Personal Blog

2021-03-01T20:09:00.001+02:00

Made by Artisans: Championing South African Craftsmanship on a Global Stage

Founded in 2020, Made by Artisans has emerged as a premier online marketplace dedicated to showcasing the rich creativity and skills of South African artisan producers. Born out of a need to support local talent, the platform bridges the gap between passionate creators and consumers seeking authentic, handmade, and locally produced goods.

Here is a closer look at how Made by Artisans is reshaping the local artisanal landscape.

A Mission Rooted in Local Support

Established during a time of economic uncertainty for many small businesses, Made by Artisans aimed to provide a stable, accessible online platform for artisans to sell their products. The platform serves as a digital community hub, highlighting stories behind the crafts and connecting artisans with customers who value quality over mass production.

By focusing on local South African goods, the company contributes significantly to:

Job Creation: Supporting creators to maintain or expand their livelihoods.
Economic Growth: Investing in South Africa's creative economy.
Sustainability: Promoting ethically sourced and manufactured items.

What You Can Find

Made by Artisans hosts a diverse, growing range of products, catering to various tastes and needs. Their inventory often includes, but is not limited to:

Handcrafted Leather Goods: Ranging from stylish sandals to durable bags.
Unique Home Goods: Hand-poured candles, ceramics, and décor.
Warmth & Comfort: Sheepskin slippers and cozy accessories.
Specialty Items: Handcrafted items that reflect South African culture.

Convenience and Global Reach

While rooted in South Africa, Made by Artisans has expanded its reach to serve international customers. The company offers international shipping, allowing South Africans abroad and international customers to purchase authentic locally made goods.

Their user-friendly platform ensures that customers can:

Browse products from multiple local sellers on one site.
Manage a single checkout process for diverse products.
Experience secure and reliable delivery.

Supporting the Artisan Community

Made by Artisans operates with a passion for uncovering new locally manufactured products. They regularly invite local artisans to become stockists, broadening their range and offering new entrepreneurs a chance to showcase their work to a wider audience.

With a focus on quality assurance and curated selections, Made by Artisans is more than just a shop; it is a vital supporter of local economic empowerment, ensuring that the unique skills of South African artisans are celebrated and sustained.

You can visit or shop from Made by Artisans here: https://madebyartisans.com

Gmail push notification on iPhone and iPad

2012-01-12T11:21:00.000+02:00

Google enabled push notification in Gmail for iPhones and iPads ages ago, but I've noticed not many people know about this and aren't sure how to set it up using the native mail client in iOS (yes, you don't need the Google Mail application)

The process is as follows (screenshots were taken on an iPhone but would be similar for an iPad);

Add a new mail account but choose 'Microsoft Exchange' (not Gmail)
Add your details as follows;

Email: youraddress@gmail.com
Domain: <leave blank>
Username: youraddress@gmail.com
Password: <yourpassword>

When you click Next, you might receive the following verification notice:

Click Continue, an additional field will become visible requiring a server name, use: m.google.com and click Done to verify and complete the setup.

And that's it - confirm that Push is enabled for this account in Settings --> Mail, Contacts, Calendars --> Fetch New Data --> Advanced

Two things to note:

If you get any messages complaining about not being able to verify a certificate, click Accept to continue anyway
Push mail has more of an impact on battery life, if this is a problem you could always revert back to Fetching without needing to re-setup your mail account.

Gmail formatting in Internet Explorer 9

2011-05-30T09:48:00.000+02:00

Experiencing the following Gmail formatting issue in Internet Explorer 9?

The problem is caused by IE9's compatibility mode feature, turning this off resolves the issue. You might not find the IE9 compatibility mode icon in the address bar though for some reason (in my case anyway) - here's a quick fix;

In IE9, while logged into your Gmail maibox, hit F12
Choose Browser Mode: IE9 on the bottom toolbar
Choose Internet Explorer 9

Voila - you should now be seeing your mailbox with the formatting corrected;

Windows app to view iPhone tracking data

2011-04-25T22:07:00.001+02:00

There's quite a buzz at the moment following the discovery that up to a years worth of geo-location data is being captured and stored on your iPhone, and the fact that this cannot be disabled without jailbreaking your phone and installing a Cydia app (no, disabling Location Services doesn't help).

If you want to check this data out and don't have a Mac, take a look at the iPhoneTracker for Windows: http://huseyint.com/iPhoneTrackerWin/. This app reads the data from a recent iTunes backup and overlays it on a map for easy viewing.

MMS 2011 Opening Keynote

2011-03-22T22:16:00.008+02:00

The opening keynote was pretty cool and as was expected, focused on the cloud. More specifically, it focused on the way Microsoft defines the cloud as a computing model rather than a computing location, the consumerization of IT as a service, and how to empower IT (and consumers) to embrace the cloud model. The cloud is broken up into two parts, the service consumer (the old application owner) and the service provider (the old application administrator) - System Center 2012 will bring the following to the private cloud model;

For the service consumer: System Center code-name 'Concero' which is a service-focused self-service experience which the service consumer (that's a lot of use of the word service) can use to manage their services without needing to know anything about the underlying technology. All they know is, they have a service made up of a bunch of components (applications, databases, etc), and they require resources for it to function. 'Concero' will allow service consumers to request more cloud capacity when required, and understand how services are performing.

For the service provider: System Center VMM 2012 which will allow a cloud fabric to be assembled regardless of the underlying infrastructure (VMware, XenServer or Hyper-V). This is a key point, the focus is moving past virtualizing the datacenter; it's no longer about the virtual machine, and no longer does the virtualization technology have to be a factor, the point is there are resources available and they can be added to a single cloud fabric for consumption. On the cloud fabric, any number of private clouds can be built, each containing services made up components such as applications, databases, etc.

To give you an idea, the following scenario was demonstrated during the keynote:

the service consumer notices performance for a specific cloud service is no longer acceptable, and requests more cloud capacity through 'Concero'.
the service provider does not have any capacity on the current fabric and needs to provision additional resources. He procures additional hardware resources and connects it to the network.
the service provider (using VMM 2012), remotely provisions the new hardware resources (by remotely interfacing with IPMI, SMASH, or DCMI which is supported by HP iLO) with the standardized Server OS image and adds the new capacity to the current fabric.
the service consumer assigns the additional capacity to the cloud service.

This is a great scenario, and is looking pretty slick due to the way Microsoft is tightly integrating the System Center products to make this easy, and possible. Nice one MS.

Some other product announcements were made;

Opalis will be renamed System Center Orchestrator 2012 (I always felt Opalis was out of place, so finally a proper place in the System Center suite of products)
Virtual Machine Manager 2012 went Beta today
System Center Advisor announced (previously code-name 'Atlanta') and will be part of System Center 2012 - this will allow a top-down view to services, focused on recommended configuration based on insight contributed by Microsoft. 90000 Microsoft employees will provide input to this 'advice' which will allow the tool to make recommendations to configuration. An example was given, showing how a hotfix would be relevant (recommended) for a SQL server which is part of a service known to have issues with a SQL server without that hotfix. This product will be available to all existing software assurance customers.

Three key takeaways from the keynote (click to enlarge):

Microsoft Management Summit 2011 - Las Vegas, Nevada

2011-03-21T19:44:00.010+02:00

I was fortunate enough to get a seat at Microsoft Management Summit in Las Vegas this year, it's my first time so I'm planning on using this opportunity to attend some in depth technical sessions, and meet some of the industry experts so I can put faces to the names. There are a lot of breakout sessions and hands-on labs to choose from, most focused on management technologies/solutions (as the event name suggests) from Microsoft and a range of partners - there's also quite a focus on cloud computing this year.

I arrived late on Saturday night (LV time), and was quite tired after my trip via Amsterdam. I almost missed my connecting flight from Minneapolis to Las Vegas as clearing customs took a while and overbooking is a huge problem in the US - I was lucky and got one of the last seats on the flight. The weather wasn't great yesterday, mostly overcast, windy and lots of rain during the night. It suited me fine though as I spent the day trying to adjust to the change in time from SA, at 1pm (bedtime back home) I got really tired all of a sudden...I think they call it 'jetlag'?... :P

Arrived in Amsterdam on KLM

Left Amsterdam on Delta

Monday morning and the weather is looking much better - I say 'looking'...as it's 8'C outside.

Registration opened for MMS attendees at 7:30am, and things looked pretty well organized. The queue at the registration counter was manageable and it took less than a minute to register. The first breakout sessions for the day only start at 1:30pm, so I have some time to kill...

LinkedIn Social Connector for Outlook 2010 x64

2011-03-08T14:29:00.001+02:00

I've been wanting to use the LinkedIn Social Connector for Outlook 2010 for quite a while now, but a x64 version was never available. Googling has never returned much around the x64 version either, just some speculation and complaints about it taking so long to release.

Until I stumbled upon this: https://download.linkedin.com/desktop/osc/en/latest/bin/LinkedInOutlookConnector_x64.exe

Happy times.

List of Standalone Installers

2011-02-28T13:48:00.001+02:00

I'm annoyed by software installers which need to constantly download additional content from the internet in order to complete an installation. Besides taking forever to install, it requires you to be connected to the internet and doesn't make efficient use of internet bandwidth if you need to install on more than a few machines.

The following is a list of the most common standalone installers I could find, any other suggestions would be great;

Skype
Windows Live Essentials
Adobe Reader X (10.0)
Google Earth
Google Chrome
Java Runtime Environment (x86) and (x64)
Internet Explorer 9 RC (x86) and (x64)

Internet Explorer 9 Release Candidate (RC) Standalone Installer

2011-02-12T22:29:00.011+02:00

The release candidate of Internet Explorer 9 was made available for download on 10 Feb, the final version is expected in April.

Here are the direct download links for the standalone (offline) installer (saves you having to re-download 30MB for each machine you want to upgrade):

Service Pack 1 for Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 is RTM

2011-02-09T11:12:00.000+02:00

SP1 is RTM and will be available for download as follows;

TechNet/MSDN/VL subscribers - Feb 16, 2011
General availability (Download Center/Windows Update) - Feb 22, 2011

It would appear that an uninstall of SP1 Beta or RC is still required before installing RTM - there have been reports of users who are not able to remove SP1 RC due to the uninstall files being placed in a Temp folder during installation, any disk cleanup tasks post installation which might have removed these files will prevent uninstallation. I guess the only safe options would be System Restore back to a pre-RC restore point, or a complete rebuild. Hopefully you didn't deploy the RC to any production servers, the RC will expire on Nov 30, 2011.

Windows 7 Media Center, XBOX360 Extenders and MKV container formats

2011-01-20T22:42:00.003+02:00

The Matroska Multimedia Container format (MKV) is a free and open-standard container format which allows any number of video, audio and subtitle tracks to be stored in a single file. Some would argue that MKV is the ONLY container format to use today, and with good reason since it supports advanced H.264 video compression standards used for High-Definition video, the latest standards in multi-channel audio, and it's supported by a multitude of portable media players and installable media solutions such as XBMC, Mythbuntu, etc.

Unfortunately Windows 7 does not include native support for the MKV container format, however playback of H.264 streams and multi-channel audio in other container formats is supported, but only through the new Media Foundation framework. Media Foundation was introduced in Windows Vista already as a replacement for DirectShow - DirectShow is still supported in Windows 7, however its use is discouraged. Windows 7's Media Foundation pipeline is what brings native support for H.264 to Windows 7 and makes use of DirectX Video Acceleration (DXVA) on supported graphics cards when available, all without requiring additional codecs to be installed.

The key to playing MKV content is to install a component which allows Windows 7 to 'open' (or more accurately 'split') the MKV container format to get to the H.264 and audio streams, and there are a number of simple ways to achieve this, the most common being installing Haali's Media Splitter (http://haali.su/mkv) or installing a codec pack such as Shark007's codec solution (http://shark007.net/).

This all works perfectly when using Windows 7 Media Center in isolation, as your sole entertainment solution directly connected to your LCD/Plasma and amplifier, but these splitters and codec packs do nothing for MKV playback when including one or more XBOX360 Extenders into your solution for remote access to media from other locations around the home. Even though Microsoft included H.264 support for XBOX360's in 2007, the MKV container is not supported. Since there is no option to install a splitter on the XBOX360 to gain access to the H.264 stream, the only way to get MKV files to play on an Extender is to transcode the content to a format which is supported by the Extender before streaming, and once again there are a number or ways this can be achieved. The problem is that transcoding is intensive, reduces video and audio quality, increases load and heat output on the PC doing the encoding, and is thus not desirable to be doing on your Windows Media Center PC which is most likely tucked away in a tight spot with minimal ventilation and prone to overheating (well mine is anyway). This can be solved by offloading the transcoding onto another PC or dedicated machine, but that's not always an effective or viable solution. Wouldn't it be nice if the H.264 stream in the MKV container could be decoded natively by the XBOX360? Well it can, using the DivX Plus Codec Pack from DivX. (http://www.divx.com/en/software/divx-plus/codec-pack).

The DivX Plus Codec Pack is free, and includes a MKV splitter for DirectShow and Media Foundation. When installed on a Windows 7 machine (Haali splitter and Shark007 codecs are not required in this scenario), it allows playback of the H.264 stream in MKV containers using the Media Foundation framework from both Media Center and connected XBOX360 Extenders, without requiring any transcoding.

The problem (and actually the point of this post) is that the splitter included in the DivX Codec Pack pack does not include decoders for AC3 and DTS audio for licensing reasons - Microsoft only allows their Media Foundation AC3 decoder to be used with their own software. Unfortunately all filters currently available, such as AC3filter, are DirectShow-based. This means that while SD and HD video from MKV containers work perfectly on both Media Center and Extenders, audio channels are limited to stereo in most circumstances which makes this solution unworkable when needing to support MKVs on Extenders.

Just to prove this theory, I did a test of my own using a clean install of Windows 7 Ultimate x86 on a PC hooked up to a 5.1 amp using SPDIF, using the following test files;

MKV file with AC3 audio (5.1 audio track)
MKV file with DTS audio (5.1 audio track)
MPG file with AC3 audio (5.1 audio track)
AVI file with AC3 audio (5.1 audio track)

This was the result:-

1. With DivX Plus installed only;

MKV file with AC3 - Media Player: NO AUDIO / Media Center: NO AUDIO
MKV file with DTS - Media Player: NO AUDIO / Media Center: NO AUDIO
MPG file with AC3 - Media Player: 5.1 / Media Center: 5.1
AVI file with AC3 - Media Player: 5.1 / Media Center: 5.1

These results seem correct and to be expected since no third-party AC3 decoder was installed for MKV files, and supported containers output audio correctly in 5.1.

2. With DivX Plus AND AC3Filter 1.63b installed;

MKV file with AC3 - Media Player: 5.1 / Media Center: STEREO
MKV file with DTS - Media Player: 5.1 / Media Center: STEREO
MPG file with AC3 - Media Player: 5.1 / Media Center: 5.1
AVI file with AC3 - Media Player: STEREO / Media Center: STEREO

That's odd - Media Player seems to use the DirectShow-based AC3Filter correctly, but Media Center will only output stereo. Oddly, a standard AVI container with AC3 audio output 5.1 correctly before AC3Filter was installed, but also dropped to stereo after installation.

So there we have it, there doesn't seem to be any way to butter your bread on both sides at the moment; either you get full 5.1 audio in Windows Media Center and transcode to your extender, or get stereo in Windows Media Center and full MKV playback support on your extender without transcoding. Think I'll take the 5.1 audio option.

Build your own oil-submerged PC

2011-01-20T14:55:00.003+02:00

Is your PC constantly overheating? Tired of noisy fans, heatpipes and pumps for water cooling? There's an easy solution - find an old fishtank, submerge your PC components in mineral oil, chuck in a few fish and you're cooking!

No seriously, although not Microsoft-related (unless your PC runs Windows), I found this idea of submerging the contents of your air-cooled PC case in mineral oil pretty cool. The guys in this video have submerged the PSU, motherboard and all components except for the hard drive to evenly distribute emitted heat and eliminate localized hot-zones, and they think it looks pretty cool. The whole solution is dead silent, except for the pump they use to add air for effect - maybe a solution for your HTPC?

Ummm......maybe not.

Check out the video:

Media Browser 2.3.0 (Draco) finally released

2011-01-16T10:36:00.004+02:00

After a number of slipped release dates (and the most extensive testing of any release), Media Browser 2.3.0 went RTM on the 14th - this is a significant release which addresses a number of performance issues, most notably issues centred around updating the library which caused quite a pain for users with large media collections. The library update process has now been moved to a service (no more high CPU utilization for the ehexthost process!).

Some highlights for this release:

Fixes for broken podcast handling
A number of fixes to the default theme
Prep work for Custom Intros prior to movies playing
Better Media Info Icons and fixes
Startup is significantly faster, no more artificial lag when playing HD content
Enhanced multi-version plugins support

Get it here: http://www.mediabrowser.tv/download

Remote Potato for iOS now available

2011-01-09T12:38:00.005+02:00

Looking for a way to remotely access your Windows 7 Media Center Library (Music, Pictures, Videos and Recorded TV) from your iPhone/iPod/iPad? Look no further than Remote Potato for iOS, just released to the Apple Store (http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/remote-potato/id378287173).

A number of applications have been available in the past which allowed limited remote access to Media Center libraries on iDevices, usually through some sort of web-based application, but Remote Potato for iOS is the first installable application to allow streaming of Recorded TV in Media Center's native WTV format.

Remote Potato for iOS provides the following functionality;

Stream Recorded TV (DVR-MS and WTV format) to your iDevice
Browse the TV Guide and schedule recordings
View the pictures library, download and email pictures

Browse the Music library, listen to music live or sync music for offline access

Remote Potato for iOS requires a server component installed on your Media Center machine, and the client component on your iDevice from the Apple Store. The server component can be downloaded here: http://www.fatattitude.com/software/software-about-remotepotato.aspx

Screenshots:

The curious case of the PCIe x16 slot

2010-12-24T10:33:00.001+02:00

I've been a proponent of using Windows Media Center as the centralized digital entertainment hub for the home for as long as I can remember. That's all great, the problem is whenever anyone sees my setup then they want a similar setup too, and that usually means that I'll be the one assisting with spec'ing, assembling and installing. I've just been sitting with a problem handed to me by one of the not-so-recent Media Center converts which has had me scratching my head for 2 days now, and that's also great, except that I'm supposed to be on holiday.

He recently bought a 42" Full-HD panel, which his 4 year old MC naturally isn't equipped for in terms of HD video decoding and the necessary HDMI or DVI ports. No problem, his board has a PCI Express x16 slot, he has some cash, so we can just slap in a suitable ATi or NVidia graphics card which supports DXVA acceleration to take the load off the CPU and be done with it. That's what I thought too, it IS supposed to be simple, there's no rocket science here. The card worked fine, resolution scales to 1920x1080 correctly, SD content plays fine, but when playing HD content WMC will either freeze or play no video at all. The container format also made no difference, H.264 in MKV or MPG would either hang the machine or just play nothing, the screen would stay black.

To cut a long story short, after hours of backwards and forwards which included reinstalling Windows, trying old and new drivers, changing BIOS settings, flashing the BIOS to the latest version, trying numerous Windows Media Foundation and DirectShow codecs and successfully testing the graphics card in another PC, I eventually narrowed it down to DXVA acceleration causing the problem. When forcing DXVA off, the content played fine but would cause the CPU to flatline since it was now doing the decoding of the HD stream.

A bit of Googling (apologies....Binging...) led me to an obscure forum post describing one specific motherboard model with a serious limitation, the Gigabyte GA-M61VME-S2, incidentally the same model in this guy's MC. The board is listed as having a PCIe x16 1.0 slot, but has only one lane physically wired to the slot, which means it can only actually perform as a PCIe x1 slot (limited to 250MB/s). Gigabyte even published a list of specific graphics cards which are supported by this model, everything else is not guaranteed or issues can be expected. All I can think is that this board was manufactured in 2006 during the migration from AGP to PCIe, and there was some confusion lurking around the PCIe standard - I would have thought that the bus speed would still have allowed the card features to work correctly at least, albeit with reduced speed to the bus.

Not much else to do but upgrade his board.

Microsoft announces Lync Client for iPhone

2010-11-29T10:44:00.003+02:00

Finally, a Lync client for the iPhone is in the works, don't get too excited though, Microsoft says it will be released 'in the coming year' - looks like we will still have to wait a while.

http://lync.microsoft.com/en-us/Product/UserInterfaces/Pages/lync-2010-mobile.aspx

Until then, use iDialog fom Modality Systems which is available through the iStore, more detail here: http://www.modalitysystems.com/idialog/

Service Pack 1 Release Candidate released for Windows 7 / Server 2008 R2!

2010-10-27T07:29:00.001+02:00

SP1 Release Candidate (RC) has just been released for Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2, here's a link to the MS download page: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/ff183870.aspx

If you installed SP1 Beta then you will need to first uninstall it before installing RC - and believe me, it's going to take a while. If you removed the SP1 Beta uninstall files to free up disk space, then sorry for you - upgrading to RC is not possible. You will be required to completely re-install Windows 7 or Server 2008 R2, or restore a complete System Image Backup, created prior to installing the SP1 Beta, before you can install the RC.