Posts

Posted on

LAN Yarns : How not to bluff, or “I’m The Phantom!”

We play a lot of Starcraft 2 at LAN parties especially the free mods in the arcade.  There are some great games on here, many of which with totally different gameplay to vanilla Starcraft 2.  One of our favourites is Phantom, a game less about Starcraft 2 and more about deception, bluffing and intricate plots to back-stab your friends.

Of course you can always be too clever for your own good…. Continue reading “LAN Yarns : How not to bluff, or “I’m The Phantom!””

Posted on

PowerShell : Find all Files Owned By A User

The Windows 10 release is just around the corner and I’m going to do a fresh install on a new hard-drive.  I’ve redirected most of my working directories to network locations so most of my files should just appear ‘auto-magically’ but I’m sure there’s a few files dotted around the place that are important that I’ve just ‘temporarily’ left outside one of the redirected folders.

So what I want is some PowerShell to find all the files owned by me on my hard-drives.  I can do this with a one-line PowerShell command as follows; Continue reading “PowerShell : Find all Files Owned By A User”

Posted on

LAN Yarns : Fear Of The Dark

Back in a time that my children referred to as ‘ago’ we used to like staying up at LAN parties late into the night.  Games stretched into the small hours with the only light coming from the glow of our monitors and the odd peripheral.  The silence was infectious so the normal shouting was replaced with long bouts of silence; quiet occasionally broken by the frenzied mashing of keyboards or the odd sigh of dismay.   Pure gaming atmosphere.

Of course this kind of immersion had its downsides if someone was feeling unscrupulous… Continue reading “LAN Yarns : Fear Of The Dark”

Posted on

Tales from IT: Man Vs Pager

In the IT department where I first worked, there was a Network Admin who was a bit ‘highly strung’. He’d get quite short when things got tense and he liked things done the way things were always done (he supported the physical network and Novell; this was in the time when Microsoft NT was just starting to make inroads into business).

It’s a good thing stress and rapid-change aren’t a big part of IT work, eh? Otherwise, a meltdown might occur…. Continue reading “Tales from IT: Man Vs Pager”

Posted on

PowerShell : Renaming And Sorting All My Music Files

We have a large collection of MP3s and FLACs and most of the time they all work great.  I’ve spent quite a bit of time getting their metadata correct so the various players we have all play them in the correct order as they use their Disc and Track number metadata to sort them.

However my wife’s and I’s cars both can read music from SD cards.  This is great as they’re a lot faster to process than phone libraries over Bluetooth but the downside is that the only sorting they do is via the filename.  This means every album plays it’s tracks in alphabetical order.

Ideally to fix this what I want is a script to rename each music file according to it’s Disc Number, Track Number and Title metadata.  The script I wrote to do exactly that follows, with some explanations after. Continue reading “PowerShell : Renaming And Sorting All My Music Files”