Archive for the ‘Windows’ Category

How to connect to a Samba share using multiple usernames and passwords

Friday, August 29th, 2008

Windows XP might be fully cooperative if you want to connect to two different Samba shares on the same machine, using different user names. Here’s how to solve it.

  • Open up your “hosts” file in a text editor. This is the location on Windows XP: 
    C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
  • Add two different hostnames with the same IP address.
  • Enter control panel -> User accounts and select your user. Then click “Manage your network passwords” (in the upper left corner, assuming you haven’t selected “classic mode”).
  • Add the different host names and the corresponding user names and passwords you want to use. You might need to add “MACHINENAME\” before the user name. The MACHINENAME is the network name of your Windows machine.
  • Optionally, map the shares as network drives.

Posted in Windows | No Comments »

How to remove the Google logo from the Picasa screen saver

Thursday, December 13th, 2007

I recently installed Google’s Picasa, and even though I ultimately decided to use Photoshop Elements, I really liked the Picasa screen saver. It lets you display random images from multiple folders, and has some pretty nifty transition effects. Much better than the XP “My pictures” screen saver.

I was quite annoyed but the Google logos displayed every now and then on top of my pictures, and decided to try to remove them. It wasn’t hard, here’s how I did it.

  • Install a resource editing program, such as the XN Resource Editor.
  • Open up the Picasa installation folder and make a backup of the file Picasa2.scr, just in case you want to switch back to the branded screen saver again.
  • Start the XN Resource Editor and open the file Picasa2.scr.
  • Locate the two JPEG resources in the resource tree, in my case it was 111 and 114 (this might differ between different versions of the screen saver).
  • Right-click on the resources and choose “Delete Resource”.
  • Save the file.
  • Done! The Google logos have now been removed from the screen saver!

A little tip: The same screen saver (atleast AFAIK) is available in the Google Pack, in case you don’t want to install the full Picasa suite. It’s called “Google Photos Screensaver”, but seems to be the same program that they bundle with Picasa.

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Posted in Windows | 1 Comment »

How to sync a Sony Ericsson phone with the Thunderbird/Lightning calendar

Wednesday, December 12th, 2007

If you’re using the Mozilla Thunderbird extension Lightning for your calendar, here’s a quick howto on making it synchronize with your Sony Ericsson phone. It worked great on my W910!

  • Install the excellent freeware program MyPhoneExplorer.
  • Enter the Options (F2), choose Sync and then choose Thunderbird Lightning in the “Calendar” field.
  • MyPhoneExplorer will automatically install the required Thunderbird plugin.
  • Click on “Advanced” to choose which calendar to sync and what mode (merge calendars or let phone override Lightning or vice versa)
  • Hit Ok, enter the Calendar and hit sync – done!

If you want to create a desktop shortcut to automatically start the sync – duplicate the shortcut to MyPhoneExplorer, enter the icon properties and add “action=sync syncitem=organizer” to the destination (after myphoneexplorer.exe). There are more command line options available in the English FAQ.

Hope this howto helps someone, it sure made my life a lot easier! Before I discovered this method, I was auto-exporting the calendar as an ICS file (through a dedicated Thunderbird extension) and then importing in manually into MyPhoneExplorer on a regular basis. Now I only need to connect the USB cable and click the dedicated shortcut – quite an improvement!

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Posted in Windows | 3 Comments »

Auto-mounting Samba shares on Windows XP

Tuesday, October 9th, 2007

Getting Windows XP to remember the password for mounted network folders can be a real hassle, but here’s some help. I’m not sure if this is a Samba-specific problem or not, but it has happened to me several times now on both Windows 2000 and XP machines.

  • Try using the “Manage my network passwords” window (accessed through the “User accounts” applet in the control panel)
  • If that didn’t help:
  • Make sure to enter the server name in the username box, example: MACHINE\username
  • Try entering the IP address of the server instead of the host name (worked for me when everything else failed).

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Posted in Linux, Windows | No Comments »

An easy way to discover the URL behind an audio/video stream

Sunday, October 30th, 2005

To be able to save a stream to disk, one usually needs the URL to the stream. Locating the “real” URL behind a Windows Media or Real stream can be pretty tricky an often involves searching through HTML code or looking through the (often sucky) interfaces of the media players…

Just today, I found a program that makes things a LOT easier: StreamSniff. Just start it, and it will start sniffing net traffic for stream URLs…

It’s available for both Windows and Linux, and worked right away on my Linux firewall. Highly recommended if you like to save internet streams to disk for later converting/viewing.

NetTransport is handy for these tasks if you’re running Windows, the Linux alternative is Mplayer using the -dumpstream option.

Posted in Linux, Windows | No Comments »

Cloning a soon-to-crash hard drive

Friday, September 2nd, 2005

When my PC at work (an 8 months old HP) started making loud clicking sounds, I realized that I needed to act quickly and replace the disk. The replacement drive arrived the next day, but the troubles started once I tried to clone the old drive to the new one.

First, a warning. Be careful when using Norton Ghost (in my case version 2003) on a HP machine – there’s a known problem with that combination.

In my case, I ran Ghost and chose to clone the drive. When the computer booted into the Ghost interface, it locked up and displayed an error message saying “internal stack overflow”. After retrying this a few times (same results) and trying to boot back into Windows (didn’t work since Ghost had taken over the boot sector) I booted Knoppix so I could look for assistance on the web.

(Thank god for Knoppix, BTW… I was able to access my files and documents on the disk, access the net and use email just as usual. It only took a quick configuration of Thunderbird to get myself back on track.)

Further attempts to clone the drive from within Knoppix failed – PartEd crashed when I selected the drive and both PartImage and NTFSclone gave up midway due to disk errors.

Finally I managed to remove the small partition created by Ghost and make the old Windows partition active again, and Windows on the faulty drive booted again. Well, after a few lockups during boottime anyway.

Now it was time for another try at cloning the drive… I decided to give Acronis True Image a try, and it worked beautifully.

So the lesson is – don’t use Ghost unless you’re sure it’s compatible with your hardware, because it can really screw up your computer…

Posted in Computer related bits & pieces, Linux, Windows | 4 Comments »

Cloning Windows XP installs with Norton Ghost

Sunday, June 5th, 2005

My employer recently bought a number of used PC:s, which all required Windows XP installs. The machines weren’t very fast (about 866 MHz/384 MB RAM on an average), and I didn’t really feel like spending 1.5 hrs x 10 machines on installing XP, and then running Windows Update, installing virus scanner, spyware detection, printers, FireFox and adjusting settings.

Thus, I decided to use Ghost… The first approach was to create a disk image file of the “master” PC and using it on the other PC:s, but accessing the file (located on an external USB hard drive) proved to be difficult.

The second option was to use the “peer-to-peer” mode, meaning the master computer rebooted into DOS/Ghost mode while the slave (target) computer booted from a “peer-to-peer network boot floppy” which Norton created for me. Both computers got IP adresses through DHCP, and all that remained was to connect them and start the copying.

I was quite surprised by the speed, a ~1.5 GB XP install took only 7 minutes on a 100 MBit network – pretty fast considering the relatively slow hardware!

All that remained when the transfer was done was to reboot, adjust the computer & user name and uninstall Ghost (since it was installed on the master computer, all slaves got it too – pretty silly but unavoidable). Voilá!

Posted in Computer related bits & pieces, Windows | 1 Comment »

Saving and burning RealAudio streams

Sunday, June 5th, 2005

When I discovered that Slayer (one of my favourite metal bands) would be featured on P3 Live, I decided to record that show… Sveriges Radio uses Windows Media and Real for their streams, and after some searching I found the excellent (free!) program Net Transport that would help me to save the stream to disk. The result was a ~40 MB large .rm file that I needed to convert to wav to be able to burn it (and/or convert it into MP3).

Someone on a mailinglist suggested I’d use DB Power Amp which, with the help from RealAlternative quickly turned the .ra file into a huge wav.

Using Sound Forge, I set so called “markers” in the file, named them into the song names, then turned them into regions and then saved all regions as separate files. I was pretty surprised to see that the Nero wave editor could read the Sound Forge marks directly, which meant I could burn the large WAV file instead of using the splitted WAV files. With the “no gaps between tracks” option enabled, the resulting disc sounded perfect!

Edit:
It’s now one month later, and I’ve almost forgotten the details on how to do this… Net Transport needs a rtsp link, and those are a bit tricky to extract. I did discover that selecting “File”->”Clip properties”->”View clip info” in the Real Player displayed the RTSP URL.

Posted in Computer related bits & pieces, Windows | No Comments »