0Freesat HD LogoGet free-to-air HD Satellite TV for under £100

Published by & filed under Freesat. Last updated .

I recently got fed up with my poor TV recep­tion and inab­il­ity to get BBC via Freeview and decided to invest­ig­ate Freesat. Look­ing at the high street the best deals I could find were £70 for a view­er box + £80 for install­a­tion (a total of £150). For record­ing facil­it­ies this rises steeply to over £300 for the box + install­a­tion. This looks to me a bit like an early-adop­ters-tax so I decided to search for altern­at­ives. The out­come of my research was that it is easy and rel­at­ively cheap to obtain and install all the neces­sary equip­ment to set up Freesat on a PC. As it hap­pens I actu­ally already had a media PC so this solu­tion was ideal for me.

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0Internet Explorer 9 LogoUnattended IE7 & IE8 during Windows XP setup

Published by & filed under Windows. Last updated .

Over the years I’ve cre­ated quite a few unat­ten­ded Win­dows install­a­tion disks. One of the toughest prob­lems to solve has been how to install Inter­net Explorer 7 (and now 8 ) dur­ing setup without caus­ing post-setup prob­lems. The prob­lem is caused by the way the install­a­tion routine cre­ates files in the dllcache which get over-writ­ten by win­dows setup.
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0Internet Explorer 9 LogoHow to launch HTML based programs fullscreen

Published by & filed under Web Technologies. Last updated .

I was asked recently if I could copy a teach­ing resource from a CD-ROM onto a laptop com­puter. This par­tic­u­lar pro­gram is mostly HTML with some embed­ded videos. There were 2 prob­lems with run­ning it from a loc­al shortcut.
1. Inter­net Explorer secur­ity warnings
2. The full-screen win­dow is launched by a par­ent browser win­dow which then sits on top of the full screen win­dow and has to be closed when the full screen win­dow is exited
Both of these are only annoy­ances rather than crit­ic­al fail­ures, but a com­plete solu­tion involves fix­ing these kind of things. Find­ing a solu­tion was a little tricky, but once the solu­tion presen­ted itself it was very simple.

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