As the popularity of Design Shack grows month on month, we have decided to expand it further and increase it’s functionality. As well as offering the same great CSS designs as before, Design Shack now contains tutorials, news articles and a whole new way of looking at our gallery.

You now search by how you would like to be inspired - by Colour, Layout or Category. This opens up a new realm of functionality for CSS gallery websites and enhances navigation greatly. It’s much easier to submit your website to us, and navigating around is a breeze. Designs load faster and are much more optimised than before.

We hope you enjoy it, and feel free to send us your feedback!

For many people, iTunes has one major flaw - it’s only possible to organise and play TV shows which were purchased from the iTunes store. For people over in America that’s no problem, but TV shows haven’t made it to Europe yet and that means showing them on your iPod or Apple TV isn’t quite so straight forward. I had several TV shows in the form of DivX AVI files - Scrubs, Friends and Lost to name a few - which I wanted to be able to play on my new Apple TV. This is the process I go through to convert them to the appropriate format, and tag them with season information and artwork:

Step 1 - Convert the files

iTunes isn’t happy with handling DivX or AVI’s, so we need to convert that file to one that is compatible with iTunes - MP4. There are several ways to do this, one simple on is using Quicktime and exporing the file to Apple TV. However the best method I’ve found is a program called Visual Hub. It’s about £10 but really is well worth it for the quality files it produces. These are the settings I use:

These convert video at a good quality resolution with fairly high settings. For me, filesize isn’t really an issue - quality is more imporant - so these work well. It generally takes a little less time to convert the file than it would to actually play it, that’s on a Macbook with 2gb RAM, you may find the time varies.

Step 2 - Tag the files

Once you’ve got your nice MP4 file, we’re nearly there. At the moment, if you drop that into iTunes it will think that it’s a movie which is fine if it’s a movie you’ve converted, but if it is a TV show you need to alter it’s embedded data to give some information about the TV show name and series etc. A great program for doing this is called Lostify. This is completely free, and lets you tag a TV show with all the relevant information - it’s really easy to use. This is a shot of the interface:

Once you have run your files through this tool, just drag and drop them into iTunes. You’ll have a great collection of TV shows in no time, all of which stream to and look great on your Apple TV.

Design Shack has been a phemonemal success since it’s launch, with over 1 million visits, and a quarter of a million clicks to our various featured designs. The current design and layout has been perfect for us so far, but not it’s time for a change. We aren’t looking to offer anything different - just integrate a couple of new features and make the whole experience easier to use. We’re adding a lot more AJAX and JavaScript for some fancy visual effects.

We’ll now have news snippets, and an easier method of submitting your site for listing. It’ll be a piece of cake to browse designs by views, clicks, type, colour scheme and more and we’ll have a wider array of RSS feeds to keep you up to date.

It’s almost ready to go, with some graphics courtesy of Veerle who has been really helpful. There’s a sneak preview on the right, but you’ll have to wait a couple more weeks for the unveiling. I’m looking forward to it, and I hope it receives a good response!

There have recently been several different contests and attempts to run Windows on the new Intel Macs, with one being particularly successful. However, there were many problems with the lack of driver support on Windows for the various Mac hardware components, and there were certain machines that it didn’t work particularly well. Until today.

It’s called Boot Camp, and is a beta piece of software from Apple to allow you to dual boot Windows XP on any of the new Intel Macs. Because it finds a way to avoid the problems with different types of BIOS, it means that Microsoft’s new operating system, Windows Vista, will also run without a problem using the software.

It is designed to be integrated into the upcoming Leopard operating system from Apple, and I’m really looking forward to seeing what other changes and additions will be present in the next operating system iteration from them.

But what will this new piece of software mean, and how will it affect the reasons people purchase a Mac? Right now in it’s early stages and I imagine that it won’t have a huge impact on sales or switchers. The real effects will begin when it is implemented by default in Leapord. It will become a very stron marketing tool for Apple, eliminating one of the reasons for people refusing to switch to a Mac - ‘I won’t be able to run x, y or z’. Now you will be able to, you’ll be able to run them legally, and you’ll be running them on a very very fast Intel Core Duo machine.

It’s great to be working on a machine built by innovators. Microsoft have another reason to quake in their boots.

View Demo

This is currently a Beta, and is under development. However, I’ve decided to release it now (as further development could take a couple of weeks). These are the functions of the plugin:

• Integrates with Technorati Tags Plugin for WordPress
• Takes the first Technorati tag, and uses it to look for related images on Flickr
• Displays the three most recent related images on your WordPress blog post
• Updates images automatically

The plugin is easy to install, but it requires the Technorati Tags Plugin to work. I strongly suggest you install this, and get it working correctly before you attempt to install the Flickr Related Images plugin.

These are some simple installation instructions for the plugin:

• Download and install Technorati Tags Plugin
• Download the plugin file, either as a .zip package or a .txt file. Place it in your plugins directory, and activate it.
• Insert the following code into wp-comments.php, where you want the Flickr images to appear (generally just below the line containing “You can start editing here”:

  flickrrelated($id);

• Begin adding Technorati tags to your posts, and watch the related images appear

This plugin will be updated rapidly over the next couple of days. Keep checking back for changes. If there are any feature requests or comments, please feel free to comment this post.

To appear in online certification exams, you need to have hassle free internet with support of online phone to better interact with your instructor. It’s also advisable to keep your computer security at maximum protected level to protect yourself from malicious online software and to avoid any hacking threats. If you are appearing in advanced courses like CCNP, you need to take a qualifying test i.e. 642-845 ONP. However, you can appear in basic tests like Linux’s LPI 117-101 general without any qualifying tests. But make sure that you have prepared well for it.

I’ve always wondered how wallpapers and images such as the above are made. I use Photoshop on a regular basis, but more for manipulating images than creating my own from scratch. I’m a big fan of Bozor’s wallpapers, and I was impressed by the new tutorial he has just posted on DeviantArt.

It’s really simple to follow, and is well worth a read. If you’ve got five minutes to spare, have a browse through.