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After a long time of waiting, I finally managed to update “Name My TV Series” to version 1.4.1 for Windows, Linux (32-bit) and Mac OS X.

Some of the most important bugs that have been resolved, based on user feedback:

– File renaming under Windows with special characters (accent, etc) has finally been resolved.
– Under Windows and Linux, the use of special characters in the show description works now as well (still show “?” under MacOS X).
– Support for .rmvb video files has been added.

Download it from the downloads page or from the original article.

In this article I’ll show you how I connected a SainSmart 1.8″ Color display to my Arduino Uno and I’ll show you how to get some basic things to work.

The Arduino does not come with a display, and that’s perfectly fine as it’s intended to be used as a micro-controller and not a micro-computer.
Adding a display however, may be needed at times though to provide user feedback for when a user is using your marvelous Arduino invention.

User feedback can be done in several ways of course: a simple beep, a simple LED, a simple LCD screen, or like in this case, a more advanced Color Display.
Considering the price I decided to get one ($20 at Amazon, $13 at SainSmart, starting at $13 on eBay, or an Arduino version at AdaFruit for $20) and experiment with it.

The Raspberry Pi is one fun little computer perfectly capable of emulation Classic Computers like the Commodore 64, ZX-81, ZX-Spectrum, Apple ][, Atari ST and even DOS/Windows 3.1. Emulation on the Raspberry Pi however is not limited to classic computers. Emulation of Classic Game Consoles like the Atari 2600, SEGA Genesis, Super Nintendo, Nintendo Entertainment System (or: NES) and Gameboy handheld work great as well.

My favorite in this however remains the emulation of classic Arcade Games with MAME.
Unfortunately, I did not find an emulator for one of my childhood consoles, the Magnavox Odyssey² (a.k.a. Philips VideoPac G7000).

In this article an introduction to CHAMELEONPI, an awesome distribution by Carles Oriol, which can be downloaded for free. It offers all of these emulators, with a beautiful interface and an easy way to upload ROMs and applications for the Classic Computers, Game Consoles, and Arcade Emulator (MAME).

Knowing how to use SSH has become more an more important, as more and more devices use Linux as their “core” firmware, utilizing SSH for remote access.

SSH, or Secure SHell, is a secure (encrypted) method to remotely access a shell (command-line) on a different computer or device, to execute commands.
What this means is that it allows you to execute commands from your computer on another computer or device, over an encrypted and secure connection, as if you were working directly on that computer.

SSH use can be found in numerous places, but the most common one of use with a Linux, Unix, or FreeBSD based devices or computers.
Some common examples are: a Raspberry Pi, NAS, Modem, DVR, Router, Satellite Receiver, Smart TV, cellphone, Media Players, some Smart TV’s, WiFi SD-Kaarten, etc. etc.

Since I have a growing number of articles that refer to SSH use, I decided to write a short article for reference purposes.

After writing the article on “How to get an Operating System on a SD-Card“, I realized that the existing methods and tools were not to my liking. Of course the existing tools are most certainly not bad and work just fine. I just didn’t like how they worked.

So instead of complaining, I decided to write my own program: The ApplePi-Baker …

This application is for MacOS X only and allows you to prepare an SD-Card for use with Raspberry Pi’s NOOBS, and it allows you to “flash” and IMG file to an SD-Card. ApplePi-Baker can now also be found on AlternativeTo.net and eLinux.org.

Note : This application is also very suitable for creating or restoring an IMG  backup of USB drives!

Update : ApplePi-Baker v2 has been released, you can get it here.
The new version offers a lot options including shrinking and expanding of IMG’s, writing to multiple disks, a better speed and improved stability compared to the old version (1.x) mentioned in this article.

MAME, the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator, has been around for a while and is readily available from the MAME website for Windows users.

MAME is an emulator that allows you to run the ROMs (games) of the old Arcade Hall machines, like Pac-Man, Out-Run, Scramble, Donkey Kong, etc.

Installation on MacOS X is unfortunately not very obvious. There are some precompiled MAME versions out there and in this article I’ll show you how to install and use MAME under MacOS X Mavericks (will probably work for older and newer Intel based MacOS X versions as well).

When I first started working with the Raspberry Pi just after the first model A was released, my first issue was: How to get an Operating System on an SD-Card?
I mean: you just purchased a Raspberry Pi – you want to see it in action right away right?

After figuring that out, others have asked me the same question on how to create a SD-Cards for the Raspberry Pi. So here a guide on how to get it done in a few simple steps for Windows, MacOS X and Linux.

The Raspberry Pi, for those unaware, is a $35 computer, equipped with all you need (network, USB, etc), capable of running an Operating Systems like Linux, RiscOS, etc. and can even run XBMC (OpenElec for example) out of the box producing 1080p video through HDMI.

My latest issue with WordPress has been the limited maximum Media Library Upload Size when I tried uploading a few videos for an Arduino article.

In this article I’ll show you several methods to increase the Maximum Upload Size for the WordPress Media Library, either by modifying php.ini, functions.php or the .htaccess file. WordPress MU/Multisite/MS use will be addressed as well.

The main reason why I bought my first Arduino board was to be able to play with LED strips with applications like BobLight and LightPack that offer colored backlighting to your TV comparable to what Philips offers with it’s beautiful AmbiLight TV’s.

I like really Philips, and I like Ambilight, so why not buy a Philips AmbiLight TV?
Well, pretty simple … first of all Philips does not carry 80″ AmbiLight enabled TV’s, smaller models are significantly more expensive than non-AmbiLight models, and it appears that these AmbiLight TV’s are hard to find in the US.

In this article we will be using an Arduino Uno connected to a strip of WS2812/WS2811 LEDs.

I recently aquired an Arduino UNO from Amazon, which can be had under $15 and for a few bucks extra you can get a nice starters kit with Breadboard, jumper wires and some components to play with.

To get familiar with an Arduino I ran my first basic project which switches an LED on and off. The good thing is that this first tiny project get’s you familiarized with the Arduino development tools, how to hook your Arduino up to your computer, and some very basic programming (C/C++ based).

When I started my first experiments with electronics, solderless breadboards, in Europe anyway, were not very common or at least not cheap.
Instead me and my dad wired everything together (the good old times!). We either used air to old everything together for the simpler designs, or we used an Open Hole Board PCB (a.k.a. Prototype PCB) for the more complex designs.

Once our design was completed and working we either left it as is – a bundle of components and wires soldered together – or we made a nice PCB to accommodate the components and connections. With Breadboards we’re only looking at the initial prototype …

Breadboards allow us to make our initial prototype much easier and much cleaner, and when I started dabbling with MicroControllers (BASICStamp) it became obvious that creating prototypes with Breadboards was the best way to go – even if it’s just to be able to handle the more expensive components more careful.
In this article a brief into to Solderless Breadboards.

WordPress is a great Content Management System, not just for bloggers …

One of the downsides I have run into is that links in comments automatically get reformatted and the HTML “target=_blank” gets stripped away so a link in a comment will always open in the same window as you website. Personally I prefer such a link to open in a new window …

So in this article a simple piece of code to make links in WordPress comments automatically open in a new window or a new tab by automatically adding “target=_blank” to links in comments.

Messages in MacOS X has the ability to combine multiple chat services. Facebook Chat however does not seem to appear in the list.

This trick will probably also work for other Jabber capable clients on different Operating Systems as well, simply use the same settings.

With this little guide, I’ll show you how to add Facebook Chat to Messages so that you do not need to open the Facebook website every time you get a message.

WordPress handles media files through it’s Media Library and in it’s default installation only certain file types, or better said: MIME-types, are allowed to be uploaded.

The current selection of allowed file types (ie.the file types that are not banned) can be rather limiting specially when you’re using bbPress as a forum wiht your WordPress setup. I’m not sure about the need for additional formats for all bbPress forums, but in the Tweaking4All forum I most certainly would like to be able to upload RAR, 7z, GZIP, XML and CSV files (amongst others).

Unfortunately WordPress does not offer a straight forward interface in the Admin Pages to modify the allowed Files Types.
In this article a short piece of code to allow you to add other file types or so called mime-types.

The need for more and more reliable data storage space keeps increasing as we move forward in time. Our picture files get bigger, we scan our documents and we collect more videos than ever before.

For more storage we used to simply buy more hard-drives, internal or external. But eventually we have a wide collection of individual drivers each with their own mount point (drive letter under Windows). This is where RAID can help and combine these individual drives to one big drive. More and more computers are RAID capable.

RAID allows us to combine drives, increase speed and improve reliability so we can store more data while our data is stored safer. But it’s not all that straight forward, so in this article a description of what RAID is, what kinds of RAID you might run into and how RAID works …