Monthly Archives: September 2010

Sep 15

Using VLC as a workaround for DVD Region Codes

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Despite industry efforts to enforce DVD region limits, there are a lot of legitimate times for using DVDs coded for other regions in the in the US. A great example of this is in schools. Most international DVDs that are perfect for History courses and specifically for World Language courses where teachers want students to see and hear the language with native speakers in local context. Since the typical built-in applications with Windows or OS X have artificial limits to the number of times you can change regions, something is needed to bridge the gap.

Enter VLC. This is a wonderful piece of free and open source software for multimedia playback. They are even branching out into media conversion. It is a very mature tool and highly recommended. Using it instead of the Apple DVD Player.app or the built-in Windows apps you may be using is a great solution.

Other workarounds might include resetting the region change counts, etc. with the programs but that is a waste of time IMHO. Once you download and do the drag and drop install (on Mac OS X) you will be able to go into your CD/DVD System Preferences and change the mapping of what to do when you insert a DVD from the Apple DVD Player to VLC.

Changing the Insert a video DVD Preference

After you have mapped it there in your System Preferences (in OS X) when you insert a DVD of whatever region, VLC will launch and give you an initial controller palette. Pressing play will then prompt for the user to tell it where to obtain the media and in general all you will need to do is click over to the ‘Disk’ tab as it will recognize the DVD and click play. You also have full-screen viewing options as well. Playing the DVD through VLC will not prompt for a region code change.

VLC is not only great for handling region code issues with DVDs, but great as an all-around media player for Quicktime movies, .avi and other formats.

Sep 14

Page Break on Value Change in Microsoft Excel

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Ran into a tough time with having Excel performing automatic page breaks based on value changes in a cell. For example, it makes sense one would want to have a separate page for each grouping of data based on the same value in a column for a row. Looked around the internet for a solution on this and did not want to get into having to build macros or go crazy for something I knew was built-in to the program.

The simple way to accomplish this is to sort by column of your worksheet, then use subtotal and check the

Page Break Between Groups

checkbox. Seems easy enough and should work. Initially, it didn’t. The reason why it did not work was related to the fact that the page setup for the printer in Excel was set to ‘Fit to’ scaling. This is very common to do with Excel so you can get the width of the print area selected in the worksheet to fit on a printed page. Well, when you do that in conjunction with the subtotal page break, the scaling wins. You don’t get your automatic page breaks on value changes (subtotal counts) in Excel.

So, just make sure that scaling is off and you just have it set to 100% like this.

If you do the subtotal count (and you can even move the totals to a column outside the print area to get it out of printing with the rest of your data) and have your printing page setup set to 100% and off any type of ‘Fit to’ scaling, you should be able to get the automatic page breaking on Mac or Windows versions of Excel. I was working with Excel 2008 on the Mac and Excel 2007 on Windows in testing.

Sep 01

USB Device Sharing: Solution for Old Printer Driver

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I had a situation where we have a perfectly fine Epson Stylus Photo R2400 that is a few years old now but still a quality printer but we had been using it with 3 iMacs in a lab area. The Epson printer driver has some nicer features than the Gutenprint one that ships with the Apple drivers and we wanted to have the printer driver be set to that.

Via direct USB, the printer driver worked fine. The Epson driver was developed for PPC I believe and since it is such an old printer, it probably is the last version we will see. Rosetta also needs to be installed to handle it, but that is pretty-much automatic. So direct USB is fine and if you do printer sharing on the iMac that has a direct USB connection, you could get the machine that was piggy-backing on the sharing iMac to work with AppleTalk. But, when we upgraded to 10.6.x we lost AppleTalk on those iMacs and we lost the Epson driver nice stuff on two of the three computers. Sharing via Bonjour or IP did not work for the Epson driver, so we had to figure another solution out or re-purpose the printer.

So, enter the IOGEAR GUB431 4-Port USB Automatic Printer Switch

IOGEAR GUB431

It can be used without software, but the software is a critical piece because it can be set to do automatic switching. After setup, we got the old R2400 going and the three iMacs into the switch. Each iMac sees the native USB so the driver is happy and shows all the options the users like and the USB switch is smart enough to handle switching between the computers when a print job is dished to it. The default software setup is to have the computer printing grab hold and own the printer for 3 minutes then let go, but I changed the settings so it would automatically let go when needed by other iMacs. It seems to be working well and we will keep testing it with users to see if it can handle what we need. I like the solution and well worth a try to keep a perfectly good piece of hardware going even if the vendor might have some driver issues across the network. We could have tried a print server on ethernet, but I was hesitant to try it since printer sharing wasn’t even working. To clarify, one could print via Bonjour printer sharing, but NOT with the extra driver features Epson bakes-in to the USB type of connection which is a major deal for us.

The device has Mac and Windows software and seems very solid. So far, so good.

For more info checkout

http://www.iogear.com/product/GUB431/