Listen to YouTube’s audio with screen turned off

It is impossible to use YouTube like an audiobook or audio source because a moment after your turn off your screen or after it is dimmed off due to timeout the playback is stopped and audio is cut-off.

To workaround this problem you can either consider or another YouTube client app:

or you can consider some other browser (namely Firefox).

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Get rid of Redirect Notice from Google Calendar

Google wants to know everything about you. One of the way of achieving it is to put every link, you paste or write into any of their services (i.e. Gmail, Calendar etc.) through their own sniffing tool. In other words, anything like http://www.example.com, it will be turned into https://www.google.com/url?q=http://www.example.com or something similar.

For most Google services this being done nearly silently. You’re still sniffed at all paces, but your user experience isn’t affected. Sniffing and redirects are nearly invisible. All you can notice is a difference between URL you’re looking in browser and the one that you see in browser’s status bar.

However, there’s a on exception. It was proven many times that Google Calendar developers are a complete morons. And yes, they wasted up even their very own sniffing tool. Thus, whenever you click any link in Google Calendar, you see a supremely annoying “Redirect Notice” middle page.

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System interrupts kills PC / eats up to 100% of CPU

If your computer is suddenly slowing down noticeable and you have just:

  • installed a new driver or added new piece of hardware,
  • installed or started using some new hardware-related service (i.e. Internet phone, conference software)

then check Task Manager to see, if System interrupts isn’t consuming most of / all of CPU power of your PC.

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Removing some lines from .srt subtitle files

The .srt format seems to be most popular for storing subtitles for corresponding video files. It is very flexible (allowing you to define begin and end of displaying each phrase to the level of single frame).

One big disadvantage of this format is that it is indexed. Meaning that each following line has a consequential numbering. You cannot simply delete let’s say line number 511 (as you would do in case of .txt or other subtitle file formats), because you’d have to renumber manually all following lines. Which, in case of modern movies, can have up to 1000-2000 lines.

Thus, if you wish to get rid of some line or lines (i.e. sound-like sentence) you must either use some designated software that will do the auto-renumbering of the following lines (not covered in this article) or do this manually, keeping some tips in your mind.

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The server drafts location you entered for offline editing is not valid (updated)

At some point in your struggle with Office 365 off-line applications (Word 365, Excel 365, PowerPoint 365 etc.), when trying to save any changes to Options dialog, you may run into following error:

The server drafts location you entered for offline editing is not valid or you do not have permission to access that location. Specify a location on your local computer.

In short, this has nothing to do with Office and most likely, you (or someone / something else) deleted your c:\Users\[username]\Documents folder. Closing Office 365, re-creating this folder should fix this problem.

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Blaupunkt VCH601 for the seniors

I had to pick a handheld-hoover for my oldies. Due to their age, the actual weight of the device was an absolute priority. I decided to get Blaupunkt VCH601 — which seems to be unbeatable in this category (only 2.2 kilograms) — even though it turned out that it surprised me in some other areas.

If you think that a handheld-hoover description is far from IT and shouldn’t be published here then you may be wrong. Even IT geeks must clean up their rooms from time to time, sorry! :>

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