Adjusting the screen resolution in VirtualBox

VirtualBox 4:3 screen-ratioFor almost two years, Windows 8 is now on the market. So enough time to find hundreds of reasons to set up a virtual machine running Windows 8. Unfortunately, you are greeted by the form factor of yesteryear already during the installation.
In plain language, the aspect ratio of the sceen was in 4:3 ratio, which looked really ugly on my laptop which is in widescreen format.
After the installation I wanted to resolve the “problem” by adjusting the screen resolution, but realized that I only had a choice between various resolutions in 4:3 factor.
Let us come to the thing – how can we fix it? The problem lies in the lack of support of the graphics driver. Normally this can be fix by re-installation of Oracle’s so-called guest expansion. But […]

Build your own homeserver – what’s the right system?

Homeserver im Eigenbau - DatacenterA couple of days ago, a friend of mine (and co-worker) and myself talked about the topic of homeservers, because we both were looking for viable solutions to make our files available in our home network. During our discussion, the following points were brought up repeatedly: price / performance ratio, processing power, storage, security, performance, power consumption (or operating costs) and flexibility.
Right from the beginning we discussed all solutions that weren’t called (Hardware-)NAS and rather quickly waved goodbye to the solutions that came our minds.
The Fritzbox as a NAS – And it lived happily ever after…
For example, one of the cheapest solutions that we thought of would be attaching an (or multiple) external harddrive via USB to our Router (Fritzbox) and configure the Fritzbox as a NAS. Most of the hardware would have been available already, power […]

Rebuild Spotlight index in MAC OS X

Rebuild Spotlight indexSince not long ago I have also become a proud owner of an Apple product. After 10 years of Windows-monarchy, the first Apple device, a 13“ Macbook Air, has managed to enter my IT scene, with the result that from now on, in addition to the Windows articles and occasional Linux articles, there will be also some articles about Apple/ MAC OS X.
But let us now get back to the actual topic. The universal search tool Spotlight in Mac OSX is without doubt very powerful. But if Spotlight strikes and if it doesn’t find all apps or files, it loses its sense. In such cases it could be helpful to set the index up again or reincorporate even just a single app in the index.
Narrow down the problem
If Spotlight doesn’t provide the desired search results anymore, even though the […]

Update: Cloud Downloader 2.3

Cloud Downloader Version 2.3In September I brought out the last cloud downloader update. Now today I’ll release the next version for you. With the last update there have been some changes to the download logic in order to respond to the changes on the SoundCloud website. Unfortunately, my algorithm was not 100% bullet-proof, so in playlists only the first 10 songs have been displayed.
In addition to that SoundCloud began to stream some songs exclusively as rtmp stream, so I had to rework the download logic another time. I look forward to your feedback and hope you enjoy the new downloader.
Changelog (Version 2.3):

Bugfix: Possible to search playlists of any size (the 10-song-limit was removed)
Bugfix: Fixed 404-errors while downloading (by adding RTMP support)
Feature: The actual status of a searchquery is shown (this helps you while searching big playlists)
Refactored: Reworked the download logic and routines for wider support
Refactored: Wrote the threading parts again for better overall […]

Update: Cloud Downloader 2.2

Cloud Downloader Update 2.2 - Soundcloud DownloaderThe last release of my Cloud Downloader was round about one and a half year ago. But since then there was no solid ground to release a new version. The Cloud Downloader worked flawlessly since it’s last release and also there were no noteworthy feature requests.
But in the last two days I got several mails and comments telling me that the Cloud Downloader stopped working. So I opened my IDE, stepped into the code, started debugging and worked on a bugfix. And what should I say – here it is!
Today I’ve released the new Cloud Download 2.2 which got some bugfixes and one, simple new feature.
Changelog (Version 2.2):

Bugfix: Search- and download functions got repaired.
Bugfix: The downloader doesn’t crash any longer, if […]