Month: May 2004

DVD on projector doesn’t work :-(

Tried to watch Independence Day on the XP laptop via the projector screen tonight and failed dismally. At first it wasn’t showing any of the video on the external monitor – just the panel of WMP9. I tried the preview for shrek2 and that did the same thing until I downgraded the hardware acceleration to medium and that worked. Back to ID and that still failed. Did the same thing in WinVideo too.
Then I found a patch for WMP9 that sounded like it would do the trick. Except the patch told me I wasn’t running version 9 or the patch was already installed. GRRRR. Now its too late to do any more digging so its off to bed for an early night. (The weird thing is that its worked before although it might have been on another projector…..)

Church site in MT?

I was speaking to the new conscriptvolunteer last night about how we were going to move the Wheelock Heath Baptist church website forward. The main criteria is easily updatable. The site needs to be updated by someone with little or no html experience and needs to be quickly updated so we don’t get stale content.
I remembered reading in my feeds that this had been done, so I just had to find out where. Redland Baptist is the end result with a very interesting page with HOWTO links at Heal Your Church Web Site: Beyond the Blog and other links on making MovableType a Content Managment System. Now I just need to check that the web host for the church website includes MT compatability – PHP and Mysql (its a IIS based server)

I also came across the pretty cool Milonic menu system that looks like a very versatile and adaptable system.

Other links I need to note are also at Beyond the blog, Redux, Part Deux

Inside every one of us…

..is a chef trying to get out. Actually I noticed a leaflet on the noticeboard at work from another company in the same building that our office was in. They were seeking volunteers to follow some recipes for a book they were doing and would pay expenses and also a small amount per recipe that was cooked. I thought it sounded like a good idea, Kristen agreed and so I contacted them. A week or so ago I got the recipe’s. Some looked pretty strange and disgusting, others looked really nice and some just looked interesting. So Thursday night after getting home from work I made Lemon Tuna on lettuce leaf bed and White Chocolate Fondue – guess which one was our favourite 😉
The fondue just screamed out for some artistic work so here are two pictures of the dips. Overhead, Side on

oops!

Just tried to post a comment on Iconoblog and realised that the system asks for the captcha code but doesn’t display it. Doesn’t do it on Kristen’s either….That and if you use internet explorer then the comment page seems to be missing text until you scroll down and back up again and it all re-appears…. (i’m sure i’ve had that and fixed it in the past though)

7dayshop speed

The stuff I ordered from 7day shop arrived last monday – the 24th May. This was stuff ordered on Wed 12th May and which was in stock but not yet despatched until the 20th May. I’m still waiting for an outofstock item that has come back in stock sometime last week but still not been processed. I really don’t think I’ll bother ordering from them again.

Sauce Reader RSS reader

Scoble blogged about SauceReader.
Sauce reader – looks really neat. As the program was launched it ran through a quick tutorial – and then crashed with a “can’t load resource” error message. A quick reload of the application later and it was working. This utility also uses internet explorer as its browser engine 🙁 but has integration with w.bloggar (which you can use to “blog this”) or you can use its built in blog this facility – with the choice of which blog you want to use.
The autodetection of feeds works fine on my website although its not that obvious that it has detected a feed – the subscribe button becomes available but thats the only indication you get. Other readers tend to say “hey i’ve found a feed – do you want to subscribe?”. This is quite handy although can get annoying if they do this every time you visit a web page.
one bug i’ve seen is that if you hit the back button on the browser bar it actually moves the active browser window back – NOT the browser window within Sauce reader. Unfortunately for me, this meant it moved back on the MT popup window that I was writing this review in – and I almost lost it all. Thankfully I was able to get back to the data I had typed in!

Newsmap

A cool piece of programming, newsmap shows all the headlines as they appear around the world, with the most talked about stories appearing bigger on the screen and the most recent ones in a brighter colour than older news. I did find some of the links to pages were broken but it is a good way of getting new news sources and keeping up to date.