Sunday, December 19, 2010

MS Paint tricks.

I ran across something I found interesting... If only because I often find myself using MS paint.

Here are some handy shortcuts / hidden features in MS paint (the image is not mine, the source is ANONYMOUS):


Sunday, October 3, 2010

So, what does 'writing' look like?

Greek

This is specifically Ancient Greek, and is my favourite passage in that language. I'll give a bonus ten points to anyone who can tell me what it is. It's interesting to note that outside of Greece, most people know Greek letters from either a Bible passage ('I am the Alpha and the Omega' Revelation 22:13) or from maths and sciences. Why do we use Greek letters in those fields? Because the characters are fairly easy to find, many people used to know both Latin and Greek, and it gave us an extra 48 characters to assign meanings to.

Sumerian

The oldest writing system known, the Sumerian cuneiform was written using a triangular stick (a cuneus) which was pressed into clay to form these wedge shapes. It began as a pictorial system ('cow' was a drawing of a cow, etc.) but later transformed into abstract glyphs. It, through a ridiculous five thousand plus year journey, arrived at the Latin script you're currently reading.

Arabic

There are more variants of Arabic than stars in the sky (including a number of variants for languages entirely unrelated to Arabic itself, like Farsi or Pashto). It's interesting in part because vowels are, as a general rule, not written. T wld b lk wrttng n Nglsh smthng lk ths. And you wonder why Arabic is considered difficult for English-speakers to learn? By the way.... I DO in fact know that there are more stars in the sky than variants of Arabic. It's hyperbole. Exaggeration. Deliberate rhetorical overstatement. You can stop telling me that there are a lot of stars.

Bengali

The first of a large number of the scripts on this list which are distantly related to a single ancestral script known as the Brāhmī alphabet, which in turn is a very distant relative of our Latin script.

Burmese

Another relative of that Brāhmī script, Burmese has its distinct curving shape because instead of being written with pen and ink, it was written on the surface of palm leaves which tore when you drew straight lines. Burmese is not related to the languages of India like Hindi, Gujarati, etc., and is actually a distant relative of Mandarin and Cantonese.

Cherokee

The Cherokee writing system was one of the only scripts on this list invented by one person, and is also one of the newest scripts on this list, at just over 200 years old. It was invented by Sequoyah (ᏍᏏᏉᏯ) when he found the colonists reading their language using what he called 'leaves'. He went and, over the course of a number of years, developed this script entirely from scratch without knowing how to read the writing of the colonists. It's for this reason that, while the letters may look familiar, they are entirely different to their English look-alikes. For example, Ꭰ is a, Ꭱ is e, Ꮓ is no, Ꮃ is la, etc. This is also a good example of a syllabary, a point I'll explain below.

Inuktitut

Developed by missionaries, the Canadian Aboriginal Syllabary (as it's formally known) is used to write many of the native languages of Canada, although in a number of variants. Each character represents not a word or a single sound, but a syllable. The various smaller letters alter syllables to add an extra consonant that doesn't have a vowel of its own.

Coptic

A relative of Greek, Coptic is the liturgical script and language of most Egyptian Christians. It's a distant relative, although not too distant, of our own Latin script, and was influenced by a number of centuries of distance from Greece.

Armenian

With an alphabet that's been around since around 400 CE, Armenian is one of the most distinct relatives of the majority of other European languages. Most language in Europe are part of the Indo-European family, with farflung relatives throughout the Middle-East and India. Oddly, Basque, Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian are completely unrelated to the rest of European languages, with the last three all related to one another, and Basque with no known relatives.

Chinese

There is no one language 'Chinese', but instead a number of related languages all written using similar but not identical writing systems. Each character represents a word or part of a word, although it's not a simple relationship, and very few characters are 'pictures' of what they read as, with a lot of complexities that get overlooked a lot of the time when people first hear about Chinese writing.

Monday, July 26, 2010

Three quotes…


"... all things appear as they do only by virtue of the delicate individual physical and mental media through which we are made conscious of them..."
    H.P. Lovecraft - (1922) The Tomb

"If the form of information is difficult to assimilate, that affects our judgments about the substance of that information."
    Leonard Mlodinow - Subliminal: How your unconscious rules your behavior

"Mankind have a great aversion to intellectual labor; but even supposing knowledge to be easily attainable, more people would be content to be ignorant than would take even a little trouble to acquire it."
    Samuel Johnson - (1709 - 1784)

(this last one is admittedly a bit cynical - but there are some people...)

Friday, June 11, 2010

I was having problems installing a printer to a Win 7 homegroup here is the question I posted - I finally found a workaround too:

http://www.sevenforums.com/drivers/64995-additional-print-drivers-x86-homegroup.html#post579363











Additional Print Drivers (x86) for Homegroup:

I am having no luck trying to locate and install (x86) / 32 bit printer drivers for an HP LaserJet 4 plus printer.

I'm running Win 7 64 bit and am trying to add additional drivers for the printer so that I can share it (via Homegroup) with other machines running Win 7 (x86) / 32 bit. I am prompted to provide the location of the driver...

I found a download for the driver (HP says the file is already part of the OS, but I cant find it) and that part goes fine (I think?)...

The next step is asking "Install components from Windows media". It looks like it wants the 'ntprint.inf' file, but the one on the machine (in the 'ntprint.inf_x86_neutral_c4c11fe1f3d01835' folder) will not work, I get this pop up: "... INF does not contain the required driver components"

I have also tried several work-around / cheats - such as trying to grab a copy of 'ntprint.inf_xxx' from other (32 bit) locations, with the same results.

Any suggestions or remedies?






SOLVED - Additional Print Drivers (x86) for Homegroup

I GOT IT TO WORK... / NOT STUCK ANYMORE

I had no luck getting the additional drivers to install on the 'Host' machine running Win 7(x64). So much for locating Print Drivers on the Homegroup Network.

Here is what ended up working:
~STEP ONE-
On the 'Remote Machine' running Win 7 (x86) I installed (Added) the HP 'LaserJet 4 Plus' as a local printer to LPT1... If the 'LaserJet 4 Plus' is not listed in the HP category, hit the 'Windows Update' button - this will add a complete list of printers including the 'LaserJet 4 Plus'. Finish the Install (including it as the Default printer...This printer will be removed later). This step will tell the OS about the printer and its drivers for the Next step (two) to work...

~STEP TWO-
[NOTE]

    (The "Host Machine has to be running so the 'LaserJet 4 Plus' can be found on the network created by the Homegroup - and the printer has to be shared.)


Again, on the 'Remote Machine' Add a Network printer and Select the 'LaserJet 4 Plus'. Then simply install the printer as usual. Set it as the default printer if you want to. When the Networked printer is installed. The Printer added in step one can be now be removed.

Hopefully this will be found so others can use it... I would think that it should work for any other printer as well.

Wednesday, March 3, 2010

Powershell - Sending IP address in email via GMAIL

I wanted to be able to Remote Desktop to my Home PC from work...

So, I had to enable RDP on the PC and set up port forwarding on my wireless router for  port 3389 (the machine I'm connecting to is Hard wired) - Port forwarding is easy enough, but the steps are specific to your brand of router (Google is your friend!). 

The last step was to open RDP on my work computer and connect to my home computer. To do this I needed the EXTERNAL IP address on my router. Your EXTERNAL IP information is not found on / in the physical machine you want to connect to if you use a router. It is presented to the outside facing portion of your network connection so you have to ask the outside world what IP address they see you using...

And the EXTERNAL IP is subject to change at various points in time depending on the dynamic IP lease / renew rate your ISP dictates... Unless you have a Static IP address. That is not to say that your dynamic IP address will change, but it can.

Rather than spending the money on a Static IP address, I decided to find a way to make my EXTERNAL IP address available to me while I was away (somehow). Enter Powershell...

(Note: I run Win 7 64 bit, so I use PS v2.0)

After some digging around / trial and error. I found a method that will ask for my EXTERNAL IP address (at 'http://checkip.dyndns.com:8245/') and send that information via e-mail (I use GMAIL) from my machine to my GMAIL account.

The initial return from grabbing the results of that websites information are brought in to Powershell as raw text (including the HTML tags):    
<html><head><title>Current IP Check</title></head><body>Current IP Address: xx.xx.xx.xx</body></html>




There are (of course) plenty of ways to remove the extraneous data and there are also ways to embed the HTML into the email...


I used this '-replace "[^\d\.]"' to strip out the tags and the letters (it replaces anything that is not a 'number' or a 'period', with a ~null~ value) - its function is also commented in the script:
    
This script is seeminly specific to GMAIL port and SSL requirements, but it may work for other systems as well.

I hope that this information can help someone else - in part or in whole:


##############  START ###############
$wc=New-Object net.webclient
$Results = $wc.downloadstring("http://checkip.dyndns.com:8245/") -replace "[^\d\.]"

#############################################################################################

####                       NOTES about " -replace "[^\d\.]"                              ####
####                                                                                     ####
#### "-Replace" replace "^" all Characters excluding "\d" numbers or "\." decimal points ####
####  ~ it literally only retains numbers and decimal points ~                           ####
####                                                                                     ####
#############################################################################################

$Username = "
XXXXXXXXXX" # account username goes inside the parenthesis
$PW = "xxxxxxxxxx" # account password goes inside the parenthesis"

$EmailFrom = "XXXXXXXX@gmail.com"
#FROM 'GMAIL' address goes inside the quote marks
$EmailTo = "xxxxxxxx@gmail.com"
# RECIPIENT address goes inside the quote marks
$Subject = "$Results - Home IP Address"

$Body = "$Results - Home IP Address"


$SMTPServer = "smtp.gmail.com"
$SMTPClient = New-Object Net.Mail.SmtpClient($SmtpServer, 587)
$SMTPClient.EnableSsl = $true
$SMTPClient.Credentials = New-Object System.Net.NetworkCredential($Username, $PW);
$SMTPClient.Send($EmailFrom, $EmailTo, $Subject, $Body)

##############  END ###############