0HTML5 LogoHTML5 spec finished and published!

Published by & filed under Web Technologies.

At long last, the W3C has pub­lished the final HTML5 spe­cific­a­tion.  DIY Media Home is already writ­ten coded in HTML5, but the final­isa­tion of the spe­cific­a­tion means that HTML5 com­pli­ance is no longer a mov­ing tar­get for either us, or the browser makers. Hope­fully all the main play­ers will provide fully HTML5 com­pli­ant browsers soon. In the mean­time we’ll be work­ing to ensure our site is fully com­pli­ant with the final spec.

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0Windows Media Center eHome LogoGet Media Center 8 free

Published by & filed under Windows Media Center.

If you’ve got Win­dows 8 Pro, and wish to add Media Cen­ter to it you need a key from Microsoft. In future this wont be free, but you can get one free until 31st Jan 2013 thanks to a Microsoft offer.  I have registered for mine, even though I don’t run Win­dows 8 because I may want to use it in future so why not!

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0Tin full of spamHow to reduce spam with SPF, DKIM & DMARC

Published by & filed under Web Technologies. Last updated .

Since I set up con­tact forms on vari­ous web­sites I’ve had a slowly increas­ing volume of spam. Not dir­ect spam sent to me, but bounces from non-exist­ent addresses that were being spamme, appar­ently from my address. Unfor­tu­nately the spam was­n’t ori­gin­at­ing from my address, but my address was some­how picked up (prob­ably from before I secured the con­tact forms on the site) and was being used as the “reply to” address. After some invest­ig­a­tion I heard about SPF which is an e‑mail anti-for­gery system.

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0Samsung Galaxy Note 2Samsung Galaxy Note 2: Mods, Tips, Tweaks & more

Published by & filed under Android. Last updated .

I recently wrote about ways to [int­link id=“2872” type=“post”]enhance and tweak[/intlink] the Sam­sung Galaxy S3. Since then my part­ner has acquired a Galaxy Note 2, which is rather like an over­size S3. Now that I’ve had chance to play with it a bit I’ve updated my ori­gin­al art­icle to cov­er the tweaks that work for both phones. Any dif­fer­ences are noted there. I’ve also writ­ten a new art­icle with a guide to [int­link id=“3175” type=“post”]how to root the Note 2[/intlink].  Enjoy.

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1Samsung Galaxy Note 2How to: Root the Samsung Galaxy Note 2

Published by & filed under Android. Last updated .

As I’ve noted before pretty much the first thing I do when I get a new phone is root it. This time around its the turn of my part­ners Galaxy Note 2. Below I will sum­mar­ise the steps which are very sim­il­ar to those I used for my own Sam­sung Galaxy S3.

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7Microsoft Office Excel 2010Conditional formatting for grades v targets

Published by & filed under Misc Software. Last updated .

So, in my oth­er life I’m actu­ally a sci­ence teach­er, and as it usu­ally gets round that I’m “good with com­puters” I usu­ally get asked to have a look at a few things. Twice in the last few months I’ve been asked if I’d set up con­di­tion­al format­ting in excel to col­our code stu­dent test res­ults com­pared to their tar­get grades. Whilst not exactly related to the core con­tent of this site, it is still DIY tech­nic­al help so I decided to pub­lish a full set of instruc­tions here. Enjoy…

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2Blackgold BGT3630 LogoProblem with BlackGold 36xx TV Cards

Published by & filed under Media PC Hardware.

I’ve been hav­ing on-off issues for a while with my TV-Serv­er. I run DVBLink on top of Win­dows Serv­er which allows me to share my TV sig­nals to all my PCs, Android phones, PS3, Xbox and oth­er DLNA devices. How­ever, I’ve had an issue where seem­ingly at ran­dom I’ve lost the abil­ity to tune some chan­nels. Ini­tially I put this down to DVBLink, but after extens­ive test­ing it appears the prob­lem is with the TV cards. Once the cards have lost tune this seems to last for a while in DVBLink, maybe it would­n’t have the same effect in a straight Win­dows Media Cen­ter setup.

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