Coastal's Movie Cleaner - Create .nfo files and thumbnails for movies

I've updated my Movie Cleaner. Primarily designed to be used with xbmc, it will create the necessary movie .nfo files and thumbnails for movies. Movies must be stored in individual folders & it is the name of the folder that is used as the movie title.

There are some other movie cleaners out there which do more than mine i have to admit. But it does a simple job well and satisfys my needs. Let me know if you enjoy using it.

When broadband speeds exceed the ability to view the files

My broadband supplier is excellent. They now offer 24Mbs service for £18 a month. This allows me to download video files quicker than i can watch them. This is clearly a turning point in ISP service.

Excellent.
Andrew Bailey

XBMC plugin for Firefox

This is a real nice tool by LiquidIce629.

New download link somewhere at the bottom of the thread. Install it into firefox by dragging the xpi file into the browser window. Then right-click on a video source and send it to the xbmc'd xbox.

Here

Newcastle vs. Man City

It's going a bit bad for JK and the boys. Watching it here.

Cities XL

A really interesting game is being developed by Monte Cristo. Online city builder, each player gets to build a city and and you can then explore other's cities too. There's some economy rules set up but if you would be cool for your local authority to use such a system to show town centre improvements and such like. CityGML would be a nice transfer format to go from a dry town council GIS department to an online game environment.

West Hame vs. Newcastle

Here is is through Veetle.
Cracking picture.

linky

newcastle vs hull city

I'm trying to watch every toon game i can this season through the internet. Today's Hull game at home can be found through veetle and very good quality it is too.

http://www.veetle.com/viewChannel.php?cid=48cb03bd8ab18

Google should do this

Google should have a 'not this' in their search results, then we all help get rid of dumbass results like those fake page creations and price checkers.

And if google want to treat me to a new car for this excellent idea then please feel free ;-)

How to export contacts from dead phone with no screen

My PDa phone died the other day - well, the screen at least. The phone can still talk to the PC but i couldn't for the life of me extract the contacts from the phone to Outlook.

Still i found a nice solution. You need the pim.vol file from the phone and Perl installed.
Plonk the pim.vol file in c:\perlscripts and grab Sasha's script from here from which you'll have parse_pim.pl in the same directory.

If like me you're on WinXP, do start run cmd.exe and cd c:\perlscripts. Once there type parse_pim.pl pim.vol and the script will extract all the phone details.

Passing references to variables between forms in c#

Somedays i forget everything i've learnt. Being a VB programmer in the past has instilled some bad habits on how to think about forms, their controls, methods or properties when in C#.

Luckily ahmedilyas has posted a lovely little tutorial here. Ok, perhaps we shouldn't be referencing a form with another form. If doing everything by the book you should be building some data classes external to both forms and allow them to access the data through those. But today i catch myself modifying someone else's code and the oppotunity isn't there to completely rework the class definitions.

Streaming uk football through xbmc

Perhaps i'm late on the scene on this but it's a nice trick.

Ok, how to get uk football streamed to your xbox. You need sopcast installed and running on a pc on your home network. You need a file on your xbox in a location where xbmc will see it. The file is a text file - i've named mine sopcast.m3u. Contents of the file are;

#EXTM3U
#EXTINF:- 1,http://:8902/tv.asf
http://:8902/tv.asf

Edit it for your pc's ip address obviously and if you're using a recent copy of sopcast the port should be correct. Older sopcast versions use 8900.

On the pc, find a stream to watch. For UK football you should be able to find a sopcast stream from;
http://www1.myp2p.eu/competition.php?competitionid=&part=sports&discipline=football or http://www.engfootball.com/

Once it's running on the PC, switch over to your xbox. Load up xbmc (you have got it installed as the dashboard right?) and add a source which points to the folder containing the m3u file. Click the sopcast.m3u and you're away.

Getting out of BT Broadband

It can be done! BT have provided a trickle of a service since i started with them six months ago. A letter of complaint followed by two months of line testing. At the end, one guy on technical support ran a different test from normal and determined the line was capped after all. No compensation followed by further real poor speeds and i complained once more - they helpfully gave in and released the MAC code. Straight back to BeThere via Quidco and i earnt myself forty quid in the process. 24Mbps, static line and no limit all for £18 a month inc. vat. Can't complain and happy to be back.

Where to put pspvice on your psp

I'm running 3.90 M33-2. Make sure you have the 1.50 addition. PspVice goes in psp/game150. I use stylemo's excellent guide to upgrading.

now for a bit of C64 Kickstart pleasure

Flickr photos now in planetnomad

Flickr photos are now arriving in planetnomad.com. There's still some style settings to correct in regards to their size in the gmap marker htmlwindows but i'll fix that any day now. It's surprising how many photos are loaded onto Flickr without decent names or descriptions but nevermind, that's what ppl do.

Just like any other feed, e.g. Reuters News Service or Road Traffic News, users can set up to receive emails on new objects as they arrive in a certain area.

Generating HTML emails using c#.net

This missed me for days. My code was generating html which i placed into the body of an email. Problem was that the html was appearing as, well, html rather as text even though i had set the content-type as text/html. Found out this weekend that i was missing a single line of code;

MailMessage.isBodyHTML = true;

fixed.

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.net.mail.mailmessage.isbodyhtml.aspx

PlanetNomad accepts all UK road traffic data

Planetnomad.com now takes in all rss streams from the UK highway agency and maps them. I noticed the main rss feed didn't contain all the regional lower-graded road data and therefore was incomplete.

I now get a lovely email sent to me each morning detailing any trouble on my route into work.

New Line in c# Textboxes

Use: static string nl = Environment.NewLine;

Yes, a complete personal reminder.

Planet Nomad now receives UK Highway traffic feed

www.planetnomad.com now receives UK highways traffic data - detailing all problems on the major routes in the UK. If you're a registered user planetnomad will send you an email every morning listing problems along your route into work.

I'll be looking into SMS reporting soon. That would be rather cool for some. I generally check emails before txts so emails came first.

Installing MySQL ODBC Connector 3.51 on win64

There's no installer for this so the easiest way of installing is unpacking it to c:\Documents and Settings\User and run your Dos prompt. Once there run "Install.bat 0" and it'll work like a charm.

Replacing double quotes in VB strings

If you're forced to use VB and some of us occasionally you'll end up at some point wanting to get rid of the double quotes in a string. More as a note to myself this one but here's the help..

The way to do that is replace instances of " with "".
Sample code -

Dim str As String = "I ""love"" VB"
Console.WriteLine(str)
Console.WriteLine(str.Replace("""", ""))

now relax, job done, compile and move away.

What is Social Media?

My good friend Ruth has a piece on Social Media here. Well worth a read with plenty of references of how we're all exchanging info these days. Personally i use a pigeon. He's reliable and cheap to run on birdseed.

Setting up an email server at home on a dynamic IP address

Being a tight arse i was hoping for a free way of doing this but ended up paying a little to get this working. Here's the situation: i'm on BT broadband in the UK and all their dynamic IP addresses are blacklisted automatically. But i want to run a smtp server at home which will spit out emails once a day to users of my beta site: www.planetnomad.com when they request it.

I purchased a Mail Outbound service (from dyndns.org) and Postcast Professional Server - $15 a year and £48 respectively. Postcast allows you to enter a Smtp gateway server which will act as a hop to get your emails out there. Dyndns gives you the server details and once entered you can create emails and send them to your heart's content.

www.planetnomad.com is a google map app. that will send out emails to users notifying them of new information in a specified location. For me, i've got it sending out emails detailing new stories from Reuters news service that occur every day in Europe. To try it yourself just register and set up a favourite view.

Launchy and Winamp

Just got back into using Launchy - the Silverlight of the XP world. Found that it won't work with mp3 files (i'm using winamp in this case) if the media library is a named computer on the same network. You'll have to map a drive letter to the library first and then use that. Then Alt-Space and you're away.

Lifehacker has a great article on tweaking Launchy for twitter, amongst others, here.

Wikipedia on yer phone

Google Mdict and Wiki.mdk (the 120Mb reduced wikipedia). Chuck them on your phone and hey presto you can win most arguments down the pub.