Several months ago, I added a new item to my keychain: a 32GB USB memory stick. This blog post is about what I did to make the most of this little device so that it would be able to: Support file transfers among operating systems (primarily Mac OS X, and Windows) Support files larger than 4GB Be bootable for rescue purposes (using Hiren’s Boot CD)
Tips and Tricks
Random tips and tricks for anything computer related.
Getting a new Windows system up and running with Ninite
I have installed Windows quite a few times over this past year, from setting up different operating systems on my home lab server and installing Microsoft’s newest operating system, Windows 8. You’d think that I would have spent hours downloading all the installers for Chrome, Flash, VLC, Notepad++, PuTTY, 7-Zip, and all the other common programs I use and having to click “Next” buttons a million times. Well fortunately there’s a better solution. I came across Ninite a while ago, and it has saved me a ton of time installing the basic programs I use on Windows. With Ninite, you just need to pick the programs you want from Continue Reading
Using Mac’s Automator to Make Diffing Easier
Recently I’ve been needing an easy way to paste two versions of a text, and get the differences between the texts, specifically changes within a line (most diff programs only show which lines have changed). After some searching, DiffMerge came up as one of the best free diff programs that would work on the Mac. DiffMerge is great in many aspects, however, it lacked the interface to paste in text to diff right off the start. I set out using Mac’s Automator tool to create an application to prompt the user for two texts, create the temporary files, then pass it into DiffMerge. Continue Reading
Make Word spell check uppercase words
It’s a little known fact that Microsoft Word by default does not spell check uppercase words. I had the opportunity to read through many co-op resumes from a couple universities this past week, and the typos I’ve seen seem to support this observation. The problem comes when you have a section heading in capitals, such as “ACHIVEMENTS” or “RELEVENT SKILLS”. Microsoft Word by default doesn’t indicate that the spelling is wrong! I’m not sure why this “feature” is enabled by default, as I’d think it would be better to have more false positives than to have typos go undetected. In Continue Reading
Sweeping the disks
Every now and then it’s necessary to make some extra room on the disks. I’ve found a set of free tools that helps me see what is taking up all the space. JDiskReport (Multi-platform) JDiskReport presents multiple views for getting the statistics of file sizes. The default view is a pie chart showing the sizes of each of the subfolders in the current selected folder. Alternate views are included to determine the file types that use the most space, largest files in the entire tree, file size and file age. It is available for Windows, Mac, Linux and other Java-supported Continue Reading