0Ultrabook logo laptop vaio sonyBluetooth drivers for Sony Vaio unknown device

Published by & filed under Misc Software.

I was recently asked to look at a Sony Vaio VPCSB which was detect­ing new hard­ware on every Win­dows boot. The machine was oth­er­wise work­ing well. Upon inspec­tion I dis­covered that there were sev­er­al unknown devices which seemed to be related to Bluetooth. I rein­stalled the latest drivers from the Sony web­site but this failed to clear the unknown devices. The search was on.….. Read Full Article

0Asus E35M1-I Deluxe Wi-Fi AMD Fusion Mini-ITX MotherboardFixing stability issues with Asus E35M1‑M Pro

Published by & filed under Misc Hardware.

The basis of my main HTPC is an AMD E350 Brazos in the form of an Asus E35M1‑M Pro. I had quite a lot of prob­lems with the sys­tem when I first built it, which were caused by issues with the Seag­ate Momentus XT stor­age drive I used. These were fixed a good while ago via firm­ware update from Seag­ate, and since then the sys­tem has largely worked without any issue.… Read Full Article

0adobeRestoring Adobe Application Manager updates

Published by & filed under Misc Software.

In a recent update to Cre­at­ive Suite 6 Adobe have changed the func­tion­al­ity of the Applic­a­tion Man­ager. This used to launch the same Applic­a­tion Updates win­dow that is avail­able when select­ing Help: Updates from with­in any Adobe App, but it now launches a login win­dow for Cre­at­ive Cloud, which not all CS6 users have or want. A simple change will have the ori­gin­al func­tion­al­ity restored

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0Alarm Clock LogoKeeping your HTPC clock in sync

Published by & filed under Misc Media Software.

I’ve had a long-stand­ing issue with my HTPC where it loses a minute or two every day. If I leave it switched on for weeks on end, with only standby util­ised, I find that it starts miss­ing the start or end of TV pro­grammes due to hav­ing the wrong time. I’ve tried modi­fy­ing the win­dows time ser­vice set­tings to make it update reg­u­larly, but this has­n’t worked. Thanks to an art­icle on Life­Hack­er I recently stumbled upon I’ve now had an accur­ate clock for a couple of weeks.… Read Full Article

2pale moonPale Moon: Firefox enhanced and in 64bit

Published by & filed under Web Technologies.

I’ve been look­ing for a 64bit Fire­fox for a couple of years now, pretty much since Java and Flash play­er became avail­able in 64bit. Moz­illa seem in no hurry to pro­gress the mine­field night­lies into a full release, but sev­er­al third parties have taken the open source code and com­piled it for 64bit. I’ve looked at sev­er­al of these and the best sup­por­ted and most reg­u­larly updated seems to be a build called Pale Moon.

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1CoolerMaster Elite 335 PC CaseThe end of regular PC price drops?

Published by & filed under Misc Hardware.

I reg­u­larly build PCs for people, and have recently been look­ing at a high end spec for someone. I star­ted, as I often do, by look­ing at what I’d got for a high end sys­tem about a year ago, to see if it was worth mov­ing up the the new gen­er­a­tion, or if a sub­stan­tial drop in the older spec made it tempt­ing to repeat. In the past the year old sys­tem has always been sub­stan­tially cheap­er, so I was quite sur­prised to find that this time it was­n’t. … Read Full Article

1Media Player Classic - Home Cinema LogoHow to set remote control jump keys for MPC-HC

Published by & filed under Windows Media Center.

As I’ve doc­u­mented in the past, I have sev­er­al HTPC’s run­ning Win­dows Media Cen­ter. I also use Medi­aB­rowser for TV series and movies ripped from disk. I’ve found that Medi­aB­rowser works much bet­ter with an extern­al play­er than the intern­al play­er — per­form­ance seems to be super­i­or — so I use Media Play­er Clas­sic Home Cinema. I also have sev­er­al Media Cen­ter remote con­trols for use with the vari­ous HTPCs, and one of the most fre­quently used pairs of but­tons are the “jump” or “skip” but­tons which in media cen­ter jump the cur­rent play­back for­ward by 30 seconds or back by 30 seconds. This is really handy for skip­ping adverts in recor­ded TV.  How­ever, under default install­a­tion set­tings these keys don’t work when play­ing videos in MPC-HC.  After much tri­al and error I finally figured out the cor­rect configuration

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0Google removes ad blocking apps: Get them here

Published by & filed under Android.

It seems that the formerly “do no evil” google have decided to remove all ad block­ing apps from the Play Store. For­tu­nately it has always been pos­sible to install apps dir­ectly from the APK files — as long as you can find them. The 3 most pop­u­lar ad block­ing apps are still avail­able to down­load in apk format, all you need to do is enable the installing of apps from “unknown sources” some­where in your phones settings.

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2Wordpress LogoFixing Rich Snippets Testing Tool for Microdata

Published by & filed under Wordpress. Last updated .

Over 2 years ago I pub­lished an art­icle on how to fix prob­lems with Word­Press themes which did­n’t pass the Google Rich Snip­pets Test­ing Tool. Since then lots has changed — Word­Press and most themes have bet­ter sup­port, HTML5 and CSS3 have arrived, and Google, Yahoo and Bing got togeth­er and decided to focus on Microdata, via schema.org. At the time micro­formats seemed the easi­est way to mark up pages, and the test­ing tool had the most com­pre­hens­ive sup­port for these. The move to Microdata and the changes to Word­Press required a new art­icle: this is it!

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0Internet Explorer 9 LogoIE10 for Windows 7 finally arrives

Published by & filed under Web Technologies.

Anoth­er item that we’re a bit late to cov­er is the arrival of Inter­net Explorer 10 for Win­dows 7 (and Serv­er 2008 R2).  As with past releases, older OSes are being left behind with no sup­port for Vista or XP, which are stuck on IE9 and IE8 respect­ively. If you have Win­dows 7 we recom­mend upgrad­ing (even if you don’t use IE) and of course there is no harm giv­ing it a try. We’ll prob­ably be stick­ing with Fire­fox and Chrome ourselves, but IE some­times has its uses.

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