A nice summary by Werner Fischer (Thomas-Krenn) about how to enable and use Serial over LAN, particularly for Linux boxes:
(In German, but you can easily translate it using your favourite online translation tool, e.g. deepl.com or Google Translate)
Paragon CampTune – a handy tool to resize the Boot Camp partition
Recently I ran out of space on a Boot Camp partition with Windows 10 Pro. So I looked around for ways to make more space for Windows by shrinking the macOS partition and enlarging the Windows partition. Apple doesn’t officially support this in Boot Camp without reinstalling Windows, and doing these operations by hand, e.g. with the help of GNU Parted, is time consuming and tedious.
Luckily, I stumbled over Paragon CampTune, a commercial macOS utility (ready for 10.14 Mojave) that automates these tedious tasks and allows to resize the macOS and Boot Camp partitions on the fly, without having to reinstall Windows or macOS.
It finally worked wonderfully, the only irritating thing was that the tool showed a bland error at the first start of the repartitioning process: “Object not found”. After restarting the process with slightly different partition sizes, it could be successfully completed.
I can thus recommend this handy utility as it can save hours of work for a few bucks (ca. 22 USD).
Karabiner: Use PC-style Home/End keys on Mac OS X
Karabiner allows to customize almost any aspect of the keymap on Mac OS X in a convenient way:
Karabiner – A powerful and stable keyboard customizer for OS X. (formerly known as KeyRemap4MacBook)
For example, you can make the “Home” and “End” keys behave like on a PC. Regarding these two keys, I find the PC style behaviour more intuitive, e.g. using shift-home and shift-end to select text, rather than using the tricky three-finger-combinations shift-cmd-left_cursor and shift-cmd-right_cursor in Mac OS X.
Here’s how to configure this in Karabiner:
Further, I decided to lower the “Key Repeat Delay Until Repeat” to 100 ms and the “Key Repeat” to 23 ms for quicker navigation and repetitive typing.
Of course, there are many other useful tweaks to explore.
Skype 5.3.0.116 – a memory hog with memory leaks
Just take a look at the following screenshot I just took, showing two Skype 5.3.0.116 instances running on a current Windows 7 box with 4 GB of RAM:
That’s 330 MB of private memory for each instance at this very moment! Note that these numbers are steadily growing (at about 2 KB/s) for both processes – for no apparent reason. A hint, that there’s likely a memory leak somewhere in Skype.
Let’s hope Microsoft will rewrite Skype from scratch (The current code-base probably isn’t worth refactoring). I’m confident they don’t lack the human and financial resources to do it. It can only get better.
Windows: Move a window that is off the screen
- Make sure, the invisible (off-screen) window has the focus: Hold down ALT + Tab to select the (invisible) window you want to move
- Hold down Alt + Spacebar
- Press the M key
- Use the arrow keys to relocate the window until it becomes visible again
- Press the Enter key when you have the Window in the desired location.
Simultaneously using multiple accounts with Skype 4.0
As an addendum to my earlier post, I’ve just noticed that a) Skype 4.0 Beta 2 runs pretty stable on Windows Vista 64 and b) has built-in support for managing multiple Skype accounts! With the help of this feature, you could for example set up a private account and a business account and use both of them at the same time, using the same Windows user account. The setup is straightforward:
1) Install Skype 4.0 Beta 2
2) Create a shortcut to Skype.exe and place it on the quick launch bar. Rename the shortcut to “Skype Private Account”, for example. Start Skype using this shortcut and setup your first account (in this case, your private account).
3) Create another shortcut to Skype.exe (add it to the quick launch bar, too) and name it “Skype Business Account”. Open the “Properties” dialog of this shortcut by right-clicking on it. In the “Target” text field of the properties dialog box, append ” /secondary” (without double quotes) to the Skype.exe path that is already there. For example, in my case, the “Target” text field contains:
“C:\Program Files (x86)\Skype\Phone\Skype.exe” /secondary
Rename this shortcut to “Skype Business Account” (right-click->rename). Having done this, start Skype using this shortcut. Skype will then prompt you to enter the credentials of another Skype account of yours (in this example, of your business account).
You can also choose different icons for the two shortcuts. Further, I’d assume the /secondary feature isn’t limited to managing two Skype accounts, though I haven’t tested it with more than two accounts. The main advantage of this “/secondary” feature is that you don’t need to have a separate Windows user account for each of your Skype accounts. Note however that, even with this solution, a new instance of Skype will be created for each of your Skype accounts – every instance consuming about 40 MB of RAM.
I think that’s a very useful feature and I like it a lot.
Windows: Tame the “Restart your system” reminder
For how to get rid of the Windows “Restart your system” reminder, see Coding Horror: XP Automatic Update Nagging
Jingproject, screencast.com and Logitech G9 Laser Mouse SetPoint 5.0
I’ve just installed the free (as in ‘free beer’) Jingproject client by that allows to capture screenshots or screen videos and store or upload and share them (e.g. on screencast.com). It’s amazing, how easy and convenient it is to use – good job! There are clients for both Windows and Mac OS X (which will likely be important for me very soon as I intend to buy a new MacBook Pro with LED backlit display and a Penryn Core 2 Duo processor). The only thing missing is a Linux client (but we’re used to that, aren’t we? ;). Jingproject is provided by TechSmith, the creators of the well-known (and also great) SnagIt screen capture application.
Here’s an example of a screencast I just recorded (no sound, though):
Logitech G9 Laser Mouse SetPoint 5.0 German
It shows the great variety of configuration options you have for customizing your Logitech G9 Laser Mouse using SetPoint 5.0. The Logitech G9 Laser Mouse is Logitech’s latest “gamer” mouse and the best and most accurate mouse I ever used. I bought it though I’m not much of a “gamer” actually, but the form factor, features and its high quality convinced me. It’s quite a small mouse compared to other mice, but that’s intentional as you move it with your fingers rather than with your wrist or arm. This makes it a very user friendly (and particularly gamer friendly) pointing device as you’re much quicker in pointing and clicking while using less energy. The small form factor however might be a problem for you if you have really big hands (check it out in the next hardware store before you buy!).
Further, it’s a mouse with a cord, so you don’t need to worry about batteries, lag or interferences. So in short, I highly recommend the Logitech G9 Laser Mouse. For me, the only minuses are its rather high price and the fact that there is no SetPoint for Mac OS X (let’s hope Logitech will port it soon).
9 out of 10 points from me.