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So here’s how to do it:

1. Transfer the mp3 file to your phone ( duh ) , using a usb cable or bluetooth, download it, or just copy it to the sdcard, the method doesn’t matter just transfer the file to the SD card. You can put it basically anywhere the device will find it automagically

2. Now how to use it as a ringtone.

Simple when you’ve figured it out but I think it’s not user friendly at all.
The trick is that you actually have to play that mp3 first…

So use: All programs -> Music , now press the lower left button, and play the file you just transferred. Now while it’s playing, press menu, and there’s the option to “set as ringtone”…

Here you can select to use it as:

• phone ringtone – this is the default ringtone
• contact ringtone – you can assign this mp3 to a specific contact , like an mp3 file yelling “It’s him! Don’t pick it up!” you get the idea
• trim ringtone – if you haven’t already edited the file and you only want to use a part of the music as ringtone, you can very easily trim the file, so you can specify start and endpoints without needing to edit the music. This feature is actually pretty cool and very user friendly, it’s worth to have a look at.

That’s all basically.

The method should be the same for all HTC Android devices. It was tested on the Legend.

I’m just wondering why there is no “use custom” option or something like that in the standard ringtone selection menu. This is stupid actually, but the above method works.

Have fun with annoying people around you

The solution below was tested on Linux Mint 11 and Ubuntu 10.10 on a Thinkpad T410.

After installation for the most part, everything worked right away and on an SSD drive, it felt blazingly fast.

However, the screen brightness controls did not work. Some online research suggested adding acpi_osi=Linux to the kernel boot parameters and I also found a tip in the thinkpad-acpi driver documentation for how to force-enable it (over the native Linux ACPI driver).First, edit your /etc/default/grub file to add acpi_osi=Linux and acpi_backlight=vendor arguments to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT. It should look something like this:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash acpi_osi=Linux acpi_backlight=vendor"

Then run sudo update-grub to enable the new arguments. After a reboot, my brightness controls were working.

The other thing I noted was a strange error on boot: “failed to get i915 symbols”. I found a solution for that, too:

sudo -s
echo "i915" >> /etc/initramfs-tools/modules
update-initramfs -k all -u
reboot

For more general information about Linux on the Thinkpad T410, see ThinkWiki.

On June 20, Skype announced the new Skype 5.5 beta for Windows, bringing Facebook chat integration directly into the Skype client. In addition, the new Skype beta also bring Facebook social updates from your friends right into the client, allowing you to stay in touch, comment and “Like” their social updates.

Check out the screenshot below:

Does this sound familiar to you? This is because Windows Live Messenger 2011, released back in June 2010, also brought Facebook social feed and Facebook chat integration right into their client. Given that Microsoft is a major investor within Facebook, the social network had always been a close partner with Microsoft, announcing several deals together in the past including search and advertising partnerships, Office Web Apps in Facebook Messages, as well as the recent Bing Social integration. Microsoft also integrates Facebook into many of its products, including Docs.com, and of course Windows Live Messenger.

With the Microsoft-Skype deal on the horizon, it is interesting to see Skype and Facebook having a closer relationship given that Facebook had always set its eyes on Skype. If the deal goes through, we believe it will be a win-win situation for all three parties – Microsoft, Skype, and Facebook. Benefits of Microsoft and Skype integration aside, the deal will also make Facebook quite happy, allowing Facebook to access Skype’s 145 million connected users per month to its user base. We now wonder, with Skype now featuring most of Windows Live Messenger’s features (and more like multi-party video chats), what will happen by the time the deal gets signed? Will Skype simply replace Windows Live Messenger? Or will it merge into a unified communication system embedded within Microsoft’s Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 OSs? Only time will tell.

The new feature was announced by Google last week at its search event in San Francisco. The voice search option allows users to to speak their search requests in English while sitting in front of their office and home computers, instead of manually typing it out.

By continually coming up with new ways to simplify search requests, Google hopes to extend its dominance in what so far has been Internet’s most lucrative market: steering people to the information they want as quickly as possible. Spurring more search requests provides Google with more opportunities to shows the ads that generate most of its revenue.

For now, the spoken-request option for desktop computers is available only on Google’s Chrome browser. It can be activated by clicking on a microphone icon inside Google’s search box on Google.com. This feature is not yet available on Google’s India website Google.co.in.

Google hopes to eventually make all the features available through Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Mozilla’s Firefox browsers, both which have wider audiences than Chrome. Eventually, people will be able to speak requests in other languages, too.

The speech-recognition technology draws upon a database of more than 230 billion words that Google has built while processing spoken requests on phones for the past two and a half years.

So far, so good. The “rapid release” schedule of Mozilla’s Firefox browser, available for download today, doesn’t seem to have drastically affected the compatibility of add-ons, thanks to a specific Mozilla tool and a somewhat lackluster update, developers said.

As PCMag software analyst Michael Muchmore noted when reviewing the original Firefox 5 release candidate, the update brings a lot of fixes, but very little when it comes to interface advancements or new user tools.

That may be good news to add-on developers, some of which exchanged email with PCMag.com after concerns by users that the new browser updates could force users to wait to use their add-ons until the developers produced compatible versions.

That’s not to say that there weren’t exceptions. Skype version 5.3.0.7280 was listed as an incompatible add-on and was disabled, as was the Somoto Toolbar, Muchmore reported. Of twenty installed addons, two were not compatible once Tom Mutdosch, the developer of ReminderFox, upgraded to Firefox 5, he said in an email.

How’d they do it?

When asked how Mozilla avoided widespread compatibility snafus, a Mozilla representative referred to the Add-On Compatibility Reporter, a tool Mozilla launched in April. Under the new proposal, add-ons hosted on Mozilla’s add-on page that are compatible with the previous major release will be automatically marked as compatible with a new version just before it branches unless Mozilla detects that the add-on is broken. “Users of Aurora, Beta, and final releases should automatically have compatibility for the vast majority of their add-ons,” Justin Scott, a product manager for Mozilla, wrote.

“Mozilla helped alleviate any issues for the most part,” Mutdosch, whose ReminderFox add-on counts over 4 million downloads, said in an email. “They ran some automated compatibility tests, and automatically updated the version compatibility for most addons unless something was flagged.

“This happened to ReminderFox (they bumped the max compatible version up to 5.0) a couple weeks ago,” Mutdosch added. “When I updated to FF5, I had no issue with any of my addons that had had their compatibility bumped.”

Giorgio Maone, an Italian developer, who developed the incredibly popular NoScript and Flashgot with a combined total of over 180 million downloads, also praised Mozilla’s tools, although he also said he offered his own rapid releases; daily beta builds, minor releases every 10 to 15 days, and major releases every 2 to 3 months.

“Even ‘amateur’ extension makers, who can’t invest lots of time and caffeine in keeping up with the latest evolution of Mozilla’s internals, can now take advantage of the new Add-on SDK which, albeit not powerful enough to support complex extensions like NoScript yet, considerably lowers the entry barriers to add-on development by allowing web developers to reuse their skill in HTML/CSS/JavaScript, and provides a stable API which promises to hide the rough edges in the underlying platform and keep compatibility across multiple Firefox releases.”

One problem that Devon J at Enzymatic Software noted, however, was that the lack of a hosted paid marketplace for Firefox add-ons means that those paid add-ons must be hosted off-site, and therefore can’t take advantage of the update process at Mozilla’s add-ons site. Devon J said that he had to “scramble” to fix Bookmarks Up Top, an add-on that his company sells.

Devon, who also wrote Download Statusbar, also cautioned that his pace may slow if Mozilla radically revamps the API or interface on a frequent basis.

“There were very few interface/api changes with this Firefox release,” Devon J said. “If Mozilla started changing the interface or API every 6 weeks, that would certainly cause me to re-evaluate the upkeep of my various add-ons. Having kept Download Statusbar updated for the past 8 years, I’ve been through 3-4 major interface or API changes, and I have no desire to do this more frequently than the past.”

Developers also said it’s unclear what will happen to smaller developers as Mozilla ramps up its development cycle.

That’s a big change from the two years it took to move from Firefox 3.5 to Firefox 4. Firefox 5 is part of Mozilla’s new rapid release development cycle. This cycle, which is more akin to what Google does with its Chrome browser, promises faster, more iterative updates. With any luck, Mozilla expects Firefox to hit version 7 by the end of the year.

Visually, Firefox 5 looks identical to Firefox 4. Everything we said in our Firefox 4 review applies to this release.

Rather than reinventing the wheel, Mozilla has added better support for web standards, fixed some bugs, made performance enhancements and added a few additional code touches.

The big new features, courtesy of the release notes include:

• Support for CSS animations
• Better visibility for the Do-Not-Track header preference
• Improved canvas and JavaScript support
• Better standards support for canvas, HTML5, XHR, MathML and SMIL
• Better tuned HTTP idle connection logic

In another move that mimics what Google does with Chrome, Mozilla now has more options for users who want to partake in the beta and testing process. In addition to nightly and beta channel releases, users can also opt to use the new Aurora channel, which will give users access to features before they hit beta, but with limited QA testing that you don’t get with nightly releases. This is akin to Chrome’s developer channel.

In our tests, Firefox 5 is fast — even faster than Firefox 4. We’re also loving the more frequent update cycle, because it means that the browser will be more able to support the latest and greatest browser features.

To update to the latest Firefox, click on the “check for updates” button in the “About Firefox” menu.

Ubuntu 11.04 and Linux Mint 11 Firefox 5 will install automatically, just check for updates using the package manager.

But users do not only get themes from the official Windows 7 Personalization site, they can create and distribute themes as well if they like. Sites like Windows 7 News have a large themes repository that offers official and custom themes for download.

Still, if you go down that route, you are working with individual themes only. The Windows 7 Theme manager changes this by offering a tool to browser, download and manage themes in its interface.

The program pulls the latest theme information from the Internet whenever it is started. Themes are displayed in groups on the left side. Available for selection are for instance TV Series, Celebrities, Animals, Cars or Games.

A click on a group opens the available themes on the right side in preview mode. Each theme is listed with its name and a preview image. A click on a theme in the list downloads it to the computer where it is opened with the default program, usually the theme engine. The selected theme is directly installed in this case. There is no other option to download themes without installation at this point in time, which also means that you can only select one theme for installation which will block the application window until it is installed on the system.

All installed themes are displayed in the program interface and the default Windows personalization control panel. Themes can be deleted from the program, but it is not possible to switch between downloaded themes there directly. Users need to open the Personalization menu of Windows to do that.

Regardless of those limitations, it is fair to say that Windows 7 Theme Manager offers an alternative to Microsoft’s Personalization gallery on the Internet. Then again, the limitations mean that it is as easy to download and install themes from the Internet than it is using the software, provided that you know where to find themes for Windows 7.

Interested users can download the Windows 7 Theme Manager from the Deviant Art page of the developer. The program is compatible with 32-bit and 64-bit editions of Windows 7.

Yet there are some tiny nooks and crannies around the web where space is at a premium, and there are times when being conservative with what you do online is necessary. For example, throwing a long URL into a Twitter or Facebook post can take up important space, forcing readers to look at unnecessarily long addresses and stealing precious characters you may not be able to afford. As such, using URL shorteners to condense obtrusively long addresses into smaller, more compact ones can allow you to use that space more intelligently.

There are many different URL shorteners out there, and understanding the benefits and drawbacks of each can help you choose particular tools for particular projects. This article considers a brief few and helps you distinguish between the advantages of each.

As always, Google has worked its way into the mix and offers a very simple URL shortener called goo.gl. It is absolutely bare-bones, and you certainly cannot get confused using its interface. Plug your long URL in the left and out pops a short one to the right. A history of the addresses you have shortened appears below the engine as you proceed.

Users may not be satisfied with the obscure, often unhelpful URLs such engines put out for us. After all, we are trying to change these addresses into little units that better suit our needs, so why shouldn’t we have some say in what they come out as? Enter doiop.com, a URL shortener that allows you to personalize the end of the URL for identification purposes. For example, if I want to point to Digitaltrend, I can include the term Digitaltrend in the URL.

This is one shortener that can be a big help if you want to leave viewers with a hint as to what is at the other end of the link.

Unfortunately, some of the URL shorteners that were most valuable to users have disappeared completely. DwarfURL was one such engine, which allowed you to keep stats on the links you created free of charge. There is one nifty little shortener that has stuck around – Memurl. This website allows you to plug in a long address and receive a short one, just like the others. Memurl, however, provides links that are easier to remember because they are mnemonic, making them easy to pronounce and easier to remember.

Other url shortening services offer similar options. Tinyurl for instance generates a random url by default, but offers options to pick a custom string instead for the shortened url. Several additional aspects are worth mentioning. Some services, like Tinyurl, offer preview pages for shortened urls which can be used to preview the page they link to.

Other services, like cli.gs offer statistics for the link creator. Stats usually require an account though, which some users might not want to create for that purpose. Lastly, some services like McAfee’s url shortener offer security checks of landing pages. They will warn the user if a page has been detected as malicious or otherwise harmful.

There are many different ways to shorten URLs for many different purposes. Finding the right one for your needs is the tricky part.

It was only a matter of time until some began posting screenshots of the recently leaked build of Windows 8. News about the leak with the build number 7989 broke on June 18. We did not know a lot about that build back then, other than that it was compiled on April 21. The leak has been made available first on private ftp servers and other private sites, before it made its way to the rest of the Internet.

The screenshots show several new features, including:

• A new onscreen keyboard layout, with fewer keys per layer, but additional layers for emotes and stuff.
• Handwriting recognition works very well, with enough room to write.
• The new touch interface uses a bubble and trail to visualize the fingers and movement. Dual touch is activated on the build.
• The system configuration screen has been revamped
• Windows Smartscreen is active, and will display a warning message if unwanted programs are detected.
• The new metro ui is included but deactivated

I’d say the findings are not super spectacular but confirm some of the rumors of the past months. Be aware that the build is still pre-beta which means that the features shown may be changed or even removed at any time during the development process.

If things go ahead as planned, we showed see a public beta of Windows 8 later this year.