Showing posts with label Windows Software. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Windows Software. Show all posts

Thursday, August 04, 2011

Caffeine - Utility to disable screen saver w/o interrupting input

I ran this on a machine I was RDP’d into to prevent the screen saver from appearing while I was logged in.  Handy.  And like other powerful utilities, potentially dangerous.  Not so much in an RDP session, though, because the console running the RDP client wouldn’t/shouldn’t(not a good idea) have this running, just the target host.  The author simulates an F15 keypress to make this work.  Didn’t know I had an F15 key.  Very nice.

Only 2 files inside the compressed download, and one is a README.

http://www.zhornsoftware.co.uk/caffeine/
Caffeine

imageIf you have problems with your PC locking or going to sleep, caffeine will keep it awake. It works by simulating a keypress once every 59 seconds, so your machine thinks you're still working at the keyboard, and won't lock the screen or activate the screensaver.

The icon is shown above - it's the leftmost one in the task tray, and this is all you see. Double-clicking the icon empties the coffee pot (that's what the icon is) and temporarily disables the program. Double-clicking it again refills the pot, and will keep your machine awake.

Friday, December 17, 2010

From FLAC to MP3 and back again–EAC Rips with LAME

Maximum PC has a great post on Ripping archival quality MP3s from audio CDs, but one of the user comments following the article simplifies the LAME options.

User vintagegold suggests using the following:

-V0 %s %d

I just tried the above settings within LAME to rip a classical CD – Borodin – and it sounds great on my AKG K 271 Studio headphones.  The HydrogenAudio wiki does indicate one preset with even higher quality for archiving, but my ears(which are still sensitive enough to hear the frequency on certain monitors/LCDs) don’t find the higher constant 320 kbit bitrate necessary.

Some of my essential EAC Screenshots – refer to the Maximum PC article for setting up Accurate Rip and other portions of EAC:

EAC0001EAC0002EAC0003

Arturo "Buanzo" Busleiman has current Windows and Mac downloads of the LAME binaries [high quality MPEG Audio Layer III (MP3) encoder] on his Argentina-hosted site.  The Audacity for Windows download worked on windows 7 x64.

Goodbye FLAC – I’ll not miss your options.
-8 -A tukey(0.25) -A gauss(0.1875) -b 4096 -V -T "artist=%a" -T "title=%t" -T "album=%g" -T "date=%y" -T "tracknumber=%n" -T "genre=%m" %s --sector-align

Monday, December 13, 2010

Free Space on all servers for all fixed drives? Done.

A while ago I posted on querying free disk space using WMI and batch.

I wouldn't query free disk space using batch anymore.  The PowerShell script I tweaked and currently use to query free disk space is displayed below.  The script truncates for readability – the rounding methods are commented out if that’s your preference:
# spaceused.ps1
# Lars-UT http://larsrasmussen.blogspot.com
(Get-Date -format 'yyyy-MM-dd hh:mm:ss').ToString() | Out-Default
$outData = @("")
$server = $args[0]
$dataFromServer = Get-WmiObject Win32_Volume -ComputerName $server | Select-Object SystemName,Label,Name,DriveLetter,DriveType,Capacity,Freespace

foreach ($currline in $dataFromServer) {
if ((-not $currline.name.StartsWith("\\")) -and ($currline.Drivetype -ne 5)) {
[float]$tempfloatcapacity = [math]::truncate($currline.Capacity/ 1000000000)
#[float]$tempfloatcapacity = [math]::round(($currline.Capacity/ 1000000000),1)
add-member -InputObject $currline -MemberType NoteProperty -name Capacity_in_GB -value "$tempfloatcapacity GB"

[float]$tempfloat = ($currline.Freespace / 1000000) / ($currline.Capacity / 1000000)
$temppercent = [math]::round(($tempfloat * 100),2)
add-member -InputObject $currline -MemberType NoteProperty -name FreePercent -value "$temppercent %"

[float]$tempfloatfreespace = [math]::truncate($currline.Freespace/ 1000000000)
#[float]$tempfloatfreespace = [math]::round(($currline.Freespace/ 1000000000),1)
add-member -InputObject $currline -MemberType NoteProperty -name Freespace_in_GB -value "$tempfloatfreespace GB"

$outData = $outData + $currline
}
}

$outData | Select-Object SystemName,Label,Name,Capacity_in_GB,Freespace_in_GB,FreePercent | sort-object -property Name | format-table -autosize

To run this against muliple servers just put the server names, one per line, in a text file and save that file. You'll then assign that file to a variable in PowerShell and loop through each line for each server:

PS C:\> $serverlist = Get-Content .\ServerNames-Prod.txt
PS C:\> foreach ($server in $serverlist) { .\spaceused.ps1 $server }


Here’s the pretty output!  Yep, those are sub-second times for querying multiple servers.



spaceused.ps1



Need to document this?  Use Start-Transcript.  I’ve seen auditors use it like so:



PS C:\> $strTimestamp =  [string](Get-Date -format "yyyy-MM-dd_hh-mm")
PS C:\> start-transcript .\ServerSpace-$strTimestamp.txt
PS C:\> foreach ($server in $serverlist) { .\spaceused.ps1 $server }
PS C:\> Stop-Transcript


Enjoy.

Wednesday, August 26, 2009

PathPing > Traceroute

Thanks Chris, for telling me about PathPing!

PathPing is a network utility supplied in Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows 2003, Windows XP and Windows Vista. It combines the functionality of Ping with that of Traceroute (in Windows: tracert), by providing details of the path between two hosts and Ping-like statistics for each node in the path based on samples taken over a time period, depending on how many nodes are between the start and end host. The advantages of PathPing over ping and traceroute are that each node is pinged as the result of a single command, and that the behavior of nodes is studied over an extended time period, rather than the Ping's default sample of four messages or Traceroute's default single route trace. The disadvantage is that, using the default settings, it often takes more than five minutes to produce a result.

PathPing - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Use the -q number option to reduce the number of queries per hop if you're in a hurry, as the default is 100.PathPing

Thursday, May 14, 2009

Right-Click on Desktop >> Screen Resolution (Windows 7 Top UI feature)

I just installed Windows 7 Ultimate Build 7100(32-bit) on my old Thinkpad T60p(purchased in Oct. 2006) and am creating this post with it.

Took 37min 34secs (including 5 reboots) to install the OS and all the ‘important’(and a few optional) updates. The initial install without updates took only 28 minutes.

When right-clicking on the desktop the following appeared:

Windows7-right-click-desktop-screen-resolution-option

Changing the Screen resolution is available from the desktop context menu! How cool is that? Pressing the Windows key + P also gives some simple projector display options.

I’m guessing the install required less than 10 mouse clicks – impressive. Here’s hoping final code gets released in October of this year.

Friday, July 18, 2008

Querying Disk Space on Remote Servers using Batch with WMIC

Time to check the disk free space in GB and percentage on a server volume...

WMIC(Windows Management Instrumentation Command-line) makes another appearance!

Thanks to Tipsmark for this syntax (Response number 17 in this post). I added the /node switch and some error handling / usage to have this batch file work on remote machines.

@ECHO OFF
IF "%~1"=="" goto help
IF "%~2"=="" goto help

@SETLOCAL ENABLEEXTENSIONS
@SETLOCAL ENABLEDELAYEDEXPANSION

@FOR /F "tokens=1-3" %%n IN ('"WMIC /node:"%1" LOGICALDISK GET Name,Size,FreeSpace | find /i "%2""') DO @SET FreeBytes=%%n & @SET TotalBytes=%%p

@SET /A TotalSpace=!TotalBytes:~0,-9!
@SET /A FreeSpace=!FreeBytes:~0,-10!
@SET /A TotalUsed=%TotalSpace% - %FreeSpace%
@SET /A PercentUsed=(!TotalUsed!*100)/!TotalSpace!
@SET /A PercentFree=100-!PercentUsed!

IF %TotalSpace% LSS 0 goto error

@ECHO Total space: %TotalSpace%GB
@ECHO Free space: %FreeSpace%GB
@ECHO Used space: %TotalUsed%GB
@ECHO Percent Used: %PercentUsed%%%
@ECHO Percent Free: %PercentFree%%%

@SET TotalSpace=
@SET FreeSpace=
@SET TotalUsed=
@SET PercentUsed=
@SET PercentFree=
goto end

:error
echo.
echo *** Invalid server or drive specified ***
echo.
goto help

:help
echo.
echo diskfree.cmd
echo.
echo Queries remote server for free disk space.
echo Specify a MACHINENAME and a drive letter to be queried
echo.
echo Example: diskfree.cmd MACHINENAME c:
echo.
goto end


:end


Here's an example of the script being run with a target computer named 'LARS', checking for free space on the [F:] volume:





If parameters are not passed or passed incorrectly(wrong drive letter) the script outputs the following or similar:

Tuesday, September 11, 2007

Software for Starving Students 2007.09 Released


I've been heavily involved in the Software for Starving Students project for about 2 years. I believe it's the only free collection of software available with OS X & Windows concurrent releases, and we _encourage_ folks to copy our CDs and give them away.

The cost of a college education is always increasing -- usually faster than students can earn money. We hope our efforts will help lower students' software costs.

We enthusiastically support the concept of free/open software and standards, but our primary concern is that students have access to high-quality software, free of charge. If a software title could be useful for students and is free of charge, we'll seek permission to include it even if it is not open source. We've also chosen to license our contributions to the disc (the interface, etc.) such that it must remain free of charge.

The 2007.09 release of Software for Starving Students is now available for download at: http://softwarefor.org/downloads.html -- Software for Starving Students is a free collection of programs organized with students' needs in mind, but beneficial for everyone. Windows and Mac OS X CDs are available, torrents are live!

Friday, June 29, 2007

Great Windows Programs I Use Almost Every Day

I was in a class last week with several windows admins who unaware of some great windows programs, so I thought these programs used for common tasks might be worth linking to here. I use at least one of the programs listed on a near daily basis, especially VLC & PDFCreator. All these programs are free, but not all are open source.