Whisper

I am the whisper

around the corner 

that dreams of being 

your youth

Supporting Fellow Creative Geeks

Fate Core

My current favorite RPG Fate has a patronage system setup to allow fans to support their ongoing efforts to bring great gaming content to the public.  I highly recommend checking it out and subscribing to support a great effort.


Zombie Orpheus

They brought us the Gamers series of movies, JourneyQuest, and Rude Mechanical, as well as a bevy of other great entertainment.  They are fan supported distributors of fantastic and fun entertainment and should be supported.  They now have a subscription program that allows you to give them a little cash monthly so that they can release more great content sooner.  I recommend that everyone who enjoys fun, original shows to throw some money their way.  You can check out much of their entertainment at their YouTube channel.


Geek and Sundry

The electronic child of Felicia Day, Geek and Sundry has brought us awesome shows like The Guild, TableTop, and Caper, plus much, much more.  That's hours of delicious geek culture entertainment on their YouTube channel.  You can watch for free but, wouldn't you feel better about yourself if you supported them directly, and helped keep these great shows coming, so why not buy something from their store?

Using MinGW instead of Visual Studio with Python

I was trying to install certain Python packages on a new system I was getting the following error:

error: Unable to find vcvarsall.bat

I don't use visual studio, instead I use MinGW, so the following steps were needed:

1. Install MinGW
2. Add the path to the MinGW bin folder to the system path
3. Edit or create the distutils.cfg located in your PYTHON\Lib\distutils folder
4. Add the following to the cfg file

[build]
compiler=mingw32

I also got the following error

gcc: error: unrecognized command line option '-mno-cygwin'
error: command 'gcc' failed with exit status 1

There is probably a better solution but until I can find one I edited the '-mno-cygwin' switch out of the cygwinccompiler.py file.  It shows up on 4 lines around line 322.

Edit 4/27/15: It looks like the -mno-cygwin issue has been resolved in more recent releases of distutils.

Hurt

Hurt

’twas times greatest deceit

and, thus fallen, lays love.

Was slain, in defeat

though seemed fated from above.

In pleasure the pursuit,

pleasure gained for years.

Then left destitute,

with pains wicked tears.

My soul pushed to break,

my heart bears such hurt.

This distress will not slake,

till a rest, deep in dirt.

My sleep torments me,

with dreams of nevermore.

My joy I ne’er more see,

only anguish is in store.

By times greatest lie,

my spirit was laid low.

But hope does still try,

I plead this not be so.

Synergy on Windows 7

I love Synergy and have been using it for years. Now that I have some Windows 7 machines I wanted to use it on them as well as my XP and Ubuntu systems.  The problem I was having was the Ctrl+Alt+Pause key would not work to send Ctrl+Alt+Del to the client Windows 7 system.  So after some digging around i found this site.

Basically you need to change the policy to enable software Secure Attention Sequence.  You can follow the instructions on that site or just add the following to your system:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System]
"SoftwareSASGeneration"=dword:00000001

My odd productivity scripts

I love to save time when working on my computer and as such I have written a number of time saving scripts over the years.

I have several things I do whenever I am setting up a new system that I will be using for a while.

I create a folder off the root of the system drive named Tools and I add it to the beginning of the system path.  In the Tools folder I copy my productivity scripts, and several folders:

• docs - This contains my work, personal and technical documents
• downloads - I set my browsers to download everything here
• logs - Many of my productivity scripts log actions here
• programs - I install my non portable development tools here when possible
• scripts - Any helper \ productivity script not in the Tools folder itself goes here
• utils - Any app or utility that is portable goes here
• workshop - This contains sub-folders for any language I program in and each language sub-folder contains version folders and\or project folders

By having the Tools folder in the path and numerous batch scripts in the Tools folder I can launch any of the batch files from the Run prompt.  This allows me to skip several steps when launching apps or running processes.  Here is an example script that launches the portable version of 7-zip:

@ECHO OFF
::: DOC: Runs 7-Zip
PUSHD %~dp0utils\7-Zip
SET Command=START 7-ZipPortable.exe
%Command%
FOR /f "delims=" %%a in ('cscript.exe //Nologo %~dp0scripts\vbdate.vbs') do @Set strDate=%%a
FOR /f "delims=" %%a in ('cscript.exe //Nologo %~dp0scripts\vbtime.vbs') do @Set strTime=%%a
ECHO %0 - %strDate%-%strTime% - Command: %Command%  >> %~dp0logs\cmd.log
POPD

The first line @ECHO OFF tells the script not to echo the commands in the command prompt that is launched to run the batch file.  ECHO OFF sets the echo state to off for the rest of the batch file and the @ symbol sets the echo state to off for the ECHO OFF command.

The three colons (:::) operates as a remark statement in the batch file.  The batch "language" uses a single colon as a label and labels are not parsed at run time so using the three colons makes the script run a little quicker than it would if I used the REM statement.  Also I can parse the batch files for the DOC label and generate a list of what the scripts do if needed.

PUSHD sets the current working directory temporarily, the %~dp0 sets a variable that contains the path to the running script with a trailing backslash.

I SET a variable "Command" that contains the actual command used to launch the app or process.  This allows me to use the "Command" variable to both launch the app and to log the use of the command later in the script.

The vbdate.vbs and vbtime.vbs scripts are vbscripts that I use to get date\time stamps for logging or when I automate file renaming for backups.

The ECHO %0 etc.. sends the batch file name, the date-time and the Command to a log file.  The double greater than signs causes the information to be appended to the end of the target file.

The POPD command changes the current working directory back to where it was at the beginning of the script.

A number of these steps are not needed to actually launch the app or process but in different circumstances are useful to me for the way I work.  For example when running the batch file from the run dialog I don't need to POPD at the end of the script, but when running from a command line it would leave the directory set to what was set by the PUSHD command.

I also use AutoHotKey extensively for a number of tasks.  For example I keep a number of windows and applications open for days at a time but might only use them a few times a day (or week) so I use the Min2Tray script with AutoHotKey.  I have a keyboard command that will call a vbscript to tile all windows horizontally and one to tile all windows vertically.

#!H::RUN %maindrive%\Tools\scripts\tileh.vbs
#!V::RUN %maindrive%\Tools\scripts\tilev.vbs


That is WIN+ALT+H or +V causes AutoHotKey to call one of the following vbscripts:

Tile horizontally

dim objShell
set objShell = CreateObject("Shell.Application")
objShell.TileHorizontally
set objShell = nothing

Tile vertically

dim objShell
set objShell = CreateObject("Shell.Application")
objShell.TileVertically
set objShell = nothing

I have another AutoHotKey script that will stop my music from playing and lock all of my work systems when I hit #L (WIN+L).  Another script triggered by ^PrintScreen (CTRL+PrintScreen) that takes a screen shot and uses IrfanView (portable) to automatically save it as a png file.

All in all I currently have about 150 batch files, about 50 AutoHotKey scripts\commands\hotstrings, around 20 vbscripts and probably 10 - 15 Python programs that I have written to save me time and make tasks easier.  These scripts save me minutes to hours throughout the week.

This is pretty cool

Open Source Ecology is a movement dedicated to the collaborative development of tools for replicable, open source, modern off-grid "resilient communities."