boxel » Useful stuff

Burning DVDs without a menu

chris — Tue, 06 Feb 2007 23:08:07 +0000

I like iDVD, it’s nice and dead easy to use but sometimes you just wanna burn a disc to autoplay without any of those “useful” themes. Here’s a method that works for me.

Make a black jpeg 720×480.
Open up iDVD, click Customize then Settings
Drag the black jpeg onto the Background box and then set the duration to 0:00
Click Map twice and then enter a title in the box or delete it
Click Map again and drag your movie onto the autoplay box
Then Preview or just click Burn

And that should do it.

Microsoft mail mayhem

chris — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 19:39:30 +0000

I’ve been receiving a lot of attachments from people recently called winmail.dat and have been unable to open them in Thunderbird and I’ve assumed until now that there was something wrong my end but apparently not. It’s due to a Microsoft propriety setting which the other person hasn’t reset. But I’ve found a tool called TNEF’s Enough which opens the file and lets you extract the contents. You can download it from JoshJacob.com and if you have a lot of windoze friends, I suggest you download it – it’ll be cheaper than buying them all a MacBook.

YouTube audio not playing

chris — Thu, 09 Nov 2006 11:02:00 +0000

For about a week or so, whenever I visit YouTube and play a video I can’t hear the soundtrack. I’ve unplugged & powered off my speakers, tried headphones but still no good. A quick trawl of the net and all the fixes seemed to suggest dumping the contents of ~/Library/Preferences/Macromedia which did nothing other than stop Flash stuff from playing. But this little trick seemed to do the, um, trick.

Open up “Audio MIDI Setup” which is in your Utilities folder and set the Output Format (in the bottom right corner) to 44100.0Hz. You might need to change the source as well but that’s all I needed to do and now I can listen to Star Guitar in all it’s glory.

Printing background images

chris — Fri, 14 Jul 2006 08:42:45 +0000

This is a nice little hack to print background images which are not printed by default by browsers. Normally you’d use the image tag but this little fix uses list-style-image instead.

So, lets say you’ve got an identifier setup called logo, in the print CSS you need to do this

#lo\go {
display: list-item;
list-style-image: url(logo.gif);
list-style-position: inside;
height: 39px;
width: 125px;
}

It apparently works in IE6, Firefox 1.0 and 1.5, Opera 8.5 and Safari. Pretty neat huh? A full explanation can be found here.

Min-height hack

chris — Thu, 16 Mar 2006 23:18:53 +0000

I’ve just learnt a good hack for min-height. As you’ll know min-height is one of the few things that IE gets right and Firefox doesn’t. So, this little trick below sorts it out. If you want a box to have the minimum height of 200 pixels but to expand when more text is entered, then give ~~tihs~~ this a try:

min-height: 200px;
height: auto !important;
height: 200px;

IE6 table hack

chris — Sat, 03 Sep 2005 09:36:54 +0000

So I’m using a table to display data from a database. In Firefox it’s the right width but in IE6 it goes off to the right. Another IE6 bug coz it can’t handle tables with a width of 100% in a layer without a set width. Apparently what it does is use the width of the window – nice, I guess Microsoft must be a bit short on cash to be able to invest in building a browser that’s standards compliant!! Anyways, I got round it by slapping the table into it’s own layer with a width set to 100% and that did the trick.

Browser emulator

chris — Thu, 01 Sep 2005 13:33:14 +0000

Ever wanted to know how your site looks in Opera 7.23 running under Windows 2000? Or maybe in Netscape 4.8 under Linux? Check out Browsercam coz it’s got them and all of the others…..well, most of the others but let’s not get picky