HowTo: Download and install Windows Live Movie Maker

Unfortunately, Microsoft seems to have gone to extra lenghts to make the Windows Live suite of software go away, without anyone thinking that there were people who were using them and without offering file/project-level compatible replacements for user-friendly tools like Windows Live Movie Maker.

Only Windows Live Writer was at some point reincarnated as the Open Live Writer opensource software at http://openlivewriter.org/. Hope Microsoft will do the same at some point (some community pressure and offer for opensource work on it would help of course) with Windows Live Movie Maker at least. I’ve seen that one used by educators since it’s very user friendly. It is a pitty to force them to throw away their older student projects when they get a new machine (I’m not aware of any video editing tool that can import Windows Live Movie Maker’s XML-based project file [.wlmp]).

Luckily, people have managed to locate the latest archived versions of the offline software installers (obviously the web installers won’t work anymore) for various languages (need to pick the same language as the one your OS UI is displaying in) at the Internet Wayback Machine (arthive.org) website.

Copy-pasting the links (they point to archived versions at archive.org) for the latest version released (build 16.4.3528.0331, April 17, 2014) below (in case Microsoft decides to make that discussion thread disappear too in the future) from:

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windowslive/forum/moviemaker-wlinstall/what-to-do-before-movie-maker-goes-away-jan-10/8b3a5345-7840-4a2c-922a-cf24d10771f7?page=2&msgId=7fbd8015-d7af-44ed-b81d-0d73e8abac45

as posted by the user “considerate_guy”

updated links to the Archive.org copies of the *latest* versions (build 16.4.3528.0331)

• Arabic
• Basque
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• English (United Kingdom)
• English (United States)
• Estonian
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• French
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• Gujarati
• Hebrew
• Hindi
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• Indonesian
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• Kannada
• Korean
• Latvian
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• Malay
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• Polish
• Portuguese (Brazil)
• Portuguese (Portugal)
• Romanian
• Russian
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• Serbian-Latin
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• Slovenian
• Spanish
• Swedish
• Tamil
• Telugu
• Thai
• Turkish
• Ukrainian
• Vietnamese

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HowTo: Install Skype desktop on Windows 10 (for older webcams)

On Windows 10, Microsoft (they’ve acquired Skype some years ago) provide a Windows Store app for Skype, however Universal Windows Platform (UWP) apps like that one don’t support older webcams (even the ones embedded in not-that-old laptops).

Unfortunately, Microsoft hasn’t bothered to provide some frame grabber driver to bridge with DirectShow-based etc. older webcams that would allow modern UWP apps to work with such older webcams that do function fine with classic (Win32) applications, provided their classic Windows drivers are installed.

What’s worse though is that although Skype provides a Windows desktop application download at their website (https://www.skype.com/en/get-skype/), when that one is launched on Windows 10 (probably that is the can on Windows 8 too), it just shows a message that one should use the respective Store app and takes one to the respective Windows Store webpage. They haven’t bothered to consider all those users that don’t have a supported webcam on UWP and force them to move to the Skype UWP-based Store app. Note that they could have placed the classic (Win32) Skype application on the Windows Store too (which now supports deployment of such applications via a technology called Desktop Bridge), but I don’t think they’ve considered providing that option to the user either.

So a workarround I had to do on my laptop was to trick their desktop application installer into thinking it was running on Windows 7. To achieve this can right click the .exe file of the installer and select “Properties” (should be the last option at the popup menu shown).

Then, from the “Compatibility” tab select to run in compatibility mode for “Windows 7”. Press OK to close the dialog and just run the installer again, this time it will proceed fine to install the desktop application for Skype which should work with your older webcam, provided you’ve installed the camera drivers at your system. If it still doesn’t work, checkout the webcam diagnostics tool from http://noeld.com/programs.asp?cat=video (and also try webcam with the classic Win32 AMCap application provided there to see if it does show a video feed or not).

Workarround: IE11 changing download file extension to .zip

At ClipFlair Gallery, apart from opening a ClipFlair activity in ClipFlair Studio, downloading of an activity (.clipflair) file is also supported.

However, because the component serialization file format of ClipFlair Studio is XML plus media assets packed in .zip archive (with nesting allowed, where components and whole activities can be placed in other activities), Internet Explorer 11 (and probably other browsers too) was downloading .clipflair files as .zip (changing their file extension).

At first, I thought that occured because I was using MIME type “application/zip” at the IIS web server/site settings for that file extension. So then I tried to change it to “application/octet-stream” hoping that one would be treated as an “opaque” data stream.

However, eventually I ended up setting a custom MIME type “application/clipflair” for the file extension “.clipflair”, because even with “application/octet-stream” (as with the “application/zip” that I had before), IE11 was still saving the .clipflair file as .zip (obviously detecting the zip content in the download stream).

<?xml version=”1.0″?>
<configuration>

<system.webServer>

<directoryBrowse enabled=”true” showFlags=”Size, Extension”/>

<defaultDocument>
<files>
<clear/>
<add value=”index.html”/>
<add value=”Default.aspx”/>
<add value=”Default.html”/>
</files>
</defaultDocument>

<caching>
<profiles>
<add extension=”.log”
policy=”CacheUntilChange”
kernelCachePolicy=”CacheUntilChange”/>
</profiles>
</caching>

<staticContent>
<mimeMap fileExtension=”.log” mimeType=”text/plain”/>
<mimeMap fileExtension=”.clipflair” mimeType=”application/clipflair”/>
<mimeMap fileExtension=”.dzi” mimeType=”text/xml”/>
<mimeMap fileExtension=”.dzc” mimeType=”text/xml”/>
<mimeMap fileExtension=”.cxml” mimeType=”text/xml”/>
</staticContent>

</system.webServer>

<system.web>
<compilation debug=”true” targetFramework=”4.0.3″/>
</system.web>

</configuration>

HowTo: Show block on anchor hover and click to keep open with CSS

I was looking for a way to show a hidden HTML element with just CSS (no Javascript) when mouse hovers over an anchor (say over a “more…” note), while at the same time also supporting touch-only (no mouse) clients, where clicking should show (and keep open) that same element.

I ended up combining solutions and comments from
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18849520/css-show-hide-content-with-anchor-name and

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5210033/using-only-css-show-div-on-hover-over-a#5210074

into

https://jsfiddle.net/birbilis/23nt74se/

Achieved the following behaviour:

• Can hover over an anchor to temporarily show its respective more info block
• Once the info block is open, hovering over that one too (having left the anchor above it) keeps it open (useful to select and copy content from the item)
• Can click on an anchor to show its respective more info block and keep it open. Only one such block is kept open at a time. If multiple exist and you click on another’s anchor, the last one is shown and kept open instead (this doesn’t affect what is temporarily also shown via the hover mechanism).

Notes:

• Could show the item inside the flow or float, e.g. using inline-block instead of block (https://www.w3schools.com/css/css_inline-block.asp)
• I use the :target CSS selector in a bit different way than the original suggestion had, I just set the anchor to jump to itself for easier maintenance of IDs and targets and maintenance-free CSS when adding more targets.
• The anchor with the “openhelp” class must be placed immediately before the item with the help class, since .openhelp:hover + .help is used (https://www.w3schools.com/cssref/sel_element_pluss.asp)

At Trafilm Gallery Metadata forms I ended up using yet another variation with simpler syntax, where the anchor and help text is placed inside a parent div that has text for the item the help is about and that div is marked with class “question”. See https://jsfiddle.net/birbilis/s3kaknt9/ – When the parent questions already have an ID, this has the benefit that you don’t need to add an ID to the anchor, just an href, plus when clicked it scrolls to the parent item (the question) instead of to the help item that is at the bottom of it which would put the question text out of the view when the help link is clicked, if the question is far enough down the page for it to scroll when targetted by the openhelp anchor.

Fix: Windows Update 0x8e5e03fa, 0x800703fa errors

Sometime ago, I was receiving errors 0x8e5e03fa and 0x800703fa on several pending updates at Windows 10’s Update pane (found at Settings / Updates & Security / Windows Update from the Start menu).

The updates history wasn’t showing many more details, but could see Knowldege Base article numbers (KBxx) for some pending cummulative updates.

Trying to update some graphics drivers from the Device Manager (can access that by right clicking the Start menu button and selecting “Device Manager” from the popup menu shown on Windows 10), by right-clicking respective devices and selecting to update their drivers, was also failing.

So it did look like a systematic issue, not some issue with some specific update item.

Looked up the error code 0x8e5e03fa via Google and found this article mentioning a JET (database engine) error. That’s the same engine used in Access if I remember well, interesting that it’s getting used by Windows Update too (probably to maintain some private database).

The suggested fix didn’t work since the file mentioned in that article was not existing, but at that folder (%windir%\system32\catroot2) I found a dberr.txt file that obviously was holding some error log.

Printing out that file (can use TYPE dberr.txt | more to wait after each “page”), I couldn’t help but notice that it was writing JET error all over it.

I renamed that file (think it was then recreated again automatically) and also renamed the two folders there (using the move command – e.g. can type move, press TAB till the name of the folder appears and then add a minus sign and press TAB again till the same folder name appears and press ENTER). Did that while having the cryptsvc service stopped (using net stop cryptsvc command) as that article suggested. Then started the service again (using net start cryptsvc). 

After doing this, all failing updates (some extra driver updates had been found using DriverBooster, but were also failing to install) eventually installed fine and Windows 10 started bringing more updates:

HowTo: open older Pi SD card via USB multi-reader on Raspberry Pi

After doing

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get upgrade

on an older Raspbian installation (at a 4GB SD Card), some corruption occured (probably due to lack of space, since I see newer NOOBS asks for an 8GB SD Card), making it unbootable. Would only show the NOOBS splash screen, but couldn’t boot into Raspbian.

I just needed some audio files from the desktop of that older installation (it was an unattended looping audio player for an art installation).

So I prepared a new SD Card with the free SD Card Formatter utility and put the latest NOOBS files in it. Booted the Raspberry Pi 2 with it and installed the latest Raspbian OS (full) from the menus. This time doing again the above two commands from a terminal and rebooting didn’t cause any problem.

However, I was searching for the files and couldn’t find them. I had gotten a bit confused at first, since when plugging in the reader it would show a dialog asking whether I wanted to open a file explorer, but then it would keep that dialog again and repeat the action till I closed the dialog. Then I read

…in Linux when there are more slots in a card reader, only the one labelled LUN 0 is read unless other tools are installed to read the other luns. If your SD slot is not LUN 0, then the SD card will not be seen.There are a lot of pages on web about this, I will be installing a package called sg3-utils that is supposed to enable reading other card reader slots.

at this thread https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=11397 and just in case I did:

sudo apt-get install sg3-utils

from a terminal and then tried plugging in again the USB card reader with the older SD card.

This time I was patient and instead of closing the action dialog that was shown after executing the suggested action (open with file explorer), I repeated it for three times and respective file explorer windows came up, then the action dialog closed by itself. The three windows were showing different partitions that had been found in the SD card, and one of those windows was showing “/media/pi/” folder. I navigated from there to “root/home/pi/Desktop” subfolder, where I could see the old desktop contents and drag-drop the audio files I was looking for to the new desktop.

Fix: Wordpress administration UI content area showing up blank

Some time ago, at a WordPress 3.3 blog, a friend was getting a blank main area at the administration UI (just the menu was showing up there) when they visited the classic URL of the form http://somesite/wp-admin/. Here is a writeup of some notes I had kept while troubleshooting that issue and then upgrading to newer WordPress, with updated theme and plugins.

Visiting the problematic admin UI page online, I right-clicked and selected View Source in the browser and browsed to the bottom of it where it was showing: 

That div tag wasn’t not closed with a matching closing div. Obviously some PHP code that was outputing that tag failed at that point.

For starters, I copied all files via FTP (with the FireFtp Firefox plugin) from the remote server locally (into my Dropbox). Useful for backup too in case I messed up something.

Could use grepWin tool (http://stefanstools.sourceforge.net/grepWin.html) to search all locally copied php files for “contextual-help-sidebar” and see which one was outputing this (if that string was assigned to some variable could then search again where that variable was being used).

However, WordPress also has debugging mode, so I edited wp-config.php and uploaded the edited version to the server replacing the old file. I changed WP_DEBUG setting to true below: 

 

At the problematic admin UI online page again, I right-clicked and selected View Source in the browser and browsed to the bottom of it, this time reading:

This led to indentifying the exact place in the PHP code that was causing this issue:

So, I commented out the buggy PHP code, converting it to an HTML comment block instead of a PHP block:

and the admin UI was working again after I pressed ENTER at the address bar again to refresh the admin UI (http://somesite/wp-admin/) and it was not showing up fine (F5 function key didn’t seem to really refresh the site when using Firefox btw, probably some caching issue).

Then installed (the free version) of the WP Database Backup plugin for WordPress:

http://www.wpseeds.com/documentation/docs/wp-database-backup/

by searching for “Backup” at

http://somesite/wp-admin/plugins.php

and evaluating the different backup plugins listed there (judging from both their votes and by checking out if WordPress wasn’t saying at the details page of a plugin that it hasn’t been tested with that [old] 3.3 WordPress version that was on that site) and backed up from Tools/WP-DB Backup menu:

http://somesite/wp-admin/tools.php?page=wp-database-backup

Then Downloaded the MySQL backup (.sql) file, so now I could update Themes, then Plugins, then update WordPress to new Core from

http://somesite/wp-admin/update-core.php

Did keep copies of the wp-content/themes and wp-content/plugins folders before and after updating them of course.

After WP updated, it asked to update the DB, all went ok

Then did backup up again the database via the WP-DB Backup tool and went again to

http://somesite/wp-admin/update-core.php

and installed an update for one of the plugins (can also do update per-plugin from http://somesite/wp-admin/plugins.php)

Then backed up again every file (db not included there) via FTP and done.