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29 Jul 2009
I spend an inordinate amount of time at home sat on the sofa in front of my TV working on my laptop. I have a nice little media set-up consisting of a Mac Mini connected to my Sony Bravia TV which provides me with a nice little Internet connected multimedia option. Rather than watching TV all the time I frequently find that I want to listen to some music while I work and because I’m quite fickle with what I want to listen to at any time Spotify has proven to be a great little piece of software.
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23 Jul 2009
On Windows XP you may find that you need to carry out some tasks as an administrator for which you would logon as an administrator (local or network/domain). If the user is already logged on then you can choose to run as administrator for many activities by selecting run as from a file’s context menu. However not every type of file has this option.
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22 Jul 2009
There are lots of Twitter clients out there for smart phones, but you can also tweet from a ‘dumb’ phone. The trick is to use a service like TwitSay or TwitterFone. Once you register, these services give you a local telephone number to call. You can then record a short voice message.
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20 Jul 2009
National Rail Enquiries in the UK have cornered the market for iPhone apps for UK rail. It used to be open and there apparently used to be a pretty reasonable app out there for free. National Rail’s app on the other hand is not as nice and costs a few too many pennies for many people.
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20 Jul 2009
Power saving options on computers are something that I personally think are great. They not only help reduce carbon footprints, but they also help draw out even more life from your laptop battery. One of the main ways in which this is done (others being things such as disabling hardware) is by having an inactivity option that turns off the screen and the hard disk after a period of inactivity. Unfortunately there are times when this isn’t something you want. The primary example of this is when you are giving a presentation.
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19 Jul 2009
I’ve seen a few variations over the years on how to create a progress bar and an update window in VBScript. I’ve taken many of the ideas and some of my own to create what I hope is a flexible solution that not only allows you to display updates, reports, etc., but also a reasonable looking progress bar. If you want to skip ahead then the code is at the bottom of this post and includes an example, but for those of you who want to know a little more about how to use it or how it works I’ll explain some of the whys and wherefores.
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18 Jul 2009
Sometimes I need to create shortcuts with VBScript especially if the script is being installed and
a shortcut needs to be created to the script. The code to create a
shortcut is quite straight forward, but the CreateShortcut() function
presented here pulls everything together into a single reusable form.
Optional parameters that you don’t want to use can be filled by the use
of NULL and environment variables can be included in file paths to
make this as flexible as possible.
18 Jul 2009
I like using VBScripts and the Windows Script Host to resolve issues as it has proved quick and flexible for most tasks. One thing I have found problematic on occasion is the installation of the scripts on a user’s PC. It takes time to do if it is not being deployed using logon scripts, group policy, etc. To this end I decided to write a function to allow a script to install itself. The script below is primarily made up from three functions/routines.
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16 Jul 2009
It’s been quite a few weeks since I’ve been able to devote any time to blogging. It has just been a really busy time for me. However I’m currently sat on a train between Edinburgh and York so it’s an excellent opportunity to have a bit of a catch up. Specifically I wanted to post something about one of the biggest things I’ve worked on recently - The Higher Education Academy Conference 2009.
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13 Jul 2009
I’ve been tinkering recently with some things around portable applications which I will probably post more about in the hopefully not too distant future. One of the things I’ve been trawling around for and busily configuring are various free web server packages that are “portable”. Unfortunately it has taken a fair bit of effort to actually track down and configure something that is portable enough. The problem for me is that I have a particular need to locate the web server within a particular sub folder and in the case of most software packages this is not an option.
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