It is possible to write a simple batch script that can turn computer hardware off. Might be a handy for users who connect their mobile computer to a power source and use it on the road as well. They would simply turn off the unnecessary computer hardware on the road and turn it on again once it is connected to a power source again.

The creation does not require programming skills but you need to know a bit about the computer hardware installed on your system. Not all hardware should be disabled, possibilities include

• Audio Devices
• Network Adapters
• Wireless Networking Adapters
• CD, DVD and Blu-Ray drives
• Floppy drives
• webcams, card readers and other peripherals

You need three commands to work with devcon.

• devcon find
• devcon disable
• devcon enable

Start by downloading devcon from the official Microsoft website. Unpack it to a directory of your choice. It might be a good idea to put it into a directory that is listed in the system path of the operating system, e.g. /system32.

Open the Windows command line with [Windows R], [cmd], [enter].

Enter devcon find * to get a listing of all hardware devices. This can be a long list, you can use the following command to find a specific device (the command is case sensitive):

devcon find * | find "computer hardware identifier"

To find all Creative devices one could enter

devcon find * | find "Creative"

The device in the screenshot above would be the Creative Soundblaster X-FI sound card. To disable that sound card one would use the following command

devcon disable PCI\VEN_1102

It is enough to add the unique identifier for the hardware device. Here are some tips to make the most out of the find command:

Find all PCI devices

devcon find * | find "PCI"

Find all USB devices

devcon find * | find "USB"

All that needs to be done now is to collect the unique identifiers for all computer hardware devices that should be turned off at times.

Create a new text document on the computer, name it disable.bat. Right-click it, select edit and add as many devcon disable lines to it as you want.

devcon disable PCI\VEN_1102
devcon disable PCI\VEN_1317
devcon disable USB\VID_1532

Now create a second batch file, name it enable.bat and use the following code (you basically exchange disable with enable)

devcon enable PCI\VEN_1102
devcon enable PCI\VEN_1317
devcon enable USB\VID_1532

That’s a basic script. You could add echo commands to it, combine the two scripts into one and beatify it further. The basic script on the other hand does what it is supposed to do.

Doc Shots tries to bring in more control to the webmaster by allowing them to present documents on their websites easily. The visitor is able to view a selected document right on the website in an overlay with basic controls, such as downloading, printing, searching and zooming. It feels like a document viewer on the web and resembles desktop document viewers enough to make it easy for visitors to use it.

Webmasters have to be registered users of the service before they can configure Doc Shots for their website. Registration is free on the other hand and not problematic or time consuming at all. The configuration of the document presentation script can be customized by setting the width and height of the overlay window. Other options include the display of related items and document storing policies.

Webmasters receive a JavaScript code in the end that they have to embed in the source code of their website to make use of the document presentation engine. The script will automatically recognize popular document formats such as .doc, .pdf, .ppt, .xls. Hoovering over document links or clicking on the documents will open the document presentation overlay on the same website.

The first viewer will experience a small delay while opening the document as the conversion is initiated at that time. It is therefor a good idea to be the first viewer so that regular visitors do not experience the delay. Visitors can still right-click the document and save it to their computer system directly.

Update: The service does not seem to be available any longer.

Slide Presenter offers a better one. It is a php based script that can run on any server that supports PHP. The administrator can create new presentations by adding images of the slides to it. Users can then connect to the website to see the current slide. The administrator manages the progression and decides which slide is currently seen on the website, much like a local presentation but with the major advantage that people from all over the world can connect and view the PowerPoint presentation online.

The presentation that has been created in Microsoft PowerPoint has to be saved as image slides which can be done directly in Powerpoint using the File > Save As menu. Just select a different format, jpg for instance, before saving the presentation. PowerPoint will then ask if you want to save the current slide or all slides. Select all slides which has the result that all slides of the presentation are saved as images.

The new version fixes more than 20 bugs and security vulnerabilities. Some of the most important fixes include tagging support for Windows Live Writer, a login fix for blogs that have different WordPress and Blog addresses, faster taxonomy database queries, that emailed posts can now be assigned to the author if the email uses a hyphen and link importer fixes.

I had no troubles overwriting the files of my WordPress installation to speed up the process. A suggestion would be to backup your blog before you start the process.

Read More:

WordPress 2.31
WordPress Release Notes

Zamzar offers four different format categories which are: document, image, movie and music. Each category has a large list of formats that can be converted into each other. The following can be converted on the website:

• text formats: csv, doc, odp, ods, odt, pdf, ppt and xls.
• image formats: bmp, gif, jpg, tiff, ps
• music fomats: ac3, au, flac, m4a, mp3, wav, wma
• movie formats: avi, flv, gvi, mov, mp4, mpg

As you can see there are plenty of possiblities to convert formats into each other. The maximum file limit is 100 megabytes which should be sufficient for most purposes.