Want to play with Google Buzz before they get it rolled out to your GMail?

The magic of Google Chrome can hook you up.

Create a shortcut to Google Chrome on your desktop, righ-tclick on it, select Properties, and then paste this after everything in the ‘Target’ field:

—user-agent=“Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 2.0.1; en-us; Droid Build/ESD56) AppleWebKit/530.17 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/530.17”

(That’s two dashes before user-agent, not a hyphen. I can’t figure out how to get my auto-formatting to display it properly. Also, you might need to replace the quotes with non-“smartquotes.” Smartquotes are DUMB.)

Then go to m.google.com and click on Buzz. This will, however, make all pages Chrome loads behave as if you’re browsing them from a Motorola Droid, so it’s advisable to make another desktop shortcut with user-agent=”“ to reset everything.

Defined tags for this entry: google, google buzz, google chrome, hacking, howto

UPDATE 2/11/2010: Updated the included unswindle to the latest version, fixes errors on unDRMed books.
UPDATE 2/27/2010: Added specification that users install the 32-bit version of python 2.6 for Windows, even on 64-bit systems.

People have been asking me if there’s a way to convert Kindle books downloaded with Amazon’s Kindle For PC application pretty much since the day it was released. Sadly, despite a lot of tinkering on my part, there was no elegant solution^* until now.

A fantastic Kindle For PC conversion tool has been made. And it works really, really well. And it is significantly easier than the old “Kindle-only” method.

Here’s how it works:

1) Install 32-bit python 2.6 for Windows, from here even if your system is 64-bit you need the 32-bit version in order for this to work) : http://www.python.org/download/

2) Download unswindle.pyw and mobidedrm.py via this zip file and unzip it somewhere on your PC

3) Open the unzipped folder and double-click unswindle.pyw

Kindle For PC will now open.

4) Select the book you want to convert.

5) When the book loads, simply exit Kindle For PC

A ‘Save’ dialog will open asking you where you want to save your new decrypted .mobi file. And we’re done.

(As it uses mobidedrm, it still won’t work on Topaz/.tpz files, and the first one I tried happened to be one. Still, most books will work.)

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*: I did work out a scheme wherein you record video of your desktop, scroll through the book in Kindle For PC, remove all duplicate frames from the resultant video and then convert to PDF, but it was rather unwieldy.

I’ve just discovered something kind of cool: if you want to place and receive free Google Voice calls via your computer, leaving your phone out of the loop altogether, it’s now possible to skip the installation of Gizmo, relying instead on the functionality already present in GMail.

I was playing with the settings for Gizmo while trying to improve my method of making free, minute-less VOIP calls from my Android phone and noticed that it now has the option to forward some or all calls to your Gizmo number over to Skype or Google Talk. If you opt for Google Talk — and if your operating system supports it¹ — you can answer/place calls just using GMail’s chat system. No otherwise-unused software to install at all.

Here’s how:

1a) Create a Gizmo account here (if you don’t already have one)

1b) Configure Google Voice for use with Gizmo following these instructions (if you haven’t already done so)

2) Log into Gizmo’s settings page here.

3) Scroll down to the ‘Forwarding’ section. It looks like this:

4) Select ‘forward all calls’ and put in your GMail username in the appropriate field and Click ‘Save.’

That’s all the configuration that’s required.

Now when someone calls your Google Voice number, in addition to your phone ringing, your GMail (or Google Talk desktop client) will beep at you telling you a call is incoming.

If you want to place a call, you just need to use Google Voice’s web interface. Click ‘Call,’ put in the desired number, and then select your Gizmo number as the callback number. Your GMail will then ring. When you answer it, you’ll hear the number you just dialed ringing.

Have fun.

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1: Unless you’re a freak like me running some crazy non-Windows, non-Mac operating system you’ll be fine. If you are a freak like me, you can either keep using Gizmo, or have Gizmo auto-forward your calls to Skype and do it that way.

Today, after some tinkering, I accomplished something of which I’ve long dreamt: placing a Voice-Over-IP call, from a real phone number to a real phone number, from my Android phone, using only my 3G/EDGE data connection. No plan minutes involved.

Here’s a brief how-to (that’s not even dependent upon having an Android phone):

1) Get Google Voice. (This step is going to be kind of a buzzkill for most people, as Google is still in some sort of indeterminate closed beta with the Google Voice system. I’m not exactly sure how I ended up with access, so I don’t know what to tell you to do to get it too.)

2) Create a free Gizmo account.

3) In your Google Voice settings, add the ‘SIP’ address that Gizmo gives you to your Google Voice account, selecting ‘Gizmo’ as the type of number. (Detailed instructions.)

4) Install a Gizmo-compatible client on your phone. The folks at Gizmo have written clients for many popular phones. You can get one at http://gizmo5.com/pc/products/mobile/. If your phone supports ‘J2ME,’ then chances are they’ve got you covered.

(On Android, I installed ‘sipdroid,’ which isn’t a Gizmo-specific application, but one that can handle any Voice-Over-IP service. (You can find sipdroid in the Android Market, but that version only works via wi-fi. Get the full version which supports 3G/EDGE calling via their site.) Configure it using the info from the Gizmo support page.)

5) Use Google Voice’s web interface to tell it to call whatever number you want, selecting your Gizmo number as the one to ring when connecting. (Gizmo offers incoming calls for free; telling Google Voice to initiate a call and ring your Gizmo is technically an incoming call, even when you’re calling a friend.)

6) Tell the Gizmo client on your phone to answer the call. You’re now connected, and you’re not using any minutes.

A nice side-effect of this Gizmo compatibility is that you can run Gizmo clients on any computers you have around. When someone calls your Google Voice number, all the computers will ‘ring’ as well as your cellphone, so you can answer it from one of them instead. More minutes saved.

UPDATE: If you only want to place/receive calls from your computer, here’s how to do it from GMail/Google Talk instead of Gizmo.

There are things on Usenet that you want to download regularly. Doing so is a time-consuming chore that’d be better accomplished through automation. This guide aims to show you how.

The problem with Usenet is that, even with the requisite utilities, you still find yourself manually extracting RAR files, applying PAR2 files to regenerate missing chunks, and then disposing of all the compressed/encoded files after extracting your media file. Not to mention seeking out and downloading every episode of everything you want to download. It’s not for the faint of heart.

Here’s where it gets awesome, though. There’s a free, open-source application called SABnzbd+, available for every platform, that does all that for you. Even awesomer, it can monitor RSS feeds and watch for user-defined strings in the filenames to facilitate the automatic downloading, unpacking, repairing, renaming and moving of files into your media library with zero intervention on the user’s part. After setting up SABnzbd, the content you want to download is magically downloaded FOR you, with no intervention on your part. This is the future, and it is AWESOME.

To get started with your magical new life of automatic content delivery, you first need a Usenet account. And, you’re probably going to want a ‘premium’ account, meaning that you’ll have to spend some money every month. There are many different options when choosing premium Usenet providers, but I recommend Giganews. They even have a free trial, allowing you to see how awesome this whole thing can be. You can sign up for your free trial by clicking the nifty banner below. (We’ll supposedly get referral credit or something if you end up being a paying customer.)

The next thing you need to do is install SABnzbd on a computer in your household. On Mac/Windows it’s a super-easy installer, and it runs using a web interface rather than a GUI. Upon installation you’ll need to specify the username/password for your Giganews (or other Usenet provider) in the Config tab.

The next stop is giving SABnzbd one or more RSS feeds to monitor looking for things to download. There are many different options for sites that provide RSS feeds of nzb files. A quick Google search can help you find one that has the type of content you’re looking for. Once you add a feed, you can enter in names/words in filenames to either ‘accept’ or ‘reject.’ SABnzbd will then periodically check the rss feed, and when it finds an nzb that matches your rules, it queues it for download.

You then configure the Folders option to specify where you want finished downloads to end up. That’s really all there is to it. Now your computer will periodically check any configured RSS feeds for things it should download, and when it finds something, it just does. And then it decompresses, repairs (if necessary), and then gets rid of the compressed stuff. No muss, no fuss. Set it and forget it.

An average 360meg file downloads in about 2 and a half minutes. But you don’t care how fast it is because it’ll just be there waiting for you automatically.

An added perk, is the SABnzbd Firefox extension , which gives you a constant indicator of things that are downloading, right in your browser’s status bar — and also the ability to click on any nzb file from any nzb search engine and have SABnzbd automagically start downloading it, even if you’re surfing from a different computer than SABnzbd is running on. Very awesome.

UPDATE: I’ve now written an app for Android phones that will allow you to queue nzb files on your SABnzbd installation: NZBdroid