The unknown Windows pearl called ReadyBoost

27 Dec 2011 at 21:49

KaiserSoze

Hardware

No Comments

If you are looking for a cheap and easy way to speed up your Windows PC have a look at the (for most people) unknown feature called ReadyBoost. The functionality is available since Vista and is also present in Windows 7 and Windows 8. You’re Windows installation will boot a lot faster after enabling ReadyBoost and all you need  is an externel USB flash drive. ReadyBoost works with most flash storage devices. In Windows 7, it can handle more flash memory and even multiple devices—up to eight, for a maximum 256 gigabytes (GB) of additional memory.

So if you have a flash storage drive lying around that you don’t use give it a try and make your PC faster. Not all USB flash drives are supported but it should work most of the times. If you want to take real benefit of the ReadyBoost functionality there are two simple rules:

  • Find the fastest storage available with read speeds at least ~10 MB/s
  • Use double the amount of RAM storage in size, so if you have 2GB of RAM, then you would want to use a flash drive of at least 4GB

But even if you don’t meet above specifications you can take huge benefit of ReadyBoost, the two rules mentioned are fist rules to get the most out of the  ReadyBoost functionality. Plugging in your old Flash Drive always helps quite a bit.

Continue reading →

Stream video using free cloud storage

03 Dec 2011 at 16:43

KaiserSoze

Video, Web

1 Comment

Free cloud storage is widely available. After the Dropbox hype really kicked in other providers soon followed with free cloud storage services. It was maybe one year ago I tried some of them to use in a HTML5 audio player. Back then almost no provider allowed direct public links with the ability to stream. Last week I did another round and tried which services allow users to stream video directly from the free cloud storage services and what their limits are. Of course, both Youtube and Vimeo are great but sometimes content isn’t allowed or you want to use your own player with custom functionality.

Continue reading →

Use Google Music outside United States

17 Nov 2011 at 21:25

KaiserSoze

Audio, music

7 Comments

Google Music logoYesterday Google launched it’s new music service “Google Music“, unfortunately for now only available in the United States. But there’s a workaround for it; quick, easy and simple. I’ve seen some workarounds using HideMyAss but that didn’t work for me since cookies aren’t enabled using the service.

A quick search for a free US based VPN service lead me to Streaming VPN. The service isn’t actually free but you can test it for two days with a time limit of five minutes per session. That’s all we need to enable Google Music on your Google account. Once you enabled Google Music for your account you don´t need to use the VPN anymore.

Continue reading →

Simoncelli tribute video

24 Oct 2011 at 21:01

KaiserSoze

Racing, Sports

No Comments

As most MotoGP fans around the world I was shocked yesterday when I read the news about Marco Simoncelli’s fatal crash in last MotoGP race in Sepang Malaysia. I wasn’t at home so I read the news on Twitter and saw the BBC broadcast this morning. It’s a shame such a talent dies so young. Last night I wanted to see the crash video and today i’ve been looking for some nice fan made tribute video’s. Both are hard to find in decent quality. Probably because of Dorna Sports’ fanatic hunt on copyrighted MotoGP content. Understandable but in times like these maybe not always necessary.

On Vimeo I found one good tribute video, it shows only his two years in MotoGP and not his brilliant riding in the lower classes but it gives a very nice idea about what a great rider Marco Simoncelli was: Continue reading →

The end of wdtvc.com

20 Sep 2011 at 22:43

KaiserSoze

Hardware, Video

13 Comments

wdtvc.com is no more. After more than two years I decided to close the website. The main reasons for doing this are that the WD TV has been updated to WD TV Live and I don’t own the old WD TV anymore nor the the new WDTV live version. Besides that development for the WD TV has come to an halt and I don’t have the time to update the website anymore or fix the technical problems on the website. The thumbnail creator was still popular for users who used it to automatically convert their film posters to an importable format for the WD TV media player, but this component also had some problems in the end because of the badly maintained image search API of Yahoo!

It’s been a great ride and I want to thank the members and visitors of the website. Your input helped me a lot in maintaining the website. Hopefully you’ll find a new safe haven for your WD TV (Live) tweaks. Be sure to check out http://wdtvforum.com. As of now it is the best source for your WD TV tweaks and homebrew apps.

Thanks for everything, kind regards.

LESS CSS in Adobe Dreamweaver

10 Sep 2011 at 10:57

KaiserSoze

Web

13 Comments

If you’re developing websites you may have heard of interesting tools called CSS pre-processors. In simple terms, CSS preprocessing is a method of extending the feature set of CSS by first writing the style sheets in a new extended language, then compiling the code to vanilla CSS so that it can be read by Web browsers. Several CSS preprocessors are available today, most notably LESS CSS.

Using LESS can be done in multiple ways, there’s a client side Javascript but that’s only good for testing purposes in my opinion. You don’t want your users wait the extra milliseconds and be dependent on Javascript for the compilation of the CSS for your website. I’d say don’t use less.js on you’re production evironment. For Mac OSX there’s the less app and for Windows there are different command line tools out there.

I’ve been using Dreamweaver myself, it is my preferred code editor. And since the first of september there’s a LESS CSS plugin available and with a little workaround LESS syntax highlighting is also available. The Dreamweaver extension allows you to compile your less css files into pure CSS instantly. It also includes basic syntax error checking.The Dreamweaver extension is made by Drummer_si and is available for Dreamweaver CS5 and above.

Continue reading →

Password management with Keepass and Dropbox

08 Jul 2011 at 16:44

KaiserSoze

Security

2 Comments

If you aren’t actively doing any password management right now is a good moment to start with it. You know, I was like most people. Using a set of four or five passwords used for anything; whether it was e-mail, ftp, Paypal or social and website accounts  there wasn’t much variation. Yeah I read all the stories about hackers disclosing large user databases, I knew using so little variation in my passwords was a dumb thing to do, but hey I guess I was just lazy just like a lot of other people. Recently my user account and password (damn you websites saving passwords in plain text!) where out in the open. Even worse: it happened twice in less than a month. It woke me up, as it should wake you up.

The easiest solution I found was using KeePass with Dropbox synchronization. KeePass is very secure password management software. It’s open source and because of that available on a lot of platforms (PC, MAC, Linux, Android, iOS, Blackberry, Windows Phone 7). I recommend using KeePass classic (v 1.20) because it uses the .kdb extension which has support on all platforms. If you have support for .kdbx (KeePass 2.x) on all the devices you want to use  then go for the professional edition, their both free to use on most platforms.

Although KeePass for Windows supports ftp syncing, the other two platforms I’m using Android and iOS don’t have ftp support. So I had to look for an alternative way of syncing the KeePass database. Dropbox is the obvious solution. I did try SpiderOak but although supposedly more save than Dropbox it didn’t work out for me. It just wasn’t as easy to use as dropbox is and full syncing is not possible for Android and iOS, only public shares. Besides that, the security of the password management setup described is done by KeePass (not Dropbox) using numerous ways to prevent your password database from being cracked.

Continue reading →

Enable incompatible add-ons in Firefox 4

21 Mar 2011 at 22:07

KaiserSoze

Web

3 Comments

Firefox 4 is is out in the open one day before the official release and I like it!  (Download here: win | mac | linux ) One thing I didn’t like is the fact that most of my favorite add-ons were disabled due to incompability. Even worse is that there is no option to (temporary) enable the add-ons to see if they are really incompatible or not. Now thanks to @Fjoerfoks on Twitter I found a great add-on to enable this functionality. With the Add-on Compability Reporter (which is from Mozilla) you can enable incompatible add-ons in Firefox 4 and check for yourself if its working or not. I tried it myself and some of my favorite add-ons like Del.icio.us bookmarks, MeasureIt and Colorzilla are now working again. I was having doubts on switching to Chrome all together for a while and if these plugins wouldn’t work anymore I would have definitely crossed over the Google to side but now with Firefox 4 and all of my favorite plugins working i’m holding on to my favorite browser a bit longer.

Get 10GB of Dropbox space using AdWords

20 Feb 2011 at 19:11

KaiserSoze

General, Video

2 Comments

Last Friday someone showed me the following Youtube Video: 8 GB of Dropbox referrals for $2 USD via AdWords. It’s a short video on how you can get 8GB bonus space by referring people using AdWords. At first I didn’t think much of it but since i’m in need for some more Dropbox space and it will probably cost only a few euros, which Google send me with a voucher,  I gave it a try. Within 3 hours after starting my AdWords campaign 4 people signed up and got me 768MB of extra Dropbox space. Vouchers for Adwords are easy to find. Just……. Google for it :p If you can’t find any spend 10 euro/dollar and open a new account, it’s not much, the experiment is fun and is a lot cheaper then the $9.99 a month/pro 50 account.

Continue reading →

Javascript particles on new version CLnet.nl

20 Feb 2011 at 10:40

KaiserSoze

javascript, Web

No Comments

CLnet.nl used to be the homepage of my company CLnet Media but since I started working for dutch public broadcaster NOS there isn’t much activity in the company anymore. Altough I took the website offline months ago the company is officially no more since 01-02-2011. So I decided to turn clnet.nl into something like a digital portfolio for myself. A place to show off some of my digital ninja skills.  The content isn’t perfect yet and the portfolio itself isn’t online either but I couldn’t wait to write about my cool Javascript particles. Have fun playing around with them, tinker around with your mouse and you’ll see all the awesome effects. Just drop a comment here if you’d like to say anything about the new version of clnet.nl. And because I don’t like to start and end with the same link i’m adding this final sentence :p

← Older Entries