Splitting a large folder into smaller ones

October 20, 2015

I wanted to split a large folder that was just too big for transfer so I thought I try to split the files by selecting them the old fashion way and just add up to maybe a gig. Unfortunately the new Windows 10 doesn't show this at the bottom any more. It's on the right, but if I add a few more, then nothing shows and I have to keep clicking on the side bar to see how much I have. It keeps hiding the information which is very annoying. They have gone backwards in a lot of the simple stuff with Windows 10 and why is beyond me.

Here's a sample of a bunch of pictures I wanted to make more manageable. But that was just brutal so I went to my next plan.


Let the zipping progam do this. Hell, I like the simple stuff and all that backwards nonsense just to do a simple thing just drives me nuts. Why, because when you're at work with a lot of users you just don't have time for that sort of thing. So just use your zipping proggie, whatever you use and hit the option to break it into smaller zipped folders. Keep in mind that I'm working off the now unzipped 3 plus gigs that folder was. This assumes you were able to get a hold of the large file in the first place. I did for this, but you can now see the catch 22 on this thing too. Now you're done, just let it do its thing and then share your files to wherever you need.

Windows 10 updates

October 19, 2015

After some windows update a few days ago my browsers have been so slow and this is the other reason I wanted to make sure I had a different antivirus on here. I have no idea what happened but I also took out a couple of other programs I wasn't using. Those uninstalled fine, but then the updates came and bam. I'm on the slow boat with both browsers.

It turns out, the browser and some crapware and/or ad blocker where causing this super slow browsing. I did the usual maintenance and that still didn't do a thing to fix this. The cool thing about Firefox is that it has a nice and simple way to refresh the browser. Too bad the new Edge doesn't even have this which I don't bother using, but I couldn't find that option anywhere which is not a good thing.

Avira antivirus

October 19, 2015

Next I decided to try the Avira antivirus. So far the download file was small.

 Nothing too weird looking here.

 The options after I cliked on the icon.

 Hmmm...more software

 Yup, there's more stuff in there that I don't care for, but at least they make it a bit more clear and easier to say no to it. In other software they actually purposely make these hard to catch.

 Next window, same thing.

 One more here.

And the install keeps going here. This one is still taking a while. It's still updating as I am typing. I did tried this one a long time ago but really hated their other bloatware that they added. Although I'm still not crazy about this extra stuff if you're only looking for a simple antivirus to run.But they are what they are.

I should mention that the router is also running it's own antivirus, but I want to run a different one on the actual machine. This allows me to test different ones and see what works best.

After the update is finished you get this window. It's the nice simple look that I like. So I'll test this one out and see how it goes. There are many others, but I just wanted to get something for the time being. Unless you actually use them, it's hard to tell anything else.

 The best part is that when I right click on any file, now I have my option to individually scan that file and not have to go digging around to find that program and then go through a bunch of hoops just to get to it.

 After running the browser I noticed this installed as well. Yet another piece of software under the install even though I cancelled the others.

 You'll have to lower it from the middle of the browser screen as it's basically hidden and it pulls down like you would on a touch screen.

 Here's a look at this open and you can't really see anything until you hit the settings on the top right. In short, you really have to keep an eye out for all these nasty little things that get installed with now one too many freebies.

 Here's my latest pop up from avira. Yeah they are still doing this nonsense. It seems to be working okay in the background without any problem, but this stuff gets super irritating. If you do use these freebies, make sure to check that nothing else gets installed in the background. Just to be sure.

 

I turned on my computer this morning and I get this pop-up from avira...if they think this is going to help me upgrade, they are not going to be happy when I get rid of this thing. In the long run, we may be better off with the buil-in Microsoft antivirus without the pop-ups and leave all these junks out. But for now since I'm testing I don't mind checking them out.

Panda Antivirus Free

October 19, 2015

Today I was going to work on something else and ended up testing a couple of the free antivirus software out there. I don't like the fact that I can't right click and check a file with the built-in windows defender and well, I like things a little different.  So here's the first one I just checked and uninstalled at the same time after the first pop up to upgrade to their pro version. I really hate pop ups with a passion now and anything with them, I will dump and stay away from anything with a pop up in a heart beat. I just don't care for them but if you like to annoy people with them, it's also a good way for people to never look at your page ever again. And hate you at the same time.

The first one I tried was Comodo. It's a different one that I have not tried before and wanted to see what they had.

Here's the interface right before I uninstalled it. I honestly don't like these app looking programs at all. They almost look fake and remind me of fake software. Or software that would put up a pop up of something that looked like the actual software.

I was uninstalling it and got this shot too. You keep getting that stupid pop up to put your email in there. Yeah, thanks for annoying me with that, as if I couldn't do that myself if I really wanted to.

 

Here's the kicker and what really drove me away from this software. See the pop up on the bottom right while I was reading the other site. Yeah, thanks but no thanks, I don't care how good your software is, it's getting taken off the computer. 

I was going to try Comodo before this one but the download was like 200 megs. Yeah, no thanks. So that was cancelled.

Windows 10 Software tool

October 9, 2015

I was looking for this link since I want to eventually do a clean install again and couldn't find it so I'm posting it here.

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10

Playing with OneDrive

October 1, 2015

I decided to play around with OneDrive, the Microsoft cloud space you get on Windows 10. I wanted to see exactly how this works. I figured, it's just a server somewhere out there...literally that's what it is. In any case, here's what I started with. Just a very simple copy of the music folder with one file in it, I then copied a second file and wanted to see when it would sync to the OneDrive.

Here you can see the music folder with my two files. This also brings me to my next topic. why does the music folder not look like an actual folder? When I put the second file here, it basically made a second folder that looked like the first right under the left side there. I have no idea why, but that was just very weird.

You can't see it here, but the music folder I manually created under the OneDrive icon was also the music note. The normal folder came up after I logged out and back into the computer. I did this because I was looking for a way to manually force the sync, but there's nothing I could find to do this. It's supposed to sync each time you log in, well that's how I got mine setup since I'm just testing it. Either way the second file did not sync as you can see even after I logged out and back in. There are some predetermined folders that you can sync, I unchecked them and just manually copied the music folder to test this.

There's this other thing that when I drag music folder to the cloud area where the file is, it creates a shortcut link instead of copying the folder. As you can see I'm just trying to make a simple copy of the music folder in this case and have it sync with the folder in the OneDrive. Although the tasks are pretty much like anything else of just dragging and dropping, the way it does things is a bit confusing.  So to keep this simple, just right click on the folder you want, copy and paste it to the cloud. Then just let it sync that way. It looks like this sync's okay, but not the folder I created and then copied files to.

Okay, for testing purposes I added a third file in the original music folder so now there should be 3 files. I also logged out as I didn't see any change, but there's still no update or sync. So I'm not sure if this only works with the predetermined folders that you get. It shouldn't but that's what this looks. I haven't even bother to check that since this should be no different. Well, there you go, you can use this just as extra space out there on the web. I'll keep an eye out and see if that even changes, but so far, it's not.

Update:
I left the third file in the original music folder overnight to see if the cloud folder would get sync/updated, but it hasn't. I haven't tried any of the default folder because I don't want any files there since I'm just testing. This is why I used the music folder instead and because I don't have much in there anyway. For now I'll just treat it as plain remote storage, but nothing that can sync to folders I want.

The best example of how a cloud service should work is the previous Firefox post I made. All you need is your account one any computer and it syncs your bookmarks without any fuss or other input from you.

I'm thought I play with this a bit more and even going into the OneDrive settings doesn't show me the music folder to choose it. So I can't even see many of the folders either. So this doesn't help.

It would be nice to just right click on any folder or file and have the option to just sync it and be done.

Apparently there are quite a few issues with OneDrive that others have ran into, so you an check out their forums here.
http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us 

Here's another interesting screenshot. The folders show no files, but you can clearly see that there are documents in the documents folder of the computer.

Organizing Bookmarks with Firefox Sync

September 30, 2015

One of the things I haven't bother doing for a very long time is trying to organize my bookmarks. You get link after link and most of the time you never go back to look at them. I then to either change or just re-install the operating system more times than I would like so this is one of the reasons I haven't bother with this. It's very time consuming and this is also the reason I don't bother much with backgrounds and things like that. I like my stuff mostly plain vanilla. I'll just call it clean and simple. Not that there are no awesome pictures that I see every now and then, but I just don't bother with this stuff my self for the reasons I just mentioned. Lately I have been looking at jobs here and there and I also noticed the Firefox Sync which basically allows you to Sync your bookmarks on the cloud so you can have the same thing show up on any computer that you use. Well I think I finally found a good use for it so I thought I give it a shot. Although organizing the long list of bookmarks may take you a while, but it goes pretty fast once you start and figure out where you want to put them. I just added folders of what I wanted and drag and drop the links there. Way easier to find things now which I like and I don't have to worry about backing them up each time there is a change. You must create an account and be logged in, in order for this to work though. So let me add a few pictures of what the new Microsoft Edge has vs Firefox.

As you can see Microsoft Edge on Windows 10 is more than just vanilla. It's so basic I couldn't find any other options.

You get the star which is what you use to add the links to favorites.

Here's are two links I added and I was trying to figure out if there was a way to save them to the cloud and sync them elsewhere, but other than making folders, not much else.

Now here's the reason I decided to make this post. I forgot what my password was on the Firefox Sync and since I tried to enter the wrong password one too many times, I locked myself out. Unfortunately they don't tell you how long you need to wait before you can try again. Which I guess to a point I can understand why, but then if you are the owner, you get stuck not knowing. So you still can get bitten in the rear with this. Needless to say I did write the password down and found it after I had locked myself out so I'll have to try again later.

Why is this important, well, the system states that things will be deleted if you reset your password. It's not clear if it's just your browsing history or everything you have organized which would suck if that's the case. This is the reason I decided not to reset the password. But if you must you can always export your bookmarks and try it. I figured I wait it out a bit to see if I can get back into it or I'll just do that myself. Although there is always that option, just make sure you write this down and keep it somewhere you can find it later. So far I tested this on my desktop and my laptop and it works great. However, you must remember that you have to be logged into sync in order for this to work, which also means that if anyone else uses your computer with your profile, they can also see all your bookmarks. Not a big deal if you just use it at home, but if you use it elsewhere, you just have to log out of sync, but then you also need to remember to log back into it in order to save any new bookmarks. Just one more thing to remember if you decided to use it. Most people probably don't care about the bookmarked pages they have, but if it's jobs your looking at for example, then you may want to keep that a bit more private. This is just an example, but you can see what I mean.

 Here's where you will find the Sync option. A very easy to use feature but works great because now I can keep working on whatever I was doing on the desktop if I want to use the laptop or go work somewhere else. I don't need to keep making a backup of bookmarks anymore, so this is one cloud feature that I think is very useful and that I am liking. I just hope they can figure out a better way for those of us that forget the password. Nowadays there are just so many passwords that we need to remember that it's just a matter of time before you forget one, two or three. Specially if it's one you don't use as often.

Although Windows 10 gives you space on the One-Drive, you would still need to do this manually with Edge from what I can tell.

Restoring pc

I just got windows 7 upgraded on one of my machines to test it out on an actual machine instead of just a virtual machine. This can be a bit different as there are a few things you may not be able to use from a virtual machine. One of the first things I like to check out is the restore options before anything bad happens. Unfortunately Windows 10 can't make a restore drive for whatever reason. Reading the page I ended up at got me to this page for getting your legal windows 7 media. This of course assumes you have your original key with you. I thought I add it here for reference. I have all my media but this will save a lot of headaches as many people can't seem to find their media. In short, it's nice that things are much easier to find so you can get work done.

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download

Windows 10 Antivirus?
This is one of the first questions you will probably ask yourself, if not it should be. Here's a link to that.

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/insider/forum/insider_wintp-insider_security/anti-virus-for-windows-10-technical-preview/9f5ca9a9-f3b0-4571-8e02-963bd3af94e3?auth=1

Windows 10 is officially here

July 29, 2015

I just saw this on my lower icon in windows 7. I did reserve my upgrade and will be installing it on a vm soon to test out. I have been reading a bit before doing the update as I like to slowly make my changes before I commit. I also like to test things before just making the jump to be sure things work fine.

Filament spool holder stand

July 25, 2015

I thought I post a few pictures of the filament holder I finally got done making yesterday. It took a few redesigns but I'm happy with it now. I actually didn't need this, but I saw many different crazy designs out there and I decided to make a simple one piece freestanding holder that didn't need extra parts printed or any nuts and bolts. All this needs is a sharpie or pen long enough to sit on the top of each post. That's it. I was also able to include a filament guide and a few holes to mount it on top of a Craftbot if I need it later. As you can see I went through a few versions before I got it done. Not unusual since I like to test different things to see which work best.

Camera DVR

July 22, 2015
I was playing around with a dvr and testing the web connection and I finally got tired of that thing. Apparently this is one of those software boxes that hardly if ever get any updates. The software on these things is so ugly it's not even funny. I was trying to just view part of a video for a certain time to test it out and it was just a chore just trying to choose the time slot which it didn't really do. I had to post about these as they are just very cumbersome to use even now. I got this thing a while back and even though the manufactured still shows it on there, there was nothing for it. This thing reminds me of all these android phones that just get cranked out in the thousands, sold and forgotten about after that so you never get any updates whatsoever. Pretty bad specially if you're talking about security products.

Pac-Man

July 22, 2015
I needed a little break...
https://www.google.com/search?q=google+pacman&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8#clb=clb

This little 5 axis cnc machine is just too cool not to post about it.

June 25, 2015

Although it's not here yet, it's definitely a very cool little machine. Even if it's just for small parts.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1090944145/pocket-nc-the-first-5-axis-cnc-mill-for-your-deskt

CamStudio adds plenty of adware to the installer...

June 24, 2015

I was doing a bit of cad and the program is not doing what I want it to do. So I thought I get this software installed to try and get a video of the problem so that I can pass this along to that company. Unfortunately while installing this camstudio software which is open source by the way, I didn't notice how they have made all the windows look like the very first on that you agree for the licence. I knew they started adding this crap to the software which is something I totally hate and I don't care how good any software is. If you like to add crapware to your software like this, I have no respect for you, sorry. I thing this is the worst thing you can do to any software. Yes I also understand this is one way to get paid, but sneaking crap like this in the software is just beyond old. So now I have this other problem to figure out before I can move on to what I was originally doing, thanks a lot! So I thought I write on this to make sure others don't get caught off guard. So I hope this helps and I guess it's time to go look for a different program that doesn't have this crap. Please feel free to post any suggestions on the comments.

 Here's the very first install window. Nothing weird on here. Notice the green button below.

 This next screen looks fine too, it's just the license agreement...

 Now here's the part I missed. Look how small that other software name is. Of course I missed that since the whole bottom looks pretty much like the first. I know better but the truth is, this can happen to the best of us. I'm writing about it so that you hopefully will be reminded to be more careful and slow down your horses when installing any software.

 Here's the next screen with this other software. Same look and feel at the bottom.

 Okay, so this one was more in your face and I caught it because of it. But that doesn't matter as I already agreed on the previous two which you'll see are the worst anyway.

 So after cancelled that, the installation continues.

 Here's what I saw right after under my software uninstall window. The nasty bugger.

 Here's what happens after you open your browser.

 Here's what it looks every time after that.

 So I did the basic uninstall first and this one went out.

Unfortunately I wasn't having much luck with the browser but I found this in there.

 Interestingly enough, I also found this other weird thing about chrome. I could not delete the yahoo search for the life of me.

I accidentally managed to take out the google search so I have to go back and look at that.  In short, now I got some of this crap still on here that I need to go back and clean.

So to  whoever makes is the one adding this crap to the camstudio, thanks for the crap!

Whatever happen to the days when programs were actually really good and just did what they were meant to do.

 So I kind of figured out that you need to make a different search engine the default, then you can delete the yahoo. I also wen ahead and deleted all those sites at the bottom and added the google. com site, but it won't show up on the top window so I can choose this. What the heck?

Okay, now for some solutions...to save you a bit of time with this junk.
https://support.norton.com/sp/en/us/home/current/solutions/v110202383_EndUserProfile_en_us
http://keonesoftware.com/guides/dregol/

I just did a quick search to see what else may be around and since there's not much around, here's a quick and dirty but effective suggestion. If you have one, set up a tripod and use your phone or a regular video camera. If your camera supports recent video files, then all you need to do is upload it without even screwing around with formatting files. Of course, this should work well for short clips that you may want to make like what I needed this for in the first place. I think I will go this route and just save me the headache of these programs unless I find something useful again. I just thought I throw it out there in case you really need to do this. This would probably have saved me the last two hours I have been using to fix this problem but there you go. Again, it's quick and dirty but should work just fine unless you use a really crappy camera which I don't recommend you use unless you want your viewers to hate your or just forget about you.

Other software you can try instead of this  is HyperCam. I have also added this to the software page. http://hyperionics.com/