I received an email from a long-time user of Uptime 2000 a couple of weeks ago. He was wondering if I knew of an application that showed a system’s IP address the same way Uptime 2000 showed your system’s up time transparently on the desktop. Turns out I didn’t have a good answer for him. His mail did however finally cause me to get around to updating the Uptime 2000 code to make it work with the latest versions of Windows. I also figured that, while I was at it, I could also add support for displaying a system’s IP address.

I wrote that app back in 2000 (back when Windows 2000 was new and slapping a “2000″ at the end of your app’s name was the in thing to do). Every now and then I get emails from folks asking for an updated version that works with UAC (it wrote to the registry in HKLM which requires elevation nowadays) so they wouldn’t have to run it as admin anymore. I figured it wouldn’t be that much work and it would be kind of fun to write some code again–it had been a while.

I dug up the old C++ code and was quickly reminded of the fact that it was actually going to be a fair amount of work (for me) to make it happen. I changed plans and instead decided to write an application in C# from scratch that would do it all and in what I figured would be a couple hours of work. That turned out to be pretty spot on as today I’m sharing out the first version of DeskTips. Continue reading →

If you find yourself recording videos in portrait mode with your phone/camera you might recall feeling less-than-smart when you find yourself cranking your neck to the side to watch a video on your computer. Luckily, there’s an easy way to relieve your neck and watch the video like a normal human.

I’m posting this as I was just about to send this to someone via email to help them through it and figured this could help others too (*and* I can just link to this when I get asked next time). So if you’re on a Windows PC, here’s what I recommend you do to create a properly rotated version of your videos. Continue reading →

I’ve just released a new version that you can download from the ccDismiss page. Here are the changes:

• Consistent naming (everything’s ccDismiss now instead of how some parts would show up as ChargeCompleteDisabler in the task window, etc.).
• Fixed a memory leak I had that would happen whenever the Charge Complete was closed. It was tiny but a leak is a leak.
• I’ve shared the source code out as well now (available through the same link above).

I was thinking today (rare occasion) and realized I could also just add support for actually piping data into ezclip.exe directly. I went ahead and coded it up and there’s a new version of ezClip available now that supports it. I think this method is how I’ll be using it more often than the version of a similar feature I added yesterday.

Assuming ezclip.exe lives somewhere in your %path% environment variable, one can now type something like ‘dir /s /b | ezclip’ and the output of the dir command will directly be copied to the clipboard.

You can get the latest version from the ezClip page as usual.

I’ve just uploaded a new version of ezClip–a small C# utility that provides easy access from the command-line to copy and paste files to and from the clipboard.

This version includes the following improvements:

• Wildcard support (e.g., ‘ezclip copy *.txt’ now works).
• New add command allows you to add to the files you currently have in the clipboard.
• New list command displays a list of the files currently stored in the clipboard.
• Short form commands allows you to use the first letter of each command instead of spelling out the full command name (e.g., ‘ezclip p’ instead of ‘ezclip paste’).

I’ve also shared out the source code as I have in the past. The really cool part about that is that this release was mostly just a matter of integrating changes sent to me by Joel McIntyre, an ezClip user who was nice enough to implement the very useful additions and sent them to me to share with everyone else. Thanks Joel!

You can download ezClip and read more about it here.

Thanks to JWD, the long lost little utility I wrote in 2000 is now once again available. For those that ended up on this page looking for it, just head straight over to the download page to get it. For those that don’t know what NameTag does, it’s just a tiny Win32 C++ application that runs displays the computer’s name on the desktop transparently. It’s been handy for folks who have to manage many machines on a switchbox/labs/VMs/terminal server sessions.