Firelight

Illumination from the residents of Firefall, LLC

Take a Screenshot on your PC with Windows XP

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I couldn’t find an explanation fast enough with Google, so:

How to take a screenshot on your PC with Windows XP:

1. Press the Print Screen key on your keyboard. Sometimes its abbreviated as PrtScn.

2. Right click on your desktop and select New -> Bitmap Image.

3. Right click on the file that was just created, New Bitmap Image and select Edit. Paint should open.

4. Within Paint go to the Edit menu and select Paste. The window should now contain the contents of the screenshot you took earlier.

5. Go to the File menu and select Save As….

6. Name your file, and save it as a JPEG. You could have just saved it normally as a Bitmap, but a JPEG will be much smaller.

7. Close Paint, and delete the New Bitmap Image if you Saved As. Alternatively you can keep it around if you find yourself taking screenshots often.

Not quite as easy as a Mac, but what do you expect.

Cross-Platform Network Backup Solution

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I’m looking for a cross-platform network backup solution to replace Retrospect. If you post a suggestion that I end up using (even in part), you could be the recipient of free stuff. Read on for details.

Without going into to much detail, Retrospect can’t seem to consistently maintain a backup file set that exceeds ~600 GB using it’s Backup Server function. Faced with sporadic “chunk checksum” errors, the backup set has to be frequently repaired or replaced. This has only wasted my time, served to degrade the currency of each backup, and furthered my distrust of the whole system.

The following is a required list of criteria for a replacement solution:

– Backs up to a network location.
– Covers both Macs and PCs. Note that it doesn’t have to be the same software on each platform. I’m looking for a comprehensive solution, not necessarily just one software package.
– Backs up a specific list of directories.
– Updates the backup set instead of overwriting (e.g. sync vs. overwrite).
– Runs invisible to the user.

List of optional, but preferential criteria:

– Searchable.
– Supports an exclude list
– Smart checkpointing (e.g. keeps as many previous states as room allows).
– Configurable from a central location

Possible solutions I’ve found:
– rsync on both the Mac and PC to a Mac hosting an rsync server.
– SuperDuper on the Macs, x on the PC.

So what do I do? rsync could work but it might be time consuming to setup and troublesome to maintain. SuperDuper might work for the Mac, but that doesn’t help the PC’s.

Please submit your suggestions as comments to this post. If I use any of the posted suggestions I’ll buy the person who submitted the solution an iTMS or Amazon.com gift card. Please use a valid e-mail address when making your suggestions in order to be eligible. Links to viable solutions are permissible.

Windows Version of Safari?

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For the life of me I can’t understand why more people haven’t noticed this. Over the past few months I keep seeing these kind of comments in the Web Kit change log:

“Fix win32 build.
Disable ASSERT redefinition warnings for now.

* JavaScriptCore.vcproj/testkjs/testkjs.vcproj:
* kxmlcore/Assertions.h:”

“* kjs/number_object.cpp:
(NumberProtoFunc::callAsFunction): remove trunc() to fix win32.”

“Implement basic theme support on Win32. Still much to do, but
the backgrounds of buttons, textfields, checkboxes and radio
controls now draw correctly. Still work to do for the Classic look
and to get the foreground defaults of the controls correct. …”

Land support for JPEG image decoding on Win32…

I didn’t include the name and e-mail address of the people that made the commits, but it’s easy enough to find it in the log. I will note that each of these commit messages are from Apple employees, and not from some other part of the Web Kit community. The commit logs stop after April 5th.

I just sampled a few days, but that’s an awful lot of attention to the win32 platform, especially seeing that KHTML doesn’t run on Windows last I looked.