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Geeky/Programming

Change your Default CMD prompt path

Sometimes, your path when you go to start->run, CMD will be something you don’t want. In active directory or on an NT domain, sometimes your default home path might be a network drive. This isn’t so good when you are offline or drop offline after being online. The CMD prompt is set to a place where you can’t get to.

To change the path, you can edit the registry (at your own risk)

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftCommand Processor]
“Autorun”=”c:”

 

This will change the path to your c: drive.

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Geeky/Programming Product Reviews

Mobile GPS: Google Maps for Mobile vs. Live Search for Mobile

This evening, I hooked up my Pharos Bluetooth adapter with my Microsoft GPS and synced it to my T-Mobile Dash. I hopped in my Vibe and cruised around town, so I could test out the GPS capabilities. In the past, I have used Pocket Streets and Trips (I don’t think newer versions of Streets and Trips have the Pocket Version anymore though, I have an older version – I have used the laptop version with the GPS, it works well), and Virtual Earth Mobile. As I don’t have those installed currently, I decided to try two new products. Google Maps for Mobile and Live Search for Mobile.

I’ll start off by just saying, that getting the Bluetooth GPS working can be tricky. I paired it with my Dash, then set up a COM port so I could utilize it within applications.

Live Search for Mobile was pretty easy to set up. In the settings, there is a place to pick the COM port, I chose the one I set up, and then went to the maps, and chose an option for “Center on GPS”. In a few seconds, I was watching myself (as a little red arrow) on the screen. The road maps are good, slightly out of date, but the aerial maps are really bad. Black and white even. On to the next test.

Google Maps for Mobile: the maps are nice. The aerial maps are really good for Central MN, but the thing is, as much as I tried, I couldn’t get the GPS to start within the application. There must be something funny with the way it looks for the GPS, so in all reality, I didn’t test much with GMM.

Now that I have my GPS paired, I want to get mologogo working again, but their site is down, something with a DNS issue. Has been down for a week or so. Once I get that up, maybe I will make a page here again or a sidebar widget that shows my current location. The one goofy thing is, the charger for the Bluetooth unit is kind of wacky, if I remember, my PSP charger worked better, I will have to dig into that. My car has 112V plugin, so that is cool.

I can’t wait for the day when you can get 3D GPS like Virtual Earth 3D or Google Earth, or even Bird’s Eye on your mobile, sync’d with GPS, you will never get lost.

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Geeky/Programming

T-Mobile Dash – Tethering

Last week, I wrote about how much of a debacle it was to tether a blackberry. Well, I decided to see how hard or easy it would be to tether my new T-Mobile Dash.

I read this post, which just seemed to come at the right time. My wi-fi keeps dropping, so I figured next time it dropped, I would test tethering. It just dropped about 20 minutes ago. I took a USB cable, connected to my phone, Activesync fired up on the computer, said I was connected to sync. On the phone, got to the Internet Sharing app, hit connect. 10 seconds later, the computer was on the net. No real extra setup for tethering. They are making it way to easy 🙂

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Geeky/Programming Product Reviews

Orb 2.0: Trying it out again

A long time ago, I tried out Orb right when it came out, and it was cool, seemed buggy. Yesterday I installed Orb 2.0, flashy new Ajaxy type site now, and a few more features. Still doesn’t work well over mobile data. I have to turn on Wi-Fi on my phone to get any good speeds/buffering. Even then the videos/movies audio is always ahead of the video. Listening to mp3’s over it is pretty good though.

Just another tool for the media toolbelt.

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Life

Piano Playing – MusicNotes and Video Game Music

I bought a piano back in October, and I am really liking it. I probably don’t play as much as I should be, but I try. Its actually easier for me to play guitar than piano – I can get through more songs without screwing up 🙂

Anyways, even when I was in piano lessons, I really wasn’t into playing classical music and all that, I was more into rock n roll, The Beatles, John Lennon, things like that.

I know I have blogged before about music you buy, that it is the lyrics in the treble clef, which I hate. Like you can listen to a song, and hear them play one thing, and they sing the lyrics, but in the sheet music, the try to incorporate all that into the piano part – I hate that!!

Even so, I still buy some sheet music, and now, I just do it online, and print it off. The site I primarily use is MusicNotes.com – it seems to have the best selection and price. I know Schmitt Music has an online store, I haven’t heard the best things though.

With MusicNotes, you can get music, listen to it before you buy, print off the first sheet before you buy. You can even transpose it before you print, which is exactly what I did yesterday. I have a recording of John Lennon playing “Real Love” on the piano, just him. If you don’t know the song, The Beatles put it out on their Second Anthology in the 90’s – its really the last “new” Beatles song ever. Well, when the Beatles recorded it, the jumped the key up “The song has been sped up 12% from the demo” – so, the default key on the music was too high (it matched the Beatles but not Lennon’s version), so I transposed it down to the right key. And I have been playing it the last day, but yet, I am not playing the music. Looking at the chords, taking bits and pieces, and trying get rid of the damn lyrics in the treble clef notes!!


Where else does a piano playing geek look for music? Video games of course! A while back I found a site with a ton of music from video games. Super Mario Bros. is the ultimate piece, most everyone knows it. There is the Overworld, Underworld, and Underwater themes. I can play Underworld and Underwater themes fairly well, I might even try to record Underwater. The Overworld is a bit tougher.  One of my best memories of growing up was playing “The Goonies II” on NES. I remember playing with my cousins and sister. That game, in my opinion, was one of the best. Music was great, just fun game to play. I found the music for that as well! Great stuff, tough though. Fast and crazy. I lost the original link to the site where I got the music, so I will just post up some copies here, they are zip files, containing a midi of the song, and a PDF of the music. I have more than these 4 and maybe I will post them all up on a sub site of my website.

 Super Mario Bros. Overworld Theme

Super Mario Bros. Underworld Theme

Super Mario Bros. Underwater Theme

Goonies Overworld Theme

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Geeky/Programming

Launchy the Launcher

After using Vista for a few months, I am so used to the search/find instead of start->run. I really miss this feature when I use XP at work.

Stumbled across Launchy. Pretty sweet app. Hit alt+spacebar, start typing, after a few characters, it finds the exe or whatever you are looking for, hit enter and it opens. Saves a ton of time!

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Geeky/Programming

Protected: IT War – Battle of the Scheduled Tasks

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Geeky/Programming Life

Family Tech Support Lifesaver – TeamViewer

Earlier this week I read about TeamViewer on Lifehacker. I figured, yeah, just another gimmick, like GotoMyPC, whatever. So I just made a mental note and moved on.

If you ever have had to deal with long distance friends and family and their computers, you know what I am talking about. People don’t know what they are doing when it comes to setting things up, and since you aren’t there, they try to get you to help over the phone or IM, and it ends up being a debacle.

Steve Tech Support

Microsoft tried to add remote support in XP and Vista, but it just doesn’t work! Remote Assistance is what I am talking about. Every time someone tries to request “Remote Assistance” from me, I can never connect, it always ends up being back and forth trying to get connected, and not solving the person’s problems.

So, today my mom was like “I just bought a new printer, hooked it up to the desktop in the basement, but I want to use it on my laptop, shared , you know”

Well, trying to talk a relative through windows networking is basically like trying to talk Spanish to someone in China. (“Chinaman is not the preferred nomenclature dude” [Walter from The Big Lebowski])

Anyways, I’m like, ok, good test for this new “TeamViewer”. I install it quick, on my desktop at home, Vista, no issues. Mom – install it. Give me the “Partner ID” and “Password”, in 2 seconds, I am connected. And remember now, this laptop she is on has 1 or more firewalls running, which is what is causing the problems in the first place with the printer sharing. I connected to her with no issues. So I poke around, get the computer name and just check it out. Good. “Mom – go install TeamViewer on the desktop, give me the info so I can connect”. I go play a song on the piano, before I am done, she IM’s me back the info, and I connect. No issues.

So now I have 2 remote’s up. I first disable Windows Firewall on both, try to ping each by name. The laptop can get to the desktop, the desktop cannot get to the laptop. Go back to laptop, dig around. Trend Micro running as well. Tried adding a subnet rule so it trusts the internal network. No Dice, not intuitive and I’m not spending all afternoon on this. Disable the firewall. Try pinging both again by name. Works. Add a printer, search the “workgroup” (I verified earlier they were the same). Find printer, add it, print test page. Done.

Tell mom – “you don’t need a firewall (or two) because you are behind a router”

Close TeamViewer, all is well.

I would recommend to anyone who needs to connect to someone remote this new TeamViewer app. Works great, and saved me time 🙂

Go here to get TeamViewer: http://www.teamviewer.com/index.aspx

BTW, that picture is a representation of my l33t graphic skillz. Yeah, look out graphic designers, I’m coming for ya!

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Geeky/Programming

Blogging from Mobile

Last night I blogged about T9space.com and mobile browsing. This morning I am trying out more sites. This postis written from my mobile using T9space.com 🙂
Update: The mobile blogging, I forgot a title, so I added that through the web. Must have missed it!

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Geeky/Programming

T9Space.com Mobile Browsing Proxy

Read about this on Mashable! tonight. Its a site that is a proxy for social networking sites so you can browse them on your mobile. T9Space.com

I tried it out tonight on my Dash and yeah, its sweet. Can finally get to MySpace and Wikipedia on my mobile (Facebook already has m.facebook.com, but I will check that out too).

If you mobile browse alot, check it out.

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