Individual Eleven – The World's Cyberbrain

I already tweeted this earlier in the week, but this is just too funny to not share on here too. I found a version of it with English subtitles, but to be honest you don’t need them. Laugh it up, because I sure did!

Enjoy and have a good weekend!

Miscellaneous Antennagate, Steve Jobs

This problem has been apparent since WordPress version 2.x. Sometimes it happens when you move your blog to another hoster; it was an intermittent issue for me but still annoying.

There are several solutions I have found, but this one is best as you don’t need to SSH into your web server… and you may not have access anyway if your blog is hosted by a third party. WordPress sometimes has excessive delays for carrying out schedules; by default you only have 0.01 seconds to initiate the cron job for scheduling. Cron is a time scheduler for Unix/Linux based systems, and it is handy for automating tasks. In this case, our automated task is to post blog entries at a specific date and time without manual intervention.

So to fix this issue, use FTP to access your WordPress install and edit cron.php in the wp-includes folder.

• Find this line entry in cron.php: wp_remote_post ($cron_url, Array (‘ timeout’ => 0.01, ‘ blocking’ => false));

• Change the timeout to 20 seconds: wp_remote_post ($cron_url, Array (‘ timeout’ => 20, ‘ blocking’ => false));

Save the file and upload it back onto your webspace.

Tech Wordpress missed schedule

I bought my Shuttle PC awhile back now, I love it to death. I can even play games on it, it’s a great piece of kit as a media center and it’s fully loaded with features. Now, I always planned to install a Blu-ray drive in there to watch high def movies… of course you would, it IS a media center afterall. Well think again, because it wasn’t as easy as I first thought. In fact, for awhile, I thought it might not actually be possible.

But after four days of not sleeping I cracked it. I’m not one for giving up, especially when it comes to technical quandaries of this nature. In fact, I love challenges like these and I’m about to share with you so you can avoid the pain. Lets go back in time for a bit…

The Problem

After installing Windows 7, I bought a LG Blu-ray SATA drive from PC World; not the best place to buy hardware but they had a fairly decent deal on them. So you just buy one, install it in the Shuttle, pop in a Blu-ray disc and away you go right? Wrong. So very wrong. The Shuttle comes with an Intel GMA3100 chipset for the onboard graphics card. The picture quality produced via HDMI is quite good for an onboard, but when it comes to playing Blu-ray, it is one of the most hated chipsets known to man. I have tried both Cyberlink PowerDVD and Corel WinDVD 2010 but they failed to play a Blu-ray disc. You will be greeted with something like this:

Infinite patching for both programs produced the same result. Is it a hardware problem? Well lets go through the motions:

• HDCP compliant graphics card – Check.
• HDCP compliant monitor – Check.
• HDMI connection working correctly – Check.
• Up to date graphics card drivers – Check.

So what on earth is going on?

The Solution

It’s a software problem, as in the main producers of DVD/Blu-ray playback software have limited support for the Intel GMA graphics chipset. Maybe there is a way to get the above programs to work on my system, but I gave up. After trawling through the internet, I stumbled upon one random post on a forum. It mentioned using Total Media Theatre with the Japanese version of the files required for the video renderer. What?! Yes, without the renderers for Total Media Theatre pulled from the Japanese version of the software… it will not work. Don’t ask me how or why or what kind of crazy software development cycle is going on here, but that’s how it is.

So you need:

• Total Media Theatre version 3 installed
• VMR renderer files from the Japanese trial version (linked here for your convenience)
• Save the renderer files to: C:\Program Files\ArcSoft\TotalMedia Theatre 3\Codec

And that’s it! As if by magic, you can fully enjoy your Shuttle as it was meant to be.

Tech Blu-ray, Shuttle SG33G5M

I pre-ordered the Fat Pack about two weeks ago, and to my surprise it turned up on my desk at work. Those guys at Wizards Of The Coast just keep on churning out new core sets, and players just keep on buying them. Magic is a very difficult hobby to maintain, especially how it turns into a money sink.

I haven’t played Magic for that long but I wanted to try out the new core set to see how it fairs. The best way to get started is to buy the Fat Pack; you get the following to start your collection:

• 40-card basic land pack
• Eight 15-card booster packs from the M11 core set
• Player’s guide with visual encyclopedia
• Special edition Spindown life counter
• Excerpt from Planeswalker Novel
• Nice box to keep it all in

Now the one thing I am disappointed about in this Fat Pack, is the lack of plastic dividers for your cards. Older Fat Packs used to have them, but it seems they are skimping on what you get these days. However, you do get 8 booster packs which is pretty good. All I need now is several hours to plan and create my deck of destruction!

Entertainment, Games M11 Core Set, Magic The Gathering