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0How to set remote control jump keys for MPC-HC

Published on by in Windows Media Center.

As I’ve doc­u­mented in the past, I have sev­eral HTPC’s run­ning Win­dows Media Cen­ter.  I also use Medi­aB­rowser for TV series and movies ripped from disk.  I’ve found that Medi­aB­rowser works much bet­ter with an external player than the internal player — per­form­ance seems to be super­ior — so I use Media Player Clas­sic Home Cinema.  I also have sev­eral Media Cen­ter remote con­trols for use with the vari­ous HTPCs, and one of the most fre­quently used pairs of but­tons are the “jump” or “skip” but­tons which in media cen­ter jump the cur­rent play­back for­ward by 30 seconds or back by 30 seconds.  This is really handy for skip­ping adverts in recor­ded TV.  How­ever, under default install­a­tion set­tings these keys don’t work when play­ing videos in MPC-HC.  After much trial and error I finally figured out the cor­rect configuration

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0Google removes ad blocking apps: Get them here

Published on by in Android.

It seems that the formerly “do no evil” google have decided to remove all ad block­ing apps from the Play Store.  For­tu­nately it has always been pos­sible to install apps dir­ectly from the APK files — as long as you can find them.  The 3 most pop­u­lar ad block­ing apps are still avail­able to down­load in apk format, all you need to do is enable the installing of apps from “unknown sources” some­where in your phones settings.

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0Fixing Rich Snippets Testing Tool for Microdata

Published on by in Wordpress. Updated 15th March 2013.

Over 2 years ago I pub­lished an art­icle on how to fix prob­lems with Word­Press themes which didn’t pass the Google Rich Snip­pets Test­ing Tool. Since then lots has changed — Word­Press and most themes have bet­ter sup­port, HTML5 and CSS3 have arrived, and Google, Yahoo and Bing got together and decided to focus on Microdata, via schema.org. At the time micro­formats seemed the easi­est way to mark up pages, and the test­ing tool had the most com­pre­hens­ive sup­port for these. The move to Microdata and the changes to Word­Press required a new art­icle: this is it!

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0IE10 for Windows 7 finally arrives

Published on by in Web Technologies.

Another item that we’re a bit late to cover is the arrival of Inter­net Explorer 10 for Win­dows 7 (and Server 2008 R2).  As with past releases, older OSes are being left behind with no sup­port for Vista or XP, which are stuck on IE9 and IE8 respect­ively.  If you have Win­dows 7 we recom­mend upgrad­ing (even if you don’t use IE) and of course there is no harm giv­ing it a try.  We’ll prob­ably be stick­ing with Fire­fox and Chrome ourselves, but IE some­times has its uses.

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0BBC HD to become BBC2 HD

Published on by in Freesat.

I’ve been a little slow get­ting round to updat­ing con­tent on the site recently, and this news was one item that got left behind.  The BBC have announced that BBC HD is to be replaced by BBC2 HD.  The major­ity of con­tent on BBC HD was from BBC2 any­way, so most will notice little dif­fer­ence, but expect a new logo and minor changes to the pro­gramme line-up.  The expec­ted switchover date is 6am on Tues­day 26th March.

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2Adsense ads above the last paragraph of a post

Published on by in Wordpress. Updated 7th March 2013.

You may have noticed that we’ve tweaked how we dis­play our adsense ads.  We wanted some small text-only ads near the bot­tom of each art­icle, which would be added auto­mat­ic­ally.  This took a little bit of tinker­ing, but even­tu­ally we developed a solu­tion which works well and doesn’t seem to knock page pro­cessing times much.  Simply add the fol­low­ing code to your theme’s functions.php (don’t for­get to change your adsense IDs)

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Comment bubble

0Easily set the parent of a WordPress comment

Published on by in Wordpress. Updated 7th March 2013.

As is doc­u­mented in the site update log, for a while we had a prob­lem with our theme where it wasn’t pos­sible to reply to a com­ment so that the reply would appear cor­rectly in a threaded way.  We have no fixed this prob­lem, but have been left with a sig­ni­fic­ant num­ber of com­ments which really need edit­ing so it is easier to see what they are in reply to.  With a stand­ard word­press install this requires going into the data­base and edit­ing there, which is very tedi­ous.  Instead, we’ve used some simple func­tions to add an option to the comment-edit admin page, to set the com­ment par­ent there.  Even­tu­ally this will be developed into a proper plu­gin to enable this func­tion­al­ity.  For now the code is below, just add it to your theme’s functions.php

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AVStoDVD

0How to burn files to compliant DVD-Video

Published on by in Misc Media Software.

As I’ve doc­u­mented well on this blog I run all my TV through a server and Win­dows Media Cen­ter. Occa­sion­ally I want to archive some recor­ded TV to DVD. Not a DVD of data-files, but a standards-compliant video DVD that will play in set top play­ers. This isn’t always straight for­ward as proper DVDs have to con­form to vari­ous stand­ards, includ­ing being encoded in MPEG2 and hav­ing a PAL or NTSC res­ol­u­tion (480p or 576p). Most of what I have recor­ded is 1080p and I also have some 720p, and most of this is encoded using H.264. So turn­ing these files into a stand­ard DVD video means both recod­ing and res­iz­ing the videos. (more…)

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0Batch convert old MS Office documents

Published on by in Misc Software.

I’ve been try­ing to sort out an enorm­ous (100+GB) or teach­ing resources that I’ve built-up over the years.  After the obvi­ous steps (delet­ing empty, temp and duplic­ated files) and sort­ing the big files (e.g. videos, applic­a­tion installers) I was left with a large num­ber of office doc­u­ments.  I am slowly work­ing through these, but many of them are 2003 or even older format doc­u­ments — some as old as Word 6!  Every time I open one of these files I am promp­ted with vari­ous secur­ity warn­ings.  Whist these can be turned off (see below) it is more secure to leave them on, and I wanted to con­vert all the files to office 2007 (docx, xlsx etc) formats.  Batch con­ver­sion was def­in­itely the way to go.

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Spell Checker - Spelling Police

0Install a spellchecker for your browser

Published on by in Web Technologies.

Let me start with an admis­sion: I’m one of those ped­ants on Face­book who likes to cor­rect your spelling, punc­tu­ation and gram­mar.  Some of you will think this is per­fectly reas­on­able, whilst oth­ers will prob­ably want an explan­a­tion.  If you are one of the lat­ter read on.

The simple fact is that as a social spe­cies our exist­ence depends on com­mu­nic­a­tion, the clearer the bet­ter.  When their only con­tact with you is vir­tual other people will make judge­ments about you based on what is avail­able to them — includ­ing your SPG.  I cor­rect spellings on Face­book for 2 reas­ons: 1. because I’m a teacher so it’s a habit; 2. because with mod­ern web-browsers there is quite simply no excuse for incor­rect spelling.  So, to help every­one, here is a quick guide to enabling an auto­matic ‘Microsoft word like” spell-checker in your web-browser…

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