This is a little tip that I must remember.
Just had a problem with a window appearing off-screen. In most circumstances using the keyboard to bring it back would be easy, as per this How-To Geek post, but in this case it was a toolbar window from my text editor and the keyboard movement commands were being sent to the main window and not the problematic off-screen one.
Enter NirCmd. This is a useful command line jack-of-all-trades that allows one to do various actions on Windows machines. The NirCmd homepage has a full list of all the things that it allows one to run from the command line.
The following command moves all the top level windows to the centre of the main screen:
nircmd.exe win center alltop
Job done.
Filed under tips
Another useful little tip, this time from the Daily Cup of Tech. It is a Windows command line to find all the files on the machine that match a pattern and write the results to a text file.
Pretty basic but very useful for the upgrade that I’m doing today.
dir *.ext /s /b > files.txt
Filed under Tips
I recently had a large number of bitmaps with magenta backgrounds, you know the old style way of indicating the transparent parts of an icon, that I needed to convert to PNGs with transparency.
I was preparing myself for the serious tedium of converting them by hand, when I thought that there must be another way to do it and fortunately for me, there was: ImageMagick (Wikipedia link).
I had used this open source application before but it was a long time ago and I had forgotten all about it. Luckily a couple of Google searches reminded me about it and, after the usual amount of command-line trial and error, the solution to my problem was this:
mogrify.exe -transparent magenta -format png *.bmp
The documentation gives more details about the options but to summarise:
- -transparent magenta - sets the colour to be considered transparent
- -format png - sets the output file format
- *.bmp - specifies the files to process
Filed under Useful tools
Shared by Dom
ISOTYPE and Gerd Arntz’s huge number of icons and pictograms are incredible.
My conceit, when I started making infographics, was simple. I believed this was a *new way* of…
Filed under Space
Top 5 Awesome Things About the Webb Telescope (via vlogbrothers)
“Increasing the awesome”.
Update from NASAWatch:
A Carnegie astronomer notes: “While brimming with enthusiasm, this video makes a major error by claiming that JWST will be able “to see the Earth” if it was 25 light-years away. Sadly, this is not true. Here is what the JWST web page states is the true capability of JWST: “Webb can only see large planets orbiting at relatively large distances from the parent star. To see small Earth-like planets, which are billions of time fainter than their parent star, a space telescope capable of seeing at even higher angular resolution will be required. NASA is studying such a space mission, the Terrestrial Planet Finder.” This quote is from the JWST web page located at: http://www.jwst.nasa.gov/faq.html#basic JWST will do fantastic science, but if someone says that it will do things that are impossible for it to do, the entire project is likely to suffer.
Filed under Space
Excellent breakdown of the regs for 2011, including illustrative diagrams.
Filed under F1
Filed under News
Interesting article about how the national identity database will be decommissioned. I didn’t know that one of the data centres is located in my original home town of Doncaster.
Filed under ID
Being in space can change the way you view the Earth.
It was on the Apollo 8 mission that the famous “Earthrise” image was acquired
That was certainly the case for the Apollo 8 crew…
Filed under Space
This is something a little bit special, something I’ve wanted to bring you for a while. On a recent visit to Wirth Research in Bicester, technical HQ of the Virgin Racing team, I was allowed to film…
Fantastic article from James Allen.
Filed under F1
