Daniel Maclean

It's that time of year again when The Times , a news organisation, ranks all the high schools in Scotland. It has done this for a few years now, and it would seem that this years results could be quite controversial. On account of the exams not being sat in the same manner as previous years. Instead, exams were replaced with teacher estimates. Whether you agree with that or not, this is where we are. That aside, how does this work? Schools are ranked by calculating the percentage of pupils (students) who attain 5 or more Highers for that year for that school. It's not clear to me if you need to have received specific grades for those Highers, but on the surface, it would seem it doesn't matter. Simply the number of Highers rather than at which grade.  Apparently this is Nicola Sturgeon's "Gold Standard" but my quick look around Google couldn't find a quote on this. Have a source to share? Drop it into the comments. This "Gold Standard" however ha...

If you are here, then you are getting the message "your adsense account is no longer connected" message on the Earnings page on blogger.com. You are most likely here though, because you have clicked "Remove Adsense", tried to re-enable adsense but it still didn't work. There is no official support page for this issue, so i'm sharing how I fixed this problem. 1) Click "Remove Adsense" on the Earnings page on blogger.com  2) Visit Adsense here ( https://www.google.com/adsense )  3) Login and click on "Sites" on the left side of the page  4) Now because you are logged into Blogger with your Google Account, Blogger can automatically check to see if a site is listed with Adsense and if so, then your site should be listed here already. In my case I had an error against the site i.e. "Requires review". I followed the provided steps which for me was to add a small piece of Javascript into the HEAD tags in Blogger and then click a box ...

With the release of OS X Yosemite from Apple last week it's been a few days of exploring all the different features that have been introduced into Apple's latest OS. I like the sleek new UI and Safari looks much better. Spotlight has had a facelift and seems to do so much more than it did before. But the feature that sticks out for me, is Continuity. I really like the Continuity feature in OS X Yosemite with my iPhone 5. So I wanted to find a way of pulling together a way of quickly dialling numbers on my desktop without having to fire up FaceTime or use Spotlight. One way of doing this is to create an Automator application which executes some very simple AppleScript so that when you double click the app on the desktop it dials the chosen number, here are some steps to re-create this: Fire up Automator and Click "New Document" Select "Application" and click "Choose" In the search bar at the top left, type in "AppleScript", then do...

I don't normally do reviews on just products themselves, but thought i'd make an exception. I was in the market a few months ago for a new monitor and as the last time I bought one was over 5 years ago much had changed (both how I use a computer and what is available). I mostly multitask between coding, emulators, emails, web and chat which means I need a lot of screen real estate to avoid alt-tabbing every 2 seconds. The monitor I had at the time was a 24" Acer monitor which was fine, but was VGA driven and I have a Macbook Pro Retina  which required converting from DisplayPort to VGA. For reference, I have two brands of this converter, the official Apple one and a 3rd Party. Both are terrible and are prone to flickering and general crappiness. This more than anything coupled with not enough screen pushed me to get something different. So, after a few weeks of research I settled on the LG 29EA73 With it's super wide aspect ratio at 21:9 vs my old 16:9, I c...

One of the features I missed from XBMC after I done the transition to Plex was the ability to add apps/plugins and customisations. Now I get that Plex's goal is different to XBMC's ie. the later is to be the jack of all trades and the former is a more refined experience, but sometimes it's nice to be able to add a few more things and make it your own. If you've used Plex you'll know that "Channels" (found on the main menu) is in fact a method in which to access features which can be added to Plex which are not part of the core app. I think out of the box you can add features like BBC iPlayer and Youtube, which are must have's for any serious media center. If you need more than this, like say for instance a "Channel" which allows you to forcefully update your library remotely, then the Unofficial App Store is the way to go. More instructions on how to enable this are at this forum post: https://forums.plex.tv/index.php/topic/25523-unsu...

Recently I grew tired of my complex XBMC setup for the house and decided to see what all the fuss was about with Plex. I'd heard about Plex many years ago as an alternative to XBMC, but at the time that was all it was, just another variant of XBMC. Targeted primarily at Mac users, I had little interest because XBMC was also available and it was very good and more customisable. However. Plex got serious! It's barely recognisable compared to what I remember. What stuck out for me: Incredible ease of pairing my NAS with the Media Center's using a email address and password (plex.tv account) Installation and setup on my Ubuntu based NAS was simple and didn't require any command line foolery The availability of Plex for iOS, Android and the Raspberry PI (not officially supported but works great) The great web interface allowing access from anywhere to my content Airplay support (although this is in XBMC as well) Built in transcoder! Channels for BBC iPlayer, e...

Some time ago I bought a new Macbook Pro and gave my old one to my wife. She loves it but it already had a good few years on it. It was a Macbook Pro 13 (Mid 2009) and was in need of a good home. At the time since I had my fancy new machine, so the normal maintenance cycle i'd do on a 2-3 year old system just floated by. My wife isn't a techy so naturally she put up with the bad battery life and the performance issues and just put it down to the "Crapbook" :-) Enough was enough! There being nothing technically wrong with the system, fans were operating as expected, memory wasn't dropping address's and even the HDD, a 500GB Hybrid Momentus XT was working great. The battery I actually replaced about 6 months ago because it was lasting all of 40 minutes, got it off ebay and was easier to install than the HDD upgrade. The only clear reason for bad performance was that after years of OS upgrades from the original version of OS X to the very latest, it was fina...

Been meaning to post about this one for a while, but I suppose with some actual experience using the system now i'm better placed to give some real feedback. The Hardware So before getting started, the following are the various bits of hardware I had to purchase from Amazon: 1 x  Raspberry Pi Model B 512 MB RAM Latest VERSION 1 x  PCSL Brand - Cyntech BlueBerry Case for Raspberry Pi with adaptor to fit to VESA 100 Monitor 1 x  FLIRC USB Dongle for Media Centre / Raspberry Pi / XBMC 1 x  UK Micro USB Power Supply Charger For Raspberry Pi - 5V 1000mA 1 x  Edimax EW-7811UN 150Mbps Wireless Nano USB Adapter I already had a few SD cards lying around, so I just used an 8GB SD card that used to be in my SLR. It was actually one of these: 1 x  Sandisk Ultra 30MB/s SDHC Card 8GB Putting it together is not complex. The case I bought fits the RPI perfectly, just slots into one half and just attached the other. Couple of screws later and it's ...

Wow, what a nightmare Sky Fibre is. All I wanted to do was replace the crappy Sagem wireless router with my Asus Black Diamond router and it turned out to be a 3 week sprint of reading about Asuswrt, Tomato and udhcpc. Turns out that yes, it's a pain to setup, but it's definitely possible... and with the stock firmware! :-D So, how does it all work? Well, firstly, the Sagem router communicates the with BT OpenReach modem like any other ethernet based device, except it uses MER (MAC Encapsulated Routing) to authenticate the device so that you can't just plug in any old router. What does this actually mean? Well it means the Sagem router sends some very specific information to the OpenReach modem, the client id. This client id is naturally not found in any configuration screen, you have to sniff it out of a DHCP packet to get it. You have to connect your laptop/system via ethernet to the Sagem router and make sure nothing else is connected. Then give your laptop/sy...

So it's been some time since I last posted. Much has happened since then, some big life changing events but all good thankfully! My life has settled down a little bit now so have found myself with some free time. I thought then it would good to start posting on blogger again; about something new and not media centre related. Although, plenty of that to come as OpenElec and XBMC has been making big waves since last year. Over the Christmas period just past I was able to get myself a shiny new Macbook Pro Retina while out in the states. Amazing machine. I'll save you all the usual amount of "it just works", but really it just does. After getting back I immediately set about customising and getting it to a place I was happy with everything. However, one thing I was lacking was easy ways of getting to information on the system without having to run up several apps. If I wanted to get my IP, I could either use the terminal or the network preferences, if I wanted to c...

Normally I wouldn't write a post for something so trivial such as a memory upgrade. In a normal ATX or AT form factor Desktop PC or even a modern laptop, it normally isn't that difficult to upgrade the system memory. In fact this was one of the first things I learnt to do when playing around with my dad's old system, an Intel 486dx based system with Windows 3.11 installed. However for those who own a ER1401 they will know that it's form factor, case design, etc is compact and I had some challenges while doing the upgrade. Here are some notes for others which if I had known in the first place would have helped me: Please note that this is not a complete list of instructions and that if you attempt to do this, that you may (and probably will) cause some damage to the chassis due to the fact it was never designed to be opened!  I done the whole upgrade i.e. Opening of case, removal of old memory and installation of new and rebuild in around 30 minutes, but if you ...

In my previous post I talked over the experience I had with the initial upgrade. It wasn't the smoothest of upgrades to be sure, however it's always a good upgrade when it works without my better half knowing anything has changed :-D I also mentioned some issues I was having, specifically the following: VGA Mode error on boot Audio set to Analog but coming through HDMI anyway Thumbnails on my shared drive don't seem to work with the new database, this is either because XBMC Eden index's them differently or that during the migration from the old to the new format, there was a conversion fault in the DB. However I haven't checked this out yet in more detail, could well be something entirely different. Well the good news two out of three of these issues are solved. Details below: VGA Mode error on boot So it turns out that a fix that I had to put in place with a previous version of OpenElec caused problems for the newer version. Specifically the splash scree...