I’m looking around for a free solution for multiple monitors so the taskbar is extended across both displays. looking so far at zbar and the free version of multimon

I have found a simple way of converting epub files into mobi files that are read on the Kindle. You need 2 things

– KindleGen download this and drop the .exe file into the install folder of

– epub to mobi

You can batch convert folders or just select individual files

Microsoft never make it simple. I purchased a windows 8 upgrade for 25 quid to upgrade my existing windows 7 install. However my SSD with win7 on it died so I installed windows 8 onto a new SSD. But then windows wouldn’t activate as it was a ‘clean install’ rather than an ‘upgrade install’.  Seems like this is a common problem but easily sorted

• Open regedit by pressing Windows-q, entering regedit and selecting the result from the list of hits.
• Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/Software/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Setup/OOBE/
• Change MediaBootInstall from 1 to 0
• Go back to the start screen and enter cmd there.
• Right-click Command Prompt and select to run it as administrator.
• Type slmgr /rearm on the command line and hit enter.
• Reboot Windows now.
• Run the activation utility afterwards, enter your product key to activate Windows.

Tried watching some tv episodes streamed from my WHS box and found them stuttering really badly – first time ever doing this. Logged into WHS and found one drive completely full with half a terabyte of ‘client pc backups’. Did some googling and found out how to remove safely the unwanted ones and freed up the necessary space

here is the excellent howto

No more stuttering 🙂

Well, that fix didn’t last long. I’m utterly perplexed by this. I’ve reset windows firewall rules on the remote pc which worked. For a while. The workgroup vanished again from my main rig. 🙁 . I’ve looked more closely at my main rig and have uninstalled Comodo firewall and gone back to using Windows firewall again. This seems to have cured things. For the moment anyway.

I have had issues with a Win7 homegroup vanishing (and therefore its shared libraries) from the homegroup list on my main PC. I can still browse shares and remote desktop into this other PC but can’t see it’s Homegroup. Weird thing is if I am sitting at this other PC i can see ALL the other Homegroup members with no issues. After much searching this seems to have solved the issue after i ran it on the remote PC

Sometimes the HomeGroup listening service is disabled.

Very useful little fileserver. It has been available with £100 cashback from approved resellers in the UK for a couple of years now. I bought my last one from serversplus.com

Watch out for amazon.co.uk sellers as they probably aren’t eligible for the HP cashback offer(selling parallel imported N40Ls) and it will end up costing you more….

The thread that started my interest in these devices is the great ‘Tim’s Tiddler‘ one on avforums. Once you have flashed the BIOS and unlocked the extra speed on the optical drive SATA port you can add even more drives to this little beast. There are x4 3.5″ drive slots in the main bay and in the top 5.25″ section you can have an optical drive, x2 3.5″ or 2.5″ or a combination of the two depends on the brackets you get. I’ve even seen a setup with x6 2.5″ drives in there!. to run a 6th drive you need to use an eSATA to SATA cable and need an extra molex>SATA power splitter

I have installed a passive radeon 6450 and upgraded to 8Gb of RAM although some folk have had success with 16Gb kits

Msconfig is a useful built in tool in windows that you can use to control which 3rd party applications load in at startup. Trimming these can significantly speed up the time it takes to boot up into windows to the point you can start actually doing stuff.

Start>run>msconfig

Alternatively you can use the neat little tool startupcpl from mlin.net

If you need to check if you should disable something or not there is ~27000 item searchable database here

YAMJ is a great program for presenting your media when streaming to your TV. I have setup another little batch file to rescan my media libraries after i have added new content so it can scrape the fanart and movie/tv info for the episodes/films. I can run this script remotely as described earlier

I tweaked the standard My_YAMJ.cmd to scan more than 1 library at a time, even if they are stored on different drives – see the syntax below

@Echo OFF
C:
CD \YAMJ
CALL moviejukebox My_Library.xml -o “G:\ServerFolders\Videos”
CALL moviejukebox My_LibraryTV.xml -o “F:\ServerFolders\Recorded TV”
CALL moviejukebox My_LibraryKIDSmovies.xml -o “G:\ServerFolders\kidsmovies”
exit

oops – forgot to include the syntax for .xml files above – i’ve bolded the related lines

<!– Library file generated by Omertron’s GUI Config –>
<!– YAMJ GUI Config v0.51 –>
<!– http://mediaplayersite.com/YAMJ_GUI_Config –>

<libraries>

<library>
<path>F:\ServerFolders\Recorded TV</path>
<playerpath>file:///opt/sybhttpd/localhost.drives/NETWORK_SHARE/vail tv/</playerpath>
<exclude name=”sample,tmp/,temp/,RECYCLER/,RECYCLE.BIN/”/>
<description></description>
<prebuf></prebuf>
<scrapeLibrary>true</scrapeLibrary>
</library>

</libraries>

it is a bit fiddly to get the paths correct, but is worth persevering 🙂