Category Archives: Operating Systems

HP Universal Printer PCL 6 driver cannot read printer capabilities

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printer pcl 6 driver

This bug I encountered last week. While writing a system to define printers and TCP/IP ports in bulk on Windows 2008 R2 servers, I got the report from the testers that a color printer defined with the HP Universal Printer PCL 6 driver wasn’t recognized as color when the port… Read more »

Gmail as relayhost for Postfix

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gmail as relayhost for postfix

I just installed a new Ubuntu 13.04 server and thought I’d look into using gmail as relayhost for Postfix instead of Exim for a change. Postfix is the default MTA (mail transfer agent) on Ubuntu, so let’s set it up already… Installing packages: sudo apt-get install postfix ca-certificates libsasl2-2 libsasl2-modules… Read more »

Managing Windows features from the command line with RSAT

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RSAT

Note: An update of this article for Windows 10 can be found here One of the more useful Windows features for Windows administrators is the Remote Server Administration Tools pack (RSAT). Apart from allowing you to install GUI elements in the Administrative Tools menu, this can also install the command-line… Read more »

Weird error on Windows 7 with RUNAS.EXE with locally defined user

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The other day, I noticed something strange with Windows 7’s runas.exe command. When I specify a local user, a local administrator for instance, I normally use the “period-notation”, like: .UserName However, RUNAS.EXE threw an error at me: “RUNAS ERROR: Unable to acquire user password”. Luckily, this was easily solved. I… Read more »

Merging videos with mencoder

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merging videos

In this article, I present an easy way to merge all video files in a directory using the Open Source tool mencoder (part of mplayer, the video player) using a batch file, suitable for Windows XP and later. The method below supports merging AVI, MPG, MP4, WMV and RM files.

Sharing Clementine song status in Empathy

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clementine song status empathy

Found this handy python script for sharing Clementine song status in Empathy….. regrettably it did not work on my Ubuntu 12.10 desktop installation…. Apparently you have to add a line (see the second line) about the character encoding nowadays….. so just to make it easier for other people… here’s the… Read more »

CMD.EXE: About Variables

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In this article I will give some extra information on the usage of CMD.EXE variables in batch files. These variables are stored in the so-called Environment, hence the name Environment Variables. There are two environments on a Windows machine: The System and the User environment. When a variable is set… Read more »

Speed up folders with many similar named files

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This is a little known reghack: When Windows stores files in a folder on an NTFS partition, it still creates so-called 8.3 file names for compatibility with 16-bit Windows programs. When a folder has more than 4000 file entries, it becomes noticeable that access performance decreases. When the folder has more… Read more »

Balloon tips OFF in windows

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Want to get rid of those nasty balloon tips, hovering over the task tray? Here’s the registry command: reg add “HKCUSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionExplorerAdvanced” /t REG_DWORD /v EnableBalloonTips /d 0 If you’d wish to re-enable them again, this is the code reg add “HKCUSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionExplorerAdvanced” /t REG_DWORD /v EnableBalloonTips /d 1