David L. Farquhar, computer security professional, train hobbyist, and landlord
Homonyms are terrible things in the English language. One example is led vs lead. Which one is past tense?
If I say “Past Tense Zeppelin” and it means something to you, I just answered your question. If that doesn’t help, I have a story for you to help you remember, and it involves a hard rock band.
The other day my son was working with a Zip file and getting frustrated. He was trying to delete a large number of files from it, and the CPU went to 100% usage and never finished. Here’s how I got him around the problem.
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Occasionally when I close the lid on my laptop, it doesn’t come back. The hard drive light is blinking and it shows signs of life like the caps lock light lighting when I hit the key. But the screen remains black and I can’t do anything. Before you power down and risk losing work, try this if you experience the Windows 10 black screen after hibernate.
The magic key sequence is Win+Ctrl+Shift+B to fix the Windows 10 black screen after hibernate. It resets the graphics driver and usually brings the machine back to life from the black screen of death.
I was installing Windows 10 on an HP Z210 workstation and kept getting error 0x8007025. There’s not a lot of information about that error, so here’s how I fixed it.
Sometimes you need to ping sweep a network. I have a batch file for that, but what if your list isn’t continuous? In that case, there’s a better tool for you. Here’s my favorite free Windows ping sweep tool. It’s easy to use, small, and standalone, requiring no installation.
XXCOPY vs XCOPY: Which do you like? Both of them are extensions of the DOS command COPY. Think eXtended Copy and eXtended eXtended Copy. Two extendeds are better, right? Yep.
I had an issue in a document with a hyperlink to an existing file. The file existed on a network drive, so the link worked fine… until someone with different drive mappings than me had to look at the document. Then the link didn’t resolve and the person got an error message. A confusing error message. It turns out it’s tricky to make a Word hyperlink UNC path.
Fixing it wasn’t as easy as it should have been. Read more
I see tons of guides out there claiming to tell you how to convert AVI to WMV for free. Then they give you instructions that don’t work before pitching you some $80 tool to do it. You can’t convert AVI to WMV with VLC, but you can do it with another free tool called FFMPEG. Here’s how.
The most reliable free way to convert AVI files to WMV for free is using a command line tool called FFMPEG. It’s not as easy as having a GUI, but it works. WMV isn’t the ideal video file format, but there are times you need it.
In case you haven’t noticed, I blog a lot. And I learned the hard way that if my blog posts don’t have pictures, no one ever clicks on them. Since I have a day job, I tend to write in bulk, and that means I tend to deal with images in bulk. Here’s how I resize images in bulk in Windows 10.
The classic application Irfanview, a favorite image viewer among long-time Windows users, includes a bulk rename feature. Here’s where it hides and how to use it.
Windows 10 is greedy about some of its file associations. My favorite JPEG viewer is Irfanview, but Windows 10 doesn’t make it easy to use it by default. Here’s how to change Windows 10’s default JPEG viewer to something lighter-weight than the default Photos app. I like Irfanview because it’s lightweight and surprisingly powerful, but this trick works for other apps too. Here’s how to change Windows 10’s default image viewer.
With very few exceptions, only applications installed from the Microsoft store are eligible to be set as the default viewer for image files. To set your default picture viewer to something like Irfanview, you have to install it from the store first to make it eligible.