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28 Apr 2014
Every now and then you get a day that you know is going to be a little different and more challenging than the typical one. You can tell right away it will be “one of those days” by the first thing someone says to you when you walk into the office. Some time back I was heading up a small IT department and occasionally I would walk in to an “I’m glad you’re here”, “server A is down” or “X has rung for you twice already”. None unusual in themselves, but all harbingers of what was to come. However, the strangest greeting I ever had was as I walked up to my desk one morning and a colleague turned to me and with a wry smile said … “There’s a bird in the server room”.
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01 Mar 2014
PowerPoint is a term used to strike fear into the hearts of office workers the world over, but much like a firearm it is more about whose hands it is in that makes the difference. I may not be a PowerPoint guru, but on many occasions over the years I’ve found myself needing to wrestle with its functions and features to produce the effect I (or more frequently someone else) want(s). One effect that keeps cropping up is that of a jigsaw. The analogy of the complete picture and how pieces fit together (or are missing) lends itself well to many aspects of business and life in general. Since it has been such a popular request I thought I’d share some techniques and some templates that I use to produce jigsaws in PowerPoint.
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28 Feb 2014
Over the years I’ve been doing technical support I’ve had quite a few useful VBS scripts that I’d copy over to a user’s machine. Then if it necessary, they could be run again at a later date (by remote control or referring the user to it’s location and get them to run it). However I quickly tired of manually doing this and dealing with the instances where I’d accidentally copied the script to the user’s desktop instead of the location I’d really wanted. As a result I created some extra lines to add into these scripts that would install the script to the desired location and then run it from there. This meant I could run it from a flash or network drive and it would automatically go to the right place - even updating older scripts.
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30 Jan 2014
Android devices don’t have any native feature (currently) to mirror the display onto a PC. There are however a few alternative ways to accomplish this. In this post I’ll be giving a quick run down on how I got my Samsung Galaxy S2 to mirror it’s display onto my Windows laptop using Droid@Screen
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10 Jan 2014
It’s the new year so as has become a bit of a tradition it’s time to review the past 12 months and see what’s been going on at thoughtasylum.com and with me.
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23 Dec 2013
I seem to be having a bit of a spree on TextExpander posts at the moment looking at my last few posts - can you get too much of a good thing?. This time I’m going to be sharing some snippets I have for getting useful information from the Mac using some terminal commands.
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28 Nov 2013
TextExpander is a great piece of software that can save you a lot of effort when you want to insert pieces of boiler plate text. However it is a much more versatile piece of software and I’m particularly fond of its capability to process text using shell scripts. In this post I’m going to give some details about how I use it to sort lines of text into alphabetical order.
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13 Oct 2013
I have frequently found myself needing to add a link into a blog post for an existing web page where I’d like to link it as the page title. Rather than a couple of copy and paste actions I decided to create a TextExpander snippet to do the (not particularly) heavy lifting for me.
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30 Sep 2013
Digital technology is a huge part of my life and who I am. I’m one of those people who actually finds it relative easy to read on a screen rather than having a preference for a paper book. So it’s unusual for me to find myself writing a blog post that is about something rather analogue - but it’s something I think fills a niche in the way I work and I expect could for you to. It is something brilliantly simple and fits in your pocket - a foldable whiteboard.
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26 Aug 2013
Whilst doing some house keeping on some old VBScript files the other day
I came across one for creating test files. I’ve blogged previously about
creating test files using my MTF utility
and whilst it or fsutil can be very useful, this script filled a
particular niche. It was created as part of a test suite of scripts it
creates multiple files of a specific size filled with random printable
content.
