Welcome to Randomly Collected Tech Tips

Welcome to Randomly Collected Tech Tips, not Radio Controlled TiTties (I’ll admit I chose RCTT on purpose).

The purpose of this blog is to collate all the random bits of useful internet and technology tips that I come across but don’t have the capacity to remember. Whether it be as simple as ‘Ctrl + V’ or as complicated as modifying a BIOS if I find it useful I’ll post it here.

A year…..

Hi guys and girls.

It’s been a year since I last posted something. I’m not dead yet. I’ve just been distracted by a mistress called “Life”.

There’s a pile of stuff (literally) that I want to post about and I will in due course so watch this space! 

=)

New blogger

I would like to welcome my friend Pasha as our new blogger on the team.

Fone Funny

I was talking with my good friend Pasha and we were discussing what would be our next smartphone (which I will post about soon) and this video sprung to mind.

The first scene was at the start of the show. The second scene was at the end after the credits.

Increased cover

I’ll be trying to add more content in the coming months.

Youtube High Definition Add-on for Firefox

First of all this is an add-on for Firefox. Chrome should have something similar. But IE and Safari users will probably have to look at using a Greasemonkey script.

I came across this today because I was listening to some songs that I could only find on Youtube. Problem was they streamed at 360p by default which comes with terrible audio quality (yes I chnaged my account settings to use the best quality available). I had three options. Change it manually at the start of every song, go into fullscreen mode and listen to the playlist like that (auto max quality works in fullscreen) or look for some add or tool to do this for me. Obviously I did the latter =)

What I found was “Youtube High Definition” by Baris Derin. It has the option to select a particular quality setting or always go for maximum resolution. It also has an option to automatically shrink or expand the video.

“Youtube High Definition” on the Firefox Add-on directory: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-high-definition/
“Youtube High Definition” Add-on homepage: http://barisderin.com/?p=1113

Best checksum software

This is the best checksum software I have found to date.

Made by corz and it’s called “checksum”

http://corz.org/windows/software/checksum/

Ever needed to explain the purpose of thermal compound?

Here’s a short animation that is sufficient in explaining the purpose of using thermal compound.

http://www.mgchemicals.com/techsupport/860_demo.html

Should the site ever go down I’ve backed up the flash animation but you will have to request it lest it be my hand in the gullotine should there be a lawsuit.

Logitech Gamepanel

For those with a Logitech G15 keyboard or any Logitech keyboard with a GamePanel LCD and macro buttons.

One small problem I found with assigning shortcuts to the programable keys is that if you browse for the application with the software the shortcut url contains / instead of \. For example via ‘Browse’ the GamePanel software puts the Windows Calculator path as “C:/Windows/System32/calc.exe” instead of the correct path “C:\Windows\System32\calc.exe”

This error causes it to launch the application minimised. Putting the correctly formatted path in allows the application to launch as the foremost window.

 

Speccy

Speccy is a simple tool that’s available as an installer and binary. Shows the user their computer specification of the major parts (not grammatically IK but w/e). Not as powerful as AIDA64 (formerly EVEREST) but useful for asking clients what specs they have because of it’s simplicity.

http://www.piriform.com/speccy