Category: Geek Stuff

One of the greatest mysteries in life isn’t if we go to heaven when we die or even if the light in the fridge goes out when you close the door… it’s the mystery of Microsoft licensing, something that’s confounded even the experts for years. I’ve fielded questions in this subject area for so long that one has to wonder why I haven’t added this to the “Geek Stuff” page before…

Most people know that when you buy a copy of Windows XP, you’re not really paying for the CD and the manual. You’re actually paying for a license to use the software. That license is sold in many different ways, and it can be incredibly complicated to makes heads or tails of the mess Microsoft has created with their licensing schemes. So let me break it down for you in plain English:

Continue reading “Microsoft Licensing In A Nutshell”

Ahhhhh… keyboard shortcuts, how I love thee! It’s almost always faster to use the keyboard to accomplish something than using a mouse. But while most people are familiar with basic shortcuts like CTRL+C (copy) and CTRL+V (paste), there’s an entire galaxy of lesser known ones out there that you could be using every day. Did you know about CTRL+X (cut)? How about CTRL+Z (undo)? How about CTRL+Y (redo)? Did you know that you can press F2 to rename a file? Well, even if you know all of those, I’m sure that there are a few in this list that you’ve never heard of:

Tab completion – In Windows XP, you can use the tab key as an “auto-complete” at a command-line. For example, you might have several folders in your Program Files directory with “Microsoft” in the name. To quickly change to one of those folders, you can type CD M and press the TAB key to cycle through all the folders that begin with an “M”. WHAT YOU MIGHT NOT KNOW: this also works in the “Run:” box as well. SOMETHING ELSE YOU MIGHT NOT KNOW: this feature is enabled by default in XP; you can enable it in Windows 2000 by opening RegEdit (click Start > Run > regedit > OK) and changing the value of HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\MICROSOFT\Command Processor\CompletionChar to 9.

Built-in Hotkeys – The Windows interface has a built-in hotkeys feature that few (if any) use, although it’s super-duper nifty. If you go to the shortcut properties of any desktop or Start Menu shortcut (right-click > properties > shortcut), you’ll see a box that says “shortcut key” between the boxes that say “Start In:” and “Run”. Simply type a keystroke combination (I use CTRL+SHIFT+O for Outlook and CTRL+SHIFT+F for Firefox) and save your changes. From now on, you can open the program using the keystroke combo you saved!

Continue reading “Obscure Windows Shortcuts!”

Saving a single email attachment is pretty easy: you just open the email, right-click on the attachment, select “Save”, pick a location for the file and then click OK. However, this process can be quite tedious when one has an entire folder full of attachments, which might happen if you’re part of an HR department that gets hundreds of résumés via email a day.

I ran into this problem myself just the other day – I subscribed to a new podcast using NewsGator, which integrates RSS feeds and podcasts into Outlook. Because I had never downloaded anything from this particular podcast site before, NewsGator downloaded all of the show’s previous episodes… so I suddenly had 20 emails in a folder, each with a 12-20MB MP3 attached to it. I just wasn’t in the mood to save them manually, so I went on the web to see if I could find help.

Continue reading “Saving Multiple Attachments in Outlook”

Twice in the past month people have asked me what the “best format” is for permanently archiving data that they want to keep forever, like family photos and tax records. Sadly, the short answer to that question is that there isn’t a “best format”. Technology keeps changing, and there’s absolutely no way to predict which current technologies (if any) will still be around in the next 50 or 100 years. Things can change an awful lot even in 20 years: somewhere in storage I have a box of 5.25″ floppy disks from my old Apple II+. If I suddenly had a desire to see what’s on those disks, I’d have my work cut out for me: while it’s certainly not impossible to find a 5.25″ floppy drive these days, it’s not a trivial matter, either. And 10 years from now, I reckon it’d be near impossible.

There are dozens of different ways to store data, and each one has their pluses and minuses. Magnetic media (like hard drives, tapes and proprietary disks like Zip disks) can often store huge amounts of data; however, magnetic media are also susceptible to damage from environmental issues (moisture, heat, shock, magnetic fields) and are also the most mechanically complex of the various backup types (and thus, prone to failure). The various types of “flash memory” like USB drives, Compact Flash (CF) and Secure Digital (SD) cards are renowned for being robust – indeed, the Internet abounds with stories of CF cards being run over by cars or washed in a jeans pocket and surviving. However, until only recently flash media had somewhat limited capacity, and flash still suffers from limited write-cycles and the unknown of future support.

So this leaves optical media like CD-R and DVD-R discs. Commercial CD and DVD discs (the ones you buy from Sony Music or Microsoft) are “pressed” much like vinyl records. A “master” is made containing the various “pits” on the disc (much like a record’s grooves) and thousands of copies are “stamped” from that master. CD-R and DVD-R technologies work by using a layer of dye which is heated by a laser to mimic those pits. It works well, but there are certainly some things you can do to make sure that your CD-R or DVD-R discs last as long as possible:

Continue reading “Archiving Data”

During my website’s last redesign (well, not the last redesign, that was to convert it to WordPress), there was one thing I *really* wanted to fix: the “Latest News” section of the home page. Previously, that section was basic text typed into a cell in a table in FrontPage. The problem with doing it that way was that a couple of lengthy news posts would make that section huge, possibly longer that some visitors would read. I wanted to use an inline frame instead, so that way there would be scroll bars on the side. This way I could keep lengthy news posts on the home page for as long as I wanted, yet the fixed size of the frame meant that the rest of the home page – the Rant, the Useless Fact, etc. – would always appear in the same place.

The only problem with using an IFRAME is that Internet Explorer always puts a horizontal scroll bar across the bottom of the frame. This is not only ugly, but useless as well, as the text will wrap regardless of the size of the browser window (for what it’s worth, Firefox renders the page “correctly”). Now the only options available in FrontPage for the frame were to ALWAYS show the scroll bars, NEVER show the scroll bars and to only show them AS NEEDED. I had it set for AS NEEDED, but IE still put that $@^! scroll bar across the bottom, and FrontPage doesn’t offer the option of controlling the individual scroll bar behavior.

So I went online in search of answers. I found many, most of which were CSS or HTML hacks. Neither option was what I needed and most of the HTML tricks simply didn’t work. So I tried to find a solution on my own – and I did! If you use FrontPage and have the same problem, try this: put the contents of your frame’s HTML page into a table and make sure that table has a smaller maximum size than the target table\page. The table on my home page which contains my “Latest News” section is set to 100% of the browser window size. I set the new table be 98% of the size of the browser window – and that !$@(*# horizontal scroll bar no longer appears in IE *or* Firefox.

Have you ever wanted or needed to copy a spreadsheet (or part of a spreadsheet) as an image? Maybe you used Excel to input a bunch of data and created some spiffy graph that you’d like to export as an image file to a Word document. Using one very easy – but almost universally unknown – trick, you can do this. Just open the spreadsheet in question and navigate to the worksheet you’d like to copy (NOTE: if you only want to copy a portion of the data, make sure the cells in question are highlighted). Then hold down the SHIFT key and click Edit > Copy Picture. A small box will then appear asking if you want the data copied either as it would appear on the screen or as it would appear when printed. Pick your poison. Then use image manipulation software like Photoshop or MS Paint (included free on every computer running Windows) to paste the new image. You can also paste the image directly into Word or whatever program you’d like.

Remote Desktop is a fancy new word for “Terminal Services”. It’s a cool way for systems administrators (or sons and\or boyfriends) to troubleshoot any computer running Windows XP Professional from any other computer in the world. It’s also a cool way of using one keyboard and mouse to control several computers, or for the IT guy to do routine server administration from his desk two floors down from the server room. But there’s one annoying behavior of Remote Desktop that a lot of us geeks don’t like: once someone has logged on to a computer with Remote Desktop, that computer’s console session (the session displayed on the monitor) is locked until the someone physically walks up to that computer and unlocks it. This is more of a personal annoyance than a problem, but let me give you a scenario when this might actually hamper the usefulness of remote administration.

Let’s imagine that a company has several monitors embedded in the wall of the receptionist area of their office. These monitors are connected to several older PCs that continuously run Powerpoint presentations that show pictures of the company’s products and welcome messages for visiting clients. If the company wants to change or update the Powerpoint presentation, the IT guy normally has to walk to the closet wherever these PCs are located and manually copy the new PPT file to the PCs and restart Powerpoint. He or she could do this from their desk using Remote Desktop, but unfortunately since Remote Desktop locks the console session, the IT guy will still have to walk to the closet and manually press CTRL+ALT+DEL to unlock the computers… unless you follow this trick:

Right-click on any empty area of the desktop and select New > Shortcut. In the “location” box, enter (or paste) this text:

%windir%\System32\tscon.exe 0 /dest:console

Click “Next”, then give the new shortcut a name and click “Finish”. Once this has been done, you can copy the shortcut to any PC you’d like. To have XP end the Remote Desktop session and immediately return to the console session, simply click the new shortcut you made to end the remote session.

Although “Robocopy” sounds like something robots do to make baby robots, it actually stands for “Robust File Copy” and is a popular (and free) tool from Microsoft. It’s included with Windows Vista and is available for Windows XP and Windows 200 as part of the Windows 2003 Server Resource Kit (despite the “Windows 2003? name, Robocopy works just fine in Windows 2000, XP and Vista).

What’s so cool about it is that it’s a command-line program for copying files from one place to another, yet it has some powerful features that you can’t get simply by dragging and dropping files using Windows Explorer. For instance, you can have Robocopy copy all the NTFS security information from certain files. You can set the number of retries on failed copies, exclude or include changed, newer or older files, copy subdirectories but not empty ones, copy subdirectories including empty ones and much, much more.

One of my favorite Robocopy options is /mir, which creates an exact copy of any directory on another drive or network share. This is an *excellent* tool for making backups. Here’s a sample of a batch file I use to copy my application and music files over to my server:

robocopy.exe \\mycomputer\applications \\server\applications /mir /eta /tee
robocopy.exe \\mycomputer\jukebox \\server\jukebox /mir /xd Recycled Recycler “System Volume Information” Temp /eta /tee

Both commands use the /mir switch to mirror the source directories and also use the /eta switch to show the estimated completion time and /tee to send output to console window. Since the “Jukebox” share is sharing the root of the drive I use the /xd switch to exclude various folders on the drive, such as the “Recycle Bin” and “Temp” folders. Neat huh? Of course, Robocopy with the /mir switch will (by default ) only copy newer or changed files, so it doesn’t waste time copying unchanged files. If I add four or five new albums to my music collection and then run the batch file, only those new albums will be copied to the server. This is *such* a time saver! Robocopy works far better than many shareware utilities that do the same thing.

Continue reading “Robocopy”

One of the best undocumented features of Microsoft Outlook – well, undocumented as I can tell – is the “calendar shortcuts” feature. When you create a new appointment or task, you don’t need to know the exact date of the appointment or task – let Outlook figure that out for you!

For example, if your boss tells you that a particular report is due in 25 days, you don’t have to manually figure out when that is – just enter 25d in the “Start Time” for the appointment (make sure that today is selected in your calendar, otherwise the appointment will be added 25 days from the selected day).

Other available operators include W (weeks), MO (months) and Y (years) as well as TODAY, TOMORROW and NEXT TUESDAY (or whatever other day you need next week). Note that these calendar shortcuts also work with Tasks as well.

Most large software releases – operating systems, office suites and anything else big enough to use an entire CD-ROM disc – are transferred legally (or illegally) in the form of disk images. These are single files (which usually have the extension .ISO, hence “ISO file) that contain the entire contents of the CD or DVD disc with extra “metadata” included – such as the discs’ name and boot information, if required. This allows the end-user to put a blank disc in their drive, open his or her software burning program and click “Burn Image” and end up with a CD full of stuff in just a few minutes. In a nutshell, I can create a CD-ROM named “Pictures” with a variety of digital images on it, create an .ISO file of the disc that I can distribute to anyone, who can then create a million discs just like mine – or send it on to someone else who can then make a million copies of their own.

This is not new. The Linux operating system has been distributed this way for ages. Microsoft rarely mails actual CDs of beta software to testers these days and instead opts to allow users to download ISOs of the beta program – like Windows Server 2008 for example. But what good are the image files aside from allowing users to make flawless copies of CD or DVD discs?

Continue reading “Virtual Coolness!”