Drogueship 🜨

Further Forward

Category: windows

Opening programs from browsers on windows

Opening programs from browsers on windows

Posted on by Gus

These days a website that opens an app is pretty common although this feature does not have any kind of user interface or accounting

A uri is the start of a url, for example, https.

mailto:// has been around for as long as the internet for email and call:// since the dawn of smartphones. These uri’s send the address as a parameter (text after the path and file for the app, seperated with spaces) to open the application and it saves you a few clicks

Many applications will show you these parameters by opening it from the terminal with application.exe /? Or application.exe –help

In 2009 while in a helpdesk role, I was told doing this was impossible. So I made a script and some registry entries that opens applications and sends the contents of the link, like the ip address and user name, to be formatted and sent as a parameter to putty, vnc and others.

I made a php/JavaScript intranet site using multiple mysql databases to scan networks and populate the database with ports used and the appropriate links for every client in the region. It was similar to modern managed service providers software for internal use

At the time, Mac and Linux were handling things like ssh and vnc but windows applications had little documentation about how to use it. Most software had to be opened and an address and protocol entered, nothing came with those crucial registry entries.

Now it is a component of most software packages but in the days of Windows XP it was up to the user and now, a majority of them can be handled with winscp and most vnc clients

The real magic happens when you start making your own. Automating tasks that require a command line parameter or address can be a click away with as many parameters as you need

An application or script can be used to proxy to other programs using the same method as these uri’s can be entered anywhere, the address bar, run prompt, bookmark, shortcut or command line. They can even be separated or delimited with a , or _ for even more functionality

I wrote a python script to view and edit them for windows which shows the contents of the registry and allows you to add your own if you have administrator access to the system and backup and restore registry files aswell

https://github.com/drogueship/uri

Winamp Shutdown

Winamp Shutdown

Posted on by Gus

Winamp has been bothering me by not closing itself when shutting down or sleeping/hibernating and crashing on resuming after closing the laptop lid

I tried a few variations of Event log monitoring with Task scheduler but all proved unreliable

The solution was found in Group Policy by running taskkill.exe with /IM winamp.exe as a parameter in Computer Configuration > Windows Settings > Scripts (Startup/Shutdown)

if you want to test it, enter

taskkill.exe /IM winamp.exe

into the run prompt or command line while winamp is running. You will find taskkill.exe in c:\windows\system32 if you are ever looking, but since system32 is stored in the PATH variable you don’t have to locate it yourself by default

Windowed Ultima 6 Project, glitch free

Windowed Ultima 6 Project, glitch free

Posted on by Gus

We use three displays. Dual screens at the desk and a projector for tv. Running games while watching video on other screens is possible by using windowed mode for games, instead of fullscreen

the struggle for the day was the Ultima 6 Project. It’s a Dungeon Siege mod for one of my favorite childhood games and it looks great.

There were 3 main steps.

Installation instructions for The Ultima 6 Project are at http://u6project.com/wp/?page_id=41

to prevent glitches while drawing the game to the screen in windowed mode

right click DungeonSiege.exe in C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Dungeon Siege 1
select Properties
Compatibility tab
set Reduced color mode to 16-bit (65536) color

For windowed mode and 1080p resolution, create batch file with the following (single) line

start "" "C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Dungeon Siege 1\DungeonSiege.exe" map_paths=!"C:\PROGRA~2\TEAMAR~1\U6PROJ~1\RESOUR~1" res_paths="C:\PROGRA~2\TEAMAR~1\U6PROJ~1\RESOUR~1" user_path="C:\PROGRA~2\TEAMAR~1\U6PROJ~1" width=1920 height=1080 fullscreen=false

to make it look nice, create a shortcut to the batch file and set the icon location to

%ProgramFiles(x86)%\Team Archon\U6 Project\U6_Project.ico

open your new shortcut and drag top of window to top of screen to maximize it. You may also want to adjust your volume mixer to match volumes with your video

Enjoy

Writing ISO’s to USB Hard Disks in Windows the wrong way

Writing ISO’s to USB Hard Disks in Windows the wrong way

Posted on by Gus

After creating a hand full of Windows installation USB Drives over the years, I wanted to make a Ubuntu installation USB Hard disk rather than burn the image to a DVD. The main benefit from installing from a USB Hard Disk is the speed the OS installs, it is considerably faster than a DVD installation and older flash drives. Plus you don’t need a working optical drive which isn’t always available.

There are many other ways of writing linux images and all of them are better. The ideal way to do this is using Rufus (https://rufus.ie/) which is much easier to use, gives you more options and is a lot safer to use.

I was feeling difficult and decided to try a different way

First stop was to try Win32Diskimager but it was unable to see USB Hard drives, only SD Cards and Flash Drives

So the next step was to grab a copy of dd, a linux tool that has been ported to Windows (chrysocome.net – download)

Although not very pretty, dd on windows is similar to how you use it on linux, with the exception of the paths for your physical drives and partitions

It is not quicker

It is not better

It is much harder

But it works

Winamp 5.∞ and R4 visualization on Windows 10 – Part 2

Winamp 5.∞ and R4 visualization on Windows 10 – Part 2

Posted on by Gus

I recently posted about script notifications on Winamp’s R4 plugin but didn’t give many details on how it was done so I thought I would post a little more information about how to get it going.

Once you have enabled network access to R4 (and changed permissions on windows 10), you have control over R4 via the network in a browser

Now you can send text to R4 using GET variables over HTTP. The contents of the “txt” variable will be displayed on screen or if you select the countdown option, it will count down to 0 from whatever number you enter. The display can only handle 250 characters so when using the countdown option, there is a limit to the size of the number and it will ignore numbers too big

I made a simple HTML page for testing, using code from R4’s web interface for trying things out

This may not interest many people but I thought I would follow though for the people that do. As a notification system, it’s really not that fantastic. Those who run visualizations rarely stare at the screen for long enough to see the messages although a loop that repeats a message untill it has been acknowledged is possible. Also without HTTP Authentication it is not an ideal solution for people with other users on the network or public access. As a pleasant looking way of outputting text on the screen, it does its job. Although I think this is cool, even with the fact that I rarely use it, it still works well enough to document in case someone is interested.

Winamp 5.∞ and R4 visualization on Windows 10

Winamp 5.∞ and R4 visualization on Windows 10

Posted on by Gus

Winamp was taking a little too long to release an update for version 5 for some. It was leaked and in good form the people working on it cleaned it up and released 5.∞

It is what you would expect from a Winamp release, the features of winamp 2 and 3 mashed together. That is why they skipped Winamp 4 to bring us this, the culmination of the two major releases and I suppose it was worth it.

Trivia question for this post is, why did they skip Windows 9? The answer is at the end of this post.

So why do we care about R4? Well for home users, it just looks cool. You can adjust frame rates and resolutions, visualizations and effects. My favorite thing is being able to do text overlays for script notifications using the web front end and it just looks great. For commercial users who buy a licence you could announce promotions, news or updates on products while playing music without the need for a video feed.

The downside for me was that the R4 experience is broken in Windows 10. Mainly due to permissions. People with UAC turned off are not effected but there is a simple workaround for getting this going without making too much of a mess.

R4 wouldn’t even load without being able to write to a log file in the data folder and was unable to save any changes in the session without write access to this folder so the quickest and easiest solution was just to give users full control of the folder.

Have fun, play safe and if you want to call Windows versions 95 and 98, make sure your condition for checking the version doesn’t start with a 9!

http://www.winamp.com/
https://www.rabidhamster.org/R4/download.php

ggconnect

ggconnect

Posted on by Gus

get the code

A script to open programs from various URI in links, bookmarks, shortcuts and even into the run prompt or address bar. It will open SSH and Telnet links with Putty, SFTP with Filezilla, RDP with the built in Windows Terminal Server Client, VNC with RealVNC Viewer and will even ping hosts with a link!

This was written out of frustration as it should be a feature of windows and or each application. The links that this code handles work on Mac and Linux without needing this, except for ping

It will log successful and blocked attempts to a CSV file

There is no installer so put it into c:\ggconnect\
Run the Reg File to associate the URI’s to the script which formats the links and send them to the appropriate programs (which need to be installed if you don’t already use them) and away you go.

get the code

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