Unique Motorsports

UVNC is a great open source progam for connecting to servers or PC’s. One of the major setbacks however is the difficulty in installing UVNC while connected with Remote Desktop, or RDP. The problem is it will run as the signed in user and even if you are signed into the console it still doesn’t seem to work right. Here are a couple of batch files I have written to uninstall UVNC and then another to reinstall UVNC. These can be used with a Remote Desktop (RDP) connection or through command line as well. To use these, simply copy the contents into a text file and save as UVNC-Uninstall.bat or UVNC-Install.bat.

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I have been doing it wrong. Like others in my Twitter list, I too am guilty of p0sting updates which are then automatically updated to my Facebook. What’s the point? Why would someone follow me on Twitter if they are a friend on Facebook? Linkedin, I’m comfortable with my use of. Here is my take on each of these popular Social Media tools and how I will use them going forward.

Facebook - Strictly social. If someone is a friend on Facebook, they might not want to hear every single blog update. Subjecting them to the latest change on one of my rides or an install will eventually be viewed as spam and quite frankly I wouldn’t want someone doing that to me. All that said I’ll be keeping updates regarding my life here albeit this maybe a filtered view as once something is online, it’s for the world to see and will not ever go away.

Twitter - Twitter does have purpose. The key is in it’s definition. I am choosing to use Twitter as my outlet for site updates. Not everyone understands RSS feeds, but a lot of people understand Twitter. If you like this blog and you would like to know whenever updates are made, you can do so using Twitter or by subscribing through RSS. I have already dropped one friend from Twitter for their constant Tweets and will likely drop another. Constant tweets create so much noise that I miss any actual “meat” that might I might otherwise be interested.

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If you regularly run multiple programs on your PC, then VistSwitcher is an Alt+Tab replacement well worth checking out. It replaces the standard Alt+Tab with something that is not only more attractive, but a lot more functional as it actually shows the whole screen before you switch to it. For me, this works great when I’m connected to multiple computers through UVNC and each one is doing an update or some other time consuming task. I can check the status of each without digging through the multiple windows.

The program is well under 1mb, and well worth your time to check out.

Recently I ran across an issue where the file extension was missing on quite a few files. While right clicking on the file and renaming it is not so bad, doing that 47 times could  be quite time consuming. The command line “RENAME” came in to save the day.

1. I copied the files I needed to change into a new folder on the C drive.

2. start / run “cmd” to pull up a command prompt

3. cd c:\rename

4. rename * *.jpg

5. Copied rename files back into the original folder overwriting the files which needed to be changed.

RENAME [drive:][path]filename1 filename2.
REN [drive:][path]filename1 filename2.

I was recently asked to resize a couple of images on a web page. While I’m not sure how to modify the HTML to make it work, I was able to see where the image is getting pulled from. Once there, I wanted to use The Image Resizer Powertoy available from Microsoft and just Right Click the images and resize them. The server greeted me with a message saying “The powertoys require Windows XP or a service pack. They will not function on a version of Windows earlier or later than Windows XP.

Well that’s not good enough, I don’t even have Paint installed on the server. Well, this is where InstallShields /V /a switch comes into play.

Copied the ImageResizerPowertoySetup.exe to the C: drive. I then opened up a Command prompt once to a C:\ typed “imageresizerpowertoysetup.exe /V /a told it to extract to c:\imageresize. Once the installer was done, it left a System32 folder in there. I took the phototoys.dll file out, pasted it into c:\windoows\system32, then from the command line or start/run type “regsvr32 phototoys.dll”.

I now get the “Resize Pictures” option when I right click on the image.