Premier Inn Hotels - How to connect your Media Player, Video Camera, Digital Camera, Games Console etc to the Television in your hotel room.

If you stop in Premier Inn Hotels then you may well have looked at the back of the television in your room and wondered how do I connect my own stuff to those video inputs. Looking on the remote control they give you its not possible to select anything. Well I have the answer to your problem.
With my guide you will be able to connect your media player, Video Camera, Digital Camera, Games Console etc etc and watch on your tv in your room. No longer are you limited to Freeview, load up your media player with what YOU want to watch!

This guide relates to the Philips FlatTV Screen LCD TV. Model No. 20HF5335D/05 known as a "Hospitality Television" because Philips designed it specifically for hotel use. These seem to be the standard TV used in Premier Inn Hotels.

I have created a detailed guide for you here :
Premier Inn Hotel TV,  How to connect your Media Player, Video Camera, Digital Camera, Games Console.

My how to guide video on connecting your devices to the hotel TV :

Hope this helps anyone wanting to connect their equipment.
Feel free to link to this blog the video or my web guide from Facebook etc.

If you found this of use then please leave a comment on either my YouTube video or this blog post.

Thanks
Andy

How to make a 2013 personalised calendar from your own photographs, easy to follow video tutorial. Free templates provided.

My 2013 Calendar Tutorial Guide.

Looking for a personalised gift this Christmas that will be enjoyed all year?
Its less than four weeks to Christmas day and your wondering what to get, how about creating something unique that nobody else will have?

Three years ago I created a set of calendar templates and a video tutorial on how to use them.
The free 2013 templates have a decorative framed image area into which you can import your own images to produce the nice edge effect below.

My tutorial has proved very popular with over Nineteen thousand people following my guide so far.

Here is an example of what you will be able to create using my free 2013 Calendar templates.
Go on make someones day this Xmas by giving them one of the best and very unique presents that they can enjoy all year.


My photograph of Duffield in Winter in one of my landscape calendar templates :

My calendar template with one of my photographs of Duffield used on it. YOU can create this !

 It will soon be Christmas and you may find this of use, I created an easy to follow tutorial on how to make a printed calendar using photographs YOU have taken.
The monthly calendar templates are provided free so you can make a unique gift for someone right now.
All you need is Corel PaintShop Photo Pro (or any photo editing software that supports layers such as Gimp, Photoshop etc), A colour printer, some Matt finish paper and 12 images of your choice.

If you are interested in giving it a go then have a look at my 2013 Calendar Guide page here :
Complete guide on how to make a 2013 personalised calendar from your own photographs. <-- Click me now to start making a great gift for Christmas.

I hope this has inspired you to have a go at producing a truly unique personalised Xmas present that you will be remembered for, for the whole year ahead. Use Matt Paper as I suggest and it will not cost a lot of money to make several of these calendars.

Matt Paper allows printing of high resolution images but has a finish that you can write on which you need for a calendar! Matt paper can be bought for as little as 4 Pence per sheet.




In my written guide I have supplied detailed instructions on how to use my templates with Photoshop and even the free image editing software Gimp.

If you do find my tutorial of use then please leave a comment on either the video or my blog post saying what you created.

Thanks
Andy

How to add a massive internal 2TB Hard Disk with Windows 7 on an ACER computer for less than £85

If you are starting to run out of hard disk space on your computer then its time to think about adding a new internal hard disk. I'm going to show you how easy it is to add a 2TB hard disk to a computer running Windows 7. Hard disks are so cheap these days that its not worth getting a small capacity one unless you have to because your motherboard will not support it.

The Samsung 2TB SATA-II Hard Drive from Amazon for less than £85 :

My new Samsung HD204UI F4 EcoGreen 2TB 32MB 5400RPM 3.5 Inch SATA-II Internal Hard Drive and SATA II cable.

In my tutorial here I bought an absolutely massive hard disk of 2TB (yes that 2048 Gb or 2097,152 Mb!) and it was only £84 delivered for free from Amazon :


This hard disk is a Samsung F4 EcoGreen 2TB 32MB 5400RPM 3.5 Inch SATA-II Internal Hard Drive with 3 Year Warranty This hard disk comes with a 3 year warranty and the Amazon price is better than anywhere else. The same item from Ebuyer with 3YW would cost £115. It only took 4 days to come from Amazon.

Before you buy a hard disk you need to confirm that it will work on your system and that you have the correct cables and know how to install the drive into the computer. I'm not going to describe that bit as there are many other tutorials on how to fit the hard drive into the case. Something which I have done hundreds of times over the years.

How to add a massive internal 2TB Hard Disk to Windows 7 on an ACER computer.
My computer is a Acer Aspire M3800 system running Windows 7, I currently have two physical hard disks installed. A 750Gb split into two partitions and a 500Gb drive that I use for storage. This 500Gb drive has become so full with my photographs and videos that I only have a few gigabytes of space left.
So time to install the new one!

The motherboard in this computer is an Acer G45T/G43T-AM3 v1.1 so according to the motherboard specs it has SATAII 3Gb/s connectors that support HDDs, Internal Solid State Drive (SSD), (Raid 0/1 Support). The Samsung HD204UI 2TB drive is a SATA-II drive so is perfect for this system.

At this point I will assume that you have physically installed the drive in your PC Case, Connected the power plug and connected the SATAII cable between the hard disk and the motherboard and booted up Windows 7.

Before you can use your new hard disk you have to prepare the drive for the system so it knows how to use it. This consists of allocating the free space as a partition, allocating it a drive letter and formatting it. Don't worry this process is so quick and easy using Windows7, you don't need to know anything technical. I have done screen grabs of the various panels that show up during this process.

1) First goto the Start Button and click on Control Panel then click on System and Security to get to this screen. In the Administrative Tools section near the bottom click on Create and format hard disk partitions.

In the Administrative Tools section, click on Create and format hard disk partitions.

2) You should now see this screen, this means the system has detected that a new unformatted drive has been detected. Simply click on OK to create the MBR for your new 2TB  drive.

The Initialize Disk screen will show because its found a new hard drive.

3) You will now see the Disk Management screen which shows all of your drives. You should see a new drive space which has a black line across the top of it like this below.
In my system my 2TB drive shows as 1863.02Gb Unallocated.

Here we can see the new hard disk showing as Unallocated.

4) Right-click anywhere in the Unallocated bar and select New Simple Volume from the popup menu.
A New simple volume wizard will show up.

5) Now you can decide how you want to use all that storage. i.e. do you want the whole lot as one drive or do you want to partition it into several smaller drives.
In this example I'm going to make one single massive drive of  1907,727Mb. Click next to get to the next screen.

6) Now you can assign a drive letter to this new drive. It will default to the next free letter but you may prefer to use a different letter such as S for storage or V for Videos. Click Next.

Here you can select a different drive letter to give to your new drive.

7) In the Volume Label field type in a suitable name so you can recognise it in when you view it in "My Computer" or Windows Explorer. Click Next.

Here you can type in a suitable name for the new hard disk.

8) It will now format the drive with your settings. This will only take a few seconds (unless you have unticked quick format) You should now be returned to the Disk Management screen and your new drive should now show as Healthy (Primary Partition).

Here we can see that the new partition is now ready to use.

9) So if you now goto My computer you should see your new drive ready to use. As you can see here we have a Drive S: called 2TB Storage which has nothing used so far.

Here we can now see our new hard drive showing as one drive. Drive S:

10) Now all I have to do is move all of my data from drive F: which was my old storage drive onto my new 2TB drive. Once I've done that I will remove the 500Gb drive as that's far too small to bother with :)

That was easy wasn't it !

2TB Backup Drive
Did you know that you can get something called a USB Hard Drive Enclosure or HDD Caddy?
This is a box that you fit your 3.5" SATA hard disk into and it allows you to use it as a portable mass storage device which is great for backing up your data. They come with a USB 2 connection, some even have USB 3 or Firewire depending what you need :

Make sure you have the correct cables to connect your new hard disk to your motherboard, there is nothing worse than starting to install your hard disk only to find you did not have a spare SATA cable.
The cable I bought was a latching SATA II cable :



Here are the SATA-II connectors on my Acer motherboard.

Here my new 2TB hard drive is connected to my Acer G45T/G43T-AM3 v1.1motherboard.

I hope you found this blog post of use. Please comment if it helped you.
Thanks Andy

How to play music from your iPhone through your car stereo using a Belkin FM Transmitter.

Belkin FM Transmitter for playing iPhone through your car stereo.


















How to play music from your iPhone through your car stereo.

My car stereo has a pair of AUX IN RCA sockets on flying leads at the back for connecting audio equipment to it but unfortunately at the time I installed the stereo I did not think I would ever need access to them so these are pretty much inaccessible without taking the dashboard to bits, not a task I really want to do.
So the easy way to be able to play music from the iPhone via the Car stereo is to use something called a FM Transmitter. There are many models of these available, some are dedicated for use with an iPhone/iPod where as others will work with any mp3 player via a standard headphone socket.

The model I opted for was a Belkin ClearScan FM Transmitter which I bought second hand from ebay. This consists of a small (about 3”) unit with a flying lead emerging from each end. Once lead has the standard iPhone docking plug on it which connects to the bottom of the iPhone. The other lead has a cigarette lighter plug on it.
See the photograph for how it looks. I dont think they make this model any more as there is a new one called the Belkin TuneCast Auto 4 for iPod/iPhone.




What does it do?
The FM transmitter takes the audio output from the iPhone and modulates it onto an FM radio signal which can be picked up via your car stereo. The transmission range is limited to just a few meters (as its designed to be used in a car). Its as simple as that really.

How to use the Belkin ClearScan iPhone FM Transmitter.
1: Remove the cigarette lighter from your dashboard, plug in the cigarette lighter plug from the Belkin unit into your cars cigarette lighter socket.
2: With the iPhone powered on plug the iPhone plug into the bottom of your iPhone.
3: Press the C button on the front of the Belkin unit and it will scan for a clear frequency and show it on the display. In my photograph it has found 107.0MHz is free to use.
4: Use the manual tune mode on your stereo to tune to the frequency it has found. So in my photograph tune in the stereo to 107.0MHz.
You will hear silence at this point.
5: Play some music on the iPhone by selecting the iPod icon then Playlists, Srtists or Songs.
You should now hear your music on your car stereo, Magic isn’t it!
If its an mp3 you are playing and your stereo has RDS then it will also show the song title.

This particular Belkin model has an extra feature in that it uses RDS to send the tile of the track being played to the stereo, so when you select a track it scrolls the song name across the screen.

Note: The volume on the iPhone can not be adjusted when connected to this device, its fixed at a standard volume.

I found this bit of harware very easy to use and for anyone out there who wants to play their iPhone music through their car stereo its perfect.

Andy

Silly Scissors, they have not really thought this one out. wtf!

Click on this photograph of some Scissors I bought from Wilkos (Victoria Chambers, London Road, Derby).
The Scissors are encased in plastic, now read the instructions on how to remove them from the packaging.

"To Open, Carefully cut packaging with Scissors".
Now hang on a God damn minute, the Scissors that I bought are still in the packaging so how on Earth can I use them to cut them out of the packaging that they are in!

Great if you own other pairs of Scissors but if your a first time Scissors owner or perhaps you broke your ownly pair of scissors then its game over man !

The packaging should carry a warning to say "These scissors should not be purchased unless you already possess a pair that work ok".

Are YOU a "first time scissors owner" or have you always had scissors around you?

Lets run with this scissors theme, but don't run with scissors obviously!

Andy