Ye olde geeky blog

 If you own a modern Hisense Smart TV running VIDAA OS (I have the 65U7K model), you've probably noticed the home screen getting increasingly cluttered with intrusive, auto-playing video ads. When you buy a great TV, the last thing you want is a giant ad banner screaming at you every time you hit the home button. After getting properly irritated with it recently, I decided to fix it. Instead of digging through restrictive TV settings, I tackled the problem at the network level on my Fibre router using Parental Controls and Domain Blocking locked strictly to my TV's MAC address. I used Gemini to help track down and tweak the exact ad-serving domains, and it worked like a charm! No more video ads hijacking the home screen, and the TV is much more enjoyable to use. Here is the exact setup and the list of URLs you need to block if you want peace and quiet on your TV screen again. Step 1: Find Your TV's MAC Address Go into your TV’s network settings, find its MAC Address , an...

Ahhh Diablo 3! The gaming comeback of the century! Never would I have thought that Blizzard can turn around the game as much as they did after they patched it to version 2. Diablo 3 and its auction house was an absolute mess when the game launched in 2012, but now, it's one of the games I keep on going back to. With each new Season, I level one of my remaining non-level-70 character classes to level 70, and now, with Season 5 (I skipped season 2 and 3) I've done so with my Crusader. And damn, what a fun character to play with. At the moment, I'm at such a stage with the character that I can easily do Torment VI rifts without dying and relatively quickly. With that, I've discovered a really quick and painless way to farm Death's Breath (which automatically also helps with farming Blood Shards). Death's Breath is a crafting material you need for most Legendary and Set recipes, and of course, to use on Kanai's Cube (which is where I use it mostly). Wi...

I use XAMPP for my PHP web development. My wife designs the sites that I work with, and sometimes she needs to access my local web server from her PC. Usually that's as easy as typing in my PC's network name in her browser and she can access everything on my localhost. Since a few days ago, it stopped working. She even tried using my IP address directly in her browser, but that too, didn't work. Then I remembered, Windows 10 updated something a while back, and I guess it was then when this issue started. Turned out, I had to allow port 80 over my Windows Firewall again. So, if you're running Windows 10, here's how to do that: Press the Start button, and type in Firewall, then click on Windows Firewall with Advanced Security at the top: This will open up the Firewall window, which looks like this: (click on the image to see it bigger if you need to) What we want to do is set up a new Inbound Rule, so at the top left, click on Inbound Rules: The...

I discovered how awesome Dictionaries are this week (yes I haven't been coding in Unity C# that long ok hehe). It's basically a key-value pair fancy array thing :) Here's how you'd use it: Dictionary<string, string> nameOfMyDictionary = new Dictionary<string, string> (); (Remember to include the System.Collections.Generic; namespace at the top of your file, otherwise this won't work...) Then, you can add stuff to it with code using the Add() function, etc. Similar to Lists. Anyway, I discovered that they don't show up the Editor like normal arrays do. And that made me a little sad. So, here's a small workaround I discovered. I'm sure it's not the best way to do it, but it works for me. Firstly, create a struct containing the key-value pair variables , and remember to add System.Serializable to allow them to show up in the editor: [System.Serializable] public struct NameOfStruct { public string  string1UniqueKey; pub...

Living here in good old South Africa we get to experience something I think everyone on earth should get to experience - Load Shedding. Ahhh load shedding. Nothing speaks of a government's incompetence as something like load shedding does. Anyway, with our power going out way more than it should, I have to shut down my PC way more often that I would like. I believe in turning the thing on, and leaving it on. Anyway, if you don't shut down your PC as often, the updates kinda builds up, and when you do want to shut down, your PC decides that this is now a great time to install the updates first. And yes, it sometimes takes more time than what you have! I foolishly thought one afternoon that 15 minutes would be more than enough time. Sadly it was not. In the middle of updating, where the PC says "please do not turn off your machine" the load shedding kicked in. Luckily nothing bad happened, but still. So, there is a way to shut down your computer without installing t...

My awesome wife bought me GTA 5 for PC as an anniversary gift. I already own it on my Xbox 360, but I always knew that the PC version will be the definitive version by a long shot! The game arrived a day late, but I didn't mind too much, since we had some friends staying over and I knew there wouldn't be time to play even if I wanted to. I did the install of the SEVEN discs, and was greeted by a nice 5 gig day 1 patch. Anyway, I let that run and started the game. Yes, this is the definitive version for sure. Indeed! Sadly, I haven't had much time to put into the game as of yet, but over the weekend I finally got a good amount of GTA 5 in, and my good friend Jayson also got his copy last week, so we were extremely eager to boot up the game and do some co-op stuff! I never played GTA 5 online on my Xbox, so I didn't really know how it works and stuff, but it basically comes down to what they call game sessions. When you join GTA 5 online, you join an existing session...

Hi there, thank you for visiting this blog. Please will you be so kind and follow me on Twitter as well? See my Twitter details on the right hand side of this blog. By the way, do you also have a blog? Want to know how I got my Twitter feed to the right here? It's actually quite simple once you know how, but allow me to take the guesswork out of it ok... Obviously, you need to be logged in on your Blogger account, and be editing the blog where you want your Twitter feed to go. On the left, you'll see a bunch of options like so: Third from the bottom you'll see the Layout link - click on that, which brings you here (obviously yours will look different to mine): A Gadget is what you want to add to your blog. Before you do that, head on over to your Twitter profile - we want to get a widget code from there which we'll add to your blog. Once on your Twitter page, click on your Icon at the top, and hit Settings: This will open up a page with this on the ...

One of my clients had an interesting request - he wanted to share his internet connection to another building about 400 meters away - now this is, I'm sure, a very easy task if you're a wireless network guru, and I thought it would be, for me, quite an undertaking (I was extremely curious on what it would take to set something like that up, that's why I agreed to do it!), but in the end, the hardest part was actually installing the hardware. After chatting with some experts at one of my suppliers, I decided to buy two Ubiquiti NanoBridge M5's: Luckily the two buildings have line of sight, and 400 meters isn't that far, considering that they can handle up to 30km according to their the website! Anyway, after finally mounting both dishes at the two buildings, and more or less pointing them at each other (we just manually aimed them, didn't use any calibrating tools or stuff like that), we were ready to get the stuff talking to each other. The radio is p...

After moving to our new house, we don't intend on moving again any time soon at all! So this time around, I decided to make the place fully networked with good old fashioned UTP (unshielded twisted pair, aka network cable if you didn't know). We use a media center PC to do our TV watching on, and this also happens to be the place where my ADSL router is situated (nice and central to give a better wifi coverage). So, in the living room I have a 5 port gigabit switch, which connects to our study with a network cable through the ceiling. In the study, it connects to an 8 port gigabit switch. In the study there's our work PC's and the NAS. Today, I've decided to take a cable from the study to my man cave through the ceiling as well - it was using an old 54mbps Netgear wifi dongle that I've had for ages, and the thing is just not stable enough for anything other than browsing the internet. So, now I have my man cave PC also connected with a proper cable onto the ...

So far, all the sites I have made in Drupal (both of them hehe), have had numerous content types, and each node of that type needs to be displayed in it's own theme. By default, it seems, Drupal doesn't have this functionality built in, but luckily it's not hard to add. Let's say your content type is called "Products" - naturally you would want to name the page template for that content type something like page--products.tpl.php - but without the little hack below, that won't work. So, to get that to work, make sure you have a template.php file in the root folder of your theme, and then add this code to it: <?php      function nameofyourtheme _preprocess_page(&$vars)         {             if (isset($vars['node']->type))             {                 $vars['theme_hook_suggestions'][] = 'page__' . $vars['node']->type;     ...

This will just be a quick post. Drupal tends to add a gray line at the top of any <table> elements you may have on your page, even if you don't have a border specified. A quick and simple way of getting that annoying line gone is by adding this table {   border-collapse: separate !important; } to your stylesheet file. Does the trick for me!

I have a client who asked me to look into how they can provide support to their own clients with Whatsapp, but not have to sit with a phone, and rather do it from a PC, or something similar. I looked at getting MHL connectors for a phone, connecting that to a PC screen with HDMI connection, and then also adding a bluetooth keyboard for the phone, but that all turned out to be quite a pricey option! Then I did some searching and got to a solution where you can actually take control of your phone (in my case my Galaxy Note 3) from your PC by using good old TeamViewer! I first thought this isn't possible, but it turns out it is, and I tried it, and it works great! Here's how: Obviously you need TeamViewer loaded on your PC - get that from here . Then, you'll need the Mobile TeamViewer app on your phone as well - here's the one you need . It's called TeamViewer QuickSupport. The first time you open it up, it will ask you to download and install another app t...

Last night my good buddy and I decided to give Far Cry 3's co-op campaign a chance. We both like the single player game, but haven't played any form of multiplayer on it, and I knew it's got a dedicated co-op set of maps, so we thought what the hell... We started the game, and discovered we needed to be friends on Uplay first, so we did that, and fired up the game again, and went into the Co-op section, I hosted a private match, invited my friend and that was as easy as that! We got in no problem whatsoever! Damn what a fun experience! Just tons of baddies to kill, and with us chatting and coordinating with voip it was really great! We took our dinner break, and when we got back, the game didn't want to load. It just kept on saying "can't join game". What a huge pain this turned out to be - the only thing that changed since 30 minutes before that, was we now both had level 10 characters instead of brand new players. We hit Google, and saw all kin...

Ok, that was a long title for this post hehe - here's a nice little trick I just figured out. I have a headset that I generally use when playing games or watching movies and I don't want to bother the wife. But, it's always a pain, because I have to plug in the headset (yes I'm that lazy) when I want to use it, and then unplug it again when I want to switch back to my speakers. In the "Sound" control panel option you can easily switch between the two, so what I did was create a shortcut to Sound, and I connected a unique shortcut to it, so now it's as simple as hitting the shortcut at any time, and then setting whichever device I want as the default. Now, my headset, the Steelseries Siberia V2 USB  came with it's own USB sound card, so I'm not sure if this will work if you just connect a headset to your front audio jacks (maybe leave a comment and inform us about that if you want). So, in Sound, it shows up as a separate device. Here are the ...

Last night we played the Annihilation game mode of Loadout. At first, I had no clue as to what the hell was going on, but caught on quite quickly. It is basically a combination of 3 of the other game modes, with a few twists of course - and it's a huge amount of fun! Firstly, to understand the other game modes: Death Snatch This is Loadout's version of classic death match. You run around and kill people. The twist here, however, is whenever you die, you drop a Blutonium vial. You must collect this item in order to score the actual points. This also means that if someone snipes you from far away (which I personally hate a great deal), they don't get the points unless he/she or a teammate picks up the vial. And, your team mates can get your vial, and prevent the opposing team from scoring. A very nice take on regular old boring death match indeed! Jackhammer Everyone knows Capture the Flag - you each have a base with a flag, and your job is to go over to the enemies...