This post describes how to remove the hard drive from a new Sky+ HD box (2014/2015). It turned out to be trickier than I expected and I couldn't find much on the Internet to help so thought I'd write a quick post. Firstly, you need to remove the two grey plastic panels on the sides.  This is done by removing the two screws on the far left and right at the back.  Once these screws are removed, if you look under the box, you can see a piece of black plastic that can be lifted and a triangle shaped gap:  So, whilst lifting the black plastic with your finger, put a flathead screwdriver into the triangle shaped gap and lever the grey plastic backwards so it slides out. Next, you need to remove the black plastic casing.  To do this, remove the two screws in the deep black holes on the bottom of the box (near the piece of black plastic that can be lifted).  Once these are out, locate another piece of black plastic that can be lifted on the botto...

When editing HTML and CSS, normally I use Visual Studio which has great intellisense and automatic formatting.  I've been using OS X a lot recently and wanted to find a similar editor that was Mac compatible.  I was keen to find something free as my HTML authoring needs are fairly light.  I stumbled upon a great little open source editor called Brackets  by Adobe. Brackets has the usual colour coding and automatic formatting as well as intellisense.  What makes it differ from the rest is live preview capability so you can see your code changes in the browser as you type.  It also has an inline CSS editor so, at the press of a button, you can see and edit the relevant CSS rules applied to a selected HTML element (see screenshot above).  Pretty impressive for a free piece of software!

I recently finished reading The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt. It's an excellent book for anyone looking to change the way they think about work. In a nutshell, it states that the goal of a business is to make money and that, in order to achieve this goal, you need to increase throughput of sales, reduce operational expense and reduce inventory. Throughput of sales is the rate at which money is generated through sales (i.e. the money coming in). Inventory is the money that has been invested in purchasing things which are intended to be sold (i.e. the money invested). Operational expense is the money that is spent in order to turn inventory into sales (i.e. the money going out). The key to reducing inventory and increasing throughput of sales is not to look at each local area and optimize but instead to look at the entire system. Start by identifying the Bottlenecks (resources whose capacity is equal to or less than the demand placed on them) and non-bottlenecks (resour...

An excellent post on my WordPress blog which I had forgotten about.  It contains a few custom Google Analytics dashboards such as an  SEO Monitoring Dashboard .  Well worth a look if you're a website administrator with access to Analytics and a keen interest in search engine optimization.

In this post, I describe the symptoms, possible causes and resolutions to 0x8007000D and 0x80070032. When a Microsoft IIS scan performed by XIA Configuration fails with the error "Could not obtain the IIS 7 Configuration Section 'sectionname'" and the COMException code returned is 0x8007000D, the cause could be: 1. 0x8007000D Services configured within the Web.config file that are not available or installed on IIS.  To fix this, modify the web.config file so it only includes valid directives for services that are installed on IIS. 2. 0x80070032 The web.config of the specified web directory is configured with a serviceModel directive however the required server role is not installed.  To fix this, determine if the serviceModel directive is required in the web.config. If it is not required, it should be removed from the web.config file.  If the serviceModel directive is required, the appropriate .NET services should be installed.

Engadget award winner for best pc at CES 2014, this is Razer's project Christine.  As you can see, it has a stunning modular design, which makes replacing parts as simple as inserting them into one of the many expansion bays. This redefines the meaning of plug-and-play!  I love the control panel display on the front. Check out the video here:

Previously, I've talked about using Google Webmaster Tools to  discover relevant keywords to SEO .  An easily missed feature of Webmaster Tools is 'Pages'.  This can be accessed by clicking the Pages filter at the top of the page. The pages on your site with the most clicks from a Google search are then shown at the top of the results table. If a page has enough traffic, you can expand it to reveal the search queries used to find that page.  This also includes the Impressions, Clicks, Click Through Rate and Average Position.  This is all very useful if you're keen to find out how visitors are getting to your site when they search on Google. You might find some keywords with lots of Impressions but very few Clicks.  This could be because your page title and description aren't very compelling or it could be because your average position is low and you're not on the 1st page of Google.  You can combine this information with the  Average...

When you're using AdWords to find out average monthly searches for keywords , it can be difficult to think of all the relevant keywords for your website.  An easy way to find out this information is to use Google Webmaster Tools . Assuming you've already added your site to Webmaster Tools, login, expand 'Google Index' in the menu on the left and press 'Content Keywords'.  You can download this data as a CSV.  This can then be copied into AdWords to find out the monthly searches for all the keywords on your site.  You can then sort this data to find out which keywords are searched for most often.  Remember to use the advice I gave in this post to work out which keywords to SEO first. As well as keywords, you can also obtain search queries from Google Webmaster Tools.  To do this, expand 'Search Traffic' and press 'Search Analytics'.  This data can also be downloaded as a CSV and then copied into AdWords. This is very useful for worki...

This post from MSSQLTips.com mentions a few  SQL Server Documentation Tools .  Among them is the SQL server documentation tool XIA Configuration.  The software automatically generates documentation with branding that can be modified to apply your own look and feel. Change tracking is built-in so you can view and compare the historical configuration of your servers. Reporting functionality is also included so that you can audit your environments and get the data you need to help both IT and business users. Download Free 30-Day Trial > Learn more >