some performance tweaks common to all configurations’”.

Now click on the tab that says, “Other Useful Settings”. Check the checkbox that says “Optimize Firefox Memory Usage” 

That is it, now click the Tune It! Button and fire up Firefox once the tuning is done.

Browse through pages that usually used to be slow earlier. I’m sure you will see substantial improvements in the speeds. I’m sure you will find the overall experience of using Firefox much better, not that it was bad earlier!..

Now you must be wondering why many browsers are inherently built slow.. My guess is that coders build it for the people using the slowest internet connection, so that Firefox doesn’t render pages partially for the users.

But because you are a Dailyapps reader, I’m sure you want the fastest speed you can possibily get from your Firefox. That makes it exactly right for you to try out Firetune and give your Firefox a Nitro boost!

P.S. I’ve been a long time fan of Fasterfox, but I abandoned it in favor of Firetune because it doesn’t work with Firefox 3 at the moment.

Download Firetune