*Update* I forgot when i wrote this that Quicktime Pro is required. Quicktime Pro is $15 and in my opinion well worth it. While i agree that its functionality should be standard, it is the same cost as dedicated tools for just iphone ringtones and it does a lot more.

First, obviously, you have to have the music. You won’t be able to use iTunes music for this unless its iTunes plus. DRM gets in the way (that’ll be another post). The song needs to be one you ripped from a cd, pirated, et al. I don’t judge. I’m going to do this as step by step as i can for the benefit of my less technically inclined listeners.

Ok, second. In iTunes, find the song you want. Right click (or control click) on it and choose “show in finder”.

Now, a finder window will pop up and the song file will be selected.

The next step is to open the file in quicktime. If you double click it, by default, the file will probably open in iTunes so right click on the file (control click) and choose open with -> Quicktime Player.

Now you’re in quicktime. Here you have a window showing the song as a bar. At the one end are little triangles that that you can drag to select the portion you want. Just listen to the song and try to select just the part you want. Its important to note that the iPhone won’t do ringtones over 30 seconds. I think iTunes might not even sync it for you.

When you have about what you want, i recommend selecting a little more on purpose, press apple+c to copy it. Now you will need to press apple+n for a new windows and press apple+v to paste your selection into it. Here you can edit it further down to what you want. A tip, you can drag the window out to get more precise with your selecting.

Ok, you’re done choosing your ringtone. Its time to export the ringtone into a format iTunes will accept. Go to File -> Export, or you can press apple+e.

In the export options, at the bottom, click next to Export: and choose “Movie to MPEG-4″.

Now click options. At the top, make sure it says MP4 and not MP4 (ISMA). Under video you won’t have to change anything, there is no video. In audio, you want Format: AAC-LC, Data Rate: 128 (or whatever you want if you know better), Channels: Stereo, Sample Rate: Recommended (or whatever, not important), and Encoding Quality: Best. Under streaming, just make sure that streaming is unchecked and click ok.

Now you’re back at the export save screen. This part is important. iTunes will only recognize your file as a ringtone if it has a .m4r extension.

Save it somewhere you can find too, i recommend the desktop. Now its just a simple matter of dragging the file into iTunes and syncing your iPhone. If you manually manage things, just drag the ringtone over. The ringtones will show up in a special place in iTunes called “Ringtones”.

Now you’re done. Just select the ringtone on your iPhone in the usual way and then enjoy your free ringtones forever. Feel pride in the fact that you didn’t let the record industry rape you with their $.99 ringtones and flaunt your newfound abilities in their faces. Also, if you’re bored, let apple know this is unacceptable the way things are. The recording industry won’t hear or listen to you but apple might. They want their customers to be happy.

One more thing, if this all sounds like too much, remember, there are for pay programs out there that will assist you. Unfortunately programs like iPhone Ringtone Maker cost the same as Quicktime Pro so i recommend just learning the routine with quicktime. Quicktime Pro can be used for a lot more than just ringtone editing too. Let me know how it goes in the comments .

I like managing a webserver. I like manually managing bind and apache from the command line. I like the sense of control i feel when i am able to make any changes i want any time i want. What i don’t like though, is email. Email is evil. Go ahead, take a look at the configuration files for sendmail sometime. Try postfix, not much better. I don’t want to do email but i want to get email. So what did i do? I went with google apps for your domain.

Google apps for your domain is a godsend. I make a few small changed to my dns, which i can easily do; specifying google as my mail exchanger (mx) and i’m done. Below i’ve included the records required for email.

@           IN    MX 1     aspmx.l.google.com.
@           IN    MX 5     alt1.aspmx.l.google.com.
@           IN    MX 5     alt2.aspmx.l.google.com.
@           IN    MX 10    ASPMX2.GOOGLEMAIL.COM.
@           IN    MX 10    ASPMX3.GOOGLEMAIL.COM.
@           IN    MX 10    ASPMX4.GOOGLEMAIL.COM.
@           IN    MX 10    ASPMX5.GOOGLEMAIL.COM.

Google handles all my email for me. I can use their nice, friendly-ish web interface to add up to 100 users for email. I can add mailing lists so that an email sent to, for example, lists@jessecole.org would go to whoever i added to that list. I can tie in my other domains with it so that jesse@jessecole.info works just as well as jesse@jessecole.org and it gets delivered to the same mailbox. On top of all of this, i get google’s fantastic! email filtering. I never get a single spam message through and very rarely do i see a false positive. Google even provides pop, smtp, and imap access to my email.

Another feature that isn’t talked about so much is google talk. Thats right, every user i make can log in to google talk with user@domain.com. The can also use any jabber client to log in. Also, i recently implemented XMPP server dialback as per section 14.4 of RFC 3920 allowing virtually all jabber clients to talk to anyone logged in. Ok, fine. All that is accurate but i just followed google’s instructions here. Incidently, its perfectly legal in dns-ese to paste the following into your zone file or include it globally.

_xmpp-server._tcp   IN SRV  5 0 5269 xmpp-server.l.google.com.
_xmpp-server._tcp   IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server1.l.google.com.
_xmpp-server._tcp   IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server2.l.google.com.
_xmpp-server._tcp   IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server3.l.google.com.
_xmpp-server._tcp   IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server4.l.google.com.

_jabber._tcp        IN SRV  5 0 5269 xmpp-server.l.google.com.
_jabber._tcp        IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server1.l.google.com.
_jabber._tcp        IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server2.l.google.com.
_jabber._tcp        IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server3.l.google.com.
_jabber._tcp        IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server4.l.google.com.

Fully qualified domain names are for quitters.

With google apps for your domain you get all this and all of the google apps. Thats right. Your <employee>@jessecole.org account also gets its own google docs, google calendar, google everything!. Its no wonder some businesses are using for their site. The best part about all of this is that its free! You can pay extra and get more users, features, support, etc. Not necessary. This is a great thing for little websites like me.

I hope you enjoyed my little post (post? this is an article!) on google apps. Please, leave me a comment if you liked it/disagree/hate me/whatever.

*Update* I am officially declaring the whitespace stripping in pre text a wordpress bug. I think i’ll actually file one later today. It won’t do it if you step just right through the posting process though so it should look good now.