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Category Archives: Tech
How to Change the Default Mail Client in Firefox
When you click on an email link on a webpage, Firefox will normally open your operating system’s default mail program (EG; Windows Live Mail). If you would prefer to use a different mail client, you have the option to change this setting. For example, I prefer to use Gmail. Continue reading
Avidemux – Free Video Editing Software
I’m very impressed with Avidemux, a free video editor I found today. My old video recorder used to record clips as one continuous film, and so when I took the file off it I had just that; one file. To get it back down into clips I was using Windows Live Movie Maker, which is also free and, I believe, installed with Windows 7 by default.
Firefox Address Bar Search Engine
In Firefox you can search the internet by typing keywords into the browser address bar. To change the search engine provider (EG: Bing, Google…) do the following;
- Open a new tab and type about:config into the address bar.
- On the warning that appears, click I’ll be careful, I promise.
- In the search box at the top of the page type keyword.URL.
- Right click on the keyword.URL entry that comes up and choose Modify.
- Enter one of the following depending on your preference;
- Google: http://www.google.com/search?&q=
- Yahoo: http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=
- Ask: http://www.ask.com/web?q=
- Bing: http://www.bing.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=navclient&gfns=1&q=
How to connect an external hard drive to an Xbox
It sounds like it would be pretty simple to connect an external hard drive to your Xbox. Take a USB cable and plug it in to both devices, right? Wrong, as I found out.
I wanted to hook up our 1TB hard drive with all the movies and TV shows on it, as well as my music and pictures, but when I plugged it into one of the front USB ports nothing at all happened. I tried a back port, but the Xbox remained sullen and unresponsive. Continue reading
How to link back to an album in a NextGen Gallery
When you use the amazing plugin NextGen Gallery for WordPress you can organise your photos into ‘Galleries’ and you can sort these into ‘Albums’ to create a folder hierarchy like you might have on your computer.
When these galleries and albums are viewed on your website they give the visitor a great way to see your pictures, but there’s one feature missing; links back to the album you just came from. I searched the internet for a solution to this but didn’t find a way I liked, so I created my own breadcrumb trail to insert. Continue reading
NextGen Gallery
Single Picture
[singlepic id=x w=width h=height mode=web20|watermark float=left|right|center]
The singepic shortcode displays a single picture from any gallery. Clicking on the image displays the image as you have specified on the Effects options page. With the default Thickbox effect, the background goes gray and a larger version of the image (if available) is displayed. Continue reading
My Favourite WordPress Plugins
I’m using the most up-to-date versions of each of the plugins below (as of 22-09-11) and I’m using WP v.3.2.1.
AddThis Social Bookmarking Widget
Help your visitor promote your site! The AddThis Social Bookmarking Widget allows any visitor to bookmark your site easily with many popular services. Sign up for an AddThis.com account to see how your visitors are sharing your content–which services they’re using for sharing, which content is shared the most, and more. It’s all free–even the pretty charts and graphs.
I really recommend this. Sign up for an add this account and it displays your shares and clicks on your wp dashboard, very useful.
Continue reading
Regular Expression for A Number
I’ve recently had to delete pages numbers out of some of the novels I’ve saved on this site. A handy way of stripping out these numbers quickly is by using Dreamweaver’s search function, which can take a regular expression as a search term.
To get rid of numbers in the format [1]… [10]… [100] I just searched for;
[[0-9]+]
When I needed to get rid of the page line links (<a name=”Page_12″ id=”Page_12″></a>) I searched for;
<a name=”Page_[0-9]+” id=”Page_[0-9]+”></a>
Tag Sorting PHP
To make the various tag pages on this site (eg; fanfic ship tags) I used the plugin shortcode exec php to insert the following code into a page;
$dbhost = ‘localhost’;
$dbuser = ‘dbname’;
$dbpass = ‘pass’;
$dbname = ‘dbname’;