Posts By: Jon Scaife

0Android Market Google PlayFavourite Android Apps 4: Summer 2012

Published by & filed under Android. Last updated .

Every now and then I update my list of favour­ite android apps.  These are the apps that I keep going back to time and again.  Pre­vi­ous ver­sions for [int­link id=“1576” type=“post”]Autumn 2011[/intlink], [int­link id=“711” type=“post”]Spring 2011[/intlink] and [int­link id=“57” type=“post”]Summer 2010[/intlink] are also avail­able.  Many haven’t changed over the last 2 years!  Below is the update for sum­mer 2012…
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0windows 8 logoWindows 8: Fix the start menu

Published by & filed under Windows. Last updated .

So, Win­dows 8 is com­ing in late July (Octo­ber for retail cus­tom­ers).  There are no signs that Microsoft will relent provide an option to switch back to the Win­dows 7 start menu, and instead will force the [int­link id=“2543” type=“post”]horrible metro interface[/intlink] upon every­one.  As a res­ult many of us will undoubtedly stick quite hap­pily with Win­dows 7, how­ever there are 2 reas­ons to use Win­dows 8: being forced to as it will come on all new PCs soon and for improve­ments includ­ing a per­form­ance increase and the new [int­link id=“2283” type=“post”]storage spaces[/intlink] fea­ture amongst oth­ers.  If you fall into either of these camps but, like me, can­’t stand metro, there are now more options avail­able than when I [int­link id=“2552” type=“post”]last wrote[/intlink] about this issue.

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0Disable startup repair

Posted by & filed under Windows.

Occa­sion­ally my HTPC gets bogged down doing some­thing and in frus­tra­tion the less tech­nic­al of the house­hold may choose to press the tempt­ing reset but­ton to get things going again.  Occa­sion­ally this upsets Win­dows 7 which attempts to launch “star­tup repair”.  Des­pite the name, ‘star­tup repair’ has nev­er repaired any star­tup prob­lems for me, but instead often causes prob­lems by chan­ging set­tings or repla­cing files I don’t want replaced.  So, I’ve decided to dis­able it

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5Samsung Galaxy S3How to: Root the Samsung Galaxy S3

Published by & filed under Android. Last updated .

Pretty much the first thing I do when I get a new phone is root it.  First and fore­most this allows me to install and enable adfree — which is get­ting increas­ingly essen­tial on android.  On pre­vi­ous phones this was often tricky, altho in the last couple of years it has stead­ily got easi­er.  This time it was the turn of my new Sam­sung Galaxy S3.  Below I will sum­mar­ise the steps in my own way, but I had a look at sev­er­al guides on the net and the best one I found was on Android­Au­thor­ity.

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0Samsung Galaxy S3Samsung Galaxy S3 ‘v’ Asus eeePC 901

Posted by & filed under Android.

There are plenty of reviews out there com­par­ing the latest phones, the latest tab­lets and the latest note­books, but very few ever ref­er­ence some­thing more than 18 months old.  Most people don’t upgrade their kit any­where near that fre­quently which makes the com­par­is­ons rather use­less.  In the 4–5 year time­frame which is a more typ­ic­al upgrade cycle for most people there have been huge changes to the com­put­ing power available.

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0Sony VaioDrivers for Windows 7 on Sony Vaio FZs

Published by & filed under Misc Hardware. Last updated .

This is just a quick post to men­tion an excel­lent guide I recently used when installing Win­dows 7 on an old Sony Vaio VGN-FZ31Z laptop. I was hav­ing sig­ni­fic­ant dif­fi­culty installing sev­er­al drivers, in par­tic­u­lar those for the nVidia GeForce 8600M GS (hard­ware ID: PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_0425&SUBSYS_9005104D&REV_A1) which was stub­bornly remain­ing a “Stand­ard vga adapter”. Sony don’t provide any Win­dows 7 drivers, and the gen­er­ic nVidia drivers don’t recog­nise the hard­ware ver­sion in the Vaio, instead offer­ing the unhelp­ful error “The NVIDIA setup pro­gram could not loc­ate any drivers that are com­pat­ible with your cur­rent hard­ware.  Setup will now exit.”  There is no good reas­on for this — the drivers have been dis­abled in soft­ware purely because OEM’s like Sony don’t want users installing drivers from nVidia that they (Sony) haven’t checked on their spe­cif­ic hard­ware con­fig­ur­a­tion. This would be under­stand­able if Sony actu­ally bothered to provide sup­port for their old hard­ware, but since they don’t this situ­ation really isn’t acceptable.

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32sickbeardDownload TV episodes automatically with SickBeard

Published by & filed under Web Technologies. Last updated .

As TV and movie con­tent gradu­ally moves, kick­ing and scream­ing, onto the Inter­net, the demand for ways to man­age all the media we con­sume con­tin­ues to grow. Whilst the major­ity of TV is still not avail­able from legit­im­ate sources online, there are now some series which are, includ­ing Pion­eer One — a Bit­Tor­rent only TV series. Good lists of leg­al tor­rent pro­viders are avail­able from gigaom here and here. Pub­lic Domain Movie Tor­rents also provides links to movies which are now free of copy­right. In some jur­is­dic­tions it may also be con­sidered legit­im­ate to down­load con­tent you already own in anoth­er format, or to down­load con­tent instead of record­ing it on a set-top box. Either way, the time for improved auto­mat­ic down­load ser­vices is now here. Below I detail the easi­est way to auto­mat­ic­ally down­load TV epis­odes that I’ve dis­covered so far.… Read Full Article

0Wordpress LogoFixed: Deprecated PHP errors in wordpress dashboard

Published by & filed under Wordpress. Last updated .

Earli­er today I updated our test site, in pre­par­a­tion for rolling updates out to the main site.  This involved updat­ing sev­er­al plu­gins and repla­cing the “BeforeTheDead­line” plu­gin with Jet­pack.  After com­plet­ing the updates I found I was get­ting sev­er­al error mes­sages on the dash­board, under the “incom­ing links” dash­board wid­get, and even more errors when I tried to empty the W3 Total Cache caches.

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