Posts Categorised: Computing

0PSU LogoEfficient PSU Upgrades: HuntKey Jumper update

Published by & filed under Misc Hardware. Last updated .

I spot­ted a much cheap­er 80+ gold PSU in the ebuy­er xmas sales, and decided to look up some reviews.  I found a review on anandtech which I must have some­how missed in the past.  In light of this dis­cov­ery, I’ve updated my pre­vi­ous art­icles about PSU effi­ciency to include the HuntKey Jump­er 300G (aka R90).  The price of this PSU changes the con­clu­sions of 2 of the 4 scen­ari­os I’ve pre­vi­ously detailed, and I have in fact ordered one at the dis­count price of £20, for use in my cur­rent serv­er!  After tak­ing into account that my cur­rent serv­er PSU (an Ener­max Nois­e­Taker 475 from 2004) is approx­im­ately 80% effi­cient rather than the 70% worst case I use in the art­icles, I’m hop­ing to net sav­ings of around £20 per year.

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0Wordpress LogoMystique 3 Theme: Full-post and Excerpts

Published by & filed under Wordpress. Last updated .

I’ve been try­ing to fig­ure out how to dis­play full posts on the home page, and excerpts on all archives for about 3 days.  This is nice because it means a decent amount of each post is shown on the front page, whilst archive pages con­tain a much more con­cise sum­mary of each post.  This is bet­ter both for humans, and also for SEO — my archive pages now don’t have duplic­ate con­tent from my home page!

I’ve finally pro­duced a solu­tion.  It’s not espe­cially eleg­ant, but I’ve been at the very lim­it of my PHP know­ledge just to achieve this meth­od.  This applies spe­cific­ally to the Mys­tique 3 theme, oth­er themes are likely to vary, although some of this inform­a­tion may or may not prove rel­ev­ant.  If you are try­ing or suc­ceed in doing the same to a dif­fer­ent theme do drop a com­ment in.… Read Full Article

32Windows Icons: Full list with details, locations & images

Published by & filed under Misc Software. Last updated .

Good qual­ity icons and images, espe­cially ones with an alpha trans­par­ency can be time con­sum­ing to make, and are often also hard to find.  One source of lots of high qual­ity icons in a range of sizes is Win­dows.  Win­dows 7 includes lots of icons which can be use­ful as the major­ity are avail­able in sizes from 16×16 up to 256×256, and come with alpha trans­par­ency.  You may have noticed that we use some on our down­loads page — they’re handy to quickly indic­ate file type. Win­dows stores most of its icons inside exe and dll files which makes them inac­cess­ible to stand­ard image manip­u­la­tion applic­a­tions like Pho­toshop.  How­ever, once they have been loc­ated they can eas­ily be extrac­ted with the free­ware util­ity IcoFX. Track­ing some of them down seems to be the trick­i­er part. Below is a quick ref­er­ence for the loc­a­tions of many of the icons avail­able on Win­dows 7. I will peri­od­ic­ally add more details and any extra icon lib­rar­ies I dis­cov­er to this list.
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0Google+Google+ for Apps Accounts

Posted by & filed under Web Technologies.

Google have finally enabled Google+ for apps accounts (as of the 27th Oct)!  Now those of us with an apps account can finally get an account and +1 pages etc.  Google have also enabled “pages” on Google+ for organ­isa­tions.  For the DIY Media Home Google+ Page just click on the Google+ icon at the top right of the page.  If you need to migrate a tem­por­ary non-apps account Google prom­ise there will be a migra­tion tool com­ing very soon.  Happy +ing

0DVB LogicPlanning a new networked home media setup

Published by & filed under Media PC Hardware, Misc Media Software, Storage. Last updated .

In the com­ing months I will be buy­ing a new prop­erty, and to go with my new home, I’ve been read­ing up lots on how I might integ­rate a new home media setup.  In recent months sev­er­al excit­ing new options have become avail­able, which finally makes the sort of setup I have always desired a real pos­sib­il­ity.… Read Full Article

0dosboxRunning 16bit Windows apps on Windows 7

Published by & filed under Misc Software. Last updated .

Whilst set­ting up a new laptop with Win­dows 7 x64 recently, I was asked if I could get some old 16bit pro­grams run­ning.  One of these was an edu­ca­tion­al piece of soft­ware called “Mul­ti­me­dia Motion II” by Cam­bridge Sci­ence Media.  This is a win­dows pro­gram that has worked on all pre­vi­ous ver­sions of win­dows up to win­dows XP.  How­ever, Win­dows 7 x64 no longer sup­ports 16bit Win­dows pro­grams, and instead throws the error about being an “Unsup­por­ted 16-bit applic­a­tion”… Read Full Article

72Canon CanoScan LIDE ScannerGet your old scanner working with Windows 7 x64

Published by & filed under Misc Hardware. Last updated .

In recent months I’ve encountered sev­er­al prob­lems where people have con­tac­ted me ask­ing for help get­ting their USB scan­ners work­ing on new PCs.  In each case the new PCs have come with Win­dows 7 x64, and the scan­ners have been USB devices pro­duced by Can­on and Nikon.  Both of these ima­ging spe­cial­ists have ser­i­ously dropped the ball on sup­port­ing products, includ­ing some quite expens­ive premi­um kit from not all that long ago.
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