Marc's Musings Reality from Marc's point of view!

I picked this info up from “The Winhelpline Blog” and am documenting it here so that I’ll be able to find it the next time I want to change this. The following subset of directions is lifted unabashadly by me for my own edification. If you want the whole story go to the Winhelpline link. I also used the reference below to “Rafael’s” site to determine the correct size for my image.

For my purposes I used the Windows 7 policy editor technique and it worked just fine.

I also took a favored picture and downsized it to 1900 x 1200 pixels and reduced the resolution so that the final JPEG file size would be less than 256 KBytes. In Photoshop Elements 8 that meant going for a quality of “3″. My original picture was 3872 x 2592 at weighed in at a hefty 2.74 MegaBytes. So rather than the standard background I now sport a picture of my lovely wife in front of one of the ruins of tulum.

Use the following Group Policy setting in Windows 7

1. Start the Group Policy Editor (gpedit.msc)

2. Go to the following branch:

3. Set the following option to Enabled

Always use custom logon background

4. Close the Group Policy Editor.

Step II – Include the Wallpaper Image (JPG)

Next step is to place the background wallpaper (JPEG file) in the following folder:

Note that the info folder doesn’t exist by default. You need to create the info and backgrounds folders manually.

Place the background image file (name it as backgroundDefault.jpg) into the above folder.

As for the file naming info and maximum supported file size, check out Rafael’s post Windows 7 to officially support logon UI background customization. Be sure to check out Rafael’s blog for more information and screenshots!

Posted under Photography, Tech Stuff

I love Amazon.com. I do a LOT of my shopping there. Anything from my TV to my rowing machine to filters for my furnace I purchase through Amazon.

Anybody who has dealt with Amazon knows that prices tend to fluctuate rather a lot.

Recently I was opining that Amazon’s kindle book prices should not be greater than those for new hardcopy books. So I set about looking for some kind of price watch tool that could alert me when ANY Amazon price changes, I was specifically interested in finding a tool that could track Kindle book prices as well.

This turns out to be pretty hard to find.

In my travels I elected to install a piece of [expletive deleted] software from nukeprice.com called “Amazon Price Watcher”. I found the software on CNet which is usually a pretty reliable source of safe software.

Right away, after installing it, I wasn’t impressed with the interface. It really wasn’t clear how it did what it was supposed to do and there was no useful help at all.

The clincher is that the uninstall – when you find it in the program files folder – doesn’t really uninstall everything. I ended up manually going through the registry to get this hunk of junk off my system.

I had already pointed it to my wish list (public wishlist) so it had already absorbed some of my current items of interest.  So for the past week I’ve been receiving daily emails from nukeprice.com telling me about one item that seems to drop by about 2 cents a day.

The *only* way, according to the email, to stop the emails is to reinstall the software and then change my watches. There is an intimation that the watch my expire on July 21 so that may ultimately stop the messages.

Of course I don’t feel comfortable with that software so it’s not going back on my machine so I’ll be spamming the incoming emails in the interim.

I just wanted to post this in case anybody is smarter than I am and searches teh intertubes for some opinions on Amazon Price Watch before installing.

I’ll say it again to be clear. I do not like “Amazon Price Watch” by nukeprice.com, the interface is confusing, the help is terrible and it doesn’t uninstall right.

Yech.

Posted under Opinions, Utils / Tools

*** Updated June 14, 2010 ***

It turns out that the Procexp64.exe exists ONLY while Process explorer is running. Don’t ask me why. So my registry entry instead now shows:

C:\Bin\Procexp.exe.

Otherwise you still get the “cannot find” message.

*** End June 14, 2010 Update ***

I recently was introduced to Windows’ Process Explorer and liked it enough to want to replace Window’s native task manager with it.

It *should* be as simple as clicking “Options > Replace Task Manager” in the Process Explorer window but then, when you try to invoke the Task Manager (now supposedly Process Explorer) you get a message indicating that

“Windows cannot find ‘C:\Window\System32\taskmgr.exe’. Make sure you typed the name correctly, and then try again.”

For me, going back in Process Explorer to uncheck the above option shows that it’s not checked, and clicking it again doesn’t do anything at all.

Not sure exactly why but what’s happened is that a registry key for task manager has now been created with a debugger key that has a garbage value. Mine showed something like ” ^ $ ^”.

Check it out under HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Image File Execution Options\taskmgr.exe

To go back the way things were you just need to remove the “Debugger” key. Or, if you want to go forward and actually replace the task manager, then set the value of the debug key with the location of your process explorer executable. In my case it looks like “C:\bin\Procexp64.exe” “C:\bin\Procexp.exe”.

Funny, I deleted the debug key and then went back to process explorer and try “Options > Replace Task Manager” again and it works just fine now. Must be an initialization issue.

Posted under Tech Stuff

I woke up this morning with this song in my head but wanted to have a version of it that I could listen to any time either on my home stereo (via iTunes through SoundBridge) or on my iPod.

A quick search turned up ListenToYouTube.com where all I needed to do was provide the YouTube URL for the video and they’ll rip it and provide you with an MP3 file of it, no charge(!). The resulting file is encoded at 128 bps but, for the quality on the YouTube video that’s more than enough for my purposes.

But there was a lead-in section explaining the purpose for the video which is nice in the video context but was a bit distracting for just straight listening. So another search yielded MP3Trim which is a freeware version of the software that can handle files of up to about 9.7 MBytes. The software nicely trims leading and trailing stuff off of MP3s and so was perfect for removing the distracting piece.

Using iTunes’ seek bar I figure out at what point I want the trim to take place, decide if I need it to be abrupt or a fast or slow fade in/out and *presto*. New MP3 with only the parts that I want.

So I’m walking through my collection now removing annoying guitar solos, that annoying guy at the end of the Fugee’s “Killing Me Softly” song and Dolly Parton (yes I have a couple of Dolly Parton songs) yakking away at the end of “Star Spangled Banner”.

I’ve only stumbled so far trying to trim Guns N’ Roses “Knockin’ on Heavean’s Door”. At 10.2 MBytes it’s about 5% too big for the Freeware MP3Trim to handle. Registering the software would resolve this for me. But it’s a little pricey for the use that I would make of it. I’ll just get something that can split the file grossly near where I want to trim and *then* trim it. And if that doesn’t work I don’t think I’ll worry about it.

Of course, if I were only listening to this music on my iTunes or my iPod platforms I could just alter the properties so that the portions of the song that I don’t want are simply not played, but this ONLY works on those platforms. Playing through my Soundbridge or directly off of an SD card on my BlackBerry or car stereo would still have the annoying bits.

Posted under Tech Stuff, Utils / Tools

I was exchanging messages with King and thought I’d post my thoughts on the software that I currently use on the BlackBerry.

Hey King,

I don’t use a lot of apps on my 9700 Bold BlackBerry, but I swear by Pocket Informant. It’s great for getting tasks on your calendar and I like its presentation for contacts as well.

I haven’t used the “keyboardless” version of it yet. I used to use it on my iPaq and the BlackBerry version is up to par.

I don’t have any recommendation for a calculator as I pretty much use only the 4 functions these days, but other software I use frequently:

- BerryWeather – my favorite feature is setting my “home” screen to my GPS coordinates so it is always showing me the current and forecast weather for wherever I happen to be. I keep 3 other permanent locations set as well so I can always check home, Toronto and my airport’s weather.

- Profile Scheduler – I use profiles heavily (along with filters) and the scheduler automatically puts it into phone only mode for night time. So I don’t get woken up when a friend sends me some funny message at 1 in the morning…

- I often have used google maps on my device – haven’t had much cause to lately since I’m always near a computer or my gps.

- Something that has potential but IMHO isn’t quite there yet is drivesafe.ly  (yep that’s spelled correctly). It can detect when you’re driving (by gps speed) and will auto respond to email and text if you wish and will read you your incoming email and texts. Pretty cool to know whether or not that new incoming message is something to deal with at the next light or not.

- Besides those products I regularly use the Blackberry Facebook App, Enterprise Messenger (with our corporate SameTime IM system), Viigo and UberTwitter. All are OK but none are drop dead gorgeous apps.

I synch wirelessly via BlackBerry Enterprise Server to my Lotus Notes for mail, calendar and journal/memo/notebook. But I synch manually to Lotus Notes at work and to Outlook at Home (outlook is my master) and am able to take advantage of outlook’s superior print and formatting capabilities with no major issues.

I have tried several flavors of synching contacts, calendars, etc. with google-centric products but I have found all of them lacking.

There is a product that you can search for that you would pay some modest monthly fee for that will wirelessly synch your outlook with the BlackBerry that I researched somewhat for one of our SLT folks who was leaving the company and I would definitely give it a try over any of the other solutions I’ve seen to date if I didn’t have a work-provided wireless solution.

Marc

On Fri, May 7, 2010 at 7:43 PM, King wrote:

I have taken the plunge, and gone for the BB Storm 2.

Any recommendations for ‘must have’ software?
Particularly…..

a Calculator?  The one that comes with it is just basic +-*/ and I use the
more ‘impressive’ functions a fair bit on my treo.

A contact list?  I was able to import the contacts from my trio, but it
has not converted as cleanly as I would like.

Also, what do you use on the desktop to sync to, Outlook? Google service,
Lotus notes?  What I would really like is a full address book, from which
I could print mailing labels on the PC side as well as maintain all
contact info.

King

Posted under Blackberry, Tech Stuff

At work I’m wrestling with McAfee’s on access scanner absolutely crippling Lotus Notes latest client R8.5.1.  By killing the mcshield process you can realize a dramatic improvement in the startup time and overall performance of the Lotus client. A side benefit is that the omnipresent crashes I was facing have virtually disappeared.

Also, if you use the designer client you will see at least one order of magnitude increase in performance. I went from being amazed that such a terrible designer client had been released to being horrified that a relatively capable designer client had been so crippled by on access anti malware software as to render it useless.

Obviously our security folks are not going to be satisfied with simply disabling the scanner so the challenge is now to find some way to make these crappy security products ignore the right files so that the business applications can get on with being useful.

Today I was working at home with Quicken 2010 and I was miffed by how sluggishly it was behaving. I’ve got an i7-920 computer chip overclocked to 3 GHz, 12 Gigabytes of RAM and 64-Bit Windows 7 Professional pushing Quicken along. In theory it should be screaming.  Pulling up the task manager, what do I see but for pretty much every mouse click the MsMpEng executable (Microsoft Security Essentials Anti Malware scanner) is sucking up 10-30 percent of my CPU.

I’ve tried configuring the scanner to ignore my executable (C:\Program Files (x86)\Quicken\qw.exe), the Quicken QDF data file type (QDF extension) and even the entire dedicated drive on which the Quicken data files reside. But nothing has any effect. I’m pretty sure that those options are provided for the same reason as “Close” buttons on elevators exist: to give you something to do while things proceed at their normal pace.

Now killing the MsMpEng process absolutely fixes the issue. Quicken takes off like there is no tomorrow. Again, this is not an appropriate answer. You need to have rather sophisticated protections in place to work in today’s sophisticated cyber world. But it does point a finger directly at the resource hogging culprit.

So tell me, why does our protection software have to be so crude and bloated that this is even an issue? Does anybody have any suggestions or alternatives that you are happy with? Until this issue I thought I was VERY happy with Microsoft Security Essentials. But I’ve never needed to tweak it before. Now I want something effective. Symantec’s products have proven themselves to be monstrous resource hogs in the past. My McAfee experience at work is leading me away from that direction. Suggestions are very welcome and even more so if you’ve worked with Quicken in a Windows 7 64 bit environment!

Posted under Tech Stuff, Work Portfolio

My taste in books spans from the serious (such as “The God Delusion”)  through to the fantastic (pick anything by “Peter F Hamilton” or “John Scalzi”)  through to comics (such as Dilbert, FoxTrot and XKCD).

An issue I’m facing right now is how to easily stay on top of new releases by authors that I favor.

For news and most notifications these days I can take advantage of RSS feeds and aggregate them in a single place – I use Google Reader – this lets me stay on top of the latest and greatest from a wide variety of sources without having to constantly be visiting and revisiting sites checking for changes.

I believe I now own every one of the non-anthology Dilbert books available (the anthologies IMHO are just a waste of time since they just rehash comics but collect them together in a theme). So I went to Amazon expecting to find some kind of Dilbert or Scott Adams RSS feed that I could just plug into my aggregator and when a new book becomes available it would pop up for me and then I could choose whether it was something I wanted to pick up or not.

Imagine my surprise to find that this kind of service is remarkably rarer than I thought. Amazon doesn’t appear to offer anything like this, although some older message board postings I saw indicate that you used to be able to subscribe to email alerts for new Author publications.

In the case of Dilbert, I went specifically to the website to see if something was available there. Scott Adam’s is a tech savvy kind of guy – he was publishing his email address and not-so-regular newsletters at a time when most authors were still viewing the internet with fear and suspicion. But even he doesn’t seem to have this seemingly obvious sales tool available.

Has anybody found a solution to this issue? I’d prefer to have some kind of consistent centralized solution rather than having to track  down every individual author’s web site and then try to fashion something from the content therein.

I *did* find this tracker based off the Amazon site which is exactly what I want but it doesn’t appear to be functional. Probably the API on which it depends is no longer functional / available? It’s a great idea though. Free for you and me, the provider gets a modest kickback from Amazon for directing book purchasing traffic to them.

Any ideas or suggestions would be welcome!

Posted under Affluenza, Books, Tech Stuff