If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed or follow me on twitter. Thanks for visiting - and be sure to leave a comment on any post that interests you!

Sick of these ads? Of course you are… Well what if you could avoid them altogether?

Here’s a simple tip that heps you do just that,- stopping images and pages from a long list of notorious web sites from being displayed on your browser. These particular ones are hosted on the domain “content.yieldmanager.edgesuite.net” and link to a url at “ad.adperium.com” – literally just a couple of sites among many which are purely for shoving advertising and spam down the viewers throat.

One easy way to stop such ads appearing is to use customise your HOSTS file. This is basically like a local version of a DNS server (those servers that translate domain names into numbers so your browser can find web sites). In the HOSTS file, you’d have a list of all the sites you want blocked and have them correspond to 127.0.0.1 (also known as “localhost”) – so that your browser would try to load the images and pages from your own PC instead of the actual web site.

Handily, someone’s already written a customised HOSTS file for you to use and it’s pretty simple to install. First things first though, – better safe than sorry.. back up the file you’ve got.

Sort of speaks for itself really… I’ll post something more meaningful soon… honest

[ ✔ ] Good fast processor
[ ✔ ] Adequate amount of memory
[ ✔ ] Nice size hard drive
[ ✔ ] Long battery life
[ ✔ ] High-speed double layer capable DVD burner
[     ] Can be caught in mid-air by a man using only his arse

Er… Hang on a sec…

WORST VIRAL AD EVERRRRRR!!!

The Hercules DJ Console Mk2 (pictured, right) is one of my toys – I use it for basic DJ’ing, mixing, etc. and it’s a handy little piece of kit. The other day, though, half of it died. It sill worked as an external sound card box for my laptop, but the controller part (the knobs, faders, dials, etc.) stopped working and wouldn’t control my DJ software (Virtual DJ 5) any more. Looking around on the ‘net, I saw there were a fair few other people (mostly on the Virtual DJ forums) with the same problem, so I thought I’d post the solution – which I arrived at with the help of the lovely Hercules Tech Support people.

First off, I’d tried updating the firmware, as described here – and the audio firmware updated fine, as expected – but the controller firmware failed to update, bringing back an error of ‘fail during update process of PROC’… which was meaningless to me. So, as that didn’t work, I got onto Hercules who – after a few emails suggested the following method, which involved opening up the box and doing some really very minor tinkering with the components inside:

I was in Athlone last night, producing a 3 hour talk show. All was going great and we were following the running order I wrote up perfectly to the minute with our “Top of the Hour” marker idents hitting at bang-on the top of the hour and everything else going perfectly. The presenter was on top form, the interviews were interesting, we were getting loads of text feedback… the show sounded great…

That is, until 11.50pm when the studio automation system (the usually excellent RCS Master Control) decided to throw a wobbly (i.e.: crash completely). This, for someone standing in to produce a live show on a large commercial station on their own for the first time could have signalled panic stations…