Do you use iTunes to listen to audiobooks? There was a bug in iTunes that made all files manually marked as an audiobook disappear from the iTunes library. This video shows you how to retrieve them.

8:10pm – updated to differentiate between the 3G and 3G S models.  Thanks Craig!

Ever been in this situation: you’re using your iPhone, composing that precious Tweet, when – all of a sudden – the device freezes up?  You feel immobilized by not being able to finish whatever it was you were doing. Cursing under your breath, you hold down the Home and Power buttons and force-reboot the device.  Good news: your iPhone has the ability to deal with hung applications in a way that’s better for the device, as well as faster for the user.  In a nutshell, it basically involves force-quitting an app (instead of rebooting the entire phone – executed by holding the power and home buttons). So how do you take advantage of the force-quit method?

The answer depends on which model iPhone you have:

3G: hold the Home button until you’re taken back to the home screen.

3G S: hold the Power/Lock button until the slide to power off screen appears.  Then hold the Home button until you’re taken to the home screen.

Voila! You can now continue to use your precious iPhone or iPod Touch without having had to wait two minutes and upset the iPhone’s operating system.  Enjoy!

Our good friend and TNR Podcast guest Luke DiMarco from DiMcoProductions has made a video tutorial of how to completely customize your YouTube background.  He even provides his own PSD file for you to use, for free!  So have fun and happy customizing!  Also, I highly recommend you subscribe to Luke’s YouTube channel, which provides tons of useful information about all things tech (and otherwise… Go Knicks?)

TNR Tip: My audiobook disappeared from iTunes; help! from Alex Luft on Vimeo.

Audiobooks are awesome, especially when they reside on your MP3 player of choice.  Forget audiobooks on cassettes – those times are long gone; embrace the day in which everything is digital.  At least that is the mantra of many online audiobook retailers.  But what if you still have some audiobooks on tapes laying around the house?  Well, luckily for you – today’s mainstream technology is able to help you out and digitize those cassettes – bring them to your computer, that is.  Actually, a very important tool I used to accomplish just this task is a plain-vanilla 3.5mm male-male cord – which I made my pick of the week on Saturday’s TNR podcast.  So what’s the tip, then?  Well, I ran into a bit of a predicament after bringing my cassettes over to iTunes: the audiobook files disappeared.

Let me take a step back and explain what transpired from the beginning: I recorded the cassette (both sides) and then joined the two (sides A and B) in GarageBand.  I then exported the two sides as a single MP3 file and sent it to iTunes.  From iTunes, I navigated to the Get Info pane and then to the Options tab, where I marked the file – as it properly should be marked – as Audiobook (under Media Kind).  And then… poof!  The file disappeared from iTunes entirely!  It wasn’t to be found – either by performing a search or by organizing the files by Most recently added.  It was gone.

I was stunned and stumped.  It was as if iTunes punished me for marking the Media Kind as Audiobook.  It was only a few days later that I figured it all out: iTunes removed the file (newly-marked as Audiobook) from my Music library and moved it to the Audiobook library.  Unfortunately for me, I didn’t have the Audiobook library subset enabled in iTunes, and thus could not find the file at all.  To bring up the Audiobook sub-menu, all I needed to do was to navigate to the iTunes Preferences menu and, under the General tab (Show sub-menu), tick the check box corresponding to Audiobooks.

Voila!  As soon as I had done this, the recently-converted “audiobook-on-tape” appeared under the Audiobooks subsection of iTunes.  I felt like a genius, and the day instantly became better, which inspired me to convert more tapes to the digital format.  In fact, I will be making a tutorial about how to do this very thing quite soon.  If I lost you along the way, fear not: just click play on the video tutorial below.  Happy converting!

Yesterday I published a link to a tutorial by our talented and adorable Lizette Gagné – in which she outlined (in text and in video/audio forms) the steps to change the TweetDeck logo back to its original “sans-yellow” form.  That tutorial was for the Mac and today we figured out how to change TweetDeck’s icons on the Windows platform.  So as promised, head on over to this post on Lizette’s blog and get rid of that yellow background for yourself!

On a side note – I’m starting to actually like the yellow background of the new logo.  On my Mac, I enabled the option to periodically change my desktop backgrounds; when the background is black, it makes the black bird icon difficult to see in the OS X Dock.  The yellow border makes it stand out and visible if the desktop background is black/dark.  Being visible… well, that’s always always a good thing, right?

On episode 23 of the (internationally-acclaimed) TechNest Report podcast, our lovely co-host Lizette Gagné vented, ranted, and otherwise expressed her frustration about the new TweetDeck icon in version 0.25 of the popular Twitter (and now Facebook) client.  But she didn’t just stop there.  Letting her actions speak louder than words, she created a video tutorial that guides Mac-using folk in getting the original icon back (Windows version coming soon)!

Lizette has 2 version of the tutorial: a written one and a video one – with the video posted after the break.

Update: if you have Clippy installed on a Jailbroken iPhone, Skype will crash when entering user name.  Thanks to gadgetboy on Twitter.

Earlier in the day, Ben had some complaining to do about the newly-released Skype app on the iPhone.  I myself joined some Twitterers in voicing concerns about the app and the call quality produced by it.

But I have some great news: we found the culprit to many of these problems and have traced the issue back to jailbroken phones!  So we decided to put out an audio recording about how to fix the issue.  iPhone still a virgin (not jailbroken)?  There are some tips for you in here as well, so grab a quick listen!

We enjoy being green here at TechNest Report: we don’t use paper that often – if at all, turn off our displays when we’re not using them, and have a very efficient recycling system in place.

As such, one of the predominant movements in tech (and the rest of the world) today is going green – a hot-ticket term for being more environmentally friendly.  In the past, Apple has come under heavy criticism (deservedly or not) for not doing all it could do be an environmentally-friendly company.  All that changed when Apple announced the new MacBook lineup in late 2008 – which is rated at the highest-possible standard in environmental friendliness: the EPEAT Gold rating.  The new MacBook line (along with the recently updated Mac Mini and iMac desktops) are made out of highly-recyclable materials, are more energy efficient, and use less packaging than their predecessors.

Did you know?

I noticed one very cool green bit about my 4-month-old MacBook aluminum 13″ today that I wanted to share with you – it’s something I didn’t know until a few minutes ago: when the notebook brick is plugged into a power outlet but the other end of the cable (the MagSafe adapter that plugs into the actual notebook) is not, the brick does not draw power.  That’s right, when unplugged from the actual machine, the bricks of the new MacBooks cut the power from the wall.  As far as I recall, this was not the case with my old iBook G4 12″.  I welcome this move by Apple in making “smarter” power bricks and reducing wasted energy.

How about my fellow PC users?  Does your Dell, HP, Lenovo, Sony, Acer, Gateway, E-machines, Asus (or other brand) PC notebook do the same?  I hope so.  If not, it’s time to write an email to the customer service department of the respective organization and ask that this feature be implemented – and make sure it gets to the right person within the company.  Contacting greenpeace might be another approach to start some movement in this area (it worked with Apple, didn’t it?).

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Apple iPhoto

Use iPhoto?  Make an edit on a picture and no longer like it?  Did you know that you can bring the original picture back with just one click?  Read on to find out how!iPhoto ’08 has a nifty feature called “Revert to Original.”  It’s purpose is simple: undo all edits you made to a picture and voilla – you have your original shot, just as it came off your camera!  This feature is a bit difficult to find (you’d think Apple would make it more prominent).  Here’s where you can get at it:

What iPhoto does is pretty clever (for whoever thought this up): once you make any changes to a photo, the software makes a copy of the original photo and makes all edits on the copy.  Therefore, you always have an original version of any picture in your iPhoto library.  You just don’t see it.

I’m not sure whether other versions of iPhoto have this feature.  As far as I know, iPhoto ’08 is the first iPhoto to use this and I’m sure ’09 has it as well.  I haven’t played around with ’09 yet, but I hope that this feature is more prominent and easier to find.

So now you can be calm that you won’t “mess up” that precious picture of you next to Jamie Foxx.

We really like to hear from readers. Email us with your ideas or leave a comment below.

Like reading TechNest Report? We greatly appreciate that you share articles with your friends, link from your blog, and subscribe to our feed. Submit to Digg, Reddit, or Slashdot by clicking ShareThis on the bottom of each post. If you really like TechNest Report then please consider making a small donation through PayPal on the right hand side of the page; it will really help paying the bills around here.

Lastly: TechNest Report is now reporting podcast style!  Visit the audiocast page to listen and to subscribe!

Enjoy and, as always, thanks for reading, listening, and subscribing to TechNest Report.

Full disclosure: Alex Luft owns a very small amount of shares in Apple, Inc.

If you’ve ever noticed a red light coming out of your Apple MacBook’s headphone or microphone jacks, here is what’s happening and why. As you are well aware, the 13″ MacBook  and both of the MacBook Pros (15″ and 17″)  – not the 13″ MacBook Air – have two jacks that deal with sound: one for taking sound out and one for listening to sound coming in.  Both of these jacks are capable of performing under analog and digital (optical) modes.  Sometimes, however, the optical (digital) part of the jacks malfunctions and causes the (optical) light to remain on.  Ever see the underside of an optical mouse? It’s red, isn’t it?  The same technology is used here with optical/digital

Image courtesy of DisruptiveTelephony.com

jacks.  (PS: the optical light isn’t always the color red; there are blue ones from Microsoft).

So how do you put an end to this red light so your prized laptop doesn’t emulate a Terminator laser beam?  The goal is to tell the sensor that whatever was plugged into it is no longer there.  If you see the red light, the sensor still thinks that something is plugged into it.

The solution:

1. Try to slowly insert a headphone or speaker plug.  Slowly take it out.  If that didn’t turn the light off:
2. Take a toothpick or a Q-tip and slowly poke it into the jack.  Slowly take it out.  Be careful not to poke it too far as that may damage the optical sensor.
3. Did you notice the emphasis on slowly?  Slowly does it!
4. If you are seeing the red light coming out of the jack on a non-Mac OS (such as when running BootCamp with Windows or Linux), make sure you have all the drivers installed.  And make sure they’re installed correctly.
5. If none of the above helped, take the machine into an Apple store or call up Apple support as you may have a faulty sensor inside that jack.

TechNest Report or Alex Luft are not responsble for any undesirable changes, or otherwise, you make to your machine.

That’s it, folks; good luck and let me know how it goes in the comments!

We really like to hear from readers. Email us with your ideas or leave a comment below.

Like reading TechNest Report? We greatly appreciate that you share articles with your friends, link from your blog, and subscribe to our feed. Submit to Digg, Reddit, or Slashdot by clicking ShareThis on the bottom of each post. If you really like TechNest Report then please consider making a small donation through PayPal on the right hand side of the page; it will really help paying the bills around here.

Lastly: TechNest Report is now reporting podcast style!  Visit the audiocast page to listen and to subscribe!

Enjoy and, as always, thanks for reading, listening, and subscribing to TechNest Report.

Full disclosure: Alex Luft owns a very small amount of shares in Apple, Inc.