NOT Dexter's Lab

There are so many great plugins for WordPress and Buy Me a Beer is one of them. It enables your blog users to donate you money through Paypal encouraging them with specific phrasing. One of the problems of the current Buy Me a Beer release, is that it doesn’t allow to choose the language of the Paypal donation page. To overcome this issue, here’s the trick: in buy-me-beer.php, look for $paypal_link and $paypal_contentlink variables. They should look like this:

$paypal_contentlink =  "https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_xclick&business=".$options['business']."&currency_code=".$options['currency']."&amount=".$options['amount']."&[...]

$paypal_link = "https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_xclick&business=".$options['business']."&currency_code=".$options['currency']."&amount=".$options['amount']."&return=".$options['thankspage']."&lc=US&item_name=".str_replace(" ","+",$args['title']);

And add, after the first & in each of the occurrence of the variable, the string lc=US& including the “;”. You can change the language of the page by specifying a different country code instead of US (which stands for United States, so an English page is displayed). Query your favorite search engine for a list of country codes.

I knew it, Vista is just like a child: it shouldn’t be drinking old Alcohol (are you laughing?). Ok, let’s stop it. A dear friend of mine had a strange problem on her Vista PC just after an old version of Alcohol 120% was installed. Vista simply refused to boot, even in safe mode. After a gathering some information on the net, I found out (from Alcohol Software Support forum) that she needed to boot the system with Vista rescue disk and to delete an Alcohol driver. Pretty easy, huh. But she didn’t have a rescue disk. But hey, I found a solution to that too I told her to open her PC, disconnect all the cables from the CD drives and try to boot. Vista started and she was finally able to replace the old Alcohol with the latest working version

The lesson: unless you like vintage crap, just use up-to-date software!

I really would like to know what would you say if you left your boss laptop on his desk running a defrag software (JkDefrag) and a few hours later he calls you shouting that it doesn’t boot anymore. Well, you would probably say more or less the same things I did (huh, let’s just not write them here )! For some reason the piece of junk (notebook) reboot itself while the defrag operation was in progress and most of the data was corrupted. Symptoms?

• Windows Vista not booting after POST
• mount command (Linux) not mounting Windows NTFS partition

While trying to resist the impulse to boot Windows recovery disk to run chkdsk, I stumbled upon a great live linux distribution called Trinity Rescue Kit (TRK from now on), which helped me to recover part of the lost/corrupted data.

Disclaimer: I am not responsible for any damage or corruption to your hardware, software or data. Continue reading at your own risk.

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A friend of mine, who helps running a very small TV network in my city, asked me if I could help finding a affordable solution to a problem he had. He needed to connect two studios using a ~20Km wireless bridge, in order to make it possible for a studio to stream live video to the other. The receiver was required to have an analog output (example: SCART), so that it could coexist with other equipment. Since I love Dreambox I gave it a try

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So here we go with tip #2 for this great plugin. I wanted to show both the flag and the name of available languages on my wordpress sidebar. The function responsible for checking available languages is polyglot_list_langs, which I had to modify a little bit to suit my needs. Ok, let’s stop talking and start coding

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If you need to publish the work on your WordPress blog in two or more languages, there is a great chance that you will be using Polyglot. It is a great plugin, works nicely and allows to publish multiple translation of your texts. I tried to enable the language sidebar in my theme, but somehow things got weird (the list was misplaced). Digging through polyglot code, I found a way to fix this behavior. Just follow those few simple steps…
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