Imagine you are in a video-conference meeting, and you have diligently turned the ringer on your iPhone off. Then in the middle of the meeting, while you are presenting, a phone call comes in and starts making loud ringing sounds on your Mac computer. Even worse, turned out it is one of those "we have an urgent message about your vehicle warranty" calls (or "the second warning").
Looking all over your Mac and you fail to find how to disable this. You still want your iPhone messages to show up in your Mac so you can reply to messages by typing on a comfortable keyboard instead of the tiny on-screen thing on your phone. You just want to turn off the incoming phone call.
Turned out the control is not in your Mac computer. It is in your iPhone settings.
Go into Settings - Phone - Calls on Other Devices and then toggle it off as shown in the screen captures below.
That's it. Good luck with your online meetings in the future!
On Twitter, you probably have seen big name accounts (normally they have a checkmark next to their names showing they are verified) tweeting video clips with the original video poster's name as a tag link at the bottom of the video. Have you ever wondered how that was done?
You could try to download the clip (there are lots of online tools available for you to do that), and then re-upload it. But that takes a lot of effort/bandwidth, and you also can't link the original poster's name below the clip. That's just not the right way to do it.
It's actually really easy to do that on a computer (which I use most, cause I hate looking at my tiny phone screens and get my eyes all tired). All you have to do is to first copy the original tweet's URL, e.g.,
Include that in your own tweet, and you'll be able to successfully embed the clip while still giving the original poster the credit.
I normally simply retweet someone's funny videos. But if I really want to hide the original poster's caption and use my own, I use this method. Big-name Tweeters such as Rex Chapman do this a lot. Here's an example:
When you play multiple MP3 songs on your computer, especially the ones you have downloaded off the Internet, it is possible that each song has its own volume. Some might play with such low volume that you can't really hear anything while others might have super high volumes that blow your socks off.
Luckily, computers today are smart enough to figure out what's the generally acceptable volume for human, and can automatically level off the volume, so your socks don't get blown off.
If you are using VLC Media Player (which I am using on a Mac), then it is really easy to set up.
You want to go to the menu and then select the first item on the menu (normally File on Windows computer and VLC Media Player on a Mac), then select Preferences to open the settings window.
It is very important that you click the Show All button at the bottom. Then you get a different screen. Here you want to expand Audio and then select Filters. On the right side, make sure the option "Volume normalizer" is checked as shown below.
Now click Save, and then restart VLC Media Player, and you are all set. All MP3 songs will play at the same volume automatically so you don't have different songs as dramatically different volumes.
If you are not using VLC Media Player, and you are also using a Windows computer, you can also set auto volume leveling at the computer level. It is called Windows Loudness Equalization. You basically want to go to the property page of your speakers and check the "Loudness Equalization" option under the Enhancements tab.
Check out this web page for more detailed instructions if you can't figure it out.
Hopefully, this can be helpful in your problem-solving today. Moving on to the next daily battle!
By the way, if you wonder how you can download one or multiple videos off YouTube, you can check out my other blog post:
The pandemic has made many work from home and kids going to online classes from home. That makes Internet bandwidth a very hot commodity.
Just to make matters worse, ISPs like Comcast/Xfinity started charging extras if you go over the data cap on your home Internet data usage. I have just recently found out that I almost breached the data cap last month.
I used to listen to music on YouTube while doing stuff. I even have this huge YouTube playlist called Lanny's List of Just Nice Songs. Guess the streaming actually used up quite some bandwidth, so family members were complaining about slow Internet speed, and Xfinity is warning me about data usage.
Anyway, so how do we resolve this problem? I decided to just download all the songs on my huge playlist to my computer as MP3 files. This way I can still listen to them (I don't really need to watch the videos that go with them), I won't be using up a lot of bandwidth to download them (since Mp3 files only), and when I listen to them, I won't be using any of the valuable family Internet bandwidth.
Then I realized that there is actually no easy way for me to download all the songs in my big playlist. I choose to not install any local programs and only go with free online tools. So eventually I figured out a solution.
There's a website called ddownr that will let you download multiple YouTube videos on a playlist in a batch. Here's how the interface looks like:
Of course, you can also download video clips from a playlist if that's your desire. For me, I only needed the music MP3s.
If you happen to have a lot of copyrighted material in the playlist, then you will have to use a different web site (linked from the ddownr website. But you can also just go straight to the web site: loader.to. One caveat is that you can only download 21 clips/MP3s in your playlist at a time. But it still beats downloading 392 songs manually one at a time. Here's how the interface looks like:
Note that occasionally the tool fails to download a song from the playlist (sometimes the video is still showing in the playlist, but when you go to it, the video is not available anymore). In this case, you can just find another copy and then use the same interface to download just one video/MP3. You can also use a different website if you just want to download one clip/Mp3: yt1s.com. But I would still recommend the loader.totool, because it does a better job storing thumbnail and artist metadata into the Mp3 file.
In a separate blog post, I described how you can save a YouTube playlist to a text file. You can check it out if that's something you are interested in doing.
If you create playlists on YouTube to group videos/songs you like together, it is a real pain when you go back to the playlist one day and find out that some videos are either deleted or made private (like the picture below). The worst part is that you don't remember what video you put in there, so you can't just find another copy to replace it!!
So next time after you have put in all the hard work for a playlist (like this one, for example, Lanny's List of Just Nice Songs), make sure to back up the names so you can always go back to find out which video on your list has disappeared.
So how do you back up the list easily? For example, as a text file?
What I found very useful is this free online tool at TuneMyMusic.com. The instructions on the screens are super intuitive:
1. You select YouTube as the source (you can also do this for other popular sites like Spotify, Apple Music, iTunes, or Amazon Music).
2. Next, you put in the link of your playlist and click Load playlist.
3. On the next screen, you can leave everything selected, or only select the videos you are interested in saving. Then click Select Destination.
4. Now, just select Export to file. You have the option to select TXT or CSV as the output format. I personally prefer CSV (Comma Separated Values) format, because you can open it from any spreadsheet or database program, and then it's really easy to sort.
5. At the last screen, just click STart Moving My Music and then specify where you want to store the text file on your computer.
As you probably already figured out, you can use this same free tool to move a playlist from one music source (e.g., Amazon Music) to your favorite music platform (e.g., Spotify).
Here are the screenshots of all the steps in case you need it.
Always backup your playlist. Don't let your work go to waste!
By the way, if you are interested to know how you can download all videos in a YouTube playlist in batch, check out my other post below.
