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Category: Problem solutions

Windows design fail: Unable to move a folder because of thumbs.db

Windows design fail: Unable to move a folder because of thumbs.db

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One of the most annoying things about managing files in Windows is managing media files such as photos and videos.  Windows in all it’s ‘helpfulness’ constantly tries to categorize and create thumbnail icons for all your media files.  The irritating part of this is that it’s constantly doing it – even while you’re trying to move the files or folders in question.  In fact, it seems to ALWAYS be doing this even if it’s already gotten icons for it.  Every directory you select immediately triggers Windows to start categorizing the directory.  So when you try to move the folders in question – you get a never-ending stream of ‘File in use’ errors and you can’t get anything done.

Even better is the fact Windows doesn’t tell you WHICH file(s) are in use (thumbs.db), by whom (Windows itself), nor give you any way to figure it out.  One of the cardinal rules of error dialogs is that they must give you enough information to fix the problem – or you’re wasting everyone’s time and have designed something completely useless for the user.  This fails that test miserably.

What would have been infinitely better is if Windows had the smarts to know IT is the one preventing the folder from being moved and stop doing it for the 2 seconds it needs to move the directory and then start over again.  But we don’t get that intelligence at all.

Instead, do this:

Start Menu-> Edit Group Policy

Select:

User Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Windows Explorer
The setting you want: “Turns off the caching of thumbnails in hidden thumbs.db files.”

Google Code closes down – Taskbar Sound Switcher moves to GitHub

Google Code closes down – Taskbar Sound Switcher moves to GitHub

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Well, I didn’t have my project uploaded more than a week and Google send me an email informing me that Google Code hosting is shutting down.  Here’s the email:

Hello,

Earlier today, Google announced we will be turning down Google Code Project Hosting. The service started in 2006 with the goal of providing a scalable and reliable way of hosting open source projects. Since that time, millions of people have contributed to open source projects hosted on the site.

But a lot has changed since 2006. In the past nine years, many other options for hosting open source projects have popped up, along with vibrant communities of developers. It’s time to recognize that Google Code’s mission to provide open source projects a home has been accomplished by others, such as GitHub and Bitbucket.

We will be shutting down Google Code over the coming months. Starting today, the site will no longer accept new projects, but will remain functionally unchanged until August 2015. After that, project data will be read-only. Early next year, the site will shut down, but project data will be available for download in an archive format.

The simplest option would be to use the Google Code Exporter, a new tool that will allow you to export your projects directly to GitHub. Alternatively, we have documentation on how to migrate to other services — GitHub, Bitbucket, and SourceForge — manually.

For more information, please see the Google Open Source blog or contact google-code-shutdown@google.com.

-The Google Code team

 

The good news is that the Google Code Exporter works really well.  The only extra work I needed to do was work up a readme.md file.  A handy tool for doing the markup can be found on http://dillinger.io/ which allows you to write on one side and see the results on the other.

TLDR:
So, if you want taskbar sound switcher – it’s is now hosted on GitHub:


https://github.com/mattfife/taskbar-sound-switcher

 

Quick Audio Taskbar Sound Switcher

Quick Audio Taskbar Sound Switcher

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When using my computer I often use my speakers when listening to music, watching movies, or coding something up. As a first-person shooter fan, I usually want to use headphones so I can use the mic to coordinate play with the other live players and not completely bother the rest of the people in the house with gunfire, explosions, and ‘colorful language’.

Switching between audio output devices on Windows systems usually requires no less than:

  1. Right-click on speaker tray icon
  2. Left click on playback devices
  3. Right click on device you want to be the default output device in Sound selector
  4. Left click on ‘Set as Default Device’

Fun! Not. Even worse is that many times I click on the game I want to play only to realize I forgot to switch audio devices.  In many games, alt-tabbing out and switching the default audio device doesn’t actually change the in-game playback device.  You have to exit the game and restart.  Annoying.

What I want is a taskbar icon I can simply double-click to switch between headphones and speakers – or any of my many audio devices really.  So to that end, I wrote up an app that does exactly that.  You simply select which devices you want to toggle between (any number) and double-clicking the tray icon simply toggles you to the very next device.

Or, you can right-click on the icon and select the device directly with a single click.

Give it a try.

Click here to download a copy.

The MSI installer is in the source directory.  Even better is that I’ve put the code up on Google Code and it’s open-source under the BSD license.

Drop a line if you found it handy or have suggestions!

 

 

 

42 Rules for Apartment rental (and homebuying)

42 Rules for Apartment rental (and homebuying)

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I saw this posting on Reddit and thought it was so good that I needed to save a copy here.

Reddit’s 42 Rules of Apartment Rental

  1. Check for cell reception.
  2. Inspect tops of cabinets, behind stove/fridge, for poop. If there are red/brown stains in the corners where the ceiling meets the walls, it’s bed bugs. If there is a line of white powder along the baseboards, it can mean roaches, but more likely bedbug treatment has been performed. White powder behind fridge, stove, etc. is usually boric acid or diatomaceous earth used to treat roaches. Brown or tan kernel sized paste is also used against roaches. Check the Bed Bug Registry online and ask if the building has a history of any pest problems.
  3. Inspect drawer under the oven and kitchen drawers.
  4. Check the water pressure on cold, on hot, on both, and how long it takes to get warm.
  5. Bring a socket tester and test all outlets. Also make sure there are enough outlets in each room, and enough 3-prong ones.
  6. Ask the neighbors what the worst part of the building, street, neighborhood is.
  7. Request to see the exact unit you will be moving into, NOT a showcase apartment. If they refuse to at least show you an actual unit, be suspicious.
  8. Check to see if you have a designated parking spot (and assure its cost, if any, is satisfactory). How many visitors can you have at a time & is that enough for you? On a Fri/Sat night, or any other evening/night, are there even any available spots? What happens if someone takes your spot?
  9. Drive through the area during rush hour if commuting via car.
  10. What’s in close walking distance? (food, bars, stores, etc)
  11. If touring multiple units, take pictures of each for later comparison. When you decide on one, time-stamp photograph any damage and make sure landlord is notified of it in writing prior to move-in so you aren’t blamed for it later.
  12. Research state tenant’s rights laws.
  13. Make sure you’re completely clear on all terms of the lease and know what utilities you’ll be paying and what payment method you’ll need to use.
  14. When driving around, take note of what kinds of cars are parked around, and if they’re substantially different from yours, your potential new neighbors lifestyle may differ from your own.
  15. Call a pizza place and see if they deliver there after dark. If not, the place may have a history as being unsafe.
  16. Make sure there’s an Internet provider suitable to your preferences.
  17. An experienced landlord is usually better to deal with than an inexperienced one.
  18. Get an idea of the general price range of utilities such as heat and AC for the unit. Ask neighbors in similar units the general price range for heating/cooling.
  19. Google your potential new landlord. Look up online property records in the county you are in. Slumlords will generally have lots of liens against them and/or have multiple properties in foreclosure.
  20. Assure the windows are double-paned/double-glazed and in good repair if the area is cold to avoid high heating bills. See if the windows open and close easily.
  21. Look up crime statistics for the area and ask the police how often they have been called to the street/complex in the last 6 months.
  22. An apartment with laundry facilities will save you money. If they don’t have them, check the prices/quality of the nearest ones.
  23. www.apartmentratings.com may be a useful resource.
  24. Drive through the area at 10pm one day, 2am the next, and see what kind of activity is occurring, especially on Fri/Sat nights. Walk through the complex around 8pm.
  25. Be wary of any musty smells that could indicate water damage. Too many air fresheners may be an attempt to hide this.
  26. Fill all sinks/tubs. Drain simultaneously and flush each toilet during.
  27. Ask if they accept section 8 or convicted felons, if you care about those things.
  28. Find out who does the maintenance (some handyman, a legit company, the landlord?). What are their policies on work orders? Can they be submitted online? What is their response time guarantee for after hours emergencies? If it’s just a single landlord and not a property management company, do they have someone you can call when they go on vacation and the hot water heater breaks?
  29. Make sure the building managers or owners are local.
  30. When scoping out potential neighborhoods, check out the local grocery stores to get a good sense of the type of people that live in that neighborhood. Also check the closest gas station late at night.
  31. Check your responsibilities as a tenant. After moving in many landlords require you to pay the cost of a stopped up toilet, pest infestations, and require you to shovel snow from sidewalk/mow the grass on areas around the house, or clean gutters. They may also require you to pay the cost to fix supplied appliances.
  32. Dress well, and ask for a discount.
  33. If surrounding places have belongings left sitting on the porches (toys, stoves, seating, decorations), it’s a good sign for little/no theft and a kid-friendly environment.
  34. If the leasing agent or landlord promises to do something before you move in, it needs to be written into the lease or it may not happen.
  35. Assure the unit has adequate storage space for your needs.
  36. 1st floor apartments are most convenient for thieves, and the most frequently broken into.
  37. It’s usually best to avoid living in the same building as your landlord, unless the other tenants vouch for them.
  38. If there’s a homeowner’s association, find out its rules.
  39. Find out the policy on smoking, pets, noise, and visitors.
  40. If you must break the lease, what are the consequences/options?
  41. What’s the average rental time for apartments in the building? If people aren’t staying long, it’s a bad sign.
  42. Try to get a look at as many different options in the area as possible so you can see if what they’re offering is competitively priced for the size/type of unit you’re seeking.
Steam: Failed to add new steam library folder

Steam: Failed to add new steam library folder

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Until we get 1TB SSD’s for less than $1000, space on them is always at a premium. One strategy is to split your Steam game installs between drives. For slow loading or games you play often, you might want those on your SSD.  For infrequently played games, you likely want those on a big, cheap platter drive. Steam gives you the ability to have multiple libraries on multiple drives, but it doesn’t always work as expected.

I tried recently to add a library to a big platter drive, and got the message 'Failed to add new steam library to folder'. I tried all kinds of ways of creating the library, but always got the same message. My drive was not out of space, I had adequate permissions. I started/restarted steam. No luck.

The problem:
Failed to add new steam library to folder
The issue is that the Steam client cannot add new libraries while anything is happening to the existing game library.  In my case, one single game (way off the bottom of the screen!) was updating.  This activity prevents the Steam client from being able to add a new library folder.

The solution:
Pause or cancel the download/update. Make sure nothing is updating, then go to the Library display view in the Steam client. Then select: Steam->Settings->Steam Libraries Folders->Add Library Folder. You should then be able to select/create new library folders on new drives.

The shaming:
Valve engineers – fix that dialog! Be sure to tell people WHY you can’t create the folder, not just that you can’t. Error messages are useless unless they give you enough information about what’s wrong so that you can fix the problem. Especially one so simple to report.

Installing WordPress using XAMPP

Installing WordPress using XAMPP

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When customizing/working on a new WordPress layout – it’s better if you don’t do it on your live blog.  Instead, install XAMPP

http://www.wikihow.com/Install-Wordpress-on-XAMPP

You can then set up the database and install WordPress in the httpdocs/ directory – but that’s not a straightforward/easy process.

Instead of all the extra setup, you can also use Bitnami’s WordPress application that installs WordPress for you and takes care of a lot of the annoying database and other setup bits.  They have versions for Windows, OS X, and Linux to make your life easier.

After setup, instead of the WordPress files being in the normal httpdocs\ directory, Bitnami’s WordPress on top of XAMPP puts the WordPress files in X:\..\XAMPP\apps\wordpress

 

XAMPP on Windows – Port 443 used by VMware

XAMPP on Windows – Port 443 used by VMware

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I was just installing XAMPP on my windows 7 x64 box, I tried to start Apache and got this message:

Problem detected!
Port 443 in use by ""C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Workstation\vmware-hostd.exe" -u "C:\ProgramData\VMware\hostd\config.xml"" with PID 4688!
Apache WILL NOT start without the configured ports free!
You need to uninstall/disable/reconfigure the blocking application
or reconfigure Apache and the Control Panel to listen on a different port

Unfortunately, VMWare Workstation places it’s host ports on the same ones needed by Apache.  The solution is to change the apache ports via this procedure:

  1. Open the XAMPP Control Panel
  2. Click the ‘Config’ button next to the Apache module and select the ‘Apache (httpd-ssl.conf)‘ option
  3. A text edit box will pop up with the contents of httpd-ssl.conf
  4. Find the line with Listen 443
  5. Change 443 to some other open port – like 4430
  6. Do a search/replace in the file for all the references to 443 and change them to 4430 (should be like 3-4 of them)
  7. save and exit the editor
  8. Start Apache

If all goes well, it should start right up on ports 80, 4430.  Test it by going to localhost in your web browser and you should see the familiar xampp control panel

Update 2020-02-02:
Thanks to Spadez for this additional info:

I found I also had to set it via the Service and Port Settings in the Xampp Config. In the Xampp control panel click the Config button then the Port settings button and set the port number there.

Use Windows Git with proxy server

Use Windows Git with proxy server

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Shesh – you’d think they’d have this more easily found on the official GIT website.

  1. Open a bash or cmd GIT shell
  2. git config --global http.proxy http://my.proxy.server:1234

That should do it.

 

VMWare Workstation 10 and SteamOS Beta

VMWare Workstation 10 and SteamOS Beta

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steamosbeta

Installing SteamOS natively was a real pain in the rear during the alpha.  You had to do a lot of fiddling to get it working, and it didn’t have very good hardware support.  The most successful virtual-machine installs were on VirtualBox at the time.  I managed to get that working but it required a lot of linux/unix experience.  Far beyond what most people would want.

Valve, however, just released SteamOS Beta last month.  I downloaded a copy and it’s much, MUCH easier to install.  That, and it seems to install ok in VMware (which has much better hardware support than VirtualBox).

There’s still some gotcha’s.  Upon trying to run Left4Dead2, I get errors about unsupported OpenGL extensions, but I am using VMware’s hardware drivers.  I still have some experimenting to do – maybe I can get it working properly.  But the BigPicture and all the other experience is there.

Here is the procedure (wrote this up around midnight – so forgive the typos.  I’ll clean it up later):

  1. Download the SteamOS Beta iso from this link.  Valve has done a nice job here in already packaging it as a bootable iso file.  So no more needing to use 3rd party tools to create bootable iso files or boot off usb sticks after writing them via special programs.
  2. Set up your VMware system using the following settings:
    1. Custom (advanced) setup
    2. Hardware compatibility: Workstation 10.0
    3. Select a guest operating system: Debian 7 64-bit
    4. Processors: 2 processors, 2 cores per processor (4 total)
    5. Memory: 4096MB
    6. Hard drive 500MB (40MB minimal)
  3. Save your settings and close the VMware application.
  4. Go to the file location where you created the virtual machine in Step 2
  5. Open the .VMX file associated with it and add this line to the end:
    firmware = "efi"
  6. Start VMware Workstation back up.
  7. Set the virtual machine’s cdrom drive to point to the iso you downloaded in step 1.
  8. Start up the virtual machine and you should get the steam installer started
  9. Follow the procedure for the install as normal.  Nothing special needed.  It will reboot when finished.
  10. Here’s where things might diverge.  If you have an nVidia card, odds are good you won’t have issues, but for those with ATI cards, you might.
  11. Upon reboot after install, I got a delay then Debian started up in fallback mode.
  12. Either way, complete the steam install by agreeing to the licensing terms.
  13. You’ll see the steam platform update itself.  Log into Steam using your Steam account.
  14. You should have a steam client up after logging in.
  15. For those with ATI cards or the dreaded blank screens after reboot, do this step to install VMware tools BEFORE rebooting.
    1. Open a terminal prompt.
    2. Click on the ‘Install VMware tools’ option on the bottom of the VMware window, or select VM->Install VMware Tools option from the top menu.
    3. On the desktop, open the CD-ROM drive that appears and copy the VMwareTools-x.x.x-xxxxxxxx.tar.gz (x’s will be the latest version number).
    4. copy the tarball to /tmp via:
      cp VMWareTools-x.x.x.xxxxx.tar.gz /tmp
    5. log in as the ‘desktop’ user. SteamOS has two accounts: ‘steam’ and ‘desktop’. You need to be ‘desktop’ to issue any sudo commands.
      su - desktop
    6. The default password for the ‘desktop’ user is ‘desktop’.  You need to be logged in as desktop to have su privileges.
    7. cd /tmp
    8. gunzip VMWareTools-x.x.x.xxxxx.tar.gz
    9. tar -xvf VMWareTools-x.x.x.xxxxx.tar
    10. cd VMWareTools-x.x.x.xxxxx.tar (correction: cd vmware-tools-distrib)
    11. sudo ./vmware-install.pl -default
    12. Answer yes to the prompt and VMware tools will install.
    13. When it’s complete, reboot:
      sudo reboot
  16. When your system reboots, you should be in SteamOS big-picture mode!  Log in and enjoy!

Helpful links:
Initial setup instructions for VMware with pictures
http://www.vmwareandme.com/2014/01/guide-installing-steamos-on-vmware.html#.UwMJVIW0x1G

VMware tools
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUK7Ycy2kzo