Where to find 'My Streams' on the Reciva Logik IR100

In our office we have a Logik IR100 - it's a handy little Internet Radio, but it's a little... fiddly... to navigate, particularly when you just want to skip to a favourite station. The device has a My Streams menu, but it wasn't appearing on ours.

I spent ages looking for the My Stuff menu, but just couldn't find it (in case you're wondering where it is, this Logik IR100 info site has detailed info, with a photo of the screen). I'd already registered the receiver on reciva.com (following the blessedly simple instructions), and added a test stream to the My Streams facility on the web site, but it wasn't showing on the unit.

Having added (and saved) the custom stream on the Reciva portal, it turns out that if you've already downloaded a station list and not powered the unit off for a reasonable amount of time, it still caches the old data. To force the unit to redownload complete listings - including the new 'My Streams' entry/entries, the simplest way to do it is to turn the unit off on the front panel then power off the unit at the wall socket. Wait a few seconds, power it back up, then turn it back on. The next time it downloads the station listings, bam! there's 'My Stuff' in the root of the unit's main menu. Navigate into there, navigate into 'My Streams' and listen away. 🙂

Such an obvious thing once you realise how to do it (you'd think Logik would've put an option in the menu to force a manual download of the full station listings for scenarios such as this).

Received a letter from the Domain Registry of America? Warm the shredder up

The Domain Registry of America is a scam organisation which fraudulently invoices individuals and companies alike for renewal of .com/.net/.org domain names. They work on the assumption that clueless people will simply fill out the form and send it back - but by doing so, you end up paying far above the going rate for the domain name renewals, plus they actually take ownership of your domain names and move them away from your current registrar.

How do they send you convincingly-written letters? Well, they just poll the public whois information for your domain names (which includes expiry date, full address and full name). So, be mindful also that whatever information you provided during registration will be available for the whole world to see! You may consider anonymising some of the data, or going through a third party anonymous registrar service (which will cost extra on top of the domain registration fees - GoDaddy currently charge $20 for two years).

The Domain Registry of America is one of the older scam organisations making money off the backs of unsuspecting Internet users, but sadly their 'business' persists. UK-Cheapest has published an article detailing the DROA and their various other companies (with similar names) - read and avoid if you get a letter through the post from them!

Useful timesavers when using XP on a Boot Camped Mac

I'm using a MacBook Pro at work with Windows XP via Boot Camp - however, I was hampered by the lack of some key keys (pardon the pun) - no delete key! How do I Ctrl-Alt-Del? Argh! After some careful searching, I came across a great page listing most, if not all, of the various shortcut key combos you might need when using Windows on a Mac... Kudos to EveryMac for the list.

Also, a handful of quick tips which I found useful when I was first beginning to learn the ways of the Fruit:

  • If you want to eject your CD/DVD from your Mac's drive without booting into an OS, just press and hold the left mousekey when booting up.
  • If you want to display the boot selection screen (to choose between OSX, Windows or an external drive / Install DVD) press and hold Alt during boot until the menu's displayed.
  • If you want to change your default OS for dualbooting, use the Boot Camp Assistant applet (found in the Control Panel in Windows, and similarly in the OSX Options). In Windows, you can also quickly reboot into OSX by clicking on the Assistant system tray and choosing "reboot into Mac OS X".

Next, something I found VERY useful: you can change your keyboard layout back to the regular Windows layout!

Lots more info after the jump...

Continue reading "Useful timesavers when using XP on a Boot Camped Mac"

FeedBurner's FeedSmith plugin - the correct URL

I've been setting up quite a few WordPress-based sites in the past couple of weeks, and each time I install the FeedSmith plugin as a matter of course. This simple (yet brilliant) plugin was originally written by Steve Smith, and he eventually donated the plugin to FeedBurner and they adopted it as their official plugin.

As a result, the FeedSmith URL - http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/help/wordpress_quickstart - became VERY highly ranked in Google. Type in FeedBurner FeedSmith and you'll see what I mean.

However, this old URL was changed permanently when Google completed the transition from the service's original feedburner.com domain to google.com. Bizarrely, for a company whose core offering is a search engine, nobody at FeedBurner remembered to check that the listed URL to the FeedSmith plugin was still valid. (It's not.) Bizarrely, even the plugin's original author's site still lists (as of July the 28th, 2009) the wrong URL!

I spent a fair while looking for FeedSmith, and then (after finding it once hosted by somebody else on their site) I stumbled across a poorly-linked mention of FeedSmith via Google's AdSense For Feeds blog. Can you see the link to the plugin on the blog?

No, neither could I at first. But after swearing blind that I'd seen a mention of a WordPress plugin, I did another scour through - and bam, there's the FeedSmith plugin link, nestled in an article called "Redirecting your feed to maximize revenue potential".

Clicking through to the Google Answers thread, I was almost put off the scent - the article's titled "Creating your WordPress Feed (self-hosted WordPress)", which has nothing to do with FeedSmith. However, the updated (and correct) direct link to the FeedBurner FeedSmith plugin is right at the top of the Installation instructions.

The functional direct link (as of July 2009) is http://feedburner.google.com/fb/static/feedburner_feedsmith_plugin_2.3.zip . I've had occasional problems with WordPress 2.8.x (so far, up to 2.8.2) being intermittently unable to automatically install the plugin from an upload of the zip file (apparently the file doesn't 'have any valid headers') - I think it could be because the plugin's nested in one too many folders. Either way, extracting the single .php file and uploading into wp-content/plugins works a treat. Just activate it in your Plugins section and add in the appropriate URLs, and you're done.

Suggestion to anybody from FeedBurner / Google if they're reading: add a 302 Redirect to the old URL! It shouldn't be too hard, you pretty much Own The Internet. You still own feedburner.com so this shouldn't be too hard (if you can't manage to sort it out on your own, my consultancy services are very reasonably-priced) - there's nothing worse than poor SEO, and forgetfulness is no excuse for disregarding the entire point of a Uniform Resource Location. I'm seriously disappointed in you. That's a Bad google. BAD Google.

Anyway, hopefully this will become a well-spidered article on all the search engines, and people will once again be able to find the correct URL and install the FeedSmith plugin on their own sites. (To the Internet: you can thank me later!)

I ♥