-
Feb
25thHow to Map a Drive Letter to a Folder in Windows
Although it is relatively easy to assign a drive letter to a physical or removable drive, or to a network path for that matter, it isn’t quite as obvious how one goes about mapping a drive letter to a folder in Windows. Funnily enough, this ability has existed in Windows via the subst command for quite a while now, going all the way back to Windows XP! If you are a keyboard ninja then you would of course jump straight to a command line and start banging away with the subst command, but for the rest of us out there the easiest method by far is to make use of a simple utility called Visual Subst, which gives you a nice graphical interface to assign drive letters, but also does something that the command line version can’t – you can set your virtual drives to apply again at startup. Once you’ve downloaded the utility, simply run it, use the browse button to select the path you want to map to, and click the green plus symbol to choose enforce the chosen drive letter. As simple as that. If you want to save your mapping so that it is more permanent, hit the “Apply virtual drives on Windows startup” option. Nifty. Related Link: http://www.ntwind.com/software/utilities/visual-subst.html
-
Oct
7thHow to Share a Printer to a Windows PC from an Ubuntu PC
Sharing a printer to your Windows laptop or desktop PC from your main Ubuntu desktop machine is made pretty simple thanks to the magic of Samba. Here’s a quick tutorial on how to efficiently share your printer under Ubuntu then: First, install Samba via the Ubuntu Software Center. (Search for ‘Samba’. That tends to work!) Next access the properties sheet of the printer which is connected to your system that you wish to share. (System -> Administration -> Printing. Right click on the printer icon and select ‘Properties’). Select ‘Policies’ on the left menu and check the boxes shown below. (Tick ‘Enabled’, ‘Accepting Jobs’ and ‘Shared’) Next, click on the ‘Server’ menu option on the Printing dialog and select the ‘Settings’ submenu. Again, check the boxes shown below: (Tick ‘Show printers shared…’, ‘Publish shared printers…’ and ‘Allow printing from…’) To make it easy to access the now shared printer from your other systems, you need to make it discoverable. A quick way of doing that is to press Alt+F2 on the keyboard and run: gksu gedit /etc/samba/smb.conf Scroll down the file to the Printers section and change the ‘browseable’ value to yes. Save the file and if you are not feeling so confident in restarting services on your machine, restart the whole computer. Now that the printer is shared on your Ubuntu machine, let’s access it on your Windows laptop. Access the Printers dialog found in the Control Panel and select the menu option to add a new printer. When [...]
-
Jul
11thWindows Keyboard Shortcut: Quick, Launch the Task Manager!
Here’s a nifty Windows keyboard shortcut which I was not aware of until recently. My version of Vista tends to freeze a lot, meaning a lot of sluggish trips through to the Open Task Manager button on the Control+Alt+Delete screen. However, with this particular keyboard shortcut, you can launch Task Manager directly, which is pretty awesome if your machine is about to keel over and you don’t want the poor thing struggling to draw new and unnecessary windows! To launch, simply press Control+Shift+Escape, which will quick launch task manager in the blink of an eye. Nifty!
-
Jul
4thPHP: Handle Microsoft Windows Smart Quotes in Your Strings
Microsoft Word likes converting single and double quotes into it’s so-called smart quotes representation, which can be annoying when you are trying to display the string on a device that doesn’t support smart quotes (the curly ones in case you were wondering). The easiest way to clean out these curly smart or fancy quotes is to run a simple search and replace on your string:
-
Jun
22ndPHP: How to Gracefully deal with some Microsoft Windows Special CharactersAlthough Microsoft Windows smart quotes are the usual culprits for web developers who need to display strings on devices powered by operating systems other than Windows, there are in fact a number of other Windows-only special characters that can potentially rear their heads every now and then.
-
Apr
6thWindows: ‘ipconfig’ is not Recognised as an Internal or External Command
If on opening a command line prompt and trying to run something like ipconfig or ping, you receive an error message reading something like ‘ipconfig’ is not recognised as an internal or external command, chances are pretty good that you somehow messed up your PATH system environment variable.
-
Mar
11thHow to Install the Zend Framework in Windows Vista for a Web Developer
If you already have a web development environment set up on your machine and don’t necessarily want to run the whole Zend Server package and instead just want to create Zend projects using the Zend Framework, then this simple how to install Zend Framework tutorial should be perfect for you.
-
Apr
20thDownload Webpages with Wget for Windows
Now for those of you who would like to use something like this little robust, command line and self terminating application for a scheduled task on your great big Windows Server or desktop machine, rejoice because someone has gone to the effort and created a great little port project that offers you a complete wget package for Windows, even going so far as giving you a proper installer to drop everything in its right place.
-
Apr
2ndSplit Large Files Into Smaller Pieces
So enter GSplit, a great little reliable, free file splitter application that can split large files like disk images, video files, zip archives into a whole lot of smaller chunks and then provide you with a handy little executable file to sew all those pieces back up again when you need to.
-
Mar
26thHow to Unlock Locked Files in Windows
This little app then allows you to essentially force close these open files by either closing the handle via its own interface or alternatively killing the process it indicates is currently locking that annoying file.
-
Feb
2ndRestore Your Original Fonts in Windows XP or Vista
Now restoring your Windows XP or Vista installation to the original set of installed fonts turns out not to be a particularly easy manual task, based on the way in which font handling and manipulation is executed on the Windows Explorer platform.
-
Nov
28thLittle Vista Tip: Control Your Startup Applications
Yes, there are a number of ways of controlling which applications get launched on Windows startup, ranging from editing the registry or deleting shortcuts from the windows startup folder, but in a nice stroke of genius, Microsoft allows you to quickly and efficiently control which startup applications get to run by adding a useful Startup tab to their System Configuration utility.
-
Oct
6thCopy Path Shell Extension
Senior software engineer (well, that’s what his website says) Ralph Arvesen provides a pretty nifty little Windows shell extension (that’s an application that hooks into the operating system) in the form of Copy Path
-
May
31stStickyKeys
I know designing for accessibility is important, but nuts, nothing is more annoying than accidentally enabling Microsofts StickyKey functionality. It gets enabled if you hold down the shift key too long or press it five times in a row. Basically it makes life easier if you can’t press more than one button at once, but to be honest, its still a long way off before I’m not able to do that anymore.
