Windows Media Player: Exporting or printing a Playlists

Hi,

a friend of mine wants to print the content of some Windows Media Player playlists , but there is no export or print option available.
I wrote him a small C# program which does the job :-). It uses the AxInterop.WMPLib COM Interface.
Continue reading Windows Media Player: Exporting or printing a Playlists

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Windows: Passing parameters to event triggered schedule tasks

Hi,

this week I had the problem on a Windows Server 2008 R2 system that I had to recognize if a network connection to specific closed TCP port is tried to established.

The Windows firewall on the machine is running but logs only packets to the firewall  logfile for tcp and udp ports an which a process is listen to. Also the parsing of the logfile is frequently necessary.

A better way is to enable the firewall audit option “Filtering Platform Packet Drop”. This generates an EventLog entry with EventID 5152 for each incoming packet which is dropped. Windows provides the abiltiy to trigger an schedule task after an eventlog entry is written and pass some event details as parameter to a script defined in the task.  Unfortunataly not with the GUI.
Continue reading Windows: Passing parameters to event triggered schedule tasks

Windows: Set permissions on a service

Hi,

when it is necessary that normal user needs the ability to do some operations on a service, such as starting or stopping, multiple ways exists to grant these permissions. Windows has no GUI or (easy to use) command line tool on board to set these access rights. I will show you 3 ways to set them.

  • Sysinternals Process Explorer
  • sc.exe (Service controller)
  • subinacl.exe (The security swiss knife)

For the following examples I will use the OpenVPN Service with its Service Name openvpnservice and assign the start and stop permissions to a user or group. But its the same procedure for all other services.

The easiest way is to use the sysinternals Process Explorer. It provides a graphical user interface but  has the dependency that the service must be in the running state before process explorer is started. If you already have a valid openvpn configuration start the service:

sc start openvpnservice

Then start the process explorer as administrator and locate the openvpn service process openvpnserv.exe.

Openvpn Process
Openvpn Process

Continue reading Windows: Set permissions on a service

Raspberry PI: Connecting a HD44780 Display over I2C Bus

Hi everybody,

some application, i.e. XBMC can show informations on a display by using LCDproc as driver.

This post describes a way to connect a HD44780 display to a Raspberry PI  by i2c bus.

Let’s start with the physical layer. This is the overview schematic on how to connect the display to a Raspberry PI.

Connecting a hd44780 Display with Raspberry PI
Connecting a hd44780 Display with Raspberry PI

Based on these I developed small board with a 6 Pin header which is Pin compatible to the Raspberry PI. So a simple 6 pole ribbon cable can be used to connect the HD44780 Display to the fruit.
Here is my PCB. First the schematic.

Board schematic
Board schematic

and my board layout. Unfortunately there are a lot HD44780 models available and the location and the direction of the pins are different, so you have to adapt the layout to the specification of your display.
Continue reading Raspberry PI: Connecting a HD44780 Display over I2C Bus

Windows: Configure to use a NTP Timeserver

Hi,

you can Windows tell to synchronise your PCs time time with an NTP time server of your choice.
For example the german “Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB)”, which is the responsible authority of the DCF77 (Time) transmitter, operates three of them:

ptbtime1.ptb.de
ptbtime2.ptb.de
ptbtime3.ptb.de

To set these server as timesource use the following command with Administrator rights:

If the the W32time service does not exists, register them

w32tm /register

start the Time service
Continue reading Windows: Configure to use a NTP Timeserver

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