Repair your picture thumbnails in XBMC after moving them to a central repository

I recently migrated all of my thumbnails in XBMC Eden to a single share on my Synology NAS but had all sorts of grief afterwards with random missing thumbnails.

I finally got around to repairing the missing picture thumbs this evening and found that by simply renaming "\\xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx\Userdata\Database\Textures6.db" to "\\xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx\Userdata\Database\Textures6.old", this file is recreated and the picture thumbs will be regenerated.

P.S I tried regenerating the thumbs using the option menu in XBMC and this did not work.

How To: Renaming AVI movie files using the Date and Time the movie was digitized

I am fanatical about storing my photos and home videos on my NAS using the date and time they were taken so that any media renderer will naturally sort them chronologically. It also takes any guesswork out of figuring out when the movie or photo was taken as it's simply the filename i.e. 20110824-100559 being 2011, August 24th @ 10:05:59 AM. See my other post here that shows how I use "Lupas Rename 2000" to automatically do this for hundreds (or even thousands) of photos in seconds.

Recently I found some older AVI files that had been recorded on my retired Canon S2 digital camera. The associated THM (thumbnail) file that has the date and time the movie was created had been deleted so I needed a way to extract the date and time directly from the AVI file. Again, I use the excellent EXIF Tool by Phil Harvey to accomplish this task.

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How to re-hide the hidden partition (Q) on Lenovo X220

Somehow I accidentally evoked the restore process which revealed the hidden 'Q' partition on my Lenovo X220 which is around 12GB in size. After some poking around I found how to re-hide it.

  • Download this little partition editor from Symantec. N.B Had to use a shortened URL as Posterous doesn't like FTP links.
  • Run the exe and select the 3rd partition as shown (If the partition is currently visible, it will be showing '07' like the other partitions)

Screenshot600

Click in the first column and choose Set Type and select option '17', Hidden IFS (NTFS, HPFS) as I've done.

  • Save Changes, exit and reboot

Worked a treat for me after a nervous wait for it to reboot.

Posterous theme by Cory Watilo