Posts Categorised: Computing

0HTML5 LogoResponsive lazy backgrounds instead of css background-image

Published by & filed under Web Technologies. Last updated .

I’ve recently been work­ing on an update/overhaul of both my vari­ous web­sites and the serv­er backend. As part of this pro­cess I’ve been try­ing ot make sure everything is using the latest stand­ards to max­im­ise per­form­ance and com­pat­ab­il­ity. One of the best fea­tures of recent ver­sions of word­press is the nat­ive sup­port for respons­ive images — where the img­set=”” attribut eis used to sup­ply altern­at­ive sizes of images in a group so the browser can use the most appro­pri­ate. In com­bin­a­tion with async load­ing and lazy load­ing this can make pages load far faster whilst still look­ing good to all vis­it­ors. How­ever css has not adop­ted these new­er fea­tures so back­ground images are much trick­i­er to deal with. It can be done though…
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0Windows Media Player LogoWindows volume control of HDMI output

Published by & filed under Amplifiers, Misc Media Software, Windows. Last updated .

I recently swapped out my old home cinema audio sys­tem (a Yamaha DSP-E800 and a Den­on ste­reo receiv­er) con­nec­ted via USB DAC and 6 chan­nel ana­log for an Onkyo TX-SR605 which has HDMI audio con­nec­tions. In most ways this was an instant upgrade but one issue really frus­trated me — volume…
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0Remove driver preventing windows from booting

Published by & filed under Windows. Last updated .

I recently tried installing AMD StoreMI on my Win­dows 2022 serv­er. Big mis­take — it imme­di­ately failed to boot with a BSOD. And this was just after installing — I had­n’t even run the pro­gram. So the first les­son is not to trust AMD’s soft­ware — abso­lutely shocking!
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0Wordpress LogoShow enlarged image on hover in wordpress

Published by & filed under Wordpress. Last updated .

As part of the recent improve­ments I’ve been mak­ing to vari­ous web­sites I wanted to make images in gal­ler­ies show enlarged ver­sions when hovered over. Doing this with basic CSS is fairly trivi­al, but I did­n’t just want to expand the ori­gin­al image, I wanted the browser to grab a new (lar­ger) image too…
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0Wordpress LogoAutomatically generate and serve avif images with wordpress

Published by & filed under Wordpress. Last updated .

I have spent quite a lot of time optim­ising the per­form­ance of this site, and as part of ongo­ing work I mon­it­or new tech­no­lo­gies that could help improve the speed for vis­it­ors. I’ve been track­ing the adop­tion of next-gen­er­a­tion image formats for a while and with sup­port by web browsers now fairly wide­spread it was time to fig­ure out how to make use of these new formats in wordpress.
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2Enable windows desktop slideshow with a script

Published by & filed under Windows. Last updated .

I’ve been updat­ing my unat­ten­ded win­dows deploy­ment setup recently, and one of the things I wanted to enable was the slideshow wall­pa­per with the loc­a­tion set to my wall­pa­pers loc­a­tion on my serv­er. This isn’t as straight-for­ward as it ought to be, but after bit of fid­dling around I figured out how to do it fairly simply.
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0Batch script to rename PC based on reserved DHCP name

Published by & filed under Windows. Last updated .

I use WDS on a stan­dalone serv­er to set up new PCs and to reim­age PCs when they have ended up mangled bey­ond repair. With a good num­ber of PCs in my own house it is use­ful to reim­age them oca­sion­ally when swap­ping or upgrad­ing hard­ware. Most of this pro­cess is now auto­mated by an unattend.xml file but one step the unat­ten­ded pro­cess does­n’t seem to sup­port is renam­ing PCs back to their ori­gin­al name.
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0PSU LogoThe perfect HTPC power supply 2020?

Published by & filed under Misc Hardware. Last updated .

I recently got a new GPU for my HTPC which required a replace­ment power sup­ply as the old one was­n’t suit­able for power­ing a GPU with an 8 pin PCIe power cable. The HTPC is in use for an aver­age of around 6 hours per day and with elec­tri­city at 15p/kWh any reduc­tion in power at the wall works out at 33p a year per Watt. This isn’t a big sav­ing, but if con­sump­tion is reduced by sev­er­al watts the sav­ing can add up.
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