www.i-wax.co.uk was founded in January 2009 as a place for consumers to freely share deals for valeting and detailing products while saving you and others money. The purpose of the site is to escape from the marketing messages and ads and collate all the best that the web has to offer and get us genuine deals.

Self-promotion

The basis of the site is that it is for best deals from other people who don’t stand to gain. But merchants who are self-promoting are also welcome as long as it’s a genuine deal where the consumers will save £££’s.(items may be removed without notice)

Anyone can share, public or trade

www.i-wax.co.uk has no-registration and open to everyone. The more users we have sharing and contributing their savings on detailing and valeting equipment, the more everyone gains! You can help build this community by sharing deals you’ve found.

The site is displaying offers on:

Meguiars, Pinnacle, polish, glaze, wax, Poorboys, Menzerna, Sonus, Swissol, Swizol, Zymol, pakshak, Chemical Guys, Collinite, Einszett, Gliptone, P21s, Sonus, Clearkote, Harley wax, Klasse, Mothers, Autoglym, Belgom, Wheelwax, Renovo, Eurow, Muc off, 3m, Bilt Hamber, Smartwax, Wolfgang, Four star, Optimum, Dp, 303, Lexol, Corbra, Oxo, Blackfire, Lake Country, Jeffs Werkstatt, Zaino, Concept chemicals, Dominique France Concours, Visomax, Duragloss, Prima, Hosecoil, Car cleaning, Carwash, Shampoo, Victoria wax and many more.

All can be seen at www.i-wax.co.uk.

Something should be thought through before being put online.

This was on a webcam site from someone who added me on Twitter.

Here is a list of what I was aiming for:

1. Be able to play backed up DVD, Blu-ray & HDDVD videos in either .avi, .mkv (H.264) or WMV
2. Central bit of software to cover everything
3. Able to play off network shares
4. Be able to play back Blu-ray and HDDVD easily

For my software I am using the following:

• Microsoft Windows Vista x64 Ultimate Edition
• MediaPortal v1.0 (with TVSeries 2.0 plugin and Monochrome 2.2 skin)
• iMon 7.2

I did try using Ubuntu over Vista but found that Blu-ray support was a bit limited in the way you basically had to manually dump each film on to the harddrive stripping out the DRM.

So I ended up using Vista which has been very reliable. I have turned off Aero to give a small performance increase in playing 1080p MKV files and have disabled UAC for the obvious reason; it’s annoying.

Although the integrated Windows Media Centre that comes with Windows Vista is good, it can be a bit of a chore to get set up correctly to play any video format. So I am using MediaPortal which is a free bit of software which is simply fantastic.

I followed this guide from ProjectHTPC on setting up MediaPortal which is an easy to understand guide and tells you exactly what you need to know.

I then followed this guide on getting the Monochrome skin on Media Portal and getting the sound through to my sound system playing proper DTS. Following on from that guide, I came across a plugin for MediaPortal called TVSeries. It’s fantasic. I followed this guide and have all my TV series on my computer set up with fan art, which has now given me an excuse to get all my box sets on to the harddrive to have them as easy to access as possible.

Media Portal plays off network shares which has ticked off number 3 and allows me to continue on my search to get a NAS set up with a lot of storage to store all my DVDs etc on.

The only problem I still have to overcome is getting Blu-ray and HDDVD to play through MediaPortal properly, which should be OK once I get around to getting PowerDVD 7 or hacking PowerDVD 8 which removed any trace of HDDVD.

iMon has been a pain though, my case came with a CD with it on which I have now misplaced while moving house and have found myself downloading the latest version off the SoundGraph website extremely slowly.

My first thoughts, were that, that was very wrong from Yahoo. So I tried it on another PC with Chrome and had been set up to use OpenDNS as the ISP’s DNS kept going down and having problems.

Quite clearly not a one off on the AVG results. The fact that they are so similar, either AVG toolbar uses Google for the search recommendations and Yahoo for the actual search feature or some SEO sites are spamming the keywords and getting some recommended words to the top of all search engines.

Either way it is inappropriate and you wouldn’t expect this, least of all when searching for something to do with Google itself. Perhaps they better put a redirect in for mail.google.co.uk to mail.google.com.

httpv://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=Bd4_zINaC44

Frontpage slideshow is a script by Joomlaworks.

The module requires that the script is purchased from Joomlaworks as it contains important files for it to work.

The module which is currently in development can be found at http://code.google.com/p/fpss-drupal/.

The code is still in an early stage but is working and usable, but I would recommend not using it on a production site.

There are a few issues with the module at the moment.

• Module depends on jquery_update
• Module uses the upload module to upload the image for the slide, but this allows any file to be uploaded, so requires some further work.

How does it work

The module adds in 2 new node types (slide, slideshow). Each slideshow node creates a new block which can be used anywhere in your site.

Slides are then assigned to a slideshow. The slideshow node contains most of the important settings such as dimensions and timings but as well as this there is an admin settings page which controls the default settings across the whole site such as the language of the text and the javascript engine.

I have developed the module purely with jQuery in mind. Mootools may work, but is likely to be unstable and buggy.

Where can I download this module?

Go to http://code.google.com/p/fpss-drupal/ and download it from the right hand side. If you find any issues with the module please do so by leaving an issue on the Google Code site.

Useful Drupal Module Development Book

Pro Drupal Development is a very good book published by Apress. The new second edition covers Drupal 6.

Closing multiple tabs

The huge flaw that is extremely irritating is no warning of closing multiple tabs.

If you have 10 tabs open and accidentally close the main window at the top right rather than the tab close button. Goodbye tabs.

You can have the sessions enabled to get it back once you open Chrome again but that isn’t very helpful if you had active downloads going when you accidentally closed the browser.

Earlier today I was download Portal: Prelude, an expansion modification for the game Portal. After download 550MB of the 775MB file, I accidentally closed Chrome forgetting that I had the download going.

IE and FF would of both stopped this from happening as they both open downloads in separate windows rather than the main browser, so if you close the main browser the downloads continue. Chrome does not.

I wasted that time and bandwidth downloading 550MB to be lost in the ether and having to download it again, because something so trivial was missed out of Chrome.

It doesn’t take a lot of common sense to know this is could be a problem, Mozilla, Microsoft and Opera all have implementations in place to stop this happening. The fact that Google took the best parts of all the other browsers in to 1 then deciding that a rather important feature wasn’t in their users best interest is worrying. How many other problems are there going to be under the surface?

Downloads

I have found that on many user initiated downloads that they just fail to start full stop on my Chrome installation at work and some downloads on my Chrome installation at home.

By clicking a download button the file will appear at the bottom of the browser and have ’starting…’ next to it but never progress past this stage. Right clicking the file and selecting Save as… works for all anchor links, but any downloads that are done through a form button are impossible to download which results in my opening up Firefox to download files.

Dictionary

You don’t seem to have the ability to add new words to the dictionary in Chrome which is rather strange. In Firefox you can and it is helpful when you type in something quite a lot and it isn’t in the dictionary, that little red line becomes annoying.

While writing this post, there are 2 words with red lines underneath them. The first is Firefox. Fair enough, it isn’t an actual word in the dictionary but still, Google do give a lot of money to the Mozilla foundation (which is in the dictionary). But the 2nd underlined word is an odd one indeed. It is Google. The company who have made the browser haven’t even put their name in the dictionary, instead suggesting that I meant to type goggle.

The following files are useful for web developers to use for their select drop downs or a lookup table in a database.

Countries

The Countries list comes in a CSV file and a MySQL dump.

CSV:

[download id="3"]

SQL:

[download id="4"]

Notes: Both files contain 2 columns, auto incrementing ids and the full Country name.

UK Counties

The Counties list comes in a CSV file and a MySQL dump.

CSV:

[download id="2"]

SQL:

[download id="1"]

Notes: Both files contain 2 columns, auto incrementing ids and the full County name.

The film starts with Wade and Laura Porter with their son Michael.  A noise is heard and Wade investigates to find his house being burgalled.  He follows the burglar out the house and see’s him reach in to his pocket, Wade hits the burglar with a baseball on the head and kills him resulting in him being sent to prison where he must befriend some of societies worst criminals.

Trailer:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sr0zDhqfOVo

Escapist Magazine

Yahtzee is a British-born, currently Australian-based writer and gamer with a sweet hat and a chip on his shoulder. When he isn’t talking very fast into a headset mic he also designs freeware adventure games and writes the back page column for PC Gamer, who are too important to mention us. His personal site is www.fullyramblomatic.com.