Every now and then I update my list of favourite android apps. These are the apps that I keep going back to time and again. Previous versions for [intlink id=“1576” type=“post”]Autumn 2011[/intlink], [intlink id=“711” type=“post”]Spring 2011[/intlink] en[intlink id=“57” type=“post”]Summer 2010[/intlink] are also available. Many haven’t changed over the last 2 jaar! Below is the update for summer 2012…
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0Windows 8: Fix the start menu
So, Windows 8 is coming in late July (October for retail customers). There are no signs that Microsoft will relent provide an option to switch back to the Windows 7 start menu, and instead will force the[intlink id=“2543” type=“post”]horrible metro interface[/intlink] upon everyone. As a result many of us will undoubtedly stick quite happily with Windows 7, however there are 2 reasons to use Windows 8: being forced to as it will come on all new PCs soon and for improvements including a performance increase and the new[intlink id=“2283” type=“post”]storage spaces[/intlink] feature amongst others. If you fall into either of these camps but, like me, can’t stand metro, there are now more options available than when I[intlink id=“2552” type=“post”]last wrote[/intlink] about this issue.
0Disable startup repair
Occasionally my HTPC gets bogged down doing something and in frustration the less technical of the household may choose to press the tempting reset button to get things going again. Occasionally this upsets Windows 7 which attempts to launch “startup repair”. Despite the name, ‘startup repair’ has never repaired any startup problems for me, but instead often causes problems by changing settings or replacing files I don’t want replaced. So, I’ve decided to disable it
0WD Red for storage
According to an article on Anandtech, WD have released a new range of HDDs optimised for NAS boxes (and presumably good for use with hardware RAID cards too). This have been optimised for streaming, are close in performance to the black series, and also quite economical on power.
5How to: Root the Samsung Galaxy S3
Pretty much the first thing I do when I get a new phone is root it. First and foremost this allows me to install and enable adfree — which is getting increasingly essential on android. On previous phones this was often tricky, altho in the last couple of years it has steadily got easier. This time it was the turn of my new Samsung Galaxy S3. Below I will summarise the steps in my own way, but I had a look at several guides on the net and the best one I found was on AndroidAuthority.
0Samsung Galaxy S3 ‘v’ Asus eeePC 901
There are plenty of reviews out there comparing the latest phones, the latest tablets and the latest notebooks, but very few ever reference something more than 18 months old. Most people don’t upgrade their kit anywhere near that frequently which makes the comparisons rather useless. In the 4–5 year timeframe which is a more typical upgrade cycle for most people there have been huge changes to the computing power available.
0Drivers for Windows 7 on Sony Vaio FZs
This is just a quick post to mention an excellent guide I recently used when installing Windows 7 on an old Sony Vaio VGN-FZ31Z laptop. I was having significant difficulty installing several drivers, in particular those for the nVidia GeForce 8600M GS (hardware ID: PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_0425&SUBSYS_9005104D&REV_A1
) which was stubbornly remaining a “Standard vga adapter”. Sony don’t provide any Windows 7 drivers, and the generic nVidia drivers don’t recognise the hardware version in the Vaio, instead offering the unhelpful error “The NVIDIA setup program could not locate any drivers that are compatible with your current hardware. Setup will now exit.” There is no good reason for this — the drivers have been disabled in software purely because OEM’s like Sony don’t want users installing drivers from nVidia that they (Sony) haven’t checked on their specific hardware configuration. This would be understandable if Sony actually bothered to provide support for their old hardware, but since they don’t this situation really isn’t acceptable.
0Updates: MediaBrowser 2.6 and TunerFreeMCE 5.0.8
In the last few days my 2 favourite plugins for Media Center have been updated. I highly recommend installing both updates — Whilst TunerFreeMCE has only had a minor version update, Media Browser has added several significant new features.
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32Download TV episodes automatically with SickBeard
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 en 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
0Fixed: Deprecated PHP errors in wordpress dashboard
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.
“Hi James I realise it has been a long while, but I just checked this on windows 11 (build 23H2)…”