T61 RIAA SoundMax

So today I spent a good 4 hours of time trying to record what my speakers play on my Lenovo T61.Looks like recording right off the sound mixer was kind of a standard feature in sound cards even as back as in 2002.On windows XP if you go to Volume Control Applet -> Options ->Properties and then select the Recording radio button and if your sound card/driver support the record what you listen feature, you will see more than just the microphone in the white box below the radio button

Unfortunately looks like on T61 ,Lenovo deliberately prevents "record what you hear" feature from the sound card at a hardware level.So even if you upgrade to the latest version of SoundMax driver it won't help

Here are a few forum posts I found

http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/General-Discussion/Why-has-stereo-Mix-been-disabled-on-thinkpads-amp-when-do-we-get/m-p/38690

http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=52527

People think it is probably Recording Industry Association of America(RIAA) to blame.

But if you really want to overcome the hardware restriction you can go for a combination of audacity and Virtual Audio Cable. Worked pretty slick for me, audacity is open source and free whereas VAC is 30 $ per License.They have a trial version too but it keeps saying the word "Trial" every 30 seconds in your audio output.

T61 Bug

My office T61 Lenovo runs Win XP Pro.When I shut the lid of my laptop it automatically hibernates and when I bring that lid back up it automatically wakes up.But the problem is every time the laptop wakes up like this there is no sound and I had to restart all over again

Apparently it is a bug and there are a couple of ways to fix it. 1) Disable/Enable your sound device 2)Uncheck “allow this device to bring the computer out of standby” from the Power Management properties of your software modem 3)If you don't use your software modem at all just disable it.

All I got from http://www.paralaptop.com/lenovo-laptops/fix-sound-bux-on-thinkpad-t61-after-standby.html but just blogged it on my own blog in case I forget this 6 months from now and start looking for it all over again.

The link never explained what exactly the bug was but made it sound it was some sort of a hardware conflict.I did not find any other material about it on the inter tubes.

A couple of useful google map mashups

http://www.propertymaps.com/maps/polylines.php - You give the zip code and it shows the county and also some information (select zip in the return drop down ) about the county for example average income in that county, average house value etc etc.

http://maps.huge.info/zip.htm - This one is really useful.If you are planning a road trip and want to halt somewhere en route.Google maps gives you the route and the map but with this mashup you can get the zip codes along the route as well which will help you in finding hotels easily.