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Windows XP Registry Hacks

1
3 years ago
by Boris in , ,

I finally graduate in about 2 months. However, much to my dismay, I have to finish my social volunteer work. No, I didn’t do anything weird – it’s just a graduation requisite. I’ve been working at my university’s computer division, so I’ve had to format anywhere between 4 and 15 laptops every day. Yes. Every. Single. Day.

Unfortunately, most of the laptops are Dell C610s – in other words, 1GHz, 256MB RAM and they’re running Windows XP. You can probably tell that it’s very fun to optimize each system. (I’m proud of myself, they run pretty nicely for the low specs they’re sporting…)

With this in mind, I decided to code a .NET 3.5 application (free, of course) that does the job for me and also manages to be fully extensible through the use of a text-based hack database.

If you’re interested in downloading it, give it a go here. Read more if you’re interested in some of the example hacks, as well as the database specification.

(more…)

iBrainer

0
3 years ago
by Boris in

Shameless plug:

iBrainer is now ready for public use. Feel free to give it a try, either on download.com or iBrainer.net

In a nutshell: fix your MP3 collection in a snap. No more Unknown Artist or fixing tags yourself.

I might be biased, but I use it all the time — and I’m loving it!

How to reprogram Dell’s MediaDirect button

1
3 years ago
by Boris in

Simple steps:

  1. Download IntelliType: http://www.microsoft.com/hardware/download/download.aspx?category=MK
  2. Install & select “Wireless Photo Keyboard”
  3. Wait for setup to finish
  4. Open Control Panel – Keyboard
  5. Key Settings: disable all of these (edit, disable the use of this key)
    1. Edit (Photo)
    2. Print (Photo)
    3. Send (Photo)
    4. Slide Show
    5. Show Favorites
    6. Log Off
    7. New – Print
  6. Select “Library” – this IS the MediaDirect button
  7. “Edit” – do whatever your heart desires.

Yay!

Genpuid troubles

0
4 years ago
by Boris in ,

Since there is no managed or open source way to get a PUID for MusicBrainz (Thank you, thank you MusicIP…), you have to call it as an external process. However, since Windows makes all the console-based executables have a character set of SBCSCodePageEncoding, accents get messed up.

After several hours of smashing my head against the wall and venting on GTalk w/ scottp, I finally got it to work:

Encoding.UTF8.GetString(ProcessObj.StandardOutput.CurrentEncoding.GetBytes(“yadda yadda”));

And now it all works. Yay! iBrainz is almost finished…

Working with MusicBrainz

0
4 years ago
by Boris in , ,

I decided that while I’m on winter break, instead of doing something useful like.. I don’t know, finally getting some rest, I’ll code yet another MusicBrainz client. Yes, yet another project. Picard sucks and the MBTagger is being discontinued quite soon, so…

I stumbled upon Scott Peterson’s awesome MusicBrainz-Sharp library and I’ve been talking to him re: some issues it has, but so far it’s been great help. Kudos to you, Scott!

Suggestions,  comments, etc? Feel free to leave a comment!

(And here I thought MBTagger/Picard were slow… and it’s MusicBrainz.Org forcing you to do 1 query per second. Is it time to implement a separate server cache? Hrm… Maybe.)

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