Topics

76

Living Room / Paragon Backup 9.5, normally $49.95, free today until 9AM Eastern time on May 4.

« on: May 03, 2010, 07:05 PM »

Paragon Backup 9.5, normally $49.95, free today until 9AM Eastern time on May 4.

http://www.paragon-s...m/free/giveaway.html

I have no affiliation, and I have no opinion of the product. I found out about it here.

http://lifehacker.co...skyline=true&s=i
 One of the comments says it is not incompatible with Windows 7, I haven't tested it myself yet. I installed the 64 bit version on Windows 7 just now.


Ah, I should have posted here:

https://www.donation...index.php?board=39.0

77

Living Room / KVM switch woes -- any recommendations?

« on: May 03, 2010, 05:57 PM »

I have a little KVM switch and I am not too satisfied with it:
http://www.buy.com/p...c/101/202531007.html

It works fine, until it doesn't. When I first got it, it started reinstalling the mouse and keyboard every time I flipped between the two machines (a laptop and a desktop, if that matters). Finally for the most part, they stayed installed. But the mouse cursor gets stuck in one spot frequently (at least daily) and I have to unplug it from the desktop machine. To get to the USB port I have to unplug the monitor cable as well. The other day I unplugged and replugged everything for several minutes and it still wasn't working. I don't know if I got a bad one, or if that's just the way it is for this. I leaning toward that's just the way it is. It seems to be basically unplugging the usb and plugging it back in, hence the constant reinstall that I experienced initially. I know this type of device was more reliable in my memory, back when all the keyboard and mouse ports were PS/2 style. If I recall correctly, the good ones held some power, sparing the motherboard from the shock of constantly unplugging the PS/2 connectors. It seems I need the same for USB, I was trying to go bargain basement, but that seems to be a fail. I was wondering if anyone had any recommendations. By the way, this may not be a typical use: usually only one computer will actually be powered up.

78

TapTap / I use TapTap to launch Launchy

« on: April 23, 2010, 01:57 PM »

I am another happy TapTap user.

I use it to launch Launchy with Ctrl Ctrl. Seems to make some logical sense because it is next to the Win key, which in Vista/Windows 7 does kind of a weak version of a Launchy/FARR thing with the Start menu if you press the Win key.

I have it send an Alt-F13 (a key I can't press accidentally and which is unlikely to be a conflicting hotkey with any application, UNLIKE Alt-Space which is the Launchy default), and I have Launchy hotkey configured Alt-F13.

79

Developer's Corner / Release the source without the program being open source

« on: March 28, 2010, 06:12 PM »

I have a little AutoIt3 script I am about to release after a little more testing and rewriting. It's not much and it is only about 250 lines of code. It will be freeware. I am happy to make the source code available. But for some reason I am thinking it should not be open source, even though I am releasing the source code. I'm not sure why--more of a sense of ownership, maybe?

Do you think there's any benefit to that approach, or would be best to keep it simple and make it open source?

80

Post New Requests Here / IDEA: Fix Vista so I can drop a file from Windows Explorer to cmd yet again

« on: December 12, 2008, 01:51 PM »

This is my first post, and it doesn't really seem right for my first post to be asking for something!  I may have a candidate for a coding snack, though.

Here is my idea. In every version of Windows from Windows 95 to Windows XP, I found that I could drag a file from Windows Explorer into a cmd window and Windows would put the path to the file on the command line. This worked with both executables and data filenames. I think this was extremely handy if you use any command line tools at all, especially with the length of directory paths these days. Vista broke this functionality just to be mean*, maybe someone knows an easy way to make something that would restore this functionality in Vista.

(And yes, I know you can work around it by holding down Shift and right clicking on the file and choosing Copy as Path, so if this coding snack never gets...munched on? I will live.)