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It should be noted there can be issues with uninstalling Hotspot Shield (detailed a bit on Apple’s support forum and removing the ads it uses from Safari). Install at your own risk.

How does it know where you are? Well, your IP address gives you away. Without getting too geeky, your IP address is basically your address on the internet — similar to your house address in the real world. Hulu, and other sites, can tell where you are coming from in the world by your IP address. They can’t necessarily drill down to your exact physical location in the world, but they can know that your IP address is given out by a internet service provider in, let’s say, Canada. (For more on IP address terminology, visit wikipedia) What you need is a way to fool Hulu into thinking you’re not from Canada but actually in the US.

There’s a simple little program called Hotspot Shield that can manage this for you. Hit up a href=“http://www.hotspotshield.com/”>their website and click on the Download the latest version link on the right hand side:

You’ll get a file that downloads and should mount on your desktop and present you with this image in the finder:

As the image suggests, just click and drag the Hotspot Shield application to the Applications folder. Then browse to your applications folder and double click Hotspot Shield application. You’ll have to enter your password to install the application. Once installed it will launch a web page where you’ll have to click ‘Run Hotspot Shield’:

After a few seconds it will reload the page with your newly minted IP address located somewhere in the US:

After a few more seconds the page may reload with a bunch of advertisements, which you can close. You’ll also get an icon in your menu bar at the top-right of your screen:

With these options:

Now try hitting up Hulu and viewing that episode of 30 Rock you missed. There’s a whole ton of content on there including movies, classic Saturday Night Live videos and more.

When you’re done watching, you can click the menu bar icon and choose disconnect to stop hiding your IP address.

One reason to not keep it running constantly is that it does insert adverts into your regular browsing. There’s also some web services that you use that stores data/cookies (in a good way, IMHO) for you based on your IP address.

All this is, of course, hypothetically speaking. There are legitimate reasons to block/hide your IP address including security reasons.

Then, it’s just a matter of waiting for one of your contacts to have installed it themselves so you can try it out!

You can tell one of your contacts has the video plugin installed because they’ll have a little video camera icon by their name in your contact list like this:

Mac’s don’t get viruses in their native OS (although there is a Trojan Horse or two out there), but if you use Boot Camp to run Windows on a Mac, the Windows partition is vulnerable to malicious Windows software.

I’m completely ready to trash the Windows partition and start from scratch, but hopefully I don’t have to format the Mac partition… UGH!

So my weekend challenge is to succeed where Neural Net could not and get this machine working again, hopefully with as few (data) casualties as possible. If you have any advice or well-wishes, leave it in the comments!

Update: It took me 10 minutes to fix the problem. The only casualty was my bro’s pirated movie/music collection. You can imagine how bad I feel about that…

I am a Mac user, so the emulators I use are SNES9x for Super NES (donationware) and SixtyForce for N64 (shareware, but worth the $16 fee). I’m not a fan of using the keyboard to play console games, so I bought an XBox 360 USB controller and downloaded a 3rd party driver to make it work on my Mac.

One of my favourite things about gaming with an emulator is that they allow you to freeze your game at any point and return to it later. FAR better than leaving your console paused for the evening because the wife HAS to watch Juno for the 15th time this week, only to have her shut it off. Love you, Honey!

Anyways… what about the games? Consult almighty Google for websites that have ROM’s for these emulators (CoolROM.com has a bunch). ROM’s are basically images of the old cartridges for these systems. The best part is that you don’t have to blow into them to make them work with your computer, you just keep them in a folder on your computer’s hard drive and open them with your favourite emulator.

Awesomeness!

Note: The screenshots are of the windowed mode in these applications, but you can run them in full screen mode too.

I downloaded some videos from youtube and they are currently in flv format. I’d like to put them into a powerpoint, and I think I need to convert them to mpeg, or something. But I don’t know how to do that or what program to use.
Thanks!

I get asked this question all the time. YouTube is an amazing resource until you need to use one if its videos offline or in a presentation.

And that’s where vixy.net saves the day.

Vixy converts flash videos to a few different formats, including .avi and .mov. It’s super straight forward to use:

1. Copy the URL (web address) of the page where the original video is
2. Paste the URL into the appropriate field, pick a format, then hit start.
When Vixy is finished converting the file, it will allow you to download the video!
A few quick tips:
–I recommend using .avi if you’re a Windows user and .mov if you’re a Mac user.
–Don’t expect perfection; YouTube’s videos aren’t that high of quality to start with, and you will lose more quality when you convert the video to a downloadable form.
–This works with any flash site that uses streaming flash videos, like Daily Motion, MetaCafe, etc.
–Depending on the length of your video and how busy Vixy is, conversion and downloads may take a while.
–This won’t work if you copy the address of a page where the video is embedded. You have to go straight from the source!
–Vixy can get a little glitchy; if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.