Posts tagged ‘Windows’

As mentioned before, when switching to IPv6 (or more realistically, to dual stack) one of the things that might not work out of the box is VPNs. I decided to put some effort in it to get it to work anyway.

Continue reading ‘Configuring OpenVPN to support IPv6’ »

ssh-to-puttyssh-to-puttyIn Windows you can register “url handlers”. These are programs that are run when you try to open a URL (via Start->Run for example). “http://” for example is registered to Internet Explorer by default. “telnet://” also works. This is especially useful in combination with the URL-field of KeePass. Double-clicking on this field tries to “open” the specified URL.

However, “ssh://” is not a standard registered protocol. I’d like Putty to handle this. Also, “telnet://” gets you the standard windows telnet client instead of putty. Putty can be called with command line arguments. Supplying the “telnet://” url as a parameter works, but “ssh://” does not.

Hence, I wrote a very small wrapper program to accept “ssh://” URL’s and convert them to Putty command line arguments:

  • Source code in C: ssh-to-putty.c
  • Compiled Windows executable: ssh-to-putty.exe (some virus-scanners seem to think this is a virus, exe is no longer available, please compile it yourself)
  • Registry commands to set putty as telnet-handler: putty telnet url handler.reg
  • Registry commands to set the wrapper as ssh-handler: putty ssh url handler.reg

Some notes:

  • The registry commands assume Putty and the wrapper are installed in C:\Progs\SSH. If this is not the case, you need to change the .reg-files accordingly
  • The wrapper-program assumes putty.exe to be in the same directory as itself

My previous system was a Linux-box. I made some adjustments to my keyboard in order to make it “better”. Since I use Vim a lot (apologies to Emacs-fans), the escape-key is doing overtime. On a normal keyboard however, the escape-key is located at the top left. Other keys are very near the main keyboard, but are hardly used. I almost never use the CapsLock key at all. So I switched both keys around, giving the CapsLock key the escape-function and the other way around.

Under Linux, you can remap keys using xmodmap. It seems that Windows has a similar feature, although much less documented. Here is a short summary of this article.

Continue reading ‘Remap keys under Windows’ »

I’m again having problems with my new MacBook Pro (the late 2008 unibody one). The problem is most easily visible when BootCamping into Windows and running whatever 3D application (I use 3DMark06). Within 5 minutes, the machine crashes. After some trail-and-error, I found out that it appears to be a thermal problem.

Normally, when the load goes up, the fans kick in to keep the temperature down. Mine don’t… When stressing my CPU under MacOS, it happily goes up to 90ºC with the fans still idling at their standard 2000rpm. Needless to say, a bit of GPU-load increases the temperature beyond the safety-thresholds.

Resetting the SMC solves this problem only partially. On the first boot with a clean SMC, the same CPU-test brings the CPU to 70ºC with fans blazing at 4750rpm, as it should be. Once the machine goes through a sleep-wake cycle, the same test brings it straight up to 90ºC.

Just when I was about to call Apple Care, a software update pops in: SMC Firmware Update 1.2, looked promising, but the problem persisted… I’ll call Apple Care tomorrow.

Continue reading ‘Cooling problem with MacBook Pro’ »