Tag: Windows

  • The Wonder that is FFmpeg

    I’ve recently discovered FFmpeg and I’m absolutely blown away how good it is. In the past when I’ve had to encode video I’ve generally used Handbrake but at the end of the day this is just a wrapper over the top of FFmpeg. If you’re willing to learn the commands necessary to drive FFmpeg directly…

  • Remapping Network Shares at Login

    I map a couple of drives from my NAS on my machine and for some reason they stopped reattaching correctly at login. I searched high and low for an answer but that’s the sort of question that generates millions of useless woo woo solutions. In the end I write a little command script to remap…

  • Drive Mapping from SharePoint to Windows Server

    In my day job I have the unenviable task of looking after our connection to a SharePoint server. I say unenviable because if there’s one thing that is going to go wrong this connection or something to do with it is what will fail. We don’t run the SharePoint service it’s provided by one of…

  • Windows 10 Start Menu – That’s Useful

    I’m not normally one to complain about Windows, there’s more than enough people doing more than enough complaining about it that I don’t feel the need to add my own frustrations but the start menu made something snap inside me just now and I had to let those frustrations see the light of day.

  • Increasing the Size of a qcow2 Image Under KVM

    I like to keep my disk images as small as reasonably possible when running virtual machines as I find it just generally makes life easier. Combined with the fact that if you are running LVM it’s easy to expand the disk there’s really no excuse for over specifying on the disk at install time. This…

  • Installing Non-Linux Guests on KVM

    My KVM set up will almost certainly comprise only Linux machines but there is an outside chance I’ll need to run a Windows server in order to have somewhere to install a copy of SQL Server for development purposes. This article will discuss installing non-Linux based operating systems on / under KVM. I’ll be installing…

  • Window 8 Delete Confirmation

    Well here’s something I didn’t expect, the delete confirmation dialog has been removed from Windows 8 by default. Now, when you press the delete key the item goes straight to the recycle bin without stopping to ask you is you are really sure that is what you wanted to do.

  • Starting and Stopping Services from Java

    Most of the applications I develop are web based and therefore, when deployed on Windows, are running as a service. This is great most of the time but when I want to programmatically control the application it can present some problems because starting and stopping services requires elevated permissions. This article discusses a solution that…

  • OS Install from USB Stick

    I’ve recently found myself having to do a fair bit of system administration work which makes an interesting change from the usual software development. My current project is to put together a beefy server which will run a few databases and other web applications. Ideally I’d like to run these on separate machines (virtual or…