Tag: Tools

Handy little helpers

I got a new tool in my tool box: KeePass HotKey is a wrapper utility to open a KeePass DB or trigger the Auto-Type Feature.

This utility is very specific to my use case:

  • I want to trigger one action from a dedicated hardware key on my keyboard
  • This action should either open a specific KeePass data base file, configured by the user, or
  • Trigger the “auto-type selected” feature of KeePass, if a KeePass instance is open, running, and has a selected entry.

You can find sourc code and released binaries at Github.

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Today I present you the Checkouts Overview tool.

https://github.com/sgrottel/checkouts-overview
https://go.grottel.net/checkouts-overview

What? Why? Because this little tool helps me.

In my private setup, I have a lot of smaller repos checked out, and work on them only occasionally. In addition, I got several repos to collect the history of some text documents. Some of those repos are synced against servers which are only occasionally online, partially for power saving or partially due to VPN and network connectivity stuff. As a result, I often keep losing track of the sync states of all the different repos.

Is everything checked in? — most times, yes. If the change was complete.

Is everything pushed? — maybe.

Am I on branches? — no idea.

You might not need this app, if you have a better structured work process with your stuff than I do. I don’t, so I need help by a tool, by this tool.

If you are interested, you find more info in the app’s github repository.

Note: and as for the app’s icon, it’s about (repository) clones, right.

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Redate is another tool in my growing toolbox. The idea is simple: many applications generate files, write files, update files, with exactly the same content as before. The file write date, of course, is updated. The content stays the same. Other tools, then again, us the file write date as indicate if the files have been changed. Which makes sense, right.

So, this little tool, “Redate,” stores the MD5 hashes of the files, and their original write dates. When the tool is then re-run on that list of files, it restores the original write dates for all files with unchanged MD5s. And, that’s it.

I use it for Vue.js projects, to keep the write dates of files in the dist folders. Then, a simple FTP-sync only needs to update changed files for the final deployment. This helps for projects with many unchanged assets.

You can grab source and binary releases from github.

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Simple computer graphics demos are often developed as console applications. Having the console window is simply convenient for debug output. However, if we then show these demos on our stereo powerwall, the console window flashing on program start is massively disturbing. That is why I take some time and wrote a little tool. It starts the console application, hides the console window, but captures the output. This way, we can still check what happened if something does not work.

I present the HiddenConsole:

HiddenConsole.zipHiddenConsole.zip Application starter hiding the console window
[55.3 KB; MD5: 848cbd8aa901fe38be8179d65b6d2162; Mehr Info]

And, because I can, the source is freely available:

https://bitbucket.org/sgrottel-uni/hiddenconsole

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Windows has a lot of nice features nobody knows about. And with some of them I am really wondering why. A good example are links: hard links, junctions, etc., not those silly shortcuts. NTFS has these things, it always had. And most *nix users know their way with these fellows to do cool stuff. Well, Windows has these too. They just never found their official way into the GUI. Most likely it was for political reasons, because the guys at Microsoft were afraid that the standard windows user would trap himself with these links and die. And most likely the guys are right on this. However, for us windows power users such links form great opportunities to optimize our systems. What is missing is usability. And this is where the Link Shell Extensions by Schinagl comes into the play. With this everything work great and nicely. What else could you want?

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I may be in some aspects old fashioned. For example, I like to have my music locally on the devices I am going to play them at. So, I am grabbing my CDs and collecting everything as MP3s and Flacs on my hard disk. Then, of course, I have to deal with the MP3-tags, especially unifying them across the files. This is something, I wouldn’t need to bother if I would use an online service. Whatever.

After some try and error, I finally came across Mp3tag. It works and is nice to use when you are editing multiple files at once.

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