How To Archives

The main subject of this site: how to get something done, further divided by tags.

How to re-open a closed Tab in Firefox

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Hey I’ve been there more times than I can count: close one or several tabs, only to think, “dang – I needed to keep that one open. What was that URL again?” Looks like I’m not alone, because many browsers support a feature that lets us re-open an accidentally closed tab. I use Firefox, and … Read more

How to embed your latest YouTube Video with responsive CSS

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I’ve recently had to update the code that’s responsible for pulling in my latest YouTube upload on the front page. I had previously used a solution that uses the channel name rather than the channel ID. Apparently that API has stopped working and I had to find a workaround.

In addition to making it work again, I also wanted my embed to be responsive and look handsome on all screen sizes. The trouble is that regular iFrame embeds use a static size for the video (like 600×360 or 800×480), but being the future-proof thinking kind of guy that I am, I wondered if there was a way to make this dynamic. The “height=auto” trick didn’t work for me, but thankfully I came across a great piece of CSS that adds this feature.

Let me show you both parts to solving this puzzle.

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How to specify a resolution when connecting with NoMachine

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I control most of my local computers around the office with NoMachine. It’s the only client that lets me start several GUI heavy apps from the command line without running into some type of issue (like OpenGL driver shenanigans). You can download it from NoMachine.com for free, and I absolutely love it. One thing that’s … Read more

How to recover from a 6-beep BIOS error on a HP Z600 / Z800 Workstation

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Funny story: I was setting browsing through the Z600 BIOS today trying to optimise an issue I was investigating, when I came across an interesting option I thought I’d fiddle with: the PCI-e compute option. You can find it under Advanced PCI options I believe. I thought perhaps it’ll turn my two GPUs on the … Read more

How to get the URL to your next Live Stream on YouTube (stream now)

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YouTube’s Studio “forever Beta” interface is in a continuous state of disarray. At the time of writing, and since 2018, we’re seeing a partially upgraded interface with plenty of deep links into the older YouTube Classic experience. 2020 is almost half over, and YouTube have upgraded half of the Live Streaming experience (Events). However, the Stream Now option is still Classic, and as such has a few issues that won’t be fixed (until we see the rest of YouTube’s upgrade… at some point in the indeterminate future).

The issue that I sometimes have is to find the URL to my new Stream Now live stream. With events it’s not a problem, but Stream Live Classic will often show us the generic live URL to our channel (say https://youtube.com/TheWPguru/live) rather than a direct URL with an ID. It entirely depends on the channel. On some you’ll see this (generic):

where you’d really like to see this (direct ID):

The latter is preferred because you can start chatting with people before you go live, and you can give out this link before the event begins. Although the generic live URL will work, the event will not be accessible when you start streaming the next time.

Thankfully, there is a way to extract the correct direct URL from the new YouTube Studio interface, but it’s not entirely obvious. Here’s how to grab it:

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