Archive by year

A week ago I bought some new lead (graphite) for my mechanical pencil.  Looking at the rack of refills, I realized my choice would not be simple.  There are different hardness ratings, in addition to the sizes.  I use 0.5mm.  Summoning memories from my 8th-grade art class, I selected 4H as it was one of the harder options.

This selection of mechanical pencil refills has completely revolutionized my note-taking and homework-completing lives.

• This lead writes much crisper lines.
• I have yet to snap the end of the lead off (used to happen frequently).
• I’m still using the first lead.  It probably lasts twice as long as regular lead
  • I have to click the end of my pencil less.
• It does not leave dust on the paper, which used to cause smudges.
• I don’t need to rotate my pencil as much because the edge stays sharp longer.
• Erasing marks made with this lead leaves virtually no traces of the marks and consumes less of the eraser.

The message is clear: I love this 4H lead so much that next time I buy a mechanical pencil I will throw away the *** lead that comes with it and buy some sweet 4H lead refills.

After pounding my head at this off-and-on over the last five weeks (previously thwarted), I have mashed enough VBScript skills into it (my head) that I figured out how to script the pinning of items to the taskbar.

 

Set objShell = CreateObject("Shell.Application")
Set objFolder = objShell.Namespace("C:\")
Set objApp = objFolder.ParseName("Notepad.lnk")
For Each verb in objApp.Verbs()
If verb.Name = "Pin to Tas&kbar" Then verb.DoIt
Next

For this to work, you need to have a valid shortcut Notepad.lnk in C:\.  To do a pin to the start menu, replace “Pin to Tas&kbar” with “Pin to Start Men&u”.  Yes, you need the ampersands, they are there as keyboard shortcuts.  Right-click on a shortcut and push K and it will pin that to the taskbar.

I encountered an issue at work when we wanted to add some gadgets to the Vista Sidebar.  Upon opening the Add Gadget panel, all of the available gadgets briefly appeared and then faded out, leaving a blank window.

This can be resolved by resetting the user’s Settings.ini file for the Sidebar.  This is located at %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Sidebar.  Just rename Settings.ini to something else after you close Sidebar (must be closed from system tray too), and then re-launch Sidebar.  A new Settings.ini will be created.  All of the user’s Sidebar settings will be reset, but at least they are now able to add gadgets.

I have been annoyed by needing to setup my taskbar pinned items every time I set up a new Windows 7 install, so really wanted to find out where they are stored.  They are buried pretty deep: C:\Users\**Username**\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch\User Pinned\TaskBar

So now I will be able to keep a copy of a bunch of shortcuts handy and just copy them in there.  I'm thinking cmd, Notepad, Calculator, several Office apps, Irfanview, and Paint will be priorities for now.

Windows 7 is shaping up to be a pretty perfomant operating system.  I've been ripping CDs in the background, which easily maxes out the processor on my 1.83GHz Pentium M.  All the while I've been playing songs and browsing websites with no performance problems.  Only just now when I added installing Acrobat Reader on to the top of all that did I notice some slow-downs (slight glitches in music playback).

Now you might say that this is no big deal, an OS should be able to do all of those things.  But this is with 512MB of RAM, the afore-mentioned processor, and a crappy laptop HDD.  So far I would say the performance is way closer to XP than Vista was on this machine.  But the features are way better than XP.  I'll try not to get too optimistic, but from what I've seen in the last few hours Windows 7 is going to be a hot item.

Sun's VirtualBox really irked me off, so here I am whining.

• Unable to change mounted CD-ROM while the machine is running.
• Huge delete button.  How often do you delete a virtual machine?
• Crappy virtual disk manager.  Why do I want to manage my ISOs, I already have them in folders just let me mount one.
• Unable to hard power-off a virtual machine.
• Unable to send shut down signal to virtual machine.
• Unable to send reset signal to virtual machine.
• Unable to do any sort of power-off input.
• I find it hard to believe that these features aren't there at all, but they shouldn't be hidden so well if they are there.  I should be able to right-click on the machine in the manager and knock it dead.