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iTunes has a (deservedly) bad reputation for taking total control of your music and videos, including where they live on your computer. It wasn’t always easy to move your library in past versions of the software, but happily iTunes 7 makes relocating an existing media library pretty painless - that is, with a little know-how. Here’s how to get it d

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There are plenty of software which lock your folders, some are free, other costs a lot of money. Why you’ll waste time and money when you could do it with your notepad.

* Consider you want to lock a folder named PICS in your D:\, whose path is D:\PICS

* Now open the Notepad and type the following

ren pics pics.{21EC2020-3AEA-1069-A2DD-08002B30309D}

* Where pics is your folder name. Save the text file as loc.bat in the same drive.
* Open another new notepad text file and type the following

ren pics.{21EC2020-3AEA-1069-A2DD-08002B30309D} pics

* Save the text file as key.bat in the same drive.

Usage:

* To lock the pics folder, simply click the loc.bat and it will transform into control panel icon which is inaccessible.
* To unlock the folder click the key.bat file. Thus the folder will be unlocked and the contents are accessible.

That’s all.

Between my server and my Windows Media Center home theater PC, I have at least two PCs on all the time at home. Have you ever wondered how much it’s costing you to leave a computer on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week?

The first thing you need to know is how much power your computer draws. The best way is to measure the actual power consumption. You’ll need a $30 device like the Kill-a-Watt or Seasonic PowerAngel to do this accurately. Once you get one, you’ll inevitably go through a phase where you run around your home, measuring the power draw of everything you can plug into a wall socket. For example, I learned this weekend that our 42″ plasma television draws between 90 watts (totally black screen) and 270 watts (totally white screen). Based on a little ad-hoc channel surfing with an eye on the Kill-a-Watt’s LCD display, the average appears to be around 150 watts for a typical television show or movie.

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Publishers have been asking us to report the number of users that are subscribed to their feeds in Google Reader. This is something we’ve been wanting to do for a while, but with all the products that use feeds at Google, corralling the data in one place was like herding cats. So herd we did…

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