For those loving both nostalgia and PF: the whole Dark Side of the Moon album, but now rendered in 8-bit NES sound by Sakanakao.
This is the first track, other tracks are linked from there.
Source: The Lounge – CodeProject.
YouTube: Pink Floyd Dark Side of the Moon in glorious 8 bit Nintendo sound (from: The Lounge – CodeProject)
Posted by jpluimers on 2010/04/02
Posted in About, Personal | Leave a Comment »
Completely disable accelerators feature in IE 8
Posted by jpluimers on 2010/03/27
Somehow, the accelerator “feature” in IE 8 always gets in the way when selecting text: as soon as the accelerator button becomes visible, I often cannot select more text, especially when running on RDP sessions.
Disabling it turned out to be easy: Completely disable accelerators feature in IE 8.
–jeroen
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New SPAM run faking one of my mailboxes, what do you do with the false “return to sender” messages?
Posted by jpluimers on 2010/03/26
It seems yesterday and today somebody tried to use the non-existing labourable account on my BeSharp.net domain to perform a SPAM run.
For any recipients: Sorry for that, but there is not much I can do about it.
My BeSharp.net inbox was full of administrative “return to sender” mails.
I wonder: what do you do with those false “return to sender” mails?
Normally I delete them, because I hardly get any really follow up, and they interfere with my normal mail processing.
But: if a follow up occurs, it usually is a lot later than the SPAM run, and then it is easy to have those “return to sender” mails as a reference.
So: what do you do?
–jeroen
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Non-English error messages…
Posted by jpluimers on 2010/03/17
Sometimes you wish there was some universal translation table to get the English error messages.
Just got this at a client:
Project Foo.exe raised exception class EOleException with message ‘De bewerking moet worden uitgevoerd op een query die kan worden bijgewerkt‘.
The English translation of the error message is “Operation must use an updateable query” (which is also wrong: the query is indeed updateable).
But not knowing that English translation beforehand, how do you find out the cause?
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Posted in Access, Database Development, Delphi, Development | 2 Comments »
Ref: Microsoft Word Help FAQ. How to create heading numbering and outline numbering in Microsoft Word
Posted by jpluimers on 2010/03/16
I’m always fighting with numbering and formatting headings in Word. Legal documents, manuals, etc, all benefit when the headings are numbered and formatted right.
In Word, I love styles, so the best thing to get this right is to modify the styles of your headings.
Shauna Kelley wrote a great reference titled Microsoft Word Help FAQ. How to create heading numbering and outline numbering in Microsoft Word on this topic.
No need to add anything to that :-)
–jeroen
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Windows Embedded – disable/enable W32Time “Windows Time” service
Posted by jpluimers on 2010/03/15
In some environments having the “http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc773013(WS.10).aspx” service (W32Time) running is not desirable.
Circumstances where you might want to disable W32Time include:
- scheduling algorithms that are sensitive to sudden time changes
- usage of other time synchronization mechanisms
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Posted in Development, Power User, XP-embedded | 2 Comments »
End of Support for Windows 2000, Windows XP SP2 and Windows Vista RTM – Windows Vista Team Blog – The Windows Blog
Posted by jpluimers on 2010/03/09
Starting 20100713, these products are no longer supported by Microsoft:
- Windows 2000 (with or without any SP)
- Windows XP SP2 (XP RTM and SP1 were already “end of support”)
- Windows Vista RTM
For XP: Upgrade to SP3.
For Vista: Upgrade to SP1 or SP2.
More details: End of Support for Windows 2000, Windows XP SP2 and Windows Vista RTM – Windows Vista Team Blog – The Windows Blog.
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Windows 7: getting TomTom HOME and my x7500 and to work together
Posted by jpluimers on 2010/03/09
When I downloaded TomTom HOME 2 from their site, this was the actual link that got downloaded:
This should be version 2.7.3.1894, and when installed, it calls itself “TomTom HOME 2” (while on the site it is advertised as “TomTom HOME”).
After installation, TomTom HOME 2 did not recognize my HTC x7500 PDA.
The reason was that this PDA still had TomTom Navigator 6 on it in ste x7500.
The TomTom download site has TomTom HOME in large print, which in fact is version 2.
In small print, the site tells you that in order to connect to TomTom Navigator 6 on your device, you need TomTom Home 1.6, which then downloads this file:
http://download.tomtom.com/sweet/application/latest/TomTomHOMEwinlatest.exe
This in fact is version 1.5.106.0 (not 1.6!), which on Windows XP used to recognized my HTC x7500 fine.
Well, version 1.5.106.0 installes fine on Windows 7 x64 (which I did not expect it to, since version 1.5.106.0 is from 2007).
Bad thing: at first on Windows 7, it does not recognize my HTC x7500 as a valid TomTom 6 device.
Goog thing: fiddling with the settings on my HTC x7500 (disable the USB-to-PC “advanced network functionality” now causes the x7500 to be recognized in the Windows device manager as “HTC USB Sync” in stead of “Microsoft Windows Mobile Remote Adapter”).
TomTom HOME version 1.5.106.0 understands “HTC USB Sync” and recognizes the x7500 as “HTC-ATHENA” (which is an alias for the x7500), so I’m back in business.
It gets even more odd: this 1.5.106.0 version also started to ask me if I wanted to install the newest version, then suggested to upgrade to the above mentioned version 2.7.3.1894.
This is odd, as version 2.7.3.1894 was already is installed, and is of no use because it does not support the HTC x7500 either.
Even worse: when you run the setup of 2.7.3.1894 again, it suggests to remove the 1.5.106.0.
Go figure…
Then I thought: if this fiddling works for TomTom HOME version 1.5.106.0, lets try version 2.7.3.1894 again.
Surprise: with the disabled the USB-to-PC “advanced networkfunctionality” on the x7500, TomTom HOME version 2.7.3.1894 works too!
It gets even stranger:
TomTom HOME version 1.5.106.0 recognizes free map updates that I should downloads.
TomTom HOME version 2.7.3.1894 suggests I buy new maps.
Somehow this whole TomTom HOME thing feels odd…
–jeroen
PS: When I downloaded TomTom HOME 2 from the first download URL above, upon installation, I actually got 2.6.3.1609, which – immediately after installing – asked me if I wanted to upgrade to 2.7.3.1894 (currently the actual latest), which in fact can be downloaded here:
http://download.tomtom.com/sweet/application/releases/v2_7_3_1894_win.exe
So, if that happens to you as well, now you know the direct download path to the currently latest version.
Strange :-)
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From ISS: Amsterdam at night! on Twitpic
Posted by jpluimers on 2010/03/08
Astronaut Soichi Noguchi posts a lot of pictures on Twitter he took at the ISS.
A few of them are from Amsterdam:
Nice!
–jeroen
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Windows 7 x64 on ThinkPad T61p
Posted by jpluimers on 2010/03/06
Somehow, the latest Windows Vista automatic update screwed my laptop.
It didn’t manage to make a System Restore Point, but in stead managed to remove all previous restore points.
In addition, my laptop now performed like a dog because of excessive disk activity on the primary HDD (login took 30 minutes).
Safe Mode and Safe Mode with Network were fine, so I tried to figure out what was wrong, but gave up after a day of investigating with Process Monitor and Process Explorer, and stopping/pausing allmost all services and killing/pausing almost all processes.
So: I bit the bullet and Installed Windows 7 x64 on my fully loaded T61p.
The machine has dual 7200 rpm 500 Gb drives (I have not used physical DVD’s or CD’s in years), with 4 Gb of memory (the official maximum, but I recently heard it can actually handle 8 gigabyte fine).
It functions as a host (my work is almost exclusively in a virtual machines so I can separate things), so it needs to be a balance of functional but lean installation.
Most of the installation process was straight forward (in fact much more straightforward than getting Vista on it).
Here is the run-down that includes the things I bumped into:
- Installed the Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool to copy the installation DVD to a bootable USB stick (I know there many guides on doing this by hand, but I like to be pragmatic).
- Booted from the USB stick and did basic install
- Be surprised about how much hardware was supported out of the box
- Installed these Lenovo drivers (most from the T61p drivers and software matrix):
UltraNav driver (for thehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TrackPoint– which I love – and the TouchPad – which I disabled)
FingerPrint driver (I really like the biometric fingerprint login over typing my password)
Hotkey driver (more formally called “features integration”)
4-in-1 Ricoh multi card reader driver (which is not on the driver matrix, and supports SD/SDIO/MMC/MMCplus, MS/MS-Pro, xD Picture Card, and IEEE 1394/FireWire) - DAEMON Tools Lite (a virtual CD/DVD player – ideal on a 2 HDD setup)
- GhostScript and FreePDF (so I can print to PDF files and view PostScript files)
- Adobe Reader (there are faster and smaller PDF viewers, but nothing beats the original)
- Google Chrome (my favorite browser, I use other browsers for testing web-stuff, but those are in virtual machines)
- Fiddler2 (for monitoring HTTP/HTTPS traffic when things go wrong, or I need a direct download URL of something
- Skype (the new 4.x, even though it is almost unworkable compared to the old 3.8.0.188, the old version keeps crashing under Windows 7. I moved my Skype Chat History)
- VMware Workstation (note that officially you need version 7 to run Windows as host or guest, 6.5.3 does seem to work for some people)
- 7zip (my favourite compression tool)
- My standard BIN directory with my favourite light weight command-line tools (did I mention I’m from they keyboard age? Hence the love for the TrackPoint)
Windows 7 feels a lot faster than Windows Vista, and requires a lot less memory for itself (slightly more than 1 gigabyte, where Vista needs almost half a gigabyte more).
–jeroen
Ref: Re: Device Manager unknown devices T61p – lenovo community.
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Posted in Keyboards and Keyboard Shortcuts, Power User, RSI, ThinkPad, UltraNav keyboards | 6 Comments »
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 