Category Archives: Guides

Tips, tricks, and guides around pitfalls of technology.

Fix Plex Placing Albums into “Various Artists”

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Plex is a pretty nifty media server and app for deices such as Roku. However, with a large music library, it can do some goofy things. One of the most annoying is placing albums under the “artist” Various Artists (when they shouldn’t be there).

Case in point, two albums that I ripped from CD ended up in this category. The first was Jay-Z’s The Blueprint 3, and the second was Daft Punk’s Discovery. Neither of these should be under Various Artists. What was the problem? Plex’s media scanner picks up on the Artist ID3 tag. If for a given album there are two or more artists it will throw it in the Various Artists group. The easy solution is to use an ID3 tag editor (EasyTAG and Kid3 are two open source options) to clean up and homogenize the artist field for all tracks in the album.

-John Havlik

[end of transmission, stay tuned]

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vBulletin Style Breadcrumbs for WordPress

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vBulletin is a somewhat popular forum software package that has a unique breadcrumb design. Rather than the normal, single lined breadcrumb trail, it drops the current item’s breadcrumb to a second line. It also happen to have two folder icons for flair, but those are trivial to add in with CSS3. Even without CSS3 adding the icons is fairly easy (set as a non-repeating background image).

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Fixed: BSODs Caused by garmnusb.sys in Windows 7

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Since Windows 7 was released, I have had intermittent BSODs when plugging my Garmin Forerunner 305 into its USB cradle. The cause of the issue was always garmnusb.sys. A little searching shows that many users are experiencing the same issue. No one had a solution that worked consistently. Sure, you could connect the Forerunner before booting the PC, but that’s quite inconvenient.

A few weeks back, out of curiosity, I tried clicking on the “Update Driver” button for the device within Device Manager. To my surprise, a new driver was available.  Garmin released version 2.3.1.0 of the driver back in April.

Since updating to 2.3.1.0, I have not experienced any BSODs on my system. Going from crashing every other time I connected my Forerunner to zero BSODs is a great improvement. Unfortunately, this is something Garmin should have had fixed three years ago, before Windows 7 was released.

-John Havlik

[end of transmission, stay tuned]

Make Firefox Use Dolphin for “Open Containing Folder”

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In KDE 4, Konqueror has been replaced for the most part by Dolphin for all folder/directory viewing. However, by default Firefox will end up opening Konqueror if you right click on a downloaded item and select “Open Containing Folder”. It would be nice if Firefox would open the containing folder for downloads in Dolphin. There is a simple way of achieving this, and no command line work is required!

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Using Schema.org’s Breadcrumb Microdata with Breadcrumb NavXT

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Note, that Schema.org breadcrumb has been replaced by the newer BreadcrumbList. Please see the How to Implement Schema.org BreadcrumbList with Breadcrumb NavXT article for more information.

Unlike Google’s Breadcrumb micodata format, Schema.org’s microdata format for breadcrumbs is very easy to implement. There is no need for nested tags, or overly verbose and redundant tags. Instead, there is just two modifications from the standard Breadcrumb NavXT setup.

Breadcrumbs are a property of the Schema.org WebPage CreativeWork type. The first thing you must do to use the Schema.org microdata is declare the body of the (x)HTML page to be of type WebPage. You’ll need to modify your current WordPress theme so that the opening body tag is:

<body itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/WebPage">

Once we’ve declared our body to be of type WebPage, all we have to do is include itemprop=”breadcrumb” in the div wrapping around the breadcrumb trail. For example, we’d use:

<div itemprop="breadcrumb" class="breadcrumbs">
    <?php if(function_exists('bcn_display')) { bcn_display(); }?>
</div>

That’s it! Note that this does not work with the included widget in 4.0.1, and is something that will be changed for the next release.

-John Havlik

[end of transmission, stay tuned]