My Quick Fix

Problem
I need to send a mate a link to an item on eBay after breaking his strimmer. The nice people at eBay have reworked their URL structure recently to improve SEO, so a link to a single item now looks something like this:
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Medium-duty-bump-head-for-Kawasaki-brushcutter-strimmer_W0QQitemZ190302614007QQcmdZViewItemQQptZUK_Home_Garden_GardenPowerTools_CA?hash=item2c4eeb71f7&_trksid=p3286.c0.m14&_trkparms=65:12|66:2|39:1|72:1686|293:1|294:50
..which is not exactly Twitter, Live Messenger or email friendly. Long URLs break often in email and instant messengers when they ‘wrap’ at the end of a line (like the above is doing).
Solution
Here’s the old style linking system that still works: http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=190302614007
So you can use that structure for a …

Problem
I’m now using ZoneEdit to handle the zone record for new domains. It gives far more control over the zone, and is very quick with updates etc.  I needed to setup one particular domain so that all traffic to that it – and any subdomains – went to one IP address. A ‘catchall’ if you like.
For example: ‘myquickfix.co.uk’ and ‘www.myquickfix.co.uk’  have A records pointing to 82.109.178.44. If I needed the subdomain ‘pants.myquickfix.co.uk’ to point to that IP also, I could add a CNAME record, or another A record. But if …

Problem
Every so often when I’m typing, usually when I’m coding because I use so many shortcuts, the at sign ‘@’ and double quotes (”) get swapped. Annoying!
Solution
When this happens it’s because I’ve accidentally pressed ‘Shift + Alt’. THis key combo causes Windows to switch my keyboard (input) language to US. The easiest way to stop this happening, is disable the ‘Shift+Alt’ shortcut:
1) From ‘Control Panel’, open the ‘Regional and Language Options’.
2) In ‘Regional and Language Options’ window, select the ‘Languages’ tab, and click the ‘Details’ button inside the ‘Text services and …

Problem
I’ve just had to convert a photoshop visual to a wordpress template. The designer wanted a bulleted list where the bullets themselves were very close to the list items, and were small dashes. Cross browser support for list item and bullet styling is ropey at best, and to make things perfect I’d have to resort to browser specific styles.
Solution
The solution I think I’ll be using for the rest of my ‘web’ career will be this. JUST FORGET THE BULLET ITEM, and use positioned background images instead.
In the stylesheet, add styles …

Problem
A colleague was having trouble getting a DVD imported to Adobe Premier for some overlay edits etc and asked me to take a look.
Solution
VOB files are MPEG-2 files with a different coat on. Rename the .vob file to .mpg and it should work. This also works in Sony Vegas and probably other software. No idea how copy-protection on some disks might effect this?
That really WAS a quickfix and probably not worth posting. If you have any questions, thoughts or corrections please post a comment below.