PawEng » Windows

How To Change File Name Extensions

PawEng — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 22:36:01 +0000

Changing the extension on a file can be very useful, but Windows does not make it easy. However, if you turn on “show file name extensions” in Windows, you can change the extensions by simply renaming the files.

Microsoft explains how to show or hide file name extensions on Vista. And Media College explains how to change a file extension in Windows XP.

Revision Control Made Simple with FileHamster

PawEng — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 13:25:45 +0000

Revision control systems (Wikipedia) manage multiple versions or revisions of documents. It is often used by software developers to manage their source code, but it can be useful for anyone. Have you ever made a change to a document, saved it, and later wished you had an earlier version of it? If so then you may want to consider using a revision control system. Full-blown revision control systems allow multiple people to work on multiple branches of the same files at the same time, and it is possible to track who made what change and when it was made.

A full revision control system is overkill for single-user systems like most PCs. This is where Mogware’s FileHamster comes in. It automates the revision control process and runs it in the background. Their slogan “Always working so you don’t have to” says it all. They track revisions to you files and saves them for you, and it all happens automatically.

Setup is easy. You download the program and install it. Then FileHamster asks you where you want to keep your revisions. You can choose any internal or external hard disk you want. I chose an SD card that I always keep in my laptop. Next you select the files you want to track. You can select directories or individual files. That is it. There are lots of options to control how and when the revisions are made. For example, you can create a new revision every time a file has changed, or you can specify a time delay so that at least, say, 10 minutes must pass before a new revision is created.

FileHamster lets you browse all your revisions, and you can restore revisions of individual files. I have not found a way to restore all files in a directory at once.

FileHamster supports plugins. There are plugins for storing your revisions in a compressed (zip) format, for storing revisions on an ftp server, and more.

Mogware’s FileHamster runs on Windows. The basic version is free. Mogware is currently having a sale where they offer 50% off on all paid versions of FileHamster and paided plugins.

Symbolic Links in Windows

PawEng — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 01:41:06 +0000

Symbolic links are used all the time on Linux and Unix systems, but I didn’t know they existed on Windows. It turns out, however, that Windows 2000 and higher also supports symbolic links — or junctions as they are called. You can use the program Junction v1.05 to create a link between two directories.

This comes in handy if you need to map a path from one machine to a path on another machine. For example, I have Perl CGI scripts that I run on both my Windows laptop and on a Linux server. I have been changing the shebang line from #!/usr/bin/perl to #!C:/perl/bin/perl. Using junctions, I can now simply link C:/perl to C:/usr, and the #!/usr/bin/perl line will work on both Windows and Linux.

I found this solution on Thierry Bothorel’s web page Symbolic links in Windows.

Move and Resize Windows with WindowsPad

PawEng — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 11:21:16 +0000

Windows XP and Vista offer only limited ways to control window placement and size on your screen. Sometimes the built-in features are not enough. For example, on my Windows XP laptop, I use one screen resolution on the laptop screen and another screen resolution on the monitor attached to my docking station. When I undock the laptop, windows that were fine on the docked screen, may now be too large for the laptop screen. The same happens if I dock the laptop somewhere else where the docked monitor has a different resolution. The only way to view those windows is to maximize them, but then I cannot resize them or move them to another monitor. In the past I had to shut down the application and start them up again.

After searching online for a solution I came across a story on Lifehacker called Make the most of Your Dual Monitors. They mention an AutoHotkey script called WindowPad that solves my problem. WindowPad lets you use the Windows key and the keyboard’s number pad to move and arrange windows. In particular, I can now move a window from one monitor to another on using the Windows key plus the ‘dot’ on the numerical keypad. This works even with maximized windows.

You can download the WindowPad script or the compiled version WindowPad.

Watching Podcasts on a Windows Mobile Cellphone

PawEng — Sun, 24 May 2009 19:51:02 +0000

I have an old Samsung i730 cellphone running Windows Mobile 2005. I have long wanted to watch podcasts on it, but I have never really found a good way of doing so. But now I finally have something that seems to work.

I have downloaded Apple’s iTunes software for my Windows XP PC. In iTunes I have subscribed to a series of podcasts, and iTunes automatically downloads new episodes for me.

I also tried the Juice podcast receiver. It lets you download podcasts automatically from rss feeds.

I use MobSync to copy the podcasts to my cellphone. It detects when I connect my cellphone to the computer, and then it automatically uploads the podcasts. The current version of MobSync is 2.0.3, and it has a 30 day trial period. I found an old version (MobSync 0.94) on the web, and it looks like it is freeware. It works fine for me.

On the cellphone, I use TCPMP to play the podcasts. I downloaded version 0.72RC1 and installed it. I also needed to install a few plugins. I downloaded and installed the ffmpeg plugin. It is available from the download page of TCPMP. In order to play AAC files, I needed the AAC plugin for TCPMP. It is unfortunately not available from the TCPMP page, but I found it at RareWares.org. (Yes, it says it is for version 0.66, but it works fine in version 0.72RC1.)

I added a 4GB memory card to my cellphone, and now I have plenty of space to store podcasts.

Data Recovery Tools

PawEng — Sat, 23 May 2009 15:58:07 +0000

Lifehacker has a list of the Five Best Free Data Recovery Tools. They have polled their readers, and the winner is Recuva. Recuva is free to both personal and commercial use, and it runs on Windows from 98 to Vista. The Recuva developers are currently working Windows 7 and 64 bit support.

Windows vs Linux vs Mac OS

PawEng — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 02:13:26 +0000

The gHacks blog has a post about the 5 Things Linux does better than Windows. Reading it got me thinking about a situation I had recently. I had close to 40 thousand text files, and I needed a list of all unique files. I wouldn’t even know how to attach that problem in Windows. With Linux, it only took a few minutes: Using “find” to identify the files, “md5sum” to generate a hash for each file, “sort” to sort them, “uniq” to remove files with identical hash values, and “cut” to remove the remaining hash values. Putting it all together:

$ find . | xargs md5sum | sort | uniq -w 32 | cut -b 35-

Of course, there are other situations where Windows is better. It is, for example, the de facto standard in today’s business world where everyone has a laptop running Windows. Picking a non-Windows laptop for business would be just asking for trouble.

The gHacks post says it well:

[...] the truth of the matter is, there are certain aspects of the Linux operating system that are just plain better than Windows. And, of course, there are certain aspects of the Windows operating system that are better than Linux. And…of course…there are certain aspects of OS X that are better than either Windows or Linux. It’s a three way street here.

VLC Media Player Version 0.9.9 Released

PawEng — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 00:58:17 +0000

VLC Media Player version 0.9.9 has been released. It is mainly a bug-fix release.

VLC is a free and open source cross-platform media play. It supports a large number of multimedia formats, and it can stream sound and video between computers. VLC is one of my favorite media players. I especially like how it can read DVD ISO images directly without the need for mounting them in virtual DVD drivers.

UbiquityAnywhere — Quick Access to Ubiquity From Anywhere in Windows

PawEng — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 15:52:50 +0000

Ubiquity is Mozilla’s new tool that adds a command line to Firefox. We reported on it back in August 2008. Since then there have been a number of enhancement and upgrades to it. It is a very useful tool. In fact, it is so useful that I often wish I could use it from anywhere in Windows — and not just from within Firefox.

Enter UbiquityAnywhere. I created this small tool (using AutoHotkey) to give quick access to Ubiquity. UbiquityAnywhere provides two new hotkeys:

WIN + Q: Switch to Firefox (start it if necessary) and bring up Ubiquity.

WIN + W: Switch back to the application that was active when you pressed WIN + Q.

UbiquityAnywhere is a 200 kb download. It works on Windows, and requires Firefox with the Ubiquity add-on to be installed. UbiquityAnywhere assumes that you access Ubiquity with the default CTRL + SPACE key.

UbiquityAnywhere is copyrighted software (Copyright 2009 PawEng, LLC), but you may use it for free. You may not, however, distribute UbiquityAnywhere; instead, provide a link to this page. UbiquityAnywhere comes with absolutely no warranty whatsoever.

Recover Deleted Files with DiskDigger

PawEng — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 01:55:01 +0000

Dmitry Brant’s DiskDigger allows you to recover files that you have deleted from your hard disk or from a USB stick or memory card. DiskDigger bypasses the operating system and reads the raw data directly from the disk. This means that you may be able to read files even if your disk has been corrupted and is otherwise unreadable.

DiskDigger is free and works on Windows [via Lifehacker]