Posts Categorised: Computing

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.

… Read Full Article

0Few new articles, lots of new design work

Published by & filed under Web Technologies. Last updated .

For the last 2–3 months I’ve been too busy to write much new con­tent for the site.  This has­n’t been helped by a drop in things to write about  — most of my art­icles are about tech­no­logy fixes or excit­ing new HTPC related devel­op­ments.  There haven’t been too many new devel­op­ments, and I haven’t fixed much tech­no­logy because I’ve been too busy.  That does­n’t mean the site has been entirely ignored however…

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0windows 8 logoWindows 8250 consumer preview: Traditional start menu

Posted by & filed under Windows.

Win­dows 8 looks to have many nice new fea­tures, but unfor­tu­nately, as I men­tioned in a pre­vi­ous post, Microsoft has decided to cre­ate a phone/tablet user inter­face and foist it upon desktop users as well.  This would­n’t be such a prob­lem if Microsoft had left an option to turn the excel­lent and well estab­lished tra­di­tion­al inter­face back on, but in their infin­ite wis­dom Microsoft has­n’t provided any such option.  For­tu­nately there are 2 options for get­ting the tra­di­tion­al start but­ton and menu back.

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19windows 8 logoWindows 8: Horrible Horrible Horrible Metro UI

Published by & filed under Windows. Last updated .

OK, I sus­pect the title is going to give it away.  I down­loaded Win­dows 8 8250 con­sumer pre­view today, and almost imme­di­ately real­ised that as it stands I am going to avoid Win­dows 8 like the plague.  As far as I’m con­cerned the UI changes cur­rently make Win­dows 8 the worst release of Win­dows ever (even worse than Win­dows ME!)

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22Wordpress LogoRich Snippets Code for Thesis Theme

Published by & filed under Wordpress. Last updated .

In response to a query by Darko Kovan­cives on my pre­vi­ous art­icle about [int­link id=“1520” type=“post”]fixing Rich Snip­pets code for the Mys­tique theme[/intlink] we have resolved the same issues with the Thes­is theme.  Details of the changes required are below.… Read Full Article

0Storage SpacesMicrosoft Storage Spaces: Virtual RAID for Windows 8?

Published by & filed under Storage. Last updated .

Microsoft’s Steve Sinof­sky has writ­ten a detailed art­icle about a genu­inely excit­ing new fea­ture of Win­dows 8 — Stor­age Spaces.  I won’t repeat the details here, for those you can go straight to the horses mouth.  How­ever I will point out a key line from a home media serv­er point of view: “There’s anoth­er resi­li­ency attrib­ute, called par­ity, which dir­ects Stor­age Spaces to store some redund­ancy inform­a­tion along­side user data con­tained with­in the space, thereby enabling auto­mat­ic data recon­struc­tion in the event of phys­ic­al disk fail­ure.”  To me, this sounds a LOT like a soft­ware RAID5 sim­il­ar to that provided by UnRAID.  Until Win­dows 8 is released and the tech­no­logy is fully reviewed the details are of course some­what spec­u­lat­ive, but my read­ing of the art­icle leads me to believe that Stor­age Spaces will enable the strip­ing of disks, with a par­ity in the event of single disk fail­ure.  Fur­ther, it is reas­on­able to assume that this sys­tem will work with stand­ard non-enter­prise drives without suf­fer­ing any [int­link id=“90” type=“post”]compatibility issues[/intlink].  Finally, it is reas­on­able to assume that Stor­age Spaces will offer some of the per­form­ance bene­fits of hard­ware raid‑5 too.  If you have a home serv­er with a lot of media and you want some redund­ancy, without huge cost, then this tech­no­logy sounds like it might be the per­fect solu­tion.  Thanks Microsoft!

11Windows Update IconFix Windows Update or Service Pack error 80073712

Published by & filed under Windows. Last updated .

It’s that time of year again, and as always, when I vis­it the fam­ily over xmas there are vari­ous PC issues to resolve.  This year there were blessedly few issues, but there was 1 prob­lem that it took me quite a while to track down and resolve.  One of the fam­il­ies PCs was fail­ing to install Win­dows 7 ser­vice pack 1.  It’s a fairly new PC and came with an OEM install of Win­dows 7 x64 Home Premi­um, all legit and activ­ated.  It also has up-to-date anti-vir­us pro­tec­tion, and oth­er than the SP1 install prob­lems it seemed to be in excel­lent work­ing order.… Read Full Article