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 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

An important choice to make: your browser, New update from Microsoft KB976002 is not very user friendly

Today a new Windows Update has been installed (KB976002)  which after booting up your PC will show a screen with the title..

"An important choice to make: your browser".
The window has a title of "Information Regarding Web Browsers".

It has an OK button to click on, if you click that then it shows the screen I have pasted in here, it also shows this if you click on the close button.
It shows a random selection of 9 choices of browsers.
Below each one are two buttons labelled "Install" and "Tell me more".
Apparently this update is something to do with Microsoft having to make people aware that they do have a choice as regards which web browser they wish to use, so the “Web browser choice screen” has been added to Internet Explorer users in Europe, its required by the European Commission.
This windows update is being rolled out in March 2010. So if you have not seen this yet then you will very soon (unless you have turned off Windows updates).

I think this browser choice screen is very badly thought out because there is NO option to click "I am happy to stay with my current browser choice, Ignore and don't remind of this again".
On my PC I have the latest versions IE8, Firefox, Opera and Chrome already installed yet as you can see the screen that shows does not say "Already installed" below those browsers.
Surely this is a fundamental error in the layout of this screen as its not very obvious what you need to do to ignore this Browser Choice screen.

If you click on the "Select Later" button then this just hides the Browser Choice window until you reboot next time.

On my Windows 7 machine, when you reboot after this update has installed you will notice that the shortcut to IE on your Quick launch taskbar has gone! I bet lots of people are going to google "My Internet Explorer icon has vanished on Windows 7" after this windows update has gone on.
You will notice as well as the IE8 icon vanishing from your quick launch bar that you now have a new icon on the desktop called "Browser Choice", if you run that then you will get the browser choice window.
I guess the idea of this is to force you to choose IE over other available browsers.

On my XP SP3 machines , when you reboot after this update has been installed it actually runs the Browser choice window without any interaction.

So what do you need to do?
Windows XP:
Well if you are happy with what you already use and want to keep things as they were simply click OK on the first screen then close the second screen. Now delete the Browser Choice icon from your desktop.
Reboot and thats it back to normal. It won't bother asking you ever again.

Windows 7:
Well if you are happy with what you already use and want to keep things as they were simply click OK on the first screen.
If you want to keep Internet Explorer goto the task bar and right click on Internet explorer and select "Pin to Task bar" then close the second screen. Now delete the Browser Choice icon from your desktop.
Reboot and thats it back to normal.
I do not have Vista any more so not sure how that behaves, perhaps someone can post a comment to say if its the same as Windows 7.

Hope this helps those people out there who are not sure.

The screen that shows when you click the OK button on the first screen takes you to this page :
http://www.browserchoice.eu/BrowserChoice/browserchoice_en.htm

For information about this Windows update :
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=976002

There is also a shorcut icon on the desktop which runs :
C:\WINDOWS\system32\browserchoice.exe

If you goto Start - Run and type msconfig and then click on the startup tab you can see its set to run browserchoice every time your computer starts up.


One thing I also don't understand is the selection of browsers its has to offer, Everyone I'm sure will know all of the popular ones such as Firefox, Opera, Safari and Chrome but also listed are several browsers that I have never heard of, also some that have not been updated for ages such as Maxthon which seems to have been abandoned back in 2008.
As a web designer I have kept en eye on what browsers are popular as things change over the years. There is an upto date table month by month which shows which browsers are popular. See this here :
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp
As you can see people KNOW they have a choice of web browser with Firefox being a clear winner these days.
People that only use Internet Explorer are most likely people that don't even know that there are different browsers available, so to suddenly offer a bewilldering range of browsers to these people is going to cause trouble.

I dare say in the days to follow this update will cause lots of chaos with PC users not knowing what to do.

Andy