XBMC–Some YouTube videos refuse to play

I noticed that a few YouTube videos refused to play. Having searched around, I came upon a thread in the XBMC YouTube plugin code repository;

https://code.google.com/p/youtubexbmc/issues/detail?id=95#c217

martinpe...@gmail.com  linked to an updated YouTubePlayer.py file;

YouTubePlayer.py

Copying this file to your XBMC Addons directory, over the existing file, fixes the problem nicely.

Evidently, some YoutTube videos have a ‘$’ in the JS function name, which confuses the original plugin. This plugin replaces the ‘$’ in the function names with ‘_S_’

Hope this helps somebody!

Visual Studio 2013 Update 2 – Navigation Bar Dropdowns not working

Seems as though the VS team introduced a bug in Update 2 for Visual Studio 2013, where the Navigation Bar Dropdowns don’t work if you are using VS on a screen which is to the left of your “Main Screen”;

When you have VS running on your second (or third) monitor, clicking on the Navigation Drop Downs has no effect;

In order to workaround the problem, you either need to set the screen you have VS running in as your main screen, using your graphics properties, or alternatively move VS to your main screen……

Frustrating…

Hopefully this will be cured in a future update..

Wordpress Contact-Form-7 Not Sending–”Spinning Arrows”

I recently had an issue with a new Wordpress install, where the Contact Form wasn’t sending correctly, instead hitting the Submit button would simply show the Spinning arrows animation, with no Mail Sent.

I was also using the Really Simple CAPTCHA plugin, which may have had a bearing on the issue too.

After doing some digging around I found a couple of forum posts which helped;

http://venugopalphp.wordpress.com/2014/01/08/contact-form-7-really-simple-captcha-permission/
http://wordpress.stackexchange.com/questions/13367/how-to-resolve-failed-to-send-your-message-problem-for-contact-form-7

Combining these two gave me a solution which worked;

1. Set the Permissions of the “wp-content/uploads” directory to 777
2. Open the “p-content/plugin/really-simple-captcha/really-simple-captcha.php”
   
   Change;
   
   

   /* Image type. 'png', 'gif' or 'jpeg' */

           $this->img_type = 'png';

           /* Mode of temporary image files */

           $this->file_mode = 0444;

           /* Mode of temporary answer text files */

           $this->answer_file_mode = 0440;

   
   To;
   
   
   
   
   

   /* Image type. 'png', 'gif' or 'jpeg' */

           $this->img_type = 'png';

           /* Mode of temporary image files */

           $this->file_mode = 0777;

           /* Mode of temporary answer text files */

           $this->answer_file_mode = 0770;

   
   
3. Install the “WP-Mail-SMTP” plugin and configure it to use your website’s email address smtp settings etc
   
4. Modify your Contact-Form-7 Contact Form settings;
   
   From:
   
   
   To:
   
   
   Where you should replace “info@yourdomain.com” with the email address you have configured in the “WP-Mail-SMTP” plugin.

Adding the Additional Headers, allows you to still reply to the original sender.

Skype Login Screen not Rendering Properly

Recently I had an issue where my Skype login screen wasn’t rendering properly, showing something like;

After doing some searching around I found the following Skype forum which had a solution;

http://community.skype.com/t5/Windows-desktop-client/Skype-6-10-0-104-BIG-Login-screen-problem/td-p/2064269/page/6

Turns out that this is caused by a registry key setting css to text/plain rather than text/css.

Simply setting “HKEY_LOCAL_Machine > Software > Classes > .css > Content Type” to “text/css” cured the problem.