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I have had issues playing back 1080p and 720p movies smoothly on my new TV. The TV is connected to an Asus Barebone which is capable of outputting 1080p on HDMI, but my preferred player has always been VLC. Sadly, I have come to realise that the since VLC uses built-in codec, it is very lacking when it comes to 1080p and 720p playback, i.e., H.264 decoding.

The issues I experienced was:

• Jittering
• Audio lag
• 720p could not be scaled to 1080p for playback
• 1080p playback in 1080p would just amount to large pixelated blocks on the screen
• and so on…

Unfortunately, this is really due to the lacking codec performance in VLC itself, but changing player and installing codec resolved 95% of my issue. The last 5% is really due to the lacking GPU power of my Asus Barebone’s ATI X1200 graphics card.

To get it working nicely, you need to:

• Install CCCP (Combined Community Codec Pack).
• Replace VLC with Media Player Classic – Home Cinema, since it has the ability to use external codecs
• Buy and install CoreAVC, since CCCP only uses FFDShow for H.264 decoding, which sadly is slow compared to CoreAVC.

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Lotus Notes 8 has an inherent issue on Windows 7, you can’t pin the running Lotus Notes application to the taskbar.

If you do you receive the following error message:

The Notes2 executable launcher was unable to locate its companion launcher jar.

The reason is quite simple: Lotus Notes is a compilation of application that run, not just one single executable, hence the icon that is displayed in your Taskbar is not the launcher.

The only way to get it pinned to your taskbar is to find the shortcut in the start menu, right-click it and select “Pin to Taskbar”. Downside is that you get two Notes icons in the Taskbar, the launcher and the running application, bummer.

Within my LAN I use a computer running Windows 7 as my print server and server for various other stuff, but I setup an account with no password, since others need to be able to access the computer easily also.

However, I often need access to it and Remote Desktop in Windows 7, but Windows 7 (and Vista and XP) does not accept Remote Desktop connections if the user account does not have a password.

Simply do this to get around it:

• Run gpedit.msc
• Go to Computer Configuration > Windows Settings > Security Settings > Local Policies > Security Options
• Set Accounts: Limit local accounts use of blank passwords to console login only = Disabled

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I have a NAS and several times, I need a list of the directories on it in a txt-file, using DIR is perfect for this.

But unmapped NAS’s are usually accessed by UNC paths, sadly, Windows Vista and 7 doesn’t support UNC paths when using Command Prompt commands, such as DIR.

Luckily, I found this quick workaround: http://www.pctools.com/guides/registry/detail/1247/

Works perfectly!

I finally got Windows 7 installed. Microsoft did something right this time.

But, at lot of drivers for the T60/T60p are missing, so here are a list of usefull drivers:

Power Management (install both the ACPI Power Management and Power Manager for Vista) – http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/MIGR-62928.html#pm

x1400 Drivers  – Find instructions here: http://windows7center.com/forums/11895-post11.html

Hotkeys – http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/MIGR-62928.html#utility (although not all the hotkeys work, such as the volume control)

Firefox 3.5 introduced a new feature GFX Color Management. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to work right.

Here is how to disable it

Type in “about:config” in the addressbar and click the button to gain access to the configuration

Type in “gfx.color_management.mode” and hit enter.

The value of “gfx.color_management.mode” should currently be 2, double-click the line and change the value to 0 to disable the GFX Color Management.

Restart Firefox

Thanks to http://kb.mozillazine.org/Gfx.color_management.enabled for the info on the needed values.

Firefox 3.5 is a great improvement over the past versions, but like many others I discovered one annoyance:

When you only have one tab open and try to close it, it closes Firefox too.

I find this really annoying, but I already found a solution (thanks to Lifehacker):

• Type “about:config” on your addressbar
• Type “browser.tabs.closeWindowWithLastTab” and hit Enter
• The Firefox configuration should show only only entry now, double-click it and you are done.

ARGGG… The iPhone OS 3.0 has finally been released, but the iPhone activation server has already gone down…

Lot’s of people – including me – have started to receive the error message:

… or as seen in the diagnostic log that can be sent to Apple as iTunes: Restore error 1639

Guess there is nothing to do right now, than just wait it out and keep trying…. sucks!

After having scoured the Internets to find an answer and not really being able to find an answer to the question How do I set the theme height of an Artisteer theme? I decided to find out myself.

Actually, it was not that hard.

Find the file:

/yourdomain.com/wp-content/themes/YourTheme/style.css

Edit it and look for the section

.Post-body
{

Simply add the height (in pixels) that you want your theme to be. Afterwards, it should look something like this:

.Post-body
{
position: relative;
z-index: 0;
margin: 16px;
height: 600px;
}

For quite some time, I have been taking panorama pictures and I have mainly been posting them to my Picasa gallery.

But some of the pictures are quite large and you don’t really get the full experience of them on Picasa, so I created a page for my panorama pictures on the site.

You can find it here or via the menu, look for Panoramas