How To Make Your Own Automatic Baby Rocker From A Baby Bjorn Bouncer And A Maxi-Cosi Car Seat

There are no decent automatic baby rockers on the market. For example, the Robopax Baby Rocker that we tried out is functional in principle, but in practice, did not deliver enough of a rocking motion to soothe our 2-month old baby Benjamin.

The Baby Bjorn Balance Bouncer was sold to us as a way for a baby to self soothe themselves. It requires tiny amounts of force to create a large bouncing motion which babies love. However, young babies tend not to be able to propel themselves and so young baby Benjamin always seems to need an extra push. Unfortunately for me, it's meant that for many sleepless nights, I've been reduced to a glorified baby rocker, gently nudging the Baby Bjorn Bouncer and rocking him at all hours of the night whilst slowly losing my sanity. (Other sleep depriving attachment parenting techniques include holding him in a sling and sleeping on my tummy).

North London Dim Sum Interactive Map And Reviews

View North London Dim Sum in a larger map 

The aim of the follow list is to create a comprehensive list of dim sum restaurants in the north London area, between zone 2 and Hemel Hempstead.

How To Share Google Calendar on iPhone, Blackberry and Android

Smartphones offer hyperaccessibility to shared information - they are as powerful as computers, they always-on our persons and they are always connected to a data network. With the right settings, we can instantly share huge amounts of information automatically thereby making communication powerful and seamless.

My wife often asks me to pick up something from the shops before I get home from work. She has a few options to communicate this information with me whilst I am away:

A) She can call/text SMS/email the shopping list. This would efficiently deliver the information to me. However, if she wanted to add or remove items from the shopping list, she would have to send another call/text SMS/email with the additions or changes, resulting in multiple and fragmented copies of the same shopping list information.

B) She can add the shopping list as a task in her Google Calendar (which is shared with my calendar). This will instantly show up as a notification in my own calendar on my smartphone. Furthermore, she can edit the task to add or remove items from the shopping, and this information will be instantly updated on my smartphone.

Change What Programs Are Loaded When Your Computer Starts Up

It's a common misconception that a computer will work less and less well and get slower and slower the older it is. The reality is that most computer slowness is software is due to what programs are being loaded when you start your computer. Applications that people install on their computers spawn smaller applications that load when Windows starts. For example, if you installed iTunes on your Windows PC, then you have also allowed it to install the 'iTunes helper' which loads up every time you boot your computer. All this program does is open up iTunes when an iOS device is connected, and it occupies approximately 50mb of a computer's RAM. Lots of these kinds of programs are loaded up on your computer. By going through the following guide, you can disable the loading of these programs and make your PC boot much faster.

Step 1) Press Win + R.

This allows a command box to be run in administrator mode.

Stream The Daily Show, The Colbert Report and South Park From Anywhere In The World

Current and up to date episodes of The Daily Show, The Colbert Report and South Park are available for flash video streaming for those living in the US. However, these shows are restricted for people outside of the US. With this method I'm about to go through, current episodes can be watched from anywhere in the world.

The method has worked since January 2010. It does not require the use of a proxy service and it works by changing the user agent in one's Firefox browser.

Step 1) Open Firefox and install the Add-on from this address: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/967/.

Step 2) Restart Firefox, and then click Tools -> Modify Headers.

Essential Windows Tools For Seamlessly Migrating To A Solid State Drive

Switch from a standard platter drive to a solid state drive can have a drastic reduction on loading speed. It is definitely the preferable options for loading large complex applications or loading data intensive games. However, with the prices of SSDs being so high compared to HDDs, it's not possible to find solid state drives with storage sizes like1tb without spending a fortune. The best option is to consider a hybrid approach and to place your most and critical applications on the SSD, and to keep a high capacity HDD for use for storing and backing up media and data.

In the past, the only real way to do this without reinstalling your operating system was to clone the older HDD and then restore the image onto the new SDD. This would require reducing the size of the original drive to fit onto the smaller SDD, and to engage in a fairly lengthy and complicated process of cloning and restoring. However, there are some free tools that you can use in Windows which will allow seamless moves of data from one drive to another, without ever having to reformat, clone or image your drives. The tools listed in this guide can also be used to migrate or upgrade to any other drive, be they larger or smaller than the origin drive.

Turn Any Old PC, Laptop Or Netbook Into A Flexible Media Centre

More and more people are experiencing streaming video as the primary source of video entertainment. For example, most students at college or university rely on their laptop for their source of (usually illegal) video content such as movies and television shows. However, with legitimate services like Lovefilm, Hulu, YouTube, BBC iPlayer and 4OD, a truly immense catalogue is available at one's fingertips (not to mention PPStream, a very impressive video streaming client). The problem is that most people are still consuming online video via their PCs at their desks. Video content like movies and television shows should be enjoyed as they were designed to be viewed; to be watched in the living room and shared with friends and family on the big TV screen.

Watch PPStream In English On Windows

PPStream is a streaming video player popular with users in mainland China. The technology PPStream uses is a combination of YouTube and BitTorrent. Users can stream video instantly, storing the data on their computers, and then upstream this data to other users.

What is unique about PPStream is how centralised and organised this content is made available to users. The range is phenomenal - it includes DVDs, camcorders of current films in cinemas, Asian dramas (from China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Korea and Japan), and most importantly, a gigantic range of American and British movies and TV shows. Almost all of the content is moderated with care, and most sources include subtitles in Chinese (Simplified). For example, the entirety of Lost seasons 1-6 can be streamed, as can Battlestar Galactica (dual subtitled in English and Chinese), Mad Men, True Blood, The Simpsons, Firefly, as well as more obscure things like British snooker games, pro StarCraft II matches, Little Britain, Australian Top Gear, The IT Crowd, the British rebooted Sherlock Holmes series, etc.

For this reason, I believe that PPStream is the most ridiculously, blatant and well organised wholesale infringement of copyright that has ever occurred on the internet. The content streams are very fast, the software and website is centralised and user friendly, and the breadth and range of content is staggering.

Make World of Warcraft Load Faster Using Solid State Drives

Solid State Drives are in their infancy in terms of mainstream adoption in the PC market. Barring the cheap SSDs found in notebooks, finding an SSD that offers good performance can be very expensive. The price to storage ratio is of an SSD very poor when compared with traditional hard drives. For example, a 128gb SSD will cost around £213.99 whilst a 7200rpm 250gb HDD will cost around £28.71.

With huge cost and tiny storage spaces, SSDs are not really meant to be used for replacing your 500gb of storage of movies or even for your games collection. However, in a game like World of Warcraft, SSDs make a huge difference in terms of speed increase in loading times. Any loading speed boost has a multiplicative effect on the entire game experience. This is because logging into a character, taking a ship between continents, dying in a dungeon and entering an instance or a battleground will take a long time if you are running from a slow hard drive, whilst a SSD will make your loading speed up to 60% faster.

Fixing Lord Of The Rings Online Borderless Windowed Fullscreen

Update 20 March 20120: please refer to this page on PCGamingWiki for further updates on borderless fullscreen windowed mode for any game.

I've been trying to figure out a way to fix the windowed border issue present in games such as Lord Of The Rings Online (LOTRO) in Windows. Usually when trying to run a game in borderless windowed fullscreen, I would set the resolution to the monitor native resolution and  use the program ShiftWindow to coordinate the screen so that the borders would not be visible (guide). However, games like LOTRO forcefully resize the window so that the border is always visible, no matter how you try to manipulate it. So I thought about some other solutions, and hopefully some more intelligent person will help me to figure it out, and in turn, help to fix the same issue in lots of other games too.

Civilization V And Borderless Windowed Fullscreen

Update 20 March 20120: please refer to this page on PCGamingWiki for further updates on borderless fullscreen windowed mode for any game. 

I've been trying to make Civilization V work using my normal method of windowing the game, and then using the program ShiftWindow to push the game to fullscreen (guide). However, it hasn't been working as well as I had hoped. Firstly, the windowed border refuses to stretch to the correct aspect ratio of the screen, so that it always leaves a border either at the top or the bottom. Secondly, the mouse is not bound within the window, so mouse edge scrolling is disabled (mouse scrolling is an important part of any game involving large amounts of units and terrain).

Buy New Games For Less Using Graphs

Buying games is an expensive hobby. The key to saving money is to resist the urge to impulse buy on the day of release. However, game companies are making it harder and harder to wait for prices to go down as they pile on tempting preorder bonuses and collector's editions for games that you may have been waiting for years to be released. However, the key is knowing how long to wait, and how to get the best deal.

Camelcamelcamel
There is a new service is available called camelcamelcamel uk which is an Amazon price tracker which is what I have been using to produce these graphs. It started tracking prices in March 2010, so it's a perfect tool to see how much prices of new games can drop within 6 months.

For demonstration I've take a look at the price fluctuation of Just Cause 2. Just Cause 2 was released on PC on March 26th 2010. This was retailing at an RRP of £34.99. This game began retailing in most establishments at £29.99, including Steam. Incindentally, Just Cause 2 is one of the few games whose serial key within the box will allow a Steam activation. A handy list of other such games is available on Steam Support. As of 23rd September it is available at the price of £29.99 on Steam. However on the retail side of things, Just Cause 2's price has dropped much further than that.




Data involving 'used sales' has been removed leaving only Amazon stock price (green) as well as the 3rd party new price (blue). The lowest price is available from a reputable 3rd party store called 'gzoop' which offers Just Cause 2 for £9.87 + £1.99 shipping which totals £11.86. This is a 61.5% drop in price from the original retail price of £29.99 after just 6 months, between March 26th and September 23rd 2010.

You can also check the current price of Just Cause 2 here: http://uk.camelcamelcamel.com/product/B002ZRQ3U.

The lesson here is to be patient, because games often fall in price much faster than you think!

Do PC Gaming On Your Couch Or Sofa

Sometime in the last console generation, it became unfashionable to sit at a desk to play games. This happened sometime around the release of Halo, when - shock horror - people sat on their couches to play a first-person shooter of all things. Although there were plenty of FPS games released on consoles before this, none had quite succeeded as well as Halo did in bringing the hardcore game to the mainstream audience. In turn, this meant that millions of people previously playing Quake and Counter-Strike at their desks turned to their couches to get their hardcore gaming fix from games like Halo and Gears of War.

It is easy to see why people have turned to the couch to game. Firstly, it's just much more comfortable to sit on a couch than at a desk. People spend 8 hours a day working at an office, going to classes, sitting all day and people don't want to do that when they get home. Secondly, whatever TV and sound system that you have invested in also do double duty for whatever multimedia experiences you have, for example, high definition movies, music and TV can be piped through the same equipment. Why invest in a 5.1 surround sound system for your PC when it could be used in the living room for your whole family to enjoy? Thirdly, gaming in front of the TV on a couch is a more welcoming and social than your PC. The TV has replaced the fireplace as the warm thing that families huddle around. The couch is a 3-player co-op chair.

The PC wasn't designed to be used from the couch. It was designed to be used with a keyboard and a mouse whilst sitting at a desk. PC gaming, however, can exist in the living room too. Nay, the PC is best in the living room. Why play the watered down Xbox 360 version of Mass Effect when you can play it in glorious 1980x1080 at 60 FPS from your couch on your TV?

The reason people don't do this is because is firstly, it costs a lot. But more importantly, people have no idea that it can be done comfortably and without ruining the look of your living room. If you have the means, a few simple purchases can transform your living room couch and TV into the ultimate PC gaming setup.

Auto Sync And Backup Any Savegames On The Cloud For Free

Or How To Integrate Steam Cloud Features Into Any Game

Updated 19th January 2011: changed name of Windows Live Sync Beta to Windows Live Mesh 2011 to reflect name change of the service. At present, the program, service and UI are identical to Live Sync Beta.

A World of Warcraft Interface folder being synced.

The Steam Cloud is a service that allows the synchronizing of savegames and settings from one computer to another. This means that one could play a Steam game on one computer, and then when logging into Steam on another computer their savegames and preferences would automagically be transferred. This is a feature on many Steam games such as Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead, Torchlight, Trine, Half-Life 2: Episode 2, Plants vs Zombies etc. However, although Steam Cloud is not available for all games it is still possible to sync savegames over the cloud using a program called Windows Live Mesh 2011. This free utility offers 2gb of storage (soon to be upgraded to 5gb) as well as automatically cloud syncing and peer to peer syncing.

Windows Live Mesh 2011 is far superior for the purposes of PC gamers to other popular syncing cloud services such as Dropbox. This is because Dropbox only allows a single designated Dropbox folder to be automatically synchronized. If you wanted to have automatic backup and syncing of say, your Mass Effect save game, you would have to either 1) manually copy the files or 2) create a fiddly symbolic link. Windows Live Mesh 2011 allows you to specify individual folders. This makes it possible to be extremely flexible in exactly what you want to synchronize. Windows Live Mesh 2011 also gives the option of direct peer to peer transfer bypassing the cloud, which gives a very good performance boost to certain syncs between computers and networks. Anyone who has used Dropbox or older versions of Mesh will know that it takes a long time to sync large files only through the cloud, so the peer to peer option is welcome.


Guide To Syncing Any Savegames Using Windows Live Mesh 2011

Step 1) Download the latest version of Windows Live Mesh 2011 using this link: http://explore.live.com/windows-live-essentials-beta. Windows Live Sync Beta is only available as part of the Windows Live Essentials Beta package. Make sure you only install what you need to (make sure to install Live Sync).

Install Flash Without Administrator Priviliges

Offices and schools around the world do not and will not allow Flash to be installed on their machines, therefore depriving millions of users their YouTube and Flash games. This is a quick hack to make sure that you can access Flash on any Windows based computer.

Step 1) Download and install Firefox Portable. This is a version of Firefox that is designed to be run from a USB stick, and can be installed on any computer including those without administrator privileges. Make a note of where you have installed this program.

Step 2) Right-click and save the file in this this link: http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/get/flashplayer/xpi/current/flashplayer-win.xpi and follow these instructions:

a) Save Link As...

Reorder Activities On A Logitech Harmony Remote

Part of the Harmony Remote FAQ:
9. Is there a way to reorder devices and/or activities?

For remotes that have physical buttons for activities, you are not able to reorder the activities listed under the "More Activities" option.

Logitech support states that the Harmony 600, 650 and 700 (and possibly other Harmony remote controls) do not have the native ability to 'Reorder Activities'. This means that if the remote chose to place your favourite 'Activity' on the 4th page, you would have to scroll there every time you wanted to access that 'Activity'. This ordering feature is missing on the recent versions of the desktop software (7.7.0), despite the fact that previous versions of the software supported this. This workaround functions by accessing an older web version of the software (7.3.0) which is still works on newer remotes, although not in the most user intuitive way.


Reordering Activities Hack For Harmony 650

Step 1) Login to the following website: http://members.harmonyremote.com/. If you have been using your Harmony desktop software, this will have all of your settings stored here.

Play Any Game In Borderless Windowed Fullscreen (aka Maximized Window)

World of Warcraft and StarCraft II fullscreen side by side, as God intended.

Update 20 March 2012: please refer to this page on PCGamingWiki for further updates on borderless fullscreen windowed mode for any game.

Games like StarCraft II and World of Warcraft provide the option to run their game in "Windowed Fullscreen" (aka Maximized Window). Also modern Valve Source games such as Left 4 Dead, Alien Swarm and Half-Life 2 natively support this mode, calling it "Windowed (No Border)". This is basically a normal windowed game where the window has been stretched to fit the screen in such a way that it looks maximized (by hiding borders of the window and the title bar).

This has several advantages to running a game in traditional fullscreen mode:

1) Ability to alt-tab quickly at any moment, even during loading screens.
2) Does not disturb multi-monitor set ups during loading.
3) Generally more stable experience.

Guide To GPS Stalking Using iPhone, BlackBerry and Android

For whatever reason, you might want to keep tabs on exactly where your wife/husand/girlfriend/boyfriend/teenage daughter, etc. have been all night (for their own "safety"). In the past, you had to rely on them to telling you the "truth" about where really were.

Thankfully we can bypass all of this guesswork if they happen to own either an iPhone, BlackBerry or Android device, which all contain GPS chips. These devices are capable of pinpointing and broadcasting exact locations at all times over the air. It's actually very simple process to view a smartphone's location just by configuring a few free apps.

Remember, always consult the owner before you make any changes to their device. And as always, with great power comes great responsibility.

WWSD
What would Spider-man do?