I tend to always be working on a project - or thinking about working on a project. Whether that be work related or a personal project. Some of these might be useful to other people, any of note might be mentioned here:
You may be able to tell from the other pages on this website that I attend Lan Parties on a fairly regular basis. At such events you frequently leave your computer to wander off and make some dinner, or go help another attendee with their PC or a game. When you leave your PC I tend to lock it, which brings up the stock Windows 7 locked/logon screen. At one Lan Party the idea was floated around to write an application to change the logon wallpaper image each time you lock the PC. At Lan parties people will frequently be walking past your PC, so giving them something different to look at each time is mildly amusing.
To this end I have created a Logon Background Changer. It sits in your system tray and listens for the Login/Logoff events and swaps out the wallpaper used. You can pick from:
The functionality to change the image is built into Windows out of the box, it's just not overly well known. All I have done is constructed a UI for what is essentially a file copier. It just copies the right files into the right place to have the desired effect. The source code is also available (there isn't a huge amount too it).
Note: The only downside of these logon wallpapers is that the images you display have an upper limit of 256k in size. Although in practice it seems to dislike certain images which are smaller. Aiming for images of 240k seems to be the safest option here to get them working reliably.
BackgroundChanger-1.1 (12122010).exe is 25KB in size and requires .NET 3.5 to run.
BackgroundChanger-1.1 (12122010).zip (Source Code) is 20KB and requires Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5
There is no installer, just the plain old exe file. If you want to uninstall it, select the "Default Background" option from the user interface, untick the "Automatically start at login" box. Click OK and then delete the Exe (and generated .config) file from your system.
Any questions, feedback, improvements or suggestions - please contact software @ neilpwc.co.uk
I read an article many moons ago which suggested that a better use for the Caps Lock key would be an additional Backspace key. Another backspace for your left hand to use would be more useful than a key which you generally only press by accident. The article only explained how to achieve this on Linux and I wanted a way to achieve it on a Windows box (which I generally use more)
To this end I crafted a little registry tweak which remaps the CapsLock key to behave like Backspace. I originally went down the route of creating an application to handle the key presses which works quite well, but this registry tweak is far more elegant.
Simply apply the following registry change to CapsLock to Backspace. MapCapsLockToBackspace.reg
The interactive Webcam on the seafront in Exmouth (UK) has been up and running since 2005. The webcam is available at http://www.exmouthcam.co.uk. It is operated by Dave of Electrocam.
I have produced the following pieces of software for use on the webcam:
If you are interested in any of the software used on the Exmouth webcam, chat to Dave over at http://electro.ath.cx. Dave is the camera and streaming expert. Dave writes the specifications, I just write some of the code.
Any other projects: