Onlydarksets

http://tech.yahoo.com/news/zd/20090212/tc_zd/237037 Rest assured, the next iteration of Windows is on its way, but when and how? The latest rumor making the rounds in the blogosphere is that Microsoft will provide Vista users with a free upgrade to Windows 7 when it becomes available. Yeah, right.  If that happens, I’ll eat my hat.

Long Zheng posted a link on his blog to a Microsoft-produced retrospective of the last decade of Media Center versions (also posted by Brent at GeekTonic, which reminded me to write on this).  It’s time for Microsoft to uncouple Media Center from the OS. I jumped ship from Vista Media Center almost 6 months ago, and [...]

I am creating a batch file for the command line, and I needed to parse out the arguments (e.g., get the filename, change the extension, remove the quotes, etc.).  I always forget these (and where to find them), so I’m copying them here. %~1 – expands %1 removing any surrounding quotes (“) %~f1 – expands [...]

When installing Office, etc. from our Microsoft Partner MSDN library, I usually take the lazy route and use 7-zip to unpack the ISOs.  ISODisk lets you mount up to 20 ISOs simultaneously, and it seems like a more efficient path.

The wireless stopped working reliably on my laptop, so I needed to reinstall Vista.  Instead of doing it all at once, though, I decided to resize the partition and install Vista to a new partition, which would allow me to access the old install.  This way, I can still access the programs, settings, and data [...]

I haven’t setup LogMeIn because I’m skittish about security.  PhoneFactor looks like a promising addition to the chain that could alleviate my concerns.  It provides a second-factor authentication (the first being your username/password) by requiring you to answer your phone before it lets you in.  If you (or, more likely, a would-be hacker) don’t have [...]

Ugh – what a stupid “feature”.  I’m testing some AtomicParsley settings in Remote Desktop, and every time it fails, a ridiculously loud Beep comes out of my local computer.  I’ve muted the speakers and disabled every setting in RD, but it still happens. Enter the interwebs.  Or, more specifically, a site called Weyland.be. Turns out [...]

I had to markup a file I had in PDF-only format, and a quick search turned up an incredibly powerful and FREE (even for commercial use) tool called PDF-XChange Viewer.  In addition to being a lightweight (4MB) and fast PDF viewer (with a portable version and with IE and FF plugins), it also provides markup [...]

When the iPhone syncs, iTunes will often perform a backup that is excruciatingly slow.  Mac users have an “easy” (i.e., available to anyone) way to prevent iTunes from doing backups.  A less publicized version of the same method exists for Windows: Quit iTunes. Press Win+R (opens the Windows Run dialog) Type or copy the following [...]

Last night my laptop crashed for good, and I had to reload Vista.  The culprit was BitLocker, which I had previously enabled after installing the OS.  At the time, I couldn’t access the BitLocker Drive Preparation tool through our enterprise account, so I did it manually with Partition Magic.  However, at least once a day [...]