So. You want to try your hand at busking? You need a unique selling point. OK, to go beyond that you need two, dress as a chicken and play a Pianica.
|
||||||
|
I’m a big fan of Windows 7, it has finally moved me from XP on my work machines. However I still haven’t quite got the locations for the settings stuck in the old memory and find myself hunting for them every now and then. I was going to blog about a piece of software called Windows 7 In A Box which puts a whole load of commonly used Windows setting into one place. I guess in fact I have just done that. But before going off to look at that, try the “official” Windows 7 “Gode Mode” instead. I use the word official simply because this works with vanilla out the box Windows 7 and therefore I assume was put there by the boys in Redmond. To gain access to the mode simply do the following;
The whole name is important so I’d advise copying and pasting. That’s all there is to it. Now you should have a folder with the same icon as the control panel, open it and you will gain access to a whole shedload of settings, some of which are hard to locate, some that don’t actually have GUI access normally. I’ve recently acquired a Netbook (Asus EeePC 1005HA to be precise) and in common with many such devices it came preloaded with XP. Now up until 6 months ago I’d probably have left it at that but having used Windows 7 for those last months I really didn’t want to go back. So I decided to look at installing Windows 7. Now as many people have pointed out, there is no direct upgrade from XP to 7 so the install has to be a “clean” one. The issue with the Netbook of course being that there is no optical drive to install from. The way around this is to boot from USB and take it from there. Now at this stage I will issue YMMV in extra tall letters because my experience of trying to get USB thumb drives booting is a little random to say the least. There are a whole range of techniques out there and some will work with one brand of USB and not another. The information below I know works with several brands and capacities as I’ve used it to create bootable USBs for a number of projects but if it doesn’t work, try a different USB drive. I’ve found Kingston DataTravelers pretty good, 1Gb for bootable CD type apps and 4Gb for DVD which is what I used for this. Continue reading Installing Windows 7 on a Netbook Using USB The Boston Globe has a piece on the restart of the Large Hadron Collider that has some fantastic photos including some of the damage done at the original startup. The scale of this thing never ceases to amaze.
The article and the rest of the photos can be found here. When putting together the earlier post I needed to grab some shots of the process and as always I’d forgotton the OS X screen grab shortcut keys so I thought I’d stick them down here.
Adding Ctrl to either of those combinations will do the same thing but store the image on the clipboard rather than to file. By default the saved files are in PNG format (at least since 10.4 I think) and saved to the Desktop. To change either of these you can open Terminal and enter; For the format:
image_format can be a range of popular formats, PNG being the default, JPG, PDF, BMP and GIF being some of the other more useful variations So to change to JPG would be
For the location:
For example:
This setting seems to need the user to log off and back on to become active, YMMV. Having recently upgraded to Snow Leopard one of the things that stopped working was my Cisco VPN client for access to my work network. From reading around it seems a reinstall should solve this but rather than go down that route I decided to look to the built in VPN features instead. The starting point for this is the Networks section of the System Preferences. Click the + to add a new interface and select the VPN option and then the Cisco selection. You should end up with something that looks like this;
From here you get to another dialog box where the various connection details are to be added;
This is where the problem for many people is going to come and would seem to be a fairly huge omission on Apple’s behalf. To simplify the setup of the VPN to non-techy users, and to avoid giving out the password for the VPN group, many if not most VPN admins will create a .pcf file that can then be used with the VPN client of choice to import all of the settings. I was expecting a button on the above dialog with “Import PCF” or similar functionality but no. Now .pcf files are mostly clear text so opening in a text editor will give most of the key details, Server Address for example and if you don’t already know your username and password you aren’t going to be logging on anyway! However, the next step is where the problem happens. To set up you need to click on the Authentication Settings button and you are taken to the following;
The Group Name will be clear text in the .pcf (if used) but the Machine Authentication isn’t and you will need the actual password to complete the installation. Now given that one of the reasons for the .pcf is to avoid giving this password out this isn’t something most users will have to hand and many IT departments will be loathe to give out. A quick Google search though shows that help is at hand. A quick trip to this website will allow you to copy in the encrypted password from the pcf file and get the actual password in return. As the site only takes the server password, i.e. not the server address or group name, there isn’t really a security issue here. With password in hand the setup is complete and the VPN should now work fine. Did for me anyway. Enjoy. For the non-arty one of the hardest things to do when putting together websites is to get just the right colours. For the criminally untalented, like me, there are loads of free css templates but when using these there is always the desire to choose different colours that make the site stand out. Even if we see a colour that we think would be a good starting point there’s the problem of isolating the colour and getting the necessary rgb values. If the colour is on another web site that’s easy enough, even if wading through html/css to find the colour can be tedious, but what if the starting point is a photo? Well the people over at ColorSuckr have created the solution. Simply give the URL to any photo you like the look of, or choose from one of many on the site, and the app will sample the key colours in said photo and give you the rgb values in all the usual formats such as RGB and the hex # number. They even give a “web safe” equivalent. What’s more, there is a link to colourlovers.com that will use any of the colours you choose as a base colour and generate several alternative palettes of complimentary colours. This is a great tool with an equally great partnership that makes creating interesting colour combinations a doddle. |
||||||
|
Copyright © 2010 Random Thoughts - All Rights Reserved |
||||||
