Uncle Travelling Matt » Computing

Selecting the Unselectable

Matt — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 04:48:14 +0000

Ever come across a page where you couldn’t select some text or save an image? Usually it’s due to page having something transparent stacked on top of whatever you’re trying to work with. While I urge you to respect copyright, sometimes you want to save an image for reference or whatever.

The quick way to get around these image/text selection issues is to turn off the style sheet, find the element in the unstyled markup and save/copy. Here’s how to toggle style sheets in the three main browsers:

Firefox:
View > Page Style > No Style

Safari:
Develop > Disable Styles

Internet Explorer 8:
F12 > Disable > CSS

Multiple Monitors

Matt — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 19:05:28 +0000

Turns out for a little while now the Wacom control panel has an option for swapping your tablet between monitors. I’d avoided multiple monitors since by default the tablet surface is stretched over both screens making the mouse cursor pretty much uncontrollable. However you can assign one of the buttons on the tablet to swap between screens and the cursor only works on one screen at a time, in a useful fashion. Now I can get 29% more productivity when I work 100 hour weeks–yes I feel a bit over worked at the moment. A bit of a rest in a couple of days tho I hope.

iPhone 3G

Matt — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 10:34:01 +0000

After the initial oul, I want, it’s more of a nice but not really. 3G and GPS are cool, as is the geotagging of photos taken on the phone, however the camera still isn’t of high enough resolution to be useful and I’m somewhat doubtful of how good the GPS will be. The GPS on my friends’ Nokia N95 is a bit bollocks, and I doubt either would compare the external datalogger I’ve bought, since it costs half the price of an iPhone. Like most things dedicated devices usually work better, even if slightly less convenient.

Windows XP Service Pack 3

Matt — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 15:19:46 +0000

Well I finally decided to upgrade this morning, being overseas without all my software and stuff I had been deliberating for a few weeks. However, after trying the service pack in a virtual machine and hearing about speed improvements, I took the plunge.

The update went smoothly, and the only problem so far is the virtual pc’s networking has lost the plot again, but that’s not too difficult to fix. The speed improvement is definitely real though, during Windows boot the loading progressbar doesn’t even get across once now and the desktop is fully loaded in about 5 seconds after logon, which is a noticeable improvement over SP2.

Now with Firefox 3 only a few weeks away, much better productivity appears to be on the the horizon

UPDATE: There appears to be an updated version of Virtual PC 2007 for XP SP3, read about it here.

Photoshop fails to import clipboard

Matt — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 03:06:13 +0000

Photoshop seems to have an annoying bug (or feature) where it stops importing the clipboard. I often copy and paste screenshots from Firefox and Quicktime, only to find photoshop ignoring the new content. I thought it only applied to my old Photoshop 7, but it appears it affects all versions including CS3. This registry change fixes the issue.

Open the Registry Editor and add the following:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Adobe\Photoshop\10.0]

“AlwaysImportClipboard”=dword:00000001

Where 10.0 is your photoshop version.

Things That Are Good To Hear

Matt — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 02:25:27 +0000

When one is running apache on Windows 2008 for their business:
The Apache Visit to Microsoft Campus: Day One.

Photoshop: Open Flattened Composite

Matt — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 21:55:45 +0000

Sometimes I get somewhat corrupt Photoshop documents, that make my older copy of Photoshop freak. If they’re saved with maximise compatibility on (which saves a flattened version, as well as the layers), it is often possible to open that version of the document successfully. To do so, hold down and the SHIFT and ALT keys while clicking the open button in the File Open dialog.

Disabling PC Speaker Beep

Matt — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 02:44:08 +0000

I don’t like things beeping at me at the best of times, but the default pc speaker beep that occurs everytime I change the volume on my laptop is right up there. To disable it:

Device Manager
View > Show Hidden Devices
Non-Plug and Play Drivers > Beep
Driver Tab
Stop and Startup > Disable

Ah, silence….

.NET Framework Stupidity

Matt — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 02:06:34 +0000

The .NET Framework is meant to be backwards compatible, so if in my case I have v3.0 installed an application designed for v1.1 should work just fine. Well that’s the theory, however the installers for many apps won’t let you proceed, unless you have the exact version they were designed for installed. This is pretty damn annoying, since that application itself will in most cases run just fine.

The solution is to edit the .MSI installer package and remove the framework requirement check. To do this you need the Microsoft Orca MSI Editor, which is part of the 300MB+ Windows Installer SDK package. Fortunately some kind person has posted the 1.8MB Orca Installer separately.

Once you’ve installed that, open your offending application .msi in Orca and do a search for VSDCA_VsdLaunchConditions and remove every entry it finds. Save the changes and you’ll be ready to go, without the .NET Framework prerequisite check.

Vista ClearType Fonts

Matt — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 03:37:20 +0000

Included with Windows Vista and Office 2007 are the first new web/screen fonts since Windows 95. These fonts have exceptional readably on LCD screens due to being optimised for ClearType (the font rendering technology in XP & Vista), and are a nice change to the standard Arial, Tahoma, Verdana’s we’ve been using on the web for the last 10 years.

However, if you don’t have Vista or Office 2007 it is still possible to get these fonts [legally] by downloading either the Office 2007 file format compatibility pack if you have a previous version of Office, or the Power Point 2007 viewer if you don’t have Office.

If you have a Mac or Unix machine, it should be possible to extract the font files from the .cab file in either installer and use them directly. The 7-zip File Manager on Windows can open both files, but you didn’t hear that from me