April 2, 2008
Photoshop fails to import clipboard
Photoshop seems to have an annoying bug (or feature) where it stops importing the clipboard. I often copy and paste screenshots from Firefox and Quicktime, only to find photoshop ignoring the new content. I thought it only applied to my old Photoshop 7, but it appears it affects all versions including CS3. This registry change fixes the issue.
Open the Registry Editor and add the following:
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Adobe\Photoshop\10.0]
"AlwaysImportClipboard"=dword:00000001
Where 10.0 is your photoshop version.
Great hall locations: Computing | Talked about by: 0 Fraggles
March 3, 2008
Things That Are Good To Hear
When one is running apache on Windows 2008 for their business:
The Apache Visit to Microsoft Campus: Day One.
Great hall locations: Computing , Web Development | Talked about by: 0 Fraggles
December 10, 2007
Photoshop: Open Flattened Composite
Sometimes I get somewhat corrupt Photoshop documents, that make my older copy of Photoshop freak. If they're saved with maximise compatibility on (which saves a flattened version, as well as the layers), it is often possible to open that version of the document successfully. To do so, hold down and the SHIFT and ALT keys while clicking the open button in the File Open dialog.
Great hall locations: Computing | Talked about by: 0 Fraggles
November 30, 2007
Disabling PC Speaker Beep
I don't like things beeping at me at the best of times, but the default pc speaker beep that occurs everytime I change the volume on my laptop is right up there. To disable it:
- Device Manager
- View > Show Hidden Devices
- Non-Plug and Play Drivers > Beep
- Driver Tab
- Stop and Startup > Disable
Ah, silence....
Great hall locations: Computing | Talked about by: 0 Fraggles
August 2, 2007
.NET Framework Stupidity
The .NET Framework is meant to be backwards compatible, so if in my case I have v3.0 installed an application designed for v1.1 should work just fine. Well that's the theory, however the installers for many apps won't let you proceed, unless you have the exact version they were designed for installed. This is pretty damn annoying, since that application itself will in most cases run just fine.
The solution is to edit the .MSI installer package and remove the framework requirement check. To do this you need the Microsoft Orca MSI Editor, which is part of the 300MB+ Windows Installer SDK package. Fortunately some kind person has posted the 1.8MB Orca Installer separately.
Once you've installed that, open your offending application .msi in Orca and do a search for VSDCA_VsdLaunchConditions and remove every entry it finds. Save the changes and you'll be ready to go, without the .NET Framework prerequisite check.
Great hall locations: Computing | Talked about by: 0 Fraggles
July 9, 2007
Vista ClearType Fonts
Included with Windows Vista and Office 2007 are the first new web/screen fonts since Windows 95. These fonts have exceptional readably on LCD screens due to being optimized for ClearType (the font rendering technology in XP & Vista), and are a nice change to the standard Arial, Tahoma, Verdana's we've been using on the web for the last 10 years.
However, if you don't have Vista or Office 2007 it is still possible to get these fonts [legally] by downloading either the Office 2007 file format compatibility pack if you have a previous version of Office, or the Power Point 2007 viewer if you don't have Office.
If you have a Mac or Unix machine, it should be possible to extract the font files from the .cab file in either installer and use them directly. The 7-zip File Manager on Windows can open both files, but you didn't hear that from me ;-)
Great hall locations: Computing | Talked about by: 0 Fraggles
June 27, 2007
Skypein Now In New Zealand
Well that proves it, voting can actually make a difference. Ok quit your laughing, true the government usually does what it wants, however this time I'm quite pleased I voted in the last elections. In fact it was the first time I'd voted in 10 years, and the Labour government won by a narrow margin due to people like myself, lol. However it has worked out well for me, interest free student loans and more importantly they deregulated the Telecommunications industry, effective 1 April 2007 (the start of the 2007-08 financial year here). Not only has this improved the DSL and landline offerings around the country, dereg also means we can have Skypein numbers here too!
UPDATE: I now have an Auckland Skypein number, and it works perfectly! I can also have it redirect to my cell phone if my computer isn't on :-) I've tested that as well, however the call just comes up as Private Number on the phone, so it's a bit hard to tell if it's a skype call, but it's still pretty cool either way.
Great hall locations: Computing | Talked about by: 0 Fraggles
May 16, 2007
Fixing Broken Virtual PC Networking
Originally posted on the Virtual PC Guy's WebLog. Since my networking seems to break all the time I'm posting it here so I can find it again.
1. The Virtual Machine Network Services driver is installed but not enabled.
On a Windows XP system you'll need to:
- Open the Start menu and click on Control Panel.
- Click on Network and Internet Connections and then Network Connections.
- If you are using classic mode you just need to double click on Network Connections.
- Locate your network adapter, right click on it and select Properties.
- Check the Virtual Machine Network Services entry and click OK.
On a Windows Vista system you'll need to:
- Open the Start menu and click on Control Panel.
- Click on the Network and Internet and then Network and Sharing Center.
- If you are using classic mode you just need to double click on Network and Sharing Center.
- Click on Manage network connections, in the task list on the left side of the window.
- Locate your network adapter, right click on it and select Properties.
- You'll need to approve this action.
- Check the Virtual Machine Network Services entry and click OK.
2. The Virtual Machine Network Services driver is installed and enabled, but does not seem to be working.
- Follow the steps for the first solution to get to the properties display for your network adapter.
- Select the Virtual Machine Network Services entry, and click Uninstall.
- Reboot the physical computer (this step is critical)
- Return to the properties display for your network adapter.
- Click Install...
- Select Service and click Add...
- Select the Virtual Machine Network Services entry and click OK.
Great hall locations: Computing | Talked about by: 0 Fraggles
April 12, 2007
Hooked Up, MTV Style
After several weeks of difficultly getting Internet access here in Italy, I've ended up at the other other extreme. 3.6 Megabit Broadband that works anywhere in Italia, on the train, at the beach and also on the [pictured] Patio over looking the Mediterranean! Oh, and I forgot to mention it's also free, all thanks to Vodafone Italia's HSDPA network and their 1 month free promo. After that it's €30 per month for 100 hours, but only when you use it as the SIM is prepaid. If you don't have enough credit, the Internet access is suspended until you do, which means it'll be good to go next time I'm in Italia.
Initially I did have some problems with the account not being setup correctly. It had defaulted to €4,50 per hour, and of course I ran out of credit really quickly. However, I went into the Vodafone store and managed to explain the problem and get the whole thing sorted out in Italian, and I even got a €10 credit in addition to free Internet for rest of my trip!
Great hall locations: Computing | Talked about by: 0 Fraggles
February 28, 2007
Stopping Windows XP/2003 Powering Off The Computer On Shutdown
I'm posting this here mainly for my own reference, but also in case others have this problem as well. I've recently installed a UPS on my server, which is working great. The only problem is during a test power outage (I disconnected the plug from the wall), the UPS software shutdown the server correctly but when power is restored the server doesn't start up again.
The problem is the server is running a ACPI HAL, which means the OS gets control of the power management and windows is powering off the machine on shutdown. Unfortunately the server doesn't have any power management settings in the BIOS, it just defaults to last state—if it was on when the power was disconnected, it'll turn back on when it is reconnected. Therefore, it needs to left on, displaying the "It's now safe to turn off your computer" screen after shutdown.
After some hunting on the Internet I found the setting to configure this, (you'll need SP1 or higher for either OS installed for this work):
- Click Start, click Run, and then type gpedit.msc.
- Under Local Computer Policy, expand Computer Configuration, expand Administrative Templates, and then expand System.
- Double-click Do not turn off system power after a Windows system shutdown has occurred.
- Click the Setting tab, click Enabled, and then click OK.
Great hall locations: Computing | Talked about by: 0 Fraggles
February 23, 2007
I Generally Hate Windows Add-ons...
But, this is one utility I have added to my otherwise clean Windows install. Taskbar Shuffle is a small application that lets you reorder the buttons on your Windows taskbar like you can with Firefox's tabs. It also supports close on middle click. Total computing bliss!
Great hall locations: Computing | Talked about by: 0 Fraggles
September 9, 2006
The Taming Of The Shrew
Probably the most used and least understood application in the world is Microsoft Word. Like many people my knowledge of Word was limited to the bare minimum required to get the job done. Since I never did anything extensive with it there was little motivation for me to learn how to use it properly, until now...
I've been working a Polices and Procedures training manual for my company that was becoming a rather large document and Word has been slowly driving me to distraction, formatting that wouldn't go away and headings that wouldn't revert. The final straw was the word "Error!" appearing in a grey box in the middle of document all by itself—document corruption was the last thing I needed... So I decided enough was enough, I was going to tame this beast and make it work properly for me.
Here's what I learnt:
Top 5 ways to guarantee a corrupted document
According to the horse's mouth (i.e. Microsoft MVP's) using any of these features is asking for trouble and they should be avoided at all costs.
- Using Master Documents
- Complex Nested Tables
- Using Versions
- The Fast Save feature
- Using the Document Map
The best ways to recover a corrupted document
From what I've read the most common place for document corruption to be located is in section breaks. Every document has at least one section by default, so if you haven't explicitly created sections, there will be one hidden away in the very last paragraph mark of the document. These are the best ways of recovering from document corruption:
- Select everything except that last section break, and copy & paste into a new document. Ctrl+End and then Ctrl+Shift+Home will create such a selection.
- Save as another format, reopen that new document and then save it as a new word document: Rich Text or HTML seem to work well as the middle men.
- Paragraph marks themselves can also be corrupt. So if you have one paragraph that is misbehaving, text appears in weird places when working with it or styles are screwed up, try cutting and pasting it to and from Notepad—you'll need to restyle it after you paste it back though.
- As a last resort try saving the whole file as plain text, however you'll lose all formatting and graphics in the document—but you will kill any and all corruption permanently!
Really Useful Keyboard Shortcuts
| Shift+F3 | Change the case of letters. |
| Shift+F5 | Move to the last change Handy if you've just selected some text and want to get back to where you last typed. |
| F4 | Repeat the last action More useful than it sounds, if you've just styled some text, you can select some other text and hit F4 to give it identical styling. |
| Ctrl+Alt+O | Switch to Outline view |
| Ctrl+Alt+P | Switch to Print view |
| Ctrl+Alt+N | Switch to Normal view |
Outline view is probably the most useful feature I've recently learnt. It allows to navigate around and edit a large document with incredible ease. In Outline view you can choose to see just Level 1 Headings, or Level 1 & 2 Headings, or 1, 2 & 3 and so on, or all headings and their text. Move you cursor over a heading and switch back to print or normal view you're instantly at that location, even if it was 400 pages away from where you were.
You can also move headings up and down, but it doesn't move just the heading it moves all the sub-headings and paragraphs under it, meaning you can make alters that cover dozens of pages in one go—without selecting any text.
These are the most useful shortcuts for working in Outline View:
| Shift+Alt+1 | View Level 1 Headings Only |
| Shift+Alt+2 | View Level 1 & 2 Headings |
| Shift+Alt+x | View Level 1 to x Headings |
| Shift+Alt+A | View All Headings and Paragraphs. |
| Shift+Alt+Left Arrow | Promote text (make higher level heading) |
| Shift+Alt+Right Arrow | Demote text (make lower level heading) |
| Shift+Alt+Up Arrow | Move selected headings/paragraphs up. |
| Shift+Alt+Down Arrow | Move selected headings/paragraphs down. |
Outline view is only of any use if you have used styles in your document. These are selected from Formatting Toolbar (the drop down list with Heading 1 in it) or Styles & Formatting sidebar. Using styles also makes maintaining your document a lot easier too.
Hopefully this info helps you tame the shrew too!
Great hall locations: Computing | Talked about by: 0 Fraggles
May 15, 2006
Photoshop Documents Won't Open
If you're like me and still using an older version of Photoshop (in my case v7), because the new versions are just fluff or for some other reason, you might come across this: "Could not open 'filename-goes-here.psd' because it's not a valid Photoshop document".
Turns out that the problem is there's some random characters, about 128 of them, before the 8BPS token that identifies the file as a valid Photoshop document. If you delete these extra characters in either a Hex Editor, or a text editor that supports binary files (e.g. EditPlus) so the first four characters are 8BPS, the document will open fine.
Great hall locations: Computing | Talked about by: 2 Fraggles
December 10, 2005
The Worst ISP I've Ever Used
I finally kicked Slingshot to the curb on thursday—damn pay in advance lock in. I was on their dial-up service, since i travel often and need to connect to the Internet from various locations (and Vodafone's flatrate service is still a little too expensive here). It would appear that they were slowing down their dial-up connections to force people over to DSL. My 56k dial up plan felt more like 28.8k, but now with TelstraClear I'm getting actual 56k speed, thank god for that.
Great hall locations: Computing | Talked about by: 0 Fraggles
August 15, 2005
Holy Toledo, Batman!
I'm sooo getting me one of these! It has actual 2600 hardware on the inside! Rockin'
Great hall locations: Computing | Talked about by: 0 Fraggles
July 22, 2005
Reason #474 Why Amazon.com Rocks
They mark Audio CD's that have copy protection with "[COPY PROTECTED CD]" in title, so you don't waste your money on a CD's you can't put on your iPod.
Great hall locations: Computing | Talked about by: 0 Fraggles
April 26, 2005
Freakin' Auction Listings
Every time I search for stuff these days and it happens to be remotely saleable, I seem to get tonnes of freakin' auction listing pages in my search results. I'm talking about the [very often poorly designed] pages people have made with a shit load of eBay auction listings on them that barely match my search query anyway, grrrr.
Man, if I was looking to buy something on eBay, I would be running my search query on freakin' eBay! I really wish Google would add an "exclude auction listings" from my results checkbox somewhere—that would make my day!
Great hall locations: Computing | Talked about by: 0 Fraggles
April 7, 2005
Slip Into Something More Comfortable
One of the best features of recent Microsoft installers, is the ability to Slipstream Service Packs and Hotfixes into the base install CD, so when you install the application or OS it's already updated. I'm getting ready for a reinstall of XP, and found the following link while downloading updates and drivers last night—sheer brilliance.
I used the console cmd file, since I don't have Cygwin (a unix runtime environment for windows), and I used Easy CD Creator to burn the result back to a bootable cdrom. The cdrom boot sector settings for a Windows XP are below, and if you need it—here is a XP CD boot sector file.
- No Emulation
- Load Segment: 0x7c0
- Sector Count: 4
Great hall locations: Computing | Talked about by: 0 Fraggles
March 11, 2005
International Characters Made Easy
If you've ever needed to enter international characters like the é in café, then you've probably like me either used the Character Map utility or memorized the letter's Alt + numeric keypad number combination.
The problem is this is a real pain if you have to type these letters more than once in a blue moon, especially if you have a laptop without a numeric keypad!
Well it turns out there's an easy (and painless) solution for that works for all versions of Windows.
It lets you type accented characters, by first pressing the key that looks like the accent ` and then the letter e to get the accented version è.
Configuration
I'm only going to go though the steps for configuring Windows XP below, however in other versions of windows the steps are similar.
- Control Panel
- Regional & Language Options
- Languages (tab)
- Details... (under Text Services & Input Languages)
- Click Add
- Leave the language the same (should be whatever was on the previous screen, in my case English (New Zealand))
- For the Keyboard Layout, choose United States - International
- Click OK on all three dialogs, and you're done
You should now have a little keyboard icon (
) on the taskbar down by the System Tray/Clock.
To enable International character support for the application you're currently working in, click on this icon and choose United States - International. This setting is per application, if you'd like it on all the time, you can set it as the default from the Regional & Language Options control panel.
Inputing Accented Characters
The accents are available by typing the following keys, plus the letter in question:
| circumflex | Shift+6 |
| grave | ` (above the TAB key) |
| acute | ' (single quotemark) |
| le tréma | " (double quotemark) |
| cedilla | ' (single quotemark) |
With this keyboard layout if you want to enter one of the accent keys verbatim, you'd enter the key and then press the spacebar. E.g. to type 'ed, you'd type:
' space e d
Symbol Character Support
This keyboard layout also changes the right-ALT key into a special character key (the left-ALT functions normal).
Holding down the right-ALT and pressing the keys shown in the left column gives you the character on the right:
| right ALT + / | ¿ (spanish punctuation) |
| right ALT + 1 | ¡ (spanish punctuation) |
| right ALT + c | © (copyright) |
| right ALT + C | ¢ (cents) |
| right ALT + – | ¥ (yen) |
| right ALT + $ | £ (pound) |
| right ALT + 5 | € (euro) |
| right ALT + 6 | ¼ |
| right ALT + 7 | ½ |
| right ALT + 8 | ¾ |
| right ALT + = | x |
| right ALT + + | / |
| right ALT + ; | ¶ (paragraph) |
| right ALT + : | ° (degrees) |
| right ALT + W | Å |
| right ALT + w | å |
| right ALT + Z | Æ |
| right ALT + z | æ |
Great hall locations: Computing | Talked about by: 0 Fraggles
March 3, 2005
Mr. T, Breakdancing & BMX's
I have to say, the coolest thing from the 80's by far, was the acade game "Time Bandit" for the Sanyo. Back in the days when 3-bit colour was high-tech, and floppy disks where still actually floppy & took 50 minutes to format ;)
Written by Bill Dunlevy and with artwork by Harry Lafnear, Time Bandit was originally released for the TRS-80 and was heavily based on the arcade game Tutankham. The 1984 port to the Sanyo featured 8 colors, higher resolution graphics, four direction scrolling, and a two player option.
The game starts off at the Time-gates area, where you can choose one of 16 worlds to explore. In each world you must fight the Guardians in order escape to though the time-gate at the end of the labyrinth, gathering treasures along the way and recovering all the Artifacts. Each world features sixteen levels of increasing complexity, these were the same layout but flipped or mirrored. In these sub-levels items were in different places, including the timegates and the one-way doors were often reversed—which made things interesting.
The Guardians in each of the worlds consisted of: snakes, lions, trolls, spiders, worms, eyes, aliens, ghosts and bombs. You get points (cubits) for each monster destroyed with your missiles, for the treasures you collect, and also for finding keys, locks and solving puzzles. 
The game begins with 14 lives and you get an additional one with each 1000 cubits.
There are seven Artifacts in the game. Six of them found in the last level of the different worlds and the last one is visible when you complete all of the sixteen worlds. In the Sanyo version of the game one of the artifacts was Dr. Who's time-traveling vehicle, the Tardis.
Time Bandit – Worlds by Area
|
|
Original Packaging Blurb
Fast-paced arcade action, full scale adventures, and endless variety is now only a disk's reach from your Sanyo.
Use the Timegates to explore the Worlds of Time: the medieval halls of FANTASY WORLD, the great frontiers of WEST WORLD, and the bizarre future in SPACE WORLD. Choose from more than twenty exciting adventuring areas throughout the game.
Battle the Evil Guardians: the Looking Lurker, Killer Smurfs, and lots more. Collect the Treasures of the Ages as you remove the locks blocking your escape. But hurry Bandit, your power is dwindling and the Techno-Bandits are hot on your trail!
Time Bandit's dual-player mode lets two player in on all the action at the same time—on their own playing windows! Work together, or battle it out for a bigger share of the loot!
Ultra-crisp Supergraphics, colorful scrolling landscapes, full animation of a multitude of characters, amazing sound, and literally hundreds of screens: it's all here! The conquest of Time and Space awaits you...
Great hall locations: Computing | Talked about by: 3 Fraggles
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