ukstokes.com » Random stuff

Connect Skydrive as a Windows mapped drive

ben — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 22:58:50 +0000

It still remains to be seen how useful and popular Windows Live Skydrive will become, but if you happen to have an MSN account you automatically get 25Gb of free storage at your disposal, which in my case is enough to backup all of my important personal data - documents, photos, etc (the photos of which are the most valuable). There are several ways to connect Skydrive as a mapped drive ... some are better than others, but this is the best way I have found so far.

Go and download SkyDrive Simple Viewer for WebDAV. Extract the files to your C: drive and run the command like so:

dumpurls.exe

This should output a bunch of URL's representing the folders in your Skydrive.

Open up My Computer, click on Map Network Drive. Copy and paste one of the URL's into the box and click OK. Enter your Windows Live credentials into the logon box when it appears, and hey presto, your 25Gb off-site storage box appears as a mapped drive in My Computer.

Now you can back stuff up to it, manually or automatically (through home brewed scripts) and access your stuff from anywhere on the Internet. Just remember not to backup anything personal to the "Public" folder, as that is visible to everyone.

Google Wave invite, anyone?

ben — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 22:07:03 +0000

I just joined Google Wave this week and I have 8 invites if anyone wants one ... leave me a comment or get in touch via Twitter (@ben_stokes) with your email address and I'll send one over. Personally I am not that amazed with it, not sure if it will catch on ... I think it should handle SMTP mail as well as 'waves', it's a bit too exclusive in its current form.

In other news there's been too much happening to have time to write about the interesting techy bits, I do have some new and useful bash and vbscripts which I'll probably post up in one big batch this week as I have some time off (woo). I've also been meaning to write some stuff about Android, yesterday I got Google Navigation working on my HTC Magic in the UK (currently it's only officially working in the USA). This was courtesy of xda-developers.com, see the link for details. It works really well, I feel sorry for anyone that bought CoPilot Live from the Market for £20 (ouch) ... as it looks like Google will be giving this out for free with Android 2.0 in the very near future.

Test post

ben — Mon, 25 May 2009 19:34:26 +0000

Just a quick test so see if posting and collection via RSS is working since I have migrated to a new webhost.

A cat selected at random

A quick mention for 2 useful tools

ben — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 23:34:55 +0000

Here's just a quick mention for a couple of decent tools.

Syntax Highlighter plus (plugin for wordpress). Link

IMO this is the best code highlighting plugin for WordPress. Here's a quick example:

[lang='bash']ls -la
apt-get update
apt-get upgrade[/lang]

Does exactly what is says on the tin and has the 'view source' button to you to copy and paste the plain text version of your code into notepad or Putty sessions.

Second quick mention is EasyVMX. Link

Ever wondered how to create a new VM for VMware player? Just visit the EasyVMX site, fill in the form and click go, and your VMX file is created. Then just give the file to VMware player and you can boot into your new machine. Genius!

Improving battery life on the Sony Ericsson K800

ben — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 11:51:33 +0000

3G is a great selling feature for modern mobiles, but are many people really using these 3G features yet? I certainly don't - I moved to Virgin Mobile when I got my K800 and unfortunately mobile web browsing is now too costly at £4 per Mb (with no option to add GPRS bundles), and I don't know anyone I can make video calls to yet. Another grumble I had after changing phones was battery life on my new phone was a bit disappointing. However, through a colleague at work I made a nice discovery - disabling the 3G features on your K800 can extend your battery life for another 24 hours. This is how you do it:

Menu - Settings - Connectivity - Mobile Networks - "GSM/3G Networks"
Change the option from "GSM and 3G" to "GSM Only".

The 3G icon will then disappear from your standby screen. You can always switch this back when needed or if all of your friends suddenly go out and buy video phones!

Blacklists and Whitelists?

ben — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 13:21:40 +0000

Everyone knows what blacklists and whitelists are, but we don't call them that where I work, because it's not policically correct and is upsetting for some users. Well, actually it only upsets one user, but apparently this is enough for us to change our ways and refer to them as the 'banned address list' and 'global safe list' instead, from now on. I promise I'm not making this up.

Policically correct or just pedantic and timewasting? I'll let you decide.

Woodchip – the most hateful substance known to man?

ben — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 13:15:00 +0000

OK, slightly off topic for me but I've just spent the weekend scraping walls and need to get this off my chest. Hopefully this post will save some poor souls a few hours of needless scraping and help ridthe world of woodchip.

Here's a DIY tip for anyone about to strip a room of woodchip wallpaper. Don't waste your time with normal wallpaper scrapers as you will be there scraping away for days, especially if there is more than one layer of paint on the walls. What makes this job so tough is the water or steam does not penetrate through those layers of paint, and if you get the walls too wet there is a danger you will ruin the plaster underneath.

The best woodchip removal method is to get yourself a heavy duty scraper with a razor sharp blade (a bit like this one), and scrape the top layer off the walls while they are dry. You should then find layer underneath then comes off very easily if you use a steamer or a wet sponge. The remains will just turn into pulp as you scrape it off. Scraping the top layer is still hard work but I'm talking from experience when I say it will take a lot less effort and man hours than using a normal scraper. If your room is very large you will also some spare blades for your scraper as they are easily blunted when you hit wall plugs, loose plaster or other objects in the wall.

Technorati Tags: Decorating

Linux.com through IE7?

ben — Fri, 27 Oct 2006 13:49:28 +0000

Is it just me that has this problem? I am unable to view www.linux.com through Internet Explorer 7!

"Internet Explorer cannot open the Internet site http://www.linux.com/.
Operation aborted"

Also, if I visit a link directly within linux.com, my browser crashes! Is this some kind of evil censorship from Redmond?

Technorati Tags: Linux.com, IE7, Microsoft

Books!

ben — Sun, 15 Oct 2006 17:56:24 +0000

These are most of the books I've read over the last few months (I couldn't find pictures for all of them). As you can see I have a lot of opportunity for reading these days due to my daily train journeys!

Now it's time to stop reading fiction and start reading 70-291 revision materials. I've decided I want to get this exam out of the way before the end of the year, or at least before Server 2007 and all the new examinations come out!

Technorati Tags: Books, Reading, Fiction

Quote of the day.

ben — Thu, 24 Aug 2006 19:06:12 +0000

'Integrity' is doing the right thing even when no one else is looking.

Quoted from the writings of the 'Goompahs', in "Omega" by Jack McDevit.