Zxian.org http://www.zxian.org Blog about stuff I'm doing Tue, 16 Aug 2011 07:55:55 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3 I remembered! Sort of…. http://www.zxian.org/2011/08/16/i-remembered-sort-of/ http://www.zxian.org/2011/08/16/i-remembered-sort-of/#comments Tue, 16 Aug 2011 07:51:15 +0000 nick http://www.zxian.org/?p=210 So, continuing my challenge. I meant to post this up earlier (it’s technically Tuesday now), but I got distracted with other things.

In current news, my girlfriend and I are making a trip to Hawaii next week with a few friends. I’m really looking forward to getting away from the city for a while (not that I don’t love Vancouver) and finally getting my fins wet while scuba diving again. I might have to take a bit of a break on this whole ‘post every two days’ thing while I’m away, depending on internet availability. I’ll try to get something up and running though.

I’ve also been putting a bit of spare time into getting my Youtube channel a little more streamlined and putting a few more videos up on there in order to increase it’s popularity. Most of my videos are probably going to be related to World of Warcraft (I’m currently in a progression guild at the moment), but there will be some other videos as well. Zxian’s Youtube Channel.

Now it’s time for sleep.

]]> http://www.zxian.org/2011/08/16/i-remembered-sort-of/feed/ 0 I’m really terrible at this blogging thing…. http://www.zxian.org/2011/08/13/im-really-terrible-at-this-blogging-thing/ http://www.zxian.org/2011/08/13/im-really-terrible-at-this-blogging-thing/#comments Sat, 13 Aug 2011 22:41:12 +0000 nick http://www.zxian.org/?p=200 So, I said in my previous post (which was nearly two years ago) that I was going to try to post more often. In following my girlfriend’s lead, I am posing myself a challenge. I must post at least once every two days. Even if it’s just something simple (like what I made for dinner), or something big and exciting. I’ve also started uploading quite a few videos of the games that I play, and I’m hoping to start recording a few guides on how I have my system and software setup.

For now, I leave you with a video of some kittens my friend is taking care of at the moment.

]]> http://www.zxian.org/2011/08/13/im-really-terrible-at-this-blogging-thing/feed/ 0 Phew… long time no post. http://www.zxian.org/2009/09/15/phew-long-time-no-post/ http://www.zxian.org/2009/09/15/phew-long-time-no-post/#comments Tue, 15 Sep 2009 21:51:30 +0000 nick http://www.zxian.org/?p=194 Man… it’s been a while since I wrote anything here. I’ll try to keep things going more often, even if it just is a blurb here and there. Here’s a list of the things that have happened since I last posted:

  • Almost done my research for my masters. Only a few more months until I’m done!
  • Dave Matthews Band concert at the Gorge! Amazing times with friends. Good music, lots of raw dogging (if you weren’t there, don’t ask), and plenty of empty Corona bottles.
  • Upgraded the main video card in my desktop to an XFX ATI 4890 (900Mhz core, 3.9Ghz Mem). This thing screams…
  • Upgraded my desktop and netbook to Win7 RTM. This is a legit final build copy (I’ll be buying my licenses on Oct 22), and it’s awesome. There’s a couple of small quirks when it comes to UltraMon and some other apps, but those will be sorted out soon enough.
  • I became the guild master of our guild in World of Warcraft (I’ve been playing for about a year now). Herding cats is fun!!

I think that should do it for now. Like I said, there will be more frequent updates in the future. =)

]]> http://www.zxian.org/2009/09/15/phew-long-time-no-post/feed/ 0 Getting with the times… http://www.zxian.org/2009/01/13/getting-with-the-times/ http://www.zxian.org/2009/01/13/getting-with-the-times/#comments Tue, 13 Jan 2009 21:44:46 +0000 nick http://www.zxian.org/?p=191 So… I’ve got quite a few computers (I need to update the “My Computers” page soon) that are used for various purposes. Eclipse is my main computer at home, and the biggest beast of them all. A few months back, I upgraded the video cards and installed Vista on it. After a couple of days of figuring out my way around the OS, I really liked it, and was somewhat depressed every time I had to go back to an XP system.

I had also built a media center a while back that would double as a downloading machine for my girlfriend and her roommates. Because of the way their house was setup, running ethernet to all the rooms was simply impossible, so everyone was on wireless. Everyone in the house also tends to download a lot of stuff. Let’s just say Bit Torrent and wireless don’t always like each other. It ultimately brought the network speeds to a crawl, so the media center was setup with a single copy of uTorrent installed. There were a number of bugs with the initial setup that were just bothering me, so last Friday night I installed Vista Ultimate x64 on the machine. All I have to say is that Vista MCE is glorious.

My workstation at UBC was the last Vista capable system I own that hadn’t been upgraded. That all changed this morning, and I’m now writing this from a Vista Business x64 system. Let’s just say, I’ll probably never move back to XP.

]]> http://www.zxian.org/2009/01/13/getting-with-the-times/feed/ 1 Hiding Microsoft SyncToyCmd for backups http://www.zxian.org/2009/01/08/hiding-microsoft-synctoycmd-for-backups/ http://www.zxian.org/2009/01/08/hiding-microsoft-synctoycmd-for-backups/#comments Fri, 09 Jan 2009 00:39:08 +0000 nick http://www.zxian.org/?p=179 The more work I do, the more paranoid I become of possibly losing it all. I’ve got a pretty elaborate hardware setup in terms of disk storage, but I was lacking a simple, functional tool to do the backups of the data on a regular basis. I looked at Microsoft SyncToy for the backups, and it seems to do everything I need/want it to, except for one – scheduling. Their help documentation tells you to use their command-line application and the built in scheduler. This seems to do the trick, but there was one snag – it shows the ugly command prompt. This simply wouldn’t do….

I fired up Visual Studio 2008 and started writing a simple little .NET app to act as a wrapper for the command-line window. At the moment, it just runs all of your folder pairs, but I’ll be expanding the command line parsing to search for specific pairs. You’ll need the .NET Framework 2.0 installed for the software to work. Simply extract the file into the SyncToy directory, follow the help instructions for setting the scheduled task, but replace the program path with the following:

“C:\Program Files\SyncToy\SyncToyHidden.exe” /hide /quiet

Obviously you’ll have to replace the path with the one that’s relevant to your system.

Please let me know if anyone runs into any troubles with the software.

Download Link

P.S. Thanks to jcarle for the help with the command line switches.

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