hamang.net

ie7 bug – Popup blocker prevents clicking dropdown lists.

I had a strange experience with IE 7. It was suddenly impossible to click dropdown lists. The popup blocker displayed the toolbar, saying it blocked a popup. The dropdown was from my own code running on localhost, so it was definitely not a popup defined in the event. I am really not sure when this happened. Yesterday I installed the Internet Explorer Collection, which is great for testing GUI in different versions of Internet Explorer. This could cause the strange behaviour, but I'm really not sure. The collection includes IE 8 Beta, and I have seen others with IE 8 Beta having this problem.

I soon found out other users having this problem and most referred to this page for a solution. I tried the suggestion on adding localhost to the "trusted sites" and setting security level to medium-low, but that didn't solve my problem. I then uninstalled the Internet Explorer Collection without any luck. I also tried resetting Internet Explorer; Tools->Internet options->Advanced->Reset… (button). But again, no luck. Also restarted windows just to be sure.

Only left solution was to remove or reinstall IE7. Removing will downgrade to IE 6, which is really not what I want. So I downloaded the IE 7 installer from Microsoft and installed IE7 again (no option in installer to "reinstall"). Restarting windows, and everything was working fine again. Since that was not one of the options in the guide I found (link above), I though it was worth mention it here.

Ok, back to work…

Tags: IE, windows

XBOX – be quiet!

I have 3 Xbox 360's at home. Seems a bit too much, but they have really come down in price, and I use 2 of them as extenders for my Vista Media Center. The biggest problem with the Xbox is the noise it produce. The Media Center box is virtually silent using a mCubed hfx classic, so I want my extenders to be as quiet as possible. I could of course buy some Linksys DMA 2100 extenders, but they do not support VGA out, which is the only input option on my LCD monitor.

I'm using one of the Xboxes in the kitchen, connected to a 15" LCD monitor. The LCD is mounted above the fridge and serves as a kitchen TV. The Xbox is hidden behind a shelf placed above the refrigerator. This is almost in ear height when standing up and makes the noise come out pretty loud.

I read some reviews on the Lian Li PC XB01 case and decided to give it a try. Opening the Xbox will void the warranty, so I decided to modify the oldest one, as it no longer has a warranty.

The Lian Li case is pretty large as you can see in the video below.

This is mainly because of the large 120mm fan in the back. But it also gives some opportunities regarding further modding and better controlling the noise. You can even put a water cooling system in there. There are dedicated holes in the case for the water tubes.

It was quite tricky to dismount the Xbox, and you need a set of Torx tools (6, 8 and 10) to be able to do the work. Mounting the mainboard and DVD drive in the Lian case was straight forward.

The result

As this mod is only used as a Media Center Extender and not used for playing games at all, I didn't need the Xbox harddrive. The only noise coming from the case will be the fan. The standard fan which comes with the case is not very silent, but far better than the Xbox fans. I guess I will order a Papst fan to replace the standard fan.

Standard Xbox 360 Arcade (Falcon chipset)

Xbox 360 inside Lian Li PC XB01using oem fan (Zephyr chipset)

I also found a more extreme cooling solution for even more silent mods. Check out this site, which has an awesome mod: http://www.silentxbox.com/xbox_eng.php

Tags: Xbox

Moving to WordPress

I have been using Mambo/Joomla for quite some time and have realized that it's not ideal for blogging. I decided to go with a real blogging engine, like WordPress. It's really neat and easy to use and has a lot of plug-ins and features. I migrated all my joomla content with a script and it worked pretty well. Had to upload and fix all the images manually, and all the comments are missing, but what the heck, I am pretty satisfied.

My next move will be to create my own personal skin for WP, even though I like the one I am using. I just have to put this in the queue for all of my other projects and time consuming things.

Hope you like the new blog, at least I do. The old blog is still active and will be removed pretty soon. Redirects should work for most articles, so old links should be intact. Thanks to the redirection plug-in for WordPress

Don't steal images – a great story