"It's Not A Computer Mum" Media Player PC - Toshiba U400 Mod

Just after New Year, the backlight on the screen of my Toshiba U400 decided to give up. After 7 countries, over 20 flights, 100’s of trips in my backpack, and 2 years and 2 weeks of use it wasn’t happy anymore. The simple solution to this problem is to replace the light, or if necessary get a new inverter. Boring.

Stock U400 Photo – as usual I forgot to take a picture of mine first

My better half had decided on getting a MacBook Air (I don’t really like it but I can see why some people would absolutely love it, it’s what a Netbook should be, but with OS-X) so she would be giving me her laptop, which was better than mine. Time for a project. At my parent’s house computers aren’t allowed in bedrooms until Uni. My sister is only 16 so still has some way to go. At the moment she uses the internet on the DS Lite I gave her after “Lights out” for important Facebook business. While checking emails etc. on the DS is fine, it’s not really useful. So this project was destined to be a surprise present for her when I got back from Japan.

The idea was to have essentially a media centre PC, something to keep all her music, videos and pictures. I wanted it to play the music and videos well enough for viewing from her bed (her head would be about 2.5m behind the desk) but most importantly give her the internet. Not just so she could check stuff that seems important to her (but really isn’t ) but for Skype. Me and my brother live far away from her so the only real contact we get is by phone. Currently she has to Skype on the family computer which offers no privacy, this way she would be able to talk freely (and watch BBC iPlayer from her room).

Edit The Widget Title Text In Blogger

An important consideration in making your blog is how much coordination you want it to have. If you want individual designs for each widget in your blog then individual coding is required, if however you want to add a global effect to a series of similar attributes, then read on to find out how to edit the widget title text in Blogger.

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If you look at the columns on the right of this blog, you will notice that the titles to the widgets have little chevron images before each of them. Here is a guide on how to do the same to your widgets. This works especially well if you couple it with related images for your post titles.

Fix Image Thumbnails In Blogger Popular Posts

You may have noticed that for the past couple of days any new posts you write refuse to show up with thumbnails in the Popular Posts widget (the official one!). There is a temporary fix floating around the internet that I will outline below. Hopefully Blogger will get this fixed automatically.

The problem has something to do with the image hosting for the thumbnails, but I won't go into that. In order to get the thumbnails to show you need to do the following to the first picture in your post, you do not need to do it for all.

After adding the picture into your post, switch to Edit HTML. In this section you will find a part that looks like the following (look for the first one, at the top):

<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://www.nintendo.co.uk/NOE/en_GB/nintendo_3ds_23802.html"
 imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"
 target="_blank&quot;"><img alt="Nintendo 3DS Logo" border="0" height="56"
src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/--AWSNblmvZA/TWt8UC2yFDI/AAAAAAAAAI0/vY8suL7AggQ/s400/3DS+Logo.png" title="Nintendo 3DS Logo" width="400" /></a></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">

You need to change what is highlighted in orange to the following:

src="http://lh6.ggpht.com/--

You can do this to older posts too by editing them after and it will load up new thumbnails in the widget. (The part where is says "lh6" may be different for your images so leave it as it appears in yours.)

This does work, but it needs to be done to all posts so I hope Google gets this fixed as soon as possible.

Add A Widget (Menu) Above The Title (Header) In Blogger

Browsing around websites you may notice that the vast majority have a small menu bar at the very top of the page. This sometimes adds consistent functionality to the site on all pages, or like the one on this blog adds basic quick links and some info. Adding this is a simple way to make your blog look more professional, or just to add some fanciness.