Posts Categorised: Computing

0Wordpress LogoRich snippets code for Me Gusta theme

Published by & filed under Wordpress. Last updated .

I’ve pre­vi­ously covered theme edits for rich snip­pets for vari­ous themes includ­ing [int­link id=“2948” type=“post”]Mystique 2[/intlink], [int­link id=“2949” type=“post”]Mystique 3[/intlink], [int­link id=“2468” type=“post”]Thesis[/intlink] & [int­link id=“3015” type=“post”]Twenty Eleven[/intlink] as well as some [int­link id=“1520” type=“post”]generic instructions[/intlink].  Below are details of the code for how to val­id­ate rich snip­pets in the Me Gusta by Cos­mos theme.

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2Wordpress LogoRich snippets code for Mystique 3.x

Published by & filed under Wordpress. Last updated .

I’ve pre­vi­ously writ­ten about rich snip­pets code for[int­link id=“2948” type=“post”]Mystique 2[/intlink].  There are also[int­link id=“1520” type=“post”]generic instructions[/intlink] and code for the themes [int­link id=“3015” type=“post”]twenty eleven[/intlink], [int­link id=“3017” type=“post”]me gusta[/intlink] and [int­link id=“2468” type=“post”]thesis[/intlink].  Below is updated code for Mys­tique 3

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0Wordpress LogoRich Snippets code for Mystique 2.x

Published by & filed under Wordpress. Last updated .

In addi­tion to this site I have a per­son­al blog where, amongst oth­er things, I post recipes. I’ve recently dis­covered google’s new recipe search, and have been look­ing to imple­ment sup­port for micro­formats / microdata. Google provide a tool for check­ing your markup, called the “rich snip­pets test­ing tool”. When I tried val­id­at­ing one of my recipes, I encountered vari­ous errors, which have taken me a while to track down and resolve. … Read Full Article

3windows 8 logoHow to restore a proper UI to Windows 8 & Server 2012

Published by & filed under Windows. Last updated .

Win­dows 8 and Serv­er 2012 have now RTMed and as expec­ted the good old UI of desktop and start­menu has been replaced with a[int­link id=“2543” type=“post”]horrible new UI[/intlink] (pre­vi­ously called Metro).  In their ulti­mate wis­dom Microsoft have left no way to switch back to the old desktop/start menu sys­tem, but thanks to vari­ous tweaks and tools it is pos­sible to get 90% of the inter­face restored — good enough to be fully usable. Below I doc­u­ment the vari­ous steps and tweaks required.

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0Settlers IIResurrecting a very old post: VGA fix for Settlers 2

Posted by & filed under Misc Software.

Thanks to a request by dhd in a com­ment on the down­loads page, I decided to go look­ing through backups of my old web­sites. Below is a pos­ted I wrote around 2003⁄04 about how to fix prob­lems with run­ning the game Set­tlers 2 on Win­dows XP. I’m pretty cer­tain the same wont work on new­er ver­sions of Win­dows sadly, but for those XP users still out there who want to play your (very) old copy of Set­tlers 2 — enjoy…

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0AMD Vision Fusion Premium LogoFixed: AMD E350 crashes & invalid boot device error

Published by & filed under Misc Software. Last updated .

I’ve had an AMD E350 sys­tem for over a year, which I use as my primary HTPC. How­ever, in that time I’ve always had oca­sion­al Sta­bil­ity issues where the sys­tem would lock up, reboot, and fail to find the primary HDD. At first I put this down to the HDD — a Seag­ate Momentus XT, which was known to be unre­li­able when it was first released. Since Seag­ate released update firm­ware how­ever the drive has seemed to oper­ate fine, although I could­n’t rule it out. I also updated the BIOS of my Asus E35M1‑M Pro and updated all the drivers I could find, without fully resolv­ing the issue.

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0windows 8 logoWindows 8: Fix the start menu

Published by & filed under Windows. Last updated .

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.

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0Disable startup repair

Posted by & filed under Windows.

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

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0Sony VaioDrivers for Windows 7 on Sony Vaio FZs

Published by & filed under Misc Hardware. Last updated .

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.

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