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View story at Medium.com

I found this one to be more balanced and less tech-y and is a great intro to reasons why one would switch from MS or Apple for their primary desktop / laptop OS.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/09/technology/ibm-announces-computer-chips-more-powerful-than-any-in-existence.html?_r=0

This guy has been around forever and I hadn’t heard his name mentioned since a video series on Microsoft and Apple that he did way back in the days of VHS video.  That said, reading Bob Cringley’s blog is good to get some perspective of someone who is still in the know and has a lot of history: http://www.cringely.com/

Couple articles I ran across this week that I felt like sharing:

Boston tech firm Yottaa plans HQ move to Waltham to accommodate soaring growth – from the Boston Business Journal

CookRadar wants to connect foodies with chefs in their neighborhoods – I’m a little skeptical of this.  Also from the Boston Business Journal.

I was having difficulty with this very basic task.  Ends up that I was running Command Prompt as Administrator when apparently, for a change, the system wanted me to run as non privileged.

http://www.stefangordon.com/how-to-resize-a-virtualbox-disk-in-windows/

All set – let the testing continue!

Another useful little time is checking for server uptime.  I had some servers that had not gone through a reboot in 5 months and figured it was time.  In Windows 2008 server, it’s pretty easy – can be found in Task Manager:

Tip gleaned from here:  http://www.petri.co.il/check-uptime-in-server-2008.htm#

I know that there are other ways of doing this without Task Scheduler but I find this to be the easiest way to schedule a reboot if I need to do a one-off off-hours reboot of a server.  This applies to my Windows 2003 servers and, as usual, Spiceworks Community is very straightforward and accurate…  http://community.spiceworks.com/how_to/show/254-schedule-windows-server-to-reboot

I recently needed to automate a compression of files on Windows 2008 R2 that I had been manually doing daily.  The compression tool that is built in to Windows doesn’t like the command line, apparently, so I downloaded the free 7-Zip file compression tool and it’s associated command line utility and followed the basic steps put forth on this blog: http://www.dotnetperls.com/7-zip-examples to get it up and running.

Next, I’ll set it as a Scheduled Task in Windows to run nightly and have one less manual step to perform.  I’ll be posting more automation related things here in the future as this is one key to successful IT.

(As a side note, we always used WinZip and it was great but 7-Zip is being used as a cost-cutting measure.  I do not know of any limitations that this switch has caused but I’m sure there are some.)

I found a great tool from Adobe to add dynamic Exhibit stamps / tags via Acrobat.  Our office uses the tried-and-true method of manually applying stickers to the exhibits to be used in court.  I got the request earlier this week to see if I could super-impose the tags right on to a few photos that will be used in a future trial.  Luckily, there were a couple good resources about this online, and Adobe actually released someone’s work on the task: http://blogs.adobe.com/acrolaw/2009/05/add-dynamic-exhibit-stamps-in-acrobat-using-a-free-stamp-set/.

These stamps are great, and wicked easy to modify.  I changed the background from transparent so they would look like stickers, and changed the default text.  I’m not sure how much we will use this, but at least the tool is available.  The process to get this going in Adobe Acrobat X (I use Pro but you can use it in Standard as well, I’m sure) is:

1. Download the file in the above link.
2. Save the resulting file (it’s a .pdf) in the Stamps directory (in Windows 7 it’s in your user profile\appdata\roaming\adobe\acrobat\10\stamps, I believe).
3. Now, when you are in Acrobat, you can click over on ‘Comment’, then on the Stamp icon and you will see the Exhibit tabs as an option to add as a stamp.
4. Click on the tab you want to use, then just move it over to the part of the PDF you are using, and you will be prompted to give it a name.
5. Once on the PDF, you can resize the tab – this works really well!

There are some customizations you can do right in the initial downloaded PDF – it’s just an Acrobat form.  See the above link for more details.  There is also some info (for Acrobat 9 people) here: http://www.pdfforlawyers.com/2009/05/using-acrobat-to-put-exhibit-stamps-on-digital-documents.html

We have a user who primarialy works out of another office, but visits here once every week or two.  I finally set her up with a machine from our pile of extras (a Dell Optiplex 745 – not bad for normal office work), and got the machine all configured up to her specs.

Beacuse of a couple of factors, I figured it would be worth a try to get her to use Remote Desktop from the machine at this office to connect to the one at her primary office.  She has a fairly complicated setup, we have a good enough T-1, and she is a user who likes things the same.  I also didn’t want to confuse the user by making her use dual machines and having to maintain two setups for her.

Here was the hitch that I found: her primary office has two wide-screen monitors, and her remote office machine has dual screens, but they are square ones that only do 1280×1024.  Standard RDP from XP doesn’t automatically work for dual monitors, and in setting up RDP for her, one screen would be her ‘local’ machine, and the other screen would be the ‘remote’ machine (at her primary office.)  This could work, but my fear is that she will start saving files or doing things on the local machine, thinking it is the remote one, and vice versa.

The only quick solution I could find, which works mostly, is to use the /span option when invoking the RDP Client (mstsc.exe), which then spans the remote desktop across both screens on the local PC.  This would work just fine if both of her screen setups were the same resolution, but the ones at the primary office are widescreen and at a different resolution, so you need to resize windows once RDP is running.

I think that this solution is a good one for now, and will at least eliminate the dual-PC work that I feared.  I just hope that the end user is satisfied with the solution.

Anyone have anything better?