Tip tag

In Firefox 3, the location bar learns some new tricks. This has given in the unofficial name of Awesome Bar because it gives a lot more control. Here are some tips to using it,

Tags make it easier

Bookmarking has been made a lot easier thanks to the Star icon to the right of the location bar. Click once, and you’ve bookmarked it. You might not know that you can click again to change the bookmark properties, with a new feature known as “tags.” Fill out the Tag field with keywords about the bookmark. When you want to go back to this page, just type one or few tags in the location bar to see it.

Name and then some

I follow a forum thread which gets increasingly bigger, and I don’t want to subscribe to the forum. Creating a bookmark is useless as it would quickly go out of date as the thread is quite popular. But, as forum software tends to put the first post ID in the URL, I can use that to get to the page quickly. I could easily type in the web site name, but you can also type in parts of the URL and it will still match.

So, if I want a GP Forums thread, each URL contains the word “thread” in them, so I can type “gp forums thread” and it will give me all threads that I have been to on GP Forums, despite “GP Forums” appearing in the title, and “thread” appearing in the URL. I can add the word “gta” and then I get all threads that have “GTA” in the title.

If I want all New Zealand sites I’ve been to about Vodafone, I could go “.co.nz vodafone” and get a list that way.

Turn the frequent search terms into bookmarks

If you find yourself doing a rather common search, you can turn it into a dynamic bookmark that you can access from your bookmarks toolbar or menu. Just go to Bookmarks » Organise Bookmarks, and in Search Bookmarks type in your terms (i.e. “.co.nz vodafone”). Change your Search Area to History and you should get your results that look similar to the location bar ones (without the bookmarks though). Click the Save button and give it a name. It will automatically go into the Bookmarks Menu, you can drag and drop it to where ever you please.

What are your tricks? Comment!

I just got myself a Microsoft Windows Media Center remote. When I opened up the box from the courier, I noticed no CD. Oh well, I thought, I’ll just download the drivers from the Microsoft website.

Wrong. There are no drivers available to download from the Microsoft website, even though there is a link on the page above saying “Download Software.” The drivers come pre-packaged in Windows XP Pro and MCE. So what do you do?

Search the internet! And I came upon this:

You can get them with the following procedure.
1) Download the Windows Update “Update Rollup 2 for eHome Infrared Receiver for Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 (KB912024)” from microsoft. It is available from this page (Microsoft.com).
2) run the downloaded executable. When the Hotfix install wizard appears on the screen… STOP!! do not continue with the installation wizard.
3) run notepad, and open the file named kb912024.log that is located in your windows system directory (usually c:\windows\).
4) on the fourth line of this file you will find the path to the update executable (ie: c:\0d5602f37f532d2198a162164df6\update\update.exe).
5) Open Windows and navigate to the root of this path (ie: c:\0d5602f37f532d2198a162164df6). There you will find SP2QFE. Navigate to this directory.
6) In the SP2QPE directory you will find the irbus.sys file. In the “ip” directory will contain the irbus.inf file.
7) Copy these two files to a temporary directory of your choice.
Go back to the Hotfix install wizard and select CANCEL. The wizard will ask if you are sure… answer yes. The wizard will clean up after itself.

Thank you Cybrmage your method worked a treat!

Then all I did was check a box in MediaPortal and it worked. (Yes, I switched to MediaPortal over the weekend).

Hibernation is my favourite power saving method – I press my power button and my computer powers down. I press it again and it starts up again, but with everything exactly the way I left it. Sleep never gave me the same satisfaction of reducing my power usage. But Windows XP gave me troubles with this upgraded machine of mine. I’d press the power button, Windows will proclaim it’s about to hibernate, but everything goes horribly wrong, the screen cuts out, comes back in, with a nice little balloon telling me

Windows - System Error: Insufficient system resources exist to complete the API.

How can their be insufficient resources? I have 220GB+ free on my hard drive! The system logs tell me nothing either.

Well, it appears that Windows does have troubles from time-to-time when your RAM exceeds 1GB. Go to the Knowledge Base article 909095 and download the hot fix patch there (you won’t find it in Windows Update). The problem should now be fixed.

Excellent.

[Tip: Tales from the Crypto]

The more information in the KB article says:

To prepare the computer to hibernate, the Windows kernel power manager requires a block of contiguous memory. The size of this contiguous memory is proportional to the number of physical memory regions that the computer is using. A computer that uses lots of RAM is likely to use more physical memory regions when the computer prepares to hibernate. Therefore, a larger amount of contiguous memory is required to prepare the computer to hibernate.

Additionally, the number of physical memory regions varies according to the programs, services, and device drivers that the computer uses. Therefore, the hibernate feature occasionally fails.

That still doesn’t explain why it failed on my machine… oh well.

I know, me saying stuff like that (my co-workers would be having a fit now… me liking another Microsoft product). But it’s true. The libraries new feature in this version is how it shows information. It groups songs by artist, then by album, with cover art and album details. It’s great to quickly run through a music library quickly.

I don’t know about iTunes, it has this same view (copy?) but it is slow and terrible so I’ve never had a chance to play with it.

My friends have said that making a playlist is so hard in WMP. But it’s a breeze as far as I can tell. I pop open the playlist editor (the arrow button next to the search box). I then just drag and drop stuff. If I want a single song, I drag that onto the list. Shift and Ctrl selections also work, just as in previous versions.

But here’s where the new view comes into play. I want all songs by an artist? I drag the artists name into the playlist. I want to add a CD? I drag the CD cover onto the list. Alternatively, if I just want to play that artist or album, I double click instead.

I do have some gripes with WMP11 though. For one, having no gap-killer is getting to me. I also like my cross fade, but WMP’s one is just crap. I’m also an avid user of Winamp’s Jump menu (if you don’t know - you press J in Winamp and it’ll pop up a searchable list of all songs in the current playlist, makes it a snap to play the song that is on your mind). Does anyone have any suggestions on getting these features, or shall I just get Winamp again?

iTunes is OK, I must admit. But recent versions have become pretty terrible. Cover-flow is slow and unusable on Windows (at least on my computer which has a decent graphics card) and, as mentioned, iTunes’ version of the WMP11 expanded view is slow to navigate as well.

One of the recent things I’ve been doing in Vista is playing around with stacks. A new view in Windows Explorer in Vista is to stack your files into groups by attribute. In reality, it is a bunch of searches for specific files with pretty icons. To stack folders, you can click on the arrow next to the heading you want to stack (say, Name) and selecting “Stack by Name”. You’ll then get lots of icons with files holding a certain name.

This can be helpful in certain situations. One of the things I like to keep organised is my music. In XP, I would’ve had to create a folder to each artist, then another for each album. In Vista, I can do half that work automatically.

I just type “kind:music” in the search box, then go Artist → Stack by Artist, and all my music is magically put into virtual folders. (We first type kind:music because of the folder images that can add unnecessary cruft).

Now I can double-click on an artist and get all the music by that artist.

But, what if I want to get a certain album? Well, this is why I said “half that work automatically.” It cannot remember stacks within stacks, but you can still do so. Just go Album → Stack by Album. The music is then stacked by album.

You can navigate the stacks just like any folder from the folder tree as well.

Now you may think this all useless because you can’t access this in Open dialogs. You are mistaken. Click on the Save Search button in Explorer to save it to your Saved Searches folder (or anywhere else for that matter). Then, open up an Open dialog box somewhere, goto Saved Searches and double-click your new search. Tah-da!

I finish off this post with a tip that not even US PC World knew. If you are finding the icons too large or too small, you can quickly resize them by holding down Ctrl and rolling the mouse wheel - roll up to make them bigger, roll down to make them smaller. The thing PC World didn’t mention in the article above was that this applies to the desktop as well. Just go to your desktop then Ctrl+Mouse Wheel. And yes, if you make the icons 32×32 (the old size), the shortcut icon will overlap a quarter of the icon. Just scroll down one more and it won’t.

If you are using Vista, these two tips that I posted late last year might help you out with two open source problems:

• Using The GIMP with Windows Vista
• Getting Windows Media Player and Firefox to play nicely in Windows Vista

Now that I’m in Vista full time I’ll be updating my blog with any tips and tricks I find with problems lurking about (such as the Creative Live! card one below).

Here’s a conundrum. Firefox is designed to automatically pick up the Windows Media Player Netscape plugin files when you start it up, so then there is no configuration necessary on your part. This has worked fine for Windows XP, but for Vista, something isn’t right. You won’t see WMP at all, instead you get told to install the “missing plugin,” which the service can’t find.

What’s going on here? All previous versions of Windows included the Netscape plugin, but it seems Vista has cut that part out. It is easy to solve.

Stop the presses!

Microsoft has released a plugin specifically for Firefox to restore Windows Media playback. For more information see this post.

The old post continues…

If you are dual-booting with another version of Windows, the easiest way is to copy a couple of files: npdrmv2.dll; npdsplay.dll; and npwmsdrm.dll. You’ll find these in the Program Files\Windows Media Player directory in your older Windows partition. Copy these to the plugins folder where Firefox is installed (usually Program Files\Mozilla Firefox).

If not, you’ll need to download these files. You can get them each: npdsplay.dll; npwmsdrm.dll; and npdrmv2.dll. As above, place them in your plugins folder where you installed Firefox.

Once you are done, the browser will instantly recognise the new plugin(s) and you’ll be able to start using them.

There are alternatives to this solution, which can be found here.

I recently installed Windows Vista (build 5536). It’s nice, but I’m still not going to use it full-time just yet. But I wanted a way to share my profile for Firefox in Windows XP and in Windows Vista. So I installed Firefox and started doing a bit of research, and it is quite easy.

First, backup your profile. It will be in C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles.

In Windows Vista, either go to Start > All Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Run, Start > Run if you have it showing, or WindowsKey + R to show the Run dialog. Next, type:
X:\path to firefox\firefox.exe -p
This will load the profile manager, delete the Default profile.

Load the Run dialog again, type:
X:\path to firefox\firefox.exe -CreateProfile "default c:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\xxxxxx.default"
That xxxxxx you’ll have to find out by going to that folder. When you hit enter, you are done and should load up Firefox with that profile.

(If you are trying to find Application Data in Vista, it is X:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming)