Prepare for the Analogue Television Shutdown

Well, if you’re in Sydney then you should hopefully be prepared for the switch off of old analogue television signals across the metropolitan areas this coming Tuesday, December 3rd. However, if you’re not sure then here are a few things to check out: If you have an older television then it may not support digital …

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DoNotTrackMe Upgrades to 3.0

If you’ve been following my blog you might of read about a service called DoNotTrackMe and some of the fantastic security capabilities it brings to your browser: With the ability to stop websites from tracking you as you browse across the internet and mask your e-mail address you’re ahead of the game when it comes …

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Viewing Anamorphic Widescreen Videos in VLC Media Player

Here’s a quick tip if you’ve got old DVDs that you’ve ripped to video files. The DVD format used to squeeze widescreen video into the legacy 4:3 aspect ratio in order to be compatible with the video formats used on older televisions. This legacy resolution was used given the relative but declining popularity of older …

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Mac OS X Mavericks Breaks SMB Network Shares

Well, my wife and I had a rude surprise today when her MacBook Air would no longer connect to our Windows Home Server. The operating system on the MacBook Air had been upgraded to Mac OS X 10.9 (AKA Mavericks) a while ago but this problem seemed to only manifest itself earlier this week. The …

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CHKDSK Under Windows 8

Since the early days of DOS, OS/2 and Windows NT, CHKDSK has been a one of the staple utilities to keep your file systems in good, working condition. It usually springs into action automatically after a dirty shutdown to make sure that everything is okay with the file systems and makes the necessary repairs if …

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WinAMP Winding Up

This might not be a big deal to people these days given the widespread support of MP3 audio but back in the 1990s MP3 was only just starting out when we had Pentium CPUs. My computer at the time was a Pentium 120MHz (not GHz) with 16MB RAM and a 1.2GB hard drive to give …

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Internet Explorer 11 Eschews Version-Specific Document Modes

It’s been the bane of web developers for many years – Internet Explorer and the unique quirks associated with each version. Sure, you could try and accommodate this by detecting the version of Internet Explorer and writing code for each version but then you have issues of maintaining and updating multiple versions of code for …

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The Return of the Infrared Remote in Smartphones

When LG visited work recently to show off their new G2 Android smartphone and some other product including a couple of Ultra HD televisions (which looked fantastic in my opinion) there was one particular feature on the smartphone which I really liked. It wasn’t the large screen or the quad core CPU, its speed or …

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Trawling eBay for Older Generation Computer Parts

Well, i have been doing some research on various computer components after deciding to go down the cheaper in-place upgrade path rather than building a new computer from scratch. However, I thought I would have a look and see what CPUs my Gigabyte GA-EX58-EXTREME motherboard supports. It turns out that with the last BIOS revision …

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CrashPlan – Status Update

A while ago I thought I would give CrashPlan a go as a cloud backup solution. Well, after thirty nine days I have backed up about 220GB of data from our home server and will backup additional some data from my wife’s MacBook Air this week. I’ve not run into any issues so far and …

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