Writing about Writing Part 2

 2 years ago, I wrote a blog post about writing. Or rather, how not to write. How, when writing, I’d do anything else than the actual writing. 

Writing about Writing

https://num7.paranormalis.com/2022/04/writing-about-writing.html

Now that 2024 is nearing its end, I finally have a proper writing setup that I'm happy to share. To my greatest surprise, it’s on a platform that I’ve been gravitating around and using now and then for a decade: Dropbox Paper. It only needed a couple of tweaks to reach the stars, and here we are. 

It all started about a year ago. I was writing a John Titor 2K fanfiction on Paranormalis, and the more I was re-reading it, the more it looked like shit… 

Memories of Downloading Games in 2000

The year was 2000 - or was it 1999? It was in the good old days of the Internet. When it was still somewhat new and special. Special, in the sense that not everyone had access to it. Unlike today, you had to be clever to find the good stuff. 

Being the teenager I was, I'd spend most of my time downloading game demos from various sites that do not exist anymore. They're just distant memories now. I remember how exciting and endlessly compelling it was to open Netscape Navigator or an old ass version of Internet Explorer, then head to weird sites from which you could download game demos and whatnot. Anything could happen!!

I'm going to share a couple of memories I have of those bygone days. 

First, I was able to trace back one of the best sites I'd download stuff from. It was "Electric Games". Here are 2 screenshots: 

Look at that list, man. Doom, Doom95. Duke Nukem. Holy cow the memories. 

Wasting Your Time on the Internet in 2005

Restoring long-lost content on Paranormalis using the Chronovisor technique really brings me back to those days I’d spend, fooling around on the Internet, so many years ago. Basically, wasting my time, you know... 

Here’s one of those threads: https://paranormalis.com/threads/manhattan-island-abduction.19078/

It feels like we’re back in 2005 all over again, right? 

What was I doing on the Internet back in the day? Well, I wasn’t doing much, most of the time. Youtube wasn’t around yet. I don’t think we had high-speed Internet yet. You couldn’t plug yourself on Netflix and spend the whole day watching series after series. 

How to Download a Whole Website from the Wayback Machine

As I was looking for ways to download an entire website snapshot from the Wayback Machine, I found this article: 

How to Download Entire Website from the Wayback Machine

If like me, you're on Windows, you're gonna have to download and install WGET in order to proceed. Here's a link to download it: 

Windows binaries of GNU Wget

It comes as an EXE file, so you're gonna have to copy it to your C:\Windows\ directory. From there, it'll be recognized as a command in CMD. You'll be able to follow the step-by-step guide above, in order to download a full site snapshot from the Wayback Machine. 

Here's a command I've used in order to download an old snapshot of my forum, dating back to 2005: 

wget --recursive --no-clobber --page-requisites --convert-links --domains web.archive.org --no-parent http://web.archive.org/web/20060404024947/http://paranormalnetwork.net

The command itself works perfectly. The result isn't always great though, as it seems most of the time, the Wayback Machine only archived the site's homepage. Therefore, most links don't lead anywhere. I guess it depends on what platform the site is built on. 

You'll obviously have more success if the site you're looking for is static. The less dynamic the site, the more likely you are to retrieve pages other than the homepage. 

Have fun!  

Color Highlighter in Sublime Text

I had a hard time getting the Color Highlighter package to work with Sublime Text...

My mistake? Color Highlighter doesn't work in Sublime 3. It only works in Sublime 2.

Once you figure that out, install Sublime 2 then follow the Color Highlighter install instructions. It will work just fine.

Make Your Slow Nexus 5x Faster

My Nexus 5x recently became so slow that I decided to look online for a quick way to make things a little bit faster. I found a quick fix that seems to do the trick up to now.

1. Go to Settings / System
2. Go to Developer options, and switch OpenGL Renderer to from OpenGL(Default) to OpenGL(Skia)
3. Reboot your phone

It made most lags and slowdowns go away at once. Good deal!

Donated to Wikipedia Today

I decided to donate a few dollars to Wikipedia today in order to support it. It’s not much, but it’s my way to give them something back for all the knowledge and information they make available to me… and to everyone.

“Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That’s our commitment.”

https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Ways_to_Give

Open Source Gem: WinDirStat

Every once in a while I like to share a good application I’m using on a regular basis. This one, I couldn’t live without.

WinDirStat is a Windows software that generates a graphical overview and comprehensive statistics of your occupied disk space.

At the office, WinDirStat is a great app to find stuff that doesn’t belong on your file servers, like MP3 music files and movies: You’re going to spot such data in no time! It’ll help you big time to clean up and tidy up your data.

You can download it here. It’s free and open source.
Download WinDirStat | SourceForge

MTU Size for PPTPD VPN Sessions

Users are getting a black screen when connecting to their Windows workstation using RDP through a PPTP VPN? After looking at all possible causes, I found out the issue had to do with the VPN PPP sessions’ MTU size. Here’s how to fix the MTU size of Ubuntu’s PPTPD sessions so that everyone can get their work done.

Edit /etc/ppp/ip-up and add the following line at the end:

/sbin/ifconfig $PPP_IFACE mtu 1500

You’ll see that new PPP connections now have a MTU of 1500 when using ifconfig.

It would appear that an MTU size of 1396 for PPP sessions will sometimes cause issues when using Windows 7’s RDP through the VPN, no matter what the display options are. Fixing the MTU to 1500 as explained above fixed the black screen glitch right away. The problem was on the server after all.

Error 193: 0xc1 Service fails to start

Ever encountered this error on a Windows server?
Error 193: 0xc1 Service fails to start

It’s pretty easy to fix things up and get that service to run properly as usual.

You’re going to look at the service’s executable path and check all the concerned folders. Make sure none of those folders contain a file with the same name as the first word of the next folder. When a service is launched, it’ll likely fail to start if a file with the same name as the first word of a folder name happens to be there.

For example: A file named “program” in your C: drive.

If such a file exists, delete it and try starting the service again. I bet it’ll start this time!

Back on Ubuntu

I thought I could wait until April 17th, the day they’ll release Ubuntu 14.04, before switching back to Ubuntu, but the call of open source was too strong.

I decided to reload my system with Ubuntu Gnome 13.10, a Gnome flavoured Ubuntu right away. Although I never used it very much since it was first introduced, I’ve never been a big fan of Unity. It feels modern and sweet until you try Gnome 3. Everything Unity does, Gnome 3 does it even better. More accessible, faster, looks and feels better. It delivers for sure. That’s why I’m not using vanilla Ubuntu this time.

Oh and… no Wine please!

Disable interface animations in Office 2013

Don’t like all those animations in Office? Excel’s moving focus box, Outlook’s fade-in / fade-out effects? Here’s a little registry tweak that will allow you to get rid of most of this visual uselessness.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\15.0\Common\Graphics]
"DisableAnimations"=dword:00000001

Copy that in a .reg file and run it for an easy fix.

You can also do it yourself, manually by doing the following: Navigate to HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\15.0\Common\Graphics using the registry editor, then create a new DWORD value you’ll name DisableAnimations and set its value to 1. If the Graphics key isn’t there, you’ll have to create it, then create the DWORD value inside the key.

Outlook PST Backup Script with 7-Zip

Office 2013 has been around for a little while now. If you happen to deal with people using PST files to store their emails, you probably noticed that good ol’ PFBackup from Microsoft is no longer working with this new updated Outlook.

After trying several applications and scripts, I concluded that I had to come up with a script of my own. I decided it was going to be simple, versatile and that it would compress the PST files with 7-Zip as an extra.

All you have to do is copy the code below inside a .BAT file and modify the destination paths on line 2 and 5 as you see fit. Install the resulting file on the user’s desktop and ask them to run it a few times a week in order to backup their emails. Outlook must be closed before running the script, obviously.

ECHO OFF
Del U:\BACKUP\MAIL\OutlookBackup.7z
C:
cd %USERPROFILE%
for /f "delims=" %%a in ('dir /a-d /s /b *.pst') do ("%PROGRAMFILES%\7-Zip\7z.exe" u -mmt=on U:\BACKUP\MAIL\OutlookBackup.7z "%%a")
PAUSE

This script will scan your entire profile folder looking for *.PST files and have 7-Zip compress them inside one single archive.

Obviously, 7-Zip must be installed. Make sure there are no PST files with the same file name on the workstation, as it would result in an overwrite inside the archive. Just run the script once and look at the output.

Works with any version of Outlook, but won’t work with Exchange OST files.