a7p's » windows

SOHO – Windows Backup of Choice

A7P — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 16:17:27 +0000

Whenever having to backup a SOHO-Grade Windows-Box I choose the C’ts VBS-rsync-Hardlink-Backupscript .

Generating TiffG3 aka TIFF/F

A7P — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 11:09:37 +0000

I tried generating a tiffg3 to push it through capifax and at first nothing worked.
This was my first solution (using ImageMagick, which uses GhostScript):

convert -density 204x98 -resize 1728x1186 \
-compress fax -monochrome -negate <in.pdf> <out.tiff>

Problem: the output is ugly (improvements welcome)
The second solution (using GhostScript-only) works a lot better:

gs -q -dNOPAUSE -dSAFER -dPARANOIDSAFER -dBATCH \
-sDEVICE='tiffg3' -sPAPERSIZE='a4' -r'204x169' \
-sOutputFile=<out.tiff> <in.pdf>

My favorite solution would be python only, … dream dream dream …

Send fax from the commandline (capifax for Windows, Linux)

A7P — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 15:32:33 +0000

This really nice project promises to send faxes from the command line under both Linux and Windows. The capifax command is part of a suite which also offers sending faxes via FritzBox-Phone from Linux - great.

Setting up a WindowsPC – Part I (hope it’ll be only a triology)

A7P — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 23:11:53 +0000

/me has to set up a WindowsPC – has been a long time since I was last forced into this. I feel a bit rusty concerning Windows matters.
Here I will list what I’ve done so far:

installed Antivir
system updates (including all the restriction stuff)
activating – via telephone (yeah, this sucks), since I’ve installed this version too often (used it for VM-experiments heavily)
installed Mozilla Firefox 3
installed Mozilla Thunderbird
installed OpenOffice 3
installed 7zip (free compressor)
installed Flash (and felt bad about it)
installed AcrobateReader (and felt bad about it too)
installed VirtualBox
installed Console 2 (latest beta)
concated my partimage-files (I want to virtualize an old W2k-installation with lot’s of ugly software which needs to get activated) – did not install ‘cat’, but tried: copy /b ++
used 7zip to uncompress the resulting file
used VBoxManage.exe convertfromraw to generate a VirtualBox disk image.

Then I got struck – my newly generated image simply did not boot – more on this later.

Currently everything to step 9 would be a simple aptitude update && aptitude dist-upgrade && aptitude install under Linux.

Things I did not install:

Palm Desktop (this PC will be used with an old Garmin): I hope it will work from the virtual machine … this software and it’s drivers are at least a pain.
M$-Office: only got an old very old version and don’t feel like buying a new one. Excel and co will be available in the VM as a fallback option – OpenOffice should do the job.