Posts By: Jon Scaife

2Helios NeoDigits logoNeoDigits / Helios Network Media Players

Published by & filed under Network Media Players. Last updated .

I recently had cause to resur­rect my old NeoDi­gits Helios X3000 net­work media play­er, and noticed that Helios have deceased. Sadly this means links to their soft­ware and firm­ware are no longer avail­able. Thanks to Ravi Srivast­ava and Sean on myce I was able to find altern­at­ive links, although as of Decem­ber 2012 these are no longer act­ive either. For­tu­nately I grabbed everything whilst I still could.

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5Microsoft Security Essentials LogoFree anti-virus / anti-malware for Windows Server 2008

Published by & filed under Misc Software. Last updated .

Microsoft are offer­ing a down­load­able Beta of ver­sion 2 of their free secur­ity app Secur­ity Essen­tials.  This works on Win­dows Serv­er.  For any­one (like me) who is using Serv­er 2008 at home (e.g. on a file serv­er) and needs anti-vir­us, I highly recom­mend this.

Update: [int­link id=“96” type=“post”]Version 2 final[/intlink] is now available.

1Inside HDD LogoHardware RAID and consumer HDD problems

Published by & filed under Storage. Last updated .

A couple of years ago I was lucky enough to have the oppor­tun­ity to pur­chase a second hand hard­ware raid 5 card (an Areca 1220) for a very low price. Since then I have used the card along with sev­er­al sets of drives (ori­gin­ally 300gig, then 750gig and cur­rently 1Tb) in a ded­ic­ated serv­er PC as a large net­work file-store for the fam­ily’s music, pho­tos, videos and back-ups.
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0Group Policy LogoCustom ADM file for Windows Server 2003 / XP domain

Published by & filed under Misc Software. Last updated .

I was dig­ging thru an old back-up CD today and stumbled upon a cus­tom ADM file I cre­ated when I was admin­is­ter­ing a Win­dows Serv­er 2003 / Win­dows XP Domain. To use, copy the fol­low­ing code into note­pad, save the file with a .adm exten­sion on the system32 folder of a domain serv­er. Open Group Policy edit­or and add the file, then browse to the “Tech­ni­cians Set­tings” to enable any of the settings.
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0HTC Desire Android LogoFixing poor quality images from HTC Desire camera

Published by & filed under Android. Last updated .

I’ve been rather dis­ap­poin­ted with the image qual­ity from the cam­era in my HTC Desire. Turns out its not the cam­era, its the low qual­ity plastic lens cov­er built into the back cov­er of the phone which gets eas­ily scratched. My advice: either replace the back cov­er (con­tact HTC, its often free) or (as I did) just ditch the plastic cov­er, the lens is made of glass which isn’t easy to scratch, espe­cially as its well recessed into the phone.

Thanks for this tip to HTC Desire Tricks

0Media Center Master LogoEven more advanced post-processing with MCM

Published by & filed under Media Browser. Last updated .

I’ve been look­ing to fur­ther tweak the [int­link id=“75” type=“post”]Media Cen­ter Mas­ter post-pro­cessing script[/intlink] I’ve pre­vi­ously writ­ten about — par­tially to fix a few new files that were being incor­rectly detec­ted by Stark Cov­ers, and also to build in some auto­mat­ic image res­iz­ing which, as I’ve pre­vi­ously detailed, helps to [int­link id=“74” type=“post”]improve the per­form­ance of Media Browser[/intlink].
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