| | This minor release of Procreate fixes the following issues:
You can download the latest version from the Procreate homepage. Thanks to all who provided feedback. |
Do you want a small, self-contained utility to remotely wake your computer? As promised here is a utility you can use to do just that. This small utility offers the following features:
Follow this guide to ensure your computer is setup correctly for use with WoL. If you are behind NAT or a firewall, ensure the port you specify for each host in the utility is forwarded to the relevant computer. At this point you may be wondering why i chose to write yet another WoL utility when there are already several free alternatives available. The problems i found with existing solutions could be grouped into one or more of the following:
This motivated me to write this utility which allowed me to provide all the above functionality. Hopefully you find it useful – feel free to leave a comment if you want something improved or find it useful. Oh and browse the source if you are new to WPF and want to know how to write a simple app. Note that you will need at least the .NET framework 3.5 installed to run this application. This comes included with Windows 7.
Ever tried to run an old program under a 64-bit OS and found that it just wont work, even when you try every possible compatibility mode setting and running as Administrator? Many people don’t realise that there are some key differences that can often prevent a program from working.
Both Program Files and the registry are split into 32/64 bit variants, in case there are 2 versions of the same program that need to be installed. This recently caused an issue for me where i had to manually apply a registry patch to get the game to ‘work’ – under Windows XP it worked fine but would not work under Windows 7 64-bit. The reason was because by default, the registry patch gets applied to the 64-bit registry, however the game was looking in the 32-bit registry. The easiest way to solve this is to use the 32-bit version of regedit to apply the registry patch. You can start it by running:
%systemroot%\syswow64\regedit
Then open and apply the registry patch. See here for more information
After having used IE8 since it came out, i can say that compatibility mode is absolutely essential for quite a few sites that are still using IE7 hacks that don’t play nice with the new version of the browser. Having control over when to use compatibility mode is essential and can be turned on by clicking the button in the address bar:
If you can not see this button in the address bar, it is almost certainly due to the ‘feature’ i just discovered in my last install of Windows 7. In this install i did something i almost never do – use the default settings. By default, IE8 sets the option to Include updated compatibility view website lists from Microsoft. When this option is enabled, the compatibility button is hidden from the address bar because it is assumed that the updated list from Microsoft will include all sites that you will ever need. In practise i have found this is not the case and i wouldn’t expect it to be – how can MS expect to trawl every website and ensure they work.
Fortunately, re-enabling the compatibility view button is simple. Simply go to Tools –> Compatibility View Settings to open the following dialog. Then turn off the Include updated website lists from Microsoft setting and click OK to save. A few seconds later the compatibility view button will re-appear in the address bar and you can click it to view a webpage like you are using IE7.
So in short, if you used the recommended IE8 settings the first time you ran IE8 (which is likely for a lot of people), the issue above is very likely to be the cause of the compatibility view button not displaying in the address bar. At some point in the future most websites will be written with IE8 in mind. Until then, this button can be a lifesaver, especially with Flash enabled pages.
When i was running Windows Vista i never even considered setting my computer to go to sleep for a number of reasons:
Now that i have Windows 7 installed, i have taken to using the sleep feature since it wakes up in a matter of seconds. By default Windows 7 uses the Balanced power profile which puts the computer to sleep after 30 minutes when running on power. This caused me to think about how much power my computer had been using over the past few years. In Perth, the cost of power is currently 12.67c/unit so we can use the following formula to calculate the amount of power a device is using:
Cost ($) per day = (wattage) / 1000 x ($$/kWh) x (hours used per day)
The power supply in my computer is 500W. Until i get a cheap energy power meter that can accurately measure the utilisation accuracy, lets assume an average 300W usage (based on the components in my computer). Plugging this into the above equation means that my computer is costing $1.06 a day to run!! I really should have done this calculation a few years ago. Its pretty easy to see that any down time on the computer is going to save some serious $$ over the year. This is why I’ve started to use WoL as described in my previous post.
I recommend following this guide on Lifehacker to setup WoL on your network. I’ll be writing in the near future on some issues i found with using WoL, in particular the miriad of utilities out there that don’t work, why they don’t work and present a little utility i wrote for my own use while on the train the other day.
This means that for the majority of the day the PC is not running and consuming power, but is available whenever i need to use it. Since the price of power is only going to rise in the near future, this is going to save me more and more money. As humans with a growing energy problem, we should all be looking at solutions like this to save power when its not required. Gone are the days when we can just be lazy and not think about it.
I finally got around to installing Windows 7 RC on my desktop PC to replace Vista Ultimate. After enabling extended memory in the BIOS i had 64-bit running in about 1 hour and it is WAAAY faster than the Vista setup i had before. Anyway all was going well and i had it running next to me while using the laptop. Next thing i notice is that the computer goes to sleep - it turns out the default power profile in Windows 7 is balanced which by default puts the computer to sleep after 30 minutes of activity, even on desktops. I guess this is to try and help the world save power, since most users probably don’t have an issue if their computer shuts itself off. Considering i should try and be green too, I decided to run with it and leave this profile enabled. Much to my shock the computer restarts itself 5 seconds later!
It turned out the default Windows settings are to blame for this - by default WoL is enabled for ethernet NICs and configured to allow any packet to turn the computer on! On the majority of home networks out there with more than one computer, this means that it is highly probable a packet will be received in the near future, resulting in the issue i had, which is for the computer to immediately turn itself on. I really don’t understand why this should be the default configuration for most users out there. Still, it is simple enough to change so that only a magic packet will turn the computer on, or disable WoL completely, which is much more desirable for most users. To do so:
I also recommend turning off Wake-on-Mouse (WoM) since its very easy for someone (eg – your 3 year old son) to knock the mouse and turn the computer on. I like to enable Wake-on-Keyboard (WoK) since I find it very handy to be able to hit a key and start using my computer. You control both of these through the device manager using the same method described above but for the relevant devices. WoK combined with WoL gives me a great combination – using the keyboard to turn the computer on locally and the LAN to turn on the computer when i need to access it remotely, while minimising my PC power usage.
I love WoK and WoL, put another dime in the jukebox baby …
I searched quickly and couldn’t find this anywhere on the net in one neat, succinct list, so here is the full list of all 30 maps available after installing patch 1.50 for Battlefield 2 and Special Forces:
BF2:
Euro Forces (Free):
Armored Fury (Free):
DICE recently released patch 1.50 for Battlefield 2 which includes a bunch of great enhancements and content. Its an old game but still my favourite game of all time. I installed it on my Windows 7 64-bit install and much to my dismay, found that it would crash to desktop every time before even getting to the movies.
After a bit of experimenting i found the issue had nothing to do with Windows 7 or the fact that it was 64-bit, rather it turns out this path is only incremental and requires the game to be fully patched up to version 1.41 before applying. I didn’t notice any documentation that mentioned this and was misled when the installer completed successfully even without patch 1.41 being applied. Surely they could check the current version before applying … apparently not. If you use the following steps you should find the game installs on any system. Note that updating PB is also required to avoid being booted when you do get around to joining a server online:
This is the next piece of my MBP Unibody to receive my attention. I am dismayed at the support for the LCD under Windows. No driver is provided for the monitor so it using the Generic PnP Display driver. As i have previously posted, it seems the ACPI support is almost missing. Because of this, Windows is unable to adjust the brightness of the screen as is apparent from its absence in the Mobility Centre:
This also means that some of the cool new power management features of Windows 7 like the idle screen dimming feature are unavailable. I really like this feature in OSX and would love to see it working under Windows. I decided tonight to investigate this further and the first step was to find out some useful information about the panel. Running the following command in an OSX terminal window gives you the model of your display:
ioreg -lw0 | grep IODisplayEDID | sed "/[^<]*</s///" | xxd -p -r | strings –6
Finding the model information under Windows is even easier:
The model can be seen in the last 4 digits of the hardware ID. For example mine is MONITOR\APP9CA4 which means i have the 9CA4 screen. A quick Google search reveals that this means i have the Samsung LTN154BT08 LCD panel. You can also use the trial version of the excellent Everest application to get even more detailed information:
Now that i know the panel specifications i can continue my hunt for a driver that will hopefully provide better control of the screen. In the meantime, i highly recommend running the Calibrate display colour wizard included with Windows 7 as a minimum. When i ran the wizard, i found the gamma to be WAY too high, which was leading to a washed out image. I ended up following the fantastic guide and lowering the as low as it would let me. Admittedly, up to that point i had not noticed the high gamma since the screen is so damned nice, but after making the adjustment, i can honestly say the colours are much richer. It seems a lot of other people have come to the same conclusion even compared to the standard OSX colour profile.
Oh by the way, if you are thinking of purchasing the matte display option, read this article first. While it does reduce glare to a certain extent, you do sacrifice quite a lot of colour richness. I personally dont find the glare distracting at all, but i guess its personal opinion.
After playing with Windows 7 there are a number of programs i have found invaluable in filling a few small gaps that Windows has missed:
Ill post more as i think of them. For now sleep time …
OK this post is going to fall into the ‘what the’ category. I just reinstalled Windows 7 Enterprise 64-bit on my MBPU and the iSight webcam is working inside Messenger! This is strange since last time the webcam worked in Windows but not inside Messenger. The only difference is that i installed Enterprise this time instead of RC but i cant see why that would make a huge difference as it is the same version of Messenger, which seems to be where the issue lies.
I will investigate further and keep you posted but the main reason i wrote this post is to point out an excellent utility i found for testing your webcam. Its very small and simple but provides a large range of useful information. The utility is called Webcam Diagnostic Assistant and it helped me to work out when i was using RC that the webcam was indeed working under Windows, but not inside Messenger.
The editor that comes with Blogger is SHITTTTT so i decided to give the Live Writer tool that comes with Windows Live Experience pack a go. In a word – brilliant, except for one small error – when you try to publish a post with an embedded image you can get a 403 error, as i discovered when publishing my last post. This is easily fixed by logging into your associated Picassa account, after which Live Writer is able to publish the embedded image just fine. Kudos to this guy’s post for succinctly steering me in the right direction
Discovered something else totally cool about Windows 7 (and probably Vista though i havnt tried it on there). For audio playback devices there are two default settings:
Turns out that messenger falls into the second category. If you make a video call or voice call through messenger it will direct to the default communications device not the default playback device. What this means, if you are using bluetooth headphones or similar, is that the sound will still go to the speakers unless you configure it to use your headphones. Doing this is very easy:
Note that it is necessary to restart Messenger for these changes to take effect. If Messenger is running and you make the change it will continue to use the speakers until you do so.
[bsconfig]
BluetoothPlaceSite=1
ShutDownBluetoothHardwarePower=1
DefaultLocalDeviceClass=1
[Install]
CmdLine=""%SetupExeLocation%%PROCESSOR_ARCHITECTURE%\setup.exe"
[SPDPhoneNumber]
NumberCount=1
SPNumber1=#777
My Experience With BlueSoleil
As requested, here are the modified INF files (generated from version 6.4.286.0 on 2/12/2009)
%DisplayName%=Section, HardwareID
We need to add another entry for the BT module in our MBP. Add a new line at the top of the list that looks like this:
%Apple.DeviceDesc%=TosrfUsb_Device, USB\VID_05AC&PID_8213If your Hardware ID for your BT module is different, simply subsititute it for the above. The process to find your hardware ID is outlined below.
You now need to add a description of your BT module to the INF file. Go right to the bottom of the file and you will see a bunch of declarations with the following format:
Key = "Description"
We need to add another entry for the BT module in our MBP. Add a new line at the bottom of the list that looks like this:
Apple.DeviceDesc = "Apple Built-in Bluetooth Module"You can actually make the text inside the quotes whatever you want - this is what will appear in the Device Manager for the device
The only downside to using the Toshiba BT stack is that because this is a non Toshiba piece of hardware, the BT stack only runs for 30 days. I dont believe there is an option to purchase this stack either, unlike the BlueSoleil option. I will leave that limitation as an exercise for you to overcome. I will just say that there are options out there to overcome it.
Works On My Machine!
This left me with the desired 4 partitions:
To confirm the suspicions with ACPI support, i turned to the excellent Notebook Hardware Control utility. This tool allows a driver to be written in C# (my language of choice!) for a specific hardware configuration (notebook). After mucking around for many, many hours i managed to work out how to dump my ACPI SDST file from the registry and decompile it into ACPI ASL (ill describe this process in another post), which is a descriptive language that shows what ACPI features are supported on my notebook. Ive yet to master what this file is exactly trying to tell me, but initial findings to seem to indicate that the required screen brightness entries (as defined in the official ACPI specification) are not available, which is why Windows is unable to control the screen brightness.
Now if i understand what i am reading correctly, i can actualy modify the ASL, recompile it and enable these features. I know they are available hardware-wise because OSX is able to dim the screen after 30 seconds. I also know Windows 7 supports this out of the box, so the only remaining step is the SDST definition being correct!
I originally thought that i would not bother with this since surely Apple will fix it when Windows 7 is released right? Hmm after seeing the amount of time it is taking them to fix their touchpad, sound, video, bluetooth, etc drivers im not so sure.
Try it out and let me know what you think! I have another release in the works which will add a bunch of cool new features, coming soon. If you have any requests let me know ill see if i can get it in there.
I use WMP 11 because it does everything i want and comes with Windows - nuff said. If you use another player fair enough but dont post comments here about how other players are better, im well aware of them. Anyway i recently got myself a new 8GB SDHC card to replace my dead 4GB SD card to use in my Dopod D810. After using it for a bunch of MP3s, it became obvious very quickly that i needed to cleanup my music collection and update the meta data so they would be sorted correctly in the mobile media player. This is some useful information i found along the way and is a response to, what seems to be, a very misunderstood part of WMP and rightfully so.
Organising the Collection
WMP is actually really cool at doing this. The online metadata is fairly up-to-date and enabled me to organise my collection fairly quickly with the correct artist, album and song title information. The process i used was:
Of course if you ripped the MP3s directly from a CD in WMP then usually this step is not necessary since it will be done using the CD information at the ripping stage.
Apply Media Information Changes
Doing that above gave me a very accurate set of songs. To my surprise though, the changes are not automatically applied to the files on disk, leaving the WMP database of information out of sync with the underlying files. I guess this is done for performance reasons ... although personally i think the small delay required to update ~10 files would hardly be noticed amongst the above process.
Anyway, you apply the changes to the underlying files using the Library -> Apply Media Information Changes option. This seems to be the step that gives most people a lot of hassle and i also encountered most of the problems which i was able to solve. This usually involves the progress bar not moving at all, or appearing to move but jumping back to 0 percent constantly. The following fixed the issue for me:
I am pretty excited about the impending release of Battlefield Heroes. Ive been a huge fan of the BF franchise since BF2 and this free-to-play game looks like it is going to be a lot of fun. I signed up for a beta key some time ago and had all but given up of getting one, until I received it the other day out of the blue. It turns out they are getting ready to roll out the game sometime soon and as such are slowly giving out keys to everyone who has signed up in the order that they signed up. So i fired up the game and was pretty excited by what i saw - not only is it fun but my wife was pretty excited by what she saw too. Now she doesnt usually get into games so i was pretty keen to get my wife involved in one of my favourite activities. So all i needed to do was get her a key - problem is that since i signed up over 100 000 people have since decided its a good thing too. Thats a long queue to wait for a beta key. Then i found out that a site called BFHVerse has 60 keys to give out. Naturally every man and his dog wants one so the problem then becomes being able to grab a key within 2 seconds of it being posted before someone else does. Then i saw a particular post that caught my eye - one of the keys was apparently 'not working' because the way it had been printed on the coupon was all screwed up:
Because of this, the general consensus in the comments of the post was that the image was too badly scrambled and there was no point trying to use it. Bingo! This badly printed coupon was a stroke of luck - it meant i might have enough time and little competition to use this beta key. After studying this for a while and using Paint.NET i was able to make out all of the digits except the last three:
This gave me an idea - ive been wanting to try out the WatiN automated web testing framework for a while and there was currently a need to use it at work. This was the perfect opportunity to try it out and write an application to automatically search through all the possible combinations and try and find the remaining digits!
I made the following assumptions which i felt were pretty sound:
Based on these assumption, there were around 1000 combinations of possible keys. This was a feasible amount so i came up with the following quick code to use WatiN to automatically fill in the beta key registration page with the various combinations until a valid key was found:
namespace BattlefieldHeroesBetaKeyFinder
{
using System;
using System.Globalization;
using WatiN.Core;
public class Program
{
//private const string BetaKeyFormat = "16D57-47H26-E5120-43E4H";
private const string BetaKeyFormat = "16D57-47H26-E5120-43{0}";
private const string AccountName = "TestUser";
private const string AccountPassword = "Password";
private static char[] Slot1Digits = { 'E' };//{ 'B', 'D', 'E', 'F' };
private static char[] Slot2Digits = { '0', '1', '2', '3', '4', '5', '6', '7', '8', '9', 'A', 'B', 'C', 'D', 'E', 'F', 'H', 'L', 'R', 'T' };
private static char[] Slot3Digits = { '0', '1', '2', '3', '4', '5', '6', '7', '8', '9', 'A', 'B', 'C', 'D', 'E', 'F', 'H', 'L', 'R', 'T' };
private static int slot1Offset;
private static int slot2Offset;
private static int slot3Offset;
[STAThread]
static void Main(string[] args)
{
string betaKey = "Not yet assigned";
using (IE ie = new IE("http://beta.battlefield-heroes.com/activate"))
{
do
{
string digits = Program.GetNextDigits();
if (digits == null)
{
betaKey = "No key found";
break;
}
betaKey = String.Format(CultureInfo.InvariantCulture, Program.BetaKeyFormat, digits);
Console.Write("Trying - " + betaKey);
//Console.WriteLine();
ie.TextField(Find.ByName("key")).TypeText(betaKey);
ie.TextField(Find.ByName("sec_name")).TypeText(Program.AccountName);
ie.TextField(Find.ByName("sec_pass")).TypeText(Program.AccountPassword);
ie.TextField(Find.ByName("sec_pass_confirm")).TypeText(Program.AccountPassword);
ie.CheckBox(Find.ByName("agreement")).Checked = true;
ie.Button(Find.ByValue("Activate My Key")).Click();
if (ie.ContainsText("That key appears to be invalid."))
{
Console.WriteLine(", FAILED");
}
else if (ie.ContainsText("That key has already been activated."))
{
Console.WriteLine(", IN USE");
}
else
{
Console.WriteLine(", SUCCESS!");
break;
}
}
while (true);
Console.ReadKey(true);
}
}
private static string GetNextDigits()
{
if (slot3Offset >= Program.Slot3Digits.Length)
{
slot3Offset = 0;
slot2Offset++;
}
if (slot2Offset >= Program.Slot2Digits.Length)
{
slot2Offset = 0;
slot1Offset++;
}
if (slot1Offset >= Program.Slot1Digits.Length)
{
return null;
}
return new string(new char[] { Program.Slot1Digits[slot1Offset], Program.Slot2Digits[slot2Offset], Program.Slot3Digits[slot3Offset++] });
}
}
}
The program took about 2 seconds per attempt and after about 10 minutes of trying i found the key that worked! All this and it had only taken me about an hour to create it all. Unfortunately it turns out that the key had already been registered, but the exercise had taught me a lot. The point of this post is not really to say that the above code is awesome, more that WatiN is an extremely useful package that can be used to autofill and scrap webforms with ease. I highly recommend you check it out. Im just happy that the BF Heroes beta key administration didnt pick up my multiple attempts and ban my IP.
Oh and btw...for those curious types out there, the correct beta key is included as a comment in the above code :)
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