0Media Browser LogoMedia Browser 2.5 (Hydra)

Published by & filed under Media Browser. Last updated .

Today Media Browser 2.5 code­name Hydra) was released right on schedule.

The most sig­ni­fic­ant change is the rolling out of the (much faster) SQL data­base as stand­ard for all installs.  There are vari­ous oth­er per­form­ance enhance­ments and a fix for dropped net­work shares caus­ing metadata refreshes.  There are a few oth­er smal­ler but nice enhance­ments, like screensaver support.
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0Ultrabook logo laptop vaio sonyBetter than an ultrabook?

Published by & filed under Misc Hardware. Last updated .

Intel have announced a new ini­ti­at­ive to push laptops sim­il­ar to the Mac­Book Air.  The ini­tial require­ments are a weight of up to 1.4Kg, thick­ness of 20mm and bat­tery life of 5+ hours.  For man­u­fac­tur­ers to qual­i­fy for intel mar­ket­ing money ultra­books also must have no optic­al drive, an SSD, and CULV processors.

I have been recently been look­ing for a sim­il­ar type of laptop — I was asked to find some­thing with excel­lent per­form­ance, 5+ hours bat­tery, under 2Kg, with at least a 13.3″ screen, USB3, Optic­al drive, HDMI and VGA.  A dock­ing port would be a bonus.  The faster, light­er, longer-bat­tery-life the bet­ter.… Read Full Article

0adobe acrobat pdf logoAdding searching of PDF file contents from Windows search

Published by & filed under Misc Software. Last updated .

Win­dows 7 (and Vista) include a search sys­tem that can search not just file names, but the con­tents of files.  Microsoft Office doc­u­ments are all sup­por­ted by default, how­ever PDF files are not.  Adobe provide a plu­gin which is included with Adobe Read­er 9 (and new­er) which enables this func­tion­al­ity.  How­ever a 64bit plu­gin is not included.  Adobe now provide ver­sion 9 of their iFil­ter for x64 64bit sys­tems which is freely downloadable

7HTC Desire Android LogoFixed: HTC Desire charging slowly from car charger

Published by & filed under Android. Last updated .

I have an HTC Desire, which I fre­quently use as a Sat Nav sys­tem.  I have a car char­ger, but this is often barely able to keep pace with the power draw of the phone.  This seemed strange as the offi­cial HTC wall-wart char­ger that came with the phone can fully-char­ger the bat­tery quite quickly.  I did some research and dis­covered that the HTC wall char­ger has the USB data pins (pins 2 and 3) shor­ted.  The phone detects this and increases the total power it draws whilst char­ging.… Read Full Article

3Mozilla Firefox LogoRemoving Firefox plugins, addons & extensions

Published by & filed under Web Technologies. Last updated .

Nearly 18 months ago I wrote a brief note about how to [int­link id=“54” type=“post”]remove cer­tain fire­fox plu­gins, addons and extensions[/intlink] which don’t have a “remove” but­ton in the Add-ons man­ager.  I have updated and added to the ori­gin­al list, and will con­tin­ue to add any fur­ther plu­gins I encounter here.  If in doubt there is usu­ally no harm done by leav­ing or remov­ing any plu­gins, addons or exten­sions.  I advise remov­ing all of those that you don’t use as they are using memory and pro­cessing resources and slow fire­fox down.  In some cases the sta­bil­ity of the browser can even be under­mined by plu­gins.… Read Full Article

63Wordpress LogoResolving Google’s Rich Snippets Testing Tool errors

Published by & filed under Wordpress. Last updated .

Please note!

This art­icle has now been super­ceded by a new art­icle, which has been updated to use MicroData (schema.org) instead of Micro­Formats.  If you still wish to use Micro­Formats read on, but I recom­mend using MicroData and invite you to read the new art­icle, which will con­tin­ue to be updated with new inform­a­tion and new themes. [int­link id=“3500” type=“post”]New info on MicroData[/intlink].

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0Customise Windows 7 install disk

Published by & filed under Misc Software. Last updated .

This is just a quick post to draw atten­tion to the “RT Se7en Lite” tool which can be used to update, slip­stream, tweak and modi­fy a Win­dows 7 install disk.  A full guide to using the tool for vari­ous dif­fer­ent PC’s is upcom­ing in the next few weeks.  In the mean­time, if you are inter­ested in cus­tom­ising a disk for a HTPC, take a look at this guide on thehtpc.net.

2Inside HDD LogoFix for problems with Seagate Momentus XT

Published by & filed under Misc Hardware. Last updated .

I’ve had prob­lems with the new Seag­ate Momentus XT hard­drive in my new­est HTPC.  The PC was lock­ing up every 48 hours or so (which may have been related to standby), was occa­sion­ally jerky, and upon reboot would often refuse to boot with an error about a miss­ing boot device, which could only be fixed with a hard power cycle.  There is a firm­ware update for the drive to SD25 but this did­n’t resolve the issue.  How­ever, after I changed the power man­age­ment set­tings in Win­dows 7 to nev­er spin-down the hard­drive, the prob­lems all went away.  Success!

Update (14-Sept-2011).  Seag­ate has released firm­ware SD28.  There are reports that this fixes sev­er­al issues and is a worth­while update.