I listen to a lot of podcasts, and my queue of things to listen seems to be growing constantly; I can never catch up. What's frustrating about this is that most people talk too slowly on podcasts. To be fair, they are speaking at a reasonable conversational pace, but when you are simply listening to a conversation rather than taking part in it, you can take it all in at a much faster pace.

While iPods have been able to speed up audio books for some time, the latest 3.0 iPhone / iPod Touch release has added the ability to speed up (and slow down) podcasts as well as audiobooks. That's the good news. The bad news is that whatever the algorithm is that is being used to speed up the audio ends up sounding quite rough.

For podcast listeners that are not using an iPhone or iPod Touch, there are not many options for speeding up podcasts, short of doing it yourself manually with a program like Audacity.

Luckily, there's a new site that is looking to take care of this problem for us. PodShifter is a site that will allow you to enter the RSS feed for a given podcast, and it will spit out a new feed URL that will deliver podcasts that are sped up to exactly the speed you prefer. You can choose from slowing down your feed to 0.6 times its original speed, all the way up to 3.0 times the original speed, in increments of 0.2. Based on the demo MP3s on PodShifter's homepage, the sped-up audio is quite smooth.

Unfortunately, in my testing PodShifter has generated new podcast RSS URLs, but when I put them into iTunes, the audio files that I get are exactly the same speed as the originals. I was surprised that they downloaded at all to begin with, so I'm hopeful that there is processing going on in the background and a new version of the podcast will arrive that actually is sped up.

I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that it is quite likely that some podcast publishers will not be thrilled about a republishing service such as this. Larger podcasts that rely on download statistics for determining advertising rates could potentially lose track of the subscribers that sit behind a republishing service like PodShifter. And unfortunately PodShifter's site is not particularly forthcoming with information, so it's hard to determine whether they offer publishers some manner of tracking statistics properly.

In any event, the service that PodShifter provides is a very useful one, and one I hope will succeed. Now excuse me while I go refresh my podcasts to see if any of my PodShifter subscriptions have delivered on its promise.

[via Lifehacker]

Open source software advocates like to point to OpenOffice.org as a viable alternative to Microsoft Office. It can open, create, edit, and save Office-compatible documents including text, spreadsheet, and database files. It might not have every last bell and whistle of Office, but it gets the job done. But OpenOffice.org also has a dirty little secret: It's kind of slow. And apparently, it's getting slower all the time.

OpenOffice.org Ninja ran a battery of tests and found that with each major release, OpenOffice.org has gotten a little slower when performing common tasks like opening, closing, and exporting documents. OpenOffice.org 1.1.5, for example, launches about 40% faster than OpenOffice.org 2.4. That figure holds true whether you're doing a cold start (loading the program for the first time since rebooting your computer) or a warm start (starting the program a second, third, or 15th time).

The developers have certainly been tweaking the open source office suite to improve performance. But they also keep adding new features, which is a good thing. Unfortunately, sometimes those new features slow down program performance. Of course, if you can't wait 20-25 seconds to load your office suite, you could always just buy more RAM, a faster CPU, and umm... Microsoft Office. Or try an online office suite like Google Docs or Zoho, which load faster than OpenOffice.org if you already have a browser window open.

[via Digg]

Have you ever wished for a way to practice typing so that you may become a more efficient and capable keyboard jockey? Typing at the "speed of thought," perhaps? Well so did we, but we also didn't want to bother downloading anything so that we could achieve this fickle daydream of ours. Enter Keybr, the flash based type instructor you've been waiting for.

Keybr is very straight-forward, and honestly, quite ingenious. You can choose from three basic lessons that start with a certain number of keys on the keyboard, and then, as you progress through the lessons, more keys are added to the mix to make things a little tougher. As a nice touch, it keeps live track of all your mistakes and your words-per-minute (wpm), and even creates graphs of your performance.

But, things get better yet. Once you deem that the lessons have nothing left to offer you, get ready to play with custom mode, where you can edit the text that you want to practice. Very bare-bones, but oh-so functional.

The best part of all this may be that Keybr supports a surprising amount of different keyboard layouts. Everything from international keyboards (French, German, Spanish, Russian, and Italian) to regional and alternative variations - such as Dvorak, UK layouts, and others.

And although Keybr does not have games or other fancy gimmicks that might make the experience more exciting or visually stimulating, as far as free, flash-based typing programs go, you will agree that this one is rather good.

[via Webware]

From the "if we really thought about it we would have been able to figure this out on our own" department comes a handy tip for speeding up OpenOffice.org -- by increasing its memory use.

The open source Microsoft Office alternative is great if you're looking for a low cost word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation application. But it takes so long to load up, especially if you don't enable the quick start application.

Here's how to cut down OpenOffice.org's startup time:

1. Start OpenOffice (it doesn't matter which application you load, Calc, Impress, or Writer will all work)
2. Click Tools>Options
3. Select Java menu and uncheck "Use a Java runtime environment"
4. Select the Memory Tab and change the following options:

• Number of steps: 30
• Use for Open Office: 128
• Memory per Object: 20
• Number of Objects: 20

Next time you start an OpenOffice.org application it should open much more quickly. But it will also eat up more memory. If you have an older computer with less than 1GB of RAM, you might want to just live with a slow load time. Or buy more memory.

[via gHacks]

With so many great webmail offerings out there, only two are considered the frontrunners. Yahoo, the oldest player, has just revamped with unlimited storage and some drag and drop interface changes, while Google has the threaded simplicity thing going on adding built in Chat, Doc, Calendar, and Spreadsheet applications with a less cluttered appearance.

In this battle, who is the real leader? Veronica Belmont from Cnet put up both Yahoo Mail and Gmail up to the test on which one of these AJAX email applications is the leader. She weighs in and compares all of the strengths and weaknesses of both services in interface design, features, speed, organization, and security to come up with the end winner.

I've never really thought that "keyboarding," "game," and "fun" went in the same sentence, but QWERTY Warriors--itself a snicker-inducing title--has proven me wrong. It's a fast-paced Flash typing game in which you must annihilate advancing enemies by typing the words that appear next to them. The game is played in a top-down view with you, a lone soldier, in the center. Typing the word that appears next to an enemy will make you turn and fire on it, usually destroying it. Mistype the word and you don't fire. If the enemy gets within firing range it will--what else--start firing, and you'd best dispatch it quickly. As you advance through the game the words you must type get longer and the enemies get more formidable, able to move faster and fire across longer distances. Fortunately, there are occasional power-ups that replenish your health and dispatch multiple enemies at once, but these must be activated with their own, longer words. QWERTY Warriors has four difficulty levels so you should have no trouble getting into it no matter your keyboarding skills, and if you play the game long enough you're all but guaranteed to improve your typing speed.

There have been several times in my computing career when a power supply or other component has died on me. When something is going wrong in your PC, it is good to know what is going on inside the box. You can get out your candy thermometer (or your significant other's I suppose) to test for PC component temperature or a great program to help test your systems heat and other PC vital functions is SpeedFan. This tiny app is great, giving you vital info on heat, fan speed, hard disk fan speed, and other information you may need in the process of troubleshooting. SpeedFan won't give you info on every component, but it certainly helps when troubleshooting heat issues. It has some features that over-clockers would make more use of, though I haven't tested them out yet.

SpeedFan v4.31

http://www.almico.com/speedfan.php

Want to read faster? Try ZAP Reader. It's a free web app that will, in theory, as much as quadruple your reading speed. It works like this: You find some text you want to read fast, you paste it into ZAP Reader and hit Play, and ZAP Reader starts flashing the words on the screen. You can control the speed it goes at (it starts at 30 words per minute) and pause it, and you can skip backward or forward. I tried it and was surprised at how fast I was able to push myself, though I found that only being able to see one word at a time made my brain skip a beat on words I'm not used to, in particular trade names. ZAP Reader also has a bookmarklet which, when clicked, will automatically feed any text you've selected into ZAP Reader. You can see a video of ZAP Reader in action after the jump.

Speaking of Windows getting bogged down, you're probably aware that Windows runs a lot of stuff in the background that takes up memory and processor cycles that could be better spent elsewhere, and you might even know how to access the Services control panel, but once you're there it can be hard to know what to keep and what to kill. There is help to be found, however: Guide to Useless Services is an article on TechTree written back in December that identifies and describes 29 services that are probably running on your computer and probably don't need to be. Shut 'em down!

Every one of use uses DNS every time we connect to the internet, yet it's been decades since anyone has made any improvements to the end-user experience. In case you're scratching your head (or saying, "DNS? Isn't that the thing that happens when Internet Explorer can't connect?"), DNS is the system that, among other things, translates the addresses you type into your browser into the IP numbers that let your computer to connect to web (or e-mail, or IM, etc.) servers. So how can such a basic service be improved for the end-user? Direct your gaze toward OpenDNS, which adds some features to DNS that immediately make the lives of users easier. In particular, it adds phishing protection and address spell-checking to every web site request your browser makes, without you having to install any software. All you have to do is configure your browser or OS to point to OpenDNS' DNS servers, and the next time an email points you to a phishing site, OpenDNS will block it, and the next time you accidentally type downloadsquad.cmo, OpenDNS will automatically direct you to .com. On top of that, OpenDNS claims to be faster than other DNS servers. On top of that, you can configure which features you want to use (e.g. if you don't want phishing protection, turn it off) without even registering. It's also totally free to use--OpenDNS makes money by placing advertisements on those typo pages. WordPress developer Matt Mullenweg wrote a mini-review of the service and says it's "a great idea, well-executed" and "invisible in all the right ways." I'm sold.

Keshav sent us a nice list of things you can do to your machine to speed up Windows. Some are easy, some are obvious— some are not. Most importantly, most are quite safe. Disabling services can sometimes be wonky, but that's about as extreme as this one gets (OK, the prefetch thing makes me a little nervous and it's debateable whether or not it really speeds anything up). One nice tip out of the bunch: getting rid of those delete confirmation messages. Just nice to get that one turned off finally. Once you're ready, check out the legendary Black Viper Services Configuration page.