Natural Born Coder

Tag: Miscellaneous

  • Building a Media Centre

    —

    by

    doozer
    in

    I enjoy a good film and in my youth I used to love going to the cinema but as I got older I found the cinema became far too expensive for the reward and I just didn’t have the time anyway. Since I enjoyed watching things on the big screen the natural answer was a…

  • Digikam Tagging

    —

    by

    doozer
    in

    I’ve recently switched from Picasa (which has been retired) to Digikam for photo management and I’ve noticed a few quirks that I need to document to or I’ll forget them. For the most part Digikam is a massive upgrade over Picasa but a few things in Digikam don’t necessarily work quite as I’d expect them to.

  • My List of Useful Utilities

    —

    by

    doozer
    in

    I hate to think how many computers I’ve built and installed over the years. I’ve found that there are a core set of utilities that I keep coming back to that I’ve found really useful on most installs. As I only use some of them infrequently I thought I’d put together a list so that…

  • Reading Material

    —

    by

    doozer
    in

    Over the years I’ve read my fair share of books on various aspects of computing from operating system design through to test driven development and for the last few years I’ve also been taking MOOC’s as I like the learning style. It occurred to me that I should probably keep a list so that I can see what I need…

  • Panasonic HC-V750 Metadata Files

    —

    by

    doozer
    in

    I recently bought a Panasonic HC-V750 camcorder and I was intrigued by the additional files (.cont, pmpd and .tmb) it produces along with the video files – do they contain useful additional data?. A good googling didn’t turn up anything useful but a lot of people have wondered about them. 

  • XMarks vs Chrome Means You Lose

    —

    by

    doozer
    in

    Yah, I’ve just managed to lose all of my important bookmarks thanks to a fight between Chrome and XMarks. To be fair this is a known issue but it’s easy to accidentally cause the problem and the only loser in the whole mess is the end user.

  • Test Credit Card Numbers

    —

    by

    doozer
    in

    A while back now I had to write a system to process credit cards. Since the software was capturing the card number itself it could perform some initial checking on the number to ensure that the user hadn’t made a trivial typing error.

  • Converting a List into a Quoted List

    —

    by

    doozer
    in

    I recently needed to convert a simple list of strings into something that could be used in a SQL IN clause. The format for the IN clause that I needed was quoted strings with commas between each value.

  • Moving Picasa to a New Computer

    —

    by

    doozer
    in

    I recently took the plunge and installed Windows 8 which meant re-installing Picasa. As I had to go through the pain of installing a new operating system and all my applications I thought I might as well get a solid state drive (SSD) to go along with it. While I love the SSD I’ve found…

  • Google Analytics Data Ranges

    —

    by

    doozer
    in

    I use Google Analytics to monitor the number of visits I get to this website. For the most part I find Google Analytics to be an exceptionally well put together service but, as with a lot of Google tools, there are a few sharp edges that just never seem to get fixed.

  • Adding Cover Art to Video Files

    —

    by

    doozer
    in

    I’ve been asked a couple of times recently about adding cover art to video files. This process will replace the default icon used, which is a frame from the film, with the DVD cover or any other artwork you want to use.

  • Netflix UK Update

    —

    by

    doozer
    in

    As we’ve now been using the Netflix service for a few weeks I though it was time for a bit of an update. Overall I’m still generally pleased with the service. The lack of a queue still bugs me but it’s not the end of the world so I’ll live with that. Picture quality seems…