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I use the simple, but configurable, WP YouTube plugin for WordPress to embed YouTube videos in my posts.

It hasn’t been updated since the beginning of 2008 but, hey, it works (well, okay, it doesn’t support HD videos). Well, it did. I have a post in draft in which I wanted to embed two videos. Sadly it won’t work and it appears to be down to the use of hyphens in their ID. When you look at the source code for the resultant post something has converted the hyphens to HTML friendly characters.

So, for instance, an ID of 7Yapo–1OaE is being embedded in the code with the “double dash” converted to &#8211. The ID of oatks-1x8U8 is having the dash converted to &#215.

I’ve contacted the plugin owner, via his site, but due to the lack of recent activity on this plugin, I’m not sure what response I’ll get.

Meantime I’ve been looking at other YouTube plugins that do what I need them to do (i.e. have some basic configuration options for colour, auto-start, etc). Few have been changed recently (and therefore, I’m guessing, will have picked up on what I assume is a recent change to ID formats) and only YouTuber sprang out as being a reasonable alternative. Sadly that has the same issue, and I’ve reported that via the forum on WordPress.

I had a play with WP YouTube last night but was unable to sort the problem out – I suspect the conversion is happening to the URL before it’s being passed into the plugin. However, none of the PHP commands that will decode these seemed to work.

If anybody has any ideas, I’m keen to hear them.

The latest news about OfQuack (aka the Complementary and Natural Healthcare Council) is not looking promising…

OfQuack was set up with the help of £900,000 of public money to try to give all sorts of AltMed quackery some kind of credence and legitimacy. It is backed by Prince Charles’s Foundation for Integrated Health and considering their other bastard child, Dodgy Originals, has just had to be bailed out the runes may not be falling in OfQuack’s favour!

Their failures have been highlighted by Le Canard Noir and the Lay Scientist in various blog posts. In Martin’s last post, he highlighted the problems with OfQuack’s last set of Board minutes and the pitiful numbers of quacks who have signed up since they opened shop in February.

Le Canard Noir has highlighted the way OfQuack re-wrote their press release, downsizing their estimate of numbers of members they were aiming for by the end of 2009. This started out at an ambitious 10,000, but was recently downsized to just 4,000. Even that looks a tad optimistic!

If they continue at their current rate, by the end of this year, they will have amassed just 986 followers, not even 10% of their initial target.

So far, they have averaged less than 20 registrations a week: to reach the dizzy heights of even 4,000, they would need to get to over 40 registrations a day!

Perhaps all is not lost, however. According to their buddies at the FIH, they hope to recruit cranial sacral practitioners, naturopaths, bowen practitioners, reiki practitioners and Alexander technique teachers by the end of this year.

Then again, 2010 may be a bumper year for them — assuming they’re still in business. They plan to bring micro-systems acupuncturists, hypnotherapists and professional healers into the regulatory fold. Thank goodness they aren’t letting the amateur healers in…

A varied assortment of Netbook news and utilities today.

First of all, let’s kick off with the oft-mentioned absence of the CD/DVD drive in Netbook. You can, of course, buy an external drive at about £40/£50, but when you’ve only paid about £250 for your Netbook, it can seem a steep investment.

If you’ve got a PC at home with a drive, however, you can put your Netbook on the same network and use it. I came across the instructions on a forum – pretty obvious now, but it hadn’t occurred to me to do this.

Next up, something for the Acer Aspire One owners. Kuki is a Linux build specifically for this machine. I’ve put it on a USB key, using UNetbootin, and it’s quite good, with everything seemingly working as it should do. However, I’m assuming that this “live” version probably expects to be working from a CD and, hence, appears to be “read only” – configuration changes aren’t being saved. You’d need to install to unlock its full potential – my plan is to use the Storage Expansion SD card slot and install it directly onto an SDHC card.

Definitely worth checking out.

Lastly, the award-winning Samsung NC10 is available from eBuyer for £268.79 (including free P&P). This has been on sale elsewhere recently at a cheaper price but, and crucially, these have turned out to be 3-cell battery versions, rather than the standard 7.5 hour 6 cell version.

Ben Betts, “core” member of the HT2 E-learning company, has done what many of us either do or think about doing. On his company blog he had a rant about his water cooler company, Powwow water.

His experience with their “customer service” is appalling but Powwow have been, erm, reluctant to talk to him about it.

After a large number of comments to his post, he did hear from them. Or rather the companies lawyer. Nice.

Anyway, his response has been a master-class to us all – in particular bloggers such as myself – on how to defend yourself in this situation.

It’s not over and I’m sure there will be follow-ups. I just hope it goes well for Ben.