I rebuilt my main desktop a few days ago and ever since I’ve not been able to connect to it with Remote Desktop. I click connect from the other machine and the buttons grey out for a moment before they reset. No error message is displayed. Checking the event log shows a number of Application [...]
Category Archive for 'Software'
What do we buy the birthday boy who has a no-media policy?
That’s what Phil asked me before my birthday last month. He was referring to the fact that I have no CDs, no DVDs no optical media of any description cluttering my living room. All our TV and movies are stored on a variety of [...]
Having ditched Freeview for signal quality reasons, it’s time to talk about getting the satellite cards to work under Vista Media Centre – something that until MS release the “Fuji” update is not as trivial as you’d think! Vista’s tuning architecture doesn’t understand DVB-S (or -S2), so can’t natively tune satellite cards, so we need [...]
My 1080p HTPC: Multiple Freeview Tuners
Posted in Cinema, HDTV, Hardware, Microsoft, Software on Jul 12th, 2008
When I originally built my HTPC, I used 2 Freeview cards. Each Hauppauge WinTV-NOVA-T500 has two Freeview tuners in one PCI card. By installing two of these (and with some registry tweaking) it is possible to build a device that can record/watch 4 Freeview channels at once.
Out of the box the Vista Media Centre GUI [...]
Disable Windows Desktop Search Explorer Integration
Posted in Future Howard, Microsoft, Software on Jul 10th, 2008
Another post from the “helping future Howard” category. I use Outlook 2007, which is great, but in order to be able to search your email with decent performance you must install Windows Desktop Search. Unfortunately when you do this it integrates with Explorer without asking permission to do so. This means that should you hit [...]
As I mentioned in the last post, I’m running the Media Center (yes, that’s how they spell it) interface from Vista Ultimate to drive my HTPC. Out of the box Vista Media Center (VMC) is capable of playing DVDs and MPEG2 broadcast content – such as the output of a Hauppauge DVB-T or DVB-S [...]
I use Winamp to play mp3s. I always have done – it’s lightweight, I like the interface and it has the few plugins I need. I don’t need the bloat of iTunes or Windows Media Player. However, I seem to have Windows Media Player installed – I don’t remember installing it, and I probably wouldn’t [...]
Traffic Graphing
Posted in Networking, Software on Dec 3rd, 2007
The image on the left is just one of the graphs generated automatically for tracking the data usage on my home network. (Click through to see more stats.)
That particular graph shows the usage of my ADSL connection over time; green is downloaded data, while the blue line shows my uploads. It is [...]
My first generation MacBook Pro steadfastly refuses to read the dual-layer DVD that Leopard comes on. All my Windows machines can read it (or at least the BootCamp partition) and my G5 can read the disk too, but the MacBook Pro won’t boot off it. However, I do have plenty of external drives [...]
VB.NET to C# and C# to VB.NET Translator
Posted in Development, Future Howard, Software on Jul 31st, 2007
This code translator is very handy. Give it some C# and it will spit out VB.NET, give it VB.NET and it’ll give you C#. Some of the code samples for manipulating Word documents are in VB.NET and I wanted to see them in C#. I could have tried to translate them myself but this saved [...]