Hovering over links in the Blog Manager Program

Even though almost all of the access problems (http:// instead of https:// and vice versa, blogspot.co.il, missing target="_blank") have been fixed, there are still occasional problems that arise from bad addresses being stored in the blogs. One was a link to a sort page (I corrected this, so I can't quote it anymore) and who knows what else lies waiting.

So I thought that it would be a good idea if the actual link could be displayed in the form's status bar when the mouse is hovering over the link. This way I could more easily see if the link is correct or needs to be corrected.

I posed this to CoPilot and I was quite surprised that it was doable with the TWebBrowser although it requires defining a "Delphi 7-compatible COM event sink". This CP proceeded to do. The work would have been finished far earlier had I specified displaying the link in a status bar, but originally I wanted to use a 'balloon' (this type of control is used the Management program) and this caused a long and ultimately unfruitful detour.

This is what the browser looks like when the mouse is hovering over the link in the first line ('two years ago') - the status bar shows the address stored in the link.

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This day in blog history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
296	18/10/2010	Mocha too goes on holiday	Dog
418	18/10/2011	Dennis Ritchie: The man who created Unix	Obituary, RIP
1179	18/10/2018	Conditional choose-field trigger (2)	Priority tips
1841	18/10/2024	Completing the auxiliary program	Programming, Delphi
2022	18/10/2025	Updates in CoPilot Prolog	Programming, Prolog

Saving album art to mp3 files with VLC / 2

Nearly two years ago¹, I showed how it is possible to save album art to mp3 files so that this art will be displayed when the song is playing in the VLC player. Whilst the instructions that I gave were accurate, they were intended for the song that is currently playing. A quick reminder:

• Tools/media information brings up the required dialog box
• Entering data into one of the fields (eg copyright or encoded by) causes an extra button to appear at the bottom of the dialog box, "save metadata"
• Right clicking the area for the album art and choosing "add cover art from file"
• Choose the album cover 
• Press on "save metadata" then "close"

There's a very similar method that can be used to add the art to songs that aren't currently being played. Instead of clicking tools/media for the currently selected song which is playing, one right clicks another song and chooses 'information' from the popup menu that appears. This causes the same dialog box as above to appear and the same instructions as above hold here as well. 

There are two caveats to this method: (a) the album art won't appear even though it's been selected (one can consider this a bug but it's not that important); (b) ensure that the art is being attached to the correct file!

The only thing that I was unable to do was to attach the same art to several songs at once, although this is implicit in that the dialog box has the name of only one file to be updated, so obviously this mechanism wouldn't allow several files to be updated at once. This is version 3.0.24 Vetinari, by the way, which is the current version.

Internal links
[1] 1877

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This day in blog history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
294	17/10/2010	Sweet and sour chicken	Cooking, Slow cooker
295	17/10/2010	Project Management course	MBA, Project management
417	17/10/2011	Getting ready for the Kindle	Kindle, E-book
983	17/10/2016	Who's watching who?	Grandfather
1349	17/10/2020	Completing the story of porting an application to Windows 10/Delphi 10.2	Delphi, Unicode
1840	17/10/2024	Extending the auxiliary program	Programming, Delphi
2021	17/10/2025	YouTuber discovers Nick Drake	Nick Drake, Youtube