I use Remote Desktop when working from home. I also like using keyboard shortcuts. I was looking for a keyboard shortcut to get back from the remote desktop to the local desktop, to avoid having to click the Remote Desktop minimize button. The solution is Ctrl+Alt+Pause/Break - this reduces Remote Desktop to a window, allowing you to tab between the windows on your local machine. With Remote Desktop as the current window, press Ctrl+Alt+Pause/Break again to maximize the window.

More Remote Desktop shortcuts here:

www.tipicalcharlie.com/swapping_windows_with_remote_desktop.htm

While I'm on the subject of keyboard shortcuts, a useful one for Firefox users is Ctrl+Page Up or Ctrl+Page Down - these switch you from one Firefox tab to the next/previous.

The Microsoft Office team have released a new video presenting Office 2007. This is kind of a slickly produced version of Robert Scoble's on-the-hoof interview of Julie Larson-Green a few months back:

www.microsoft.com/office/preview/ui/demo.mspx

DevComponents have produced a tool for creating an Office-2007-like ribbon in your applications:

www.devcomponents.com

Another site worth keeping your eye on is Microsoft's Vista home site:

www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/default.aspx

Microsoft have moved the home page for Windows SFU into their TechNet site at:

www.microsoft.com/technet/interopmigration/unix/sfu/default.mspx

The other important destination for SFU is Interop Systems, which is still at:

www.interix.com

What is SFU?

Check out these pages:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Services_for_UNIX
• http://reviews.zdnet.co.uk/software/os/0,39024175,39150908,00.htm
• www.microsoft-watch.com/article2/0,4248,1434520,00.asp

I've tweaked the script in my previous posting. The method described previously left a command console open displaying the files that had been deleted. This worked OK, but wasn't terribly smart because I'm not in the office every day, and the program didn't exit until I'd closed the console window.

A better way is to get the script to email the list of which files had been deleted. This is what the following script does. It also dispenses with the need for a batch file. The Windows scheduled task can then call the script directly. In my case, the scheduled task executes the command:

C:\Perl\bin\perl.exe D:\MyStuff\PerlScripts\deleter-scripts\deleter.pl 1 "C:\Documents and Settings\ac\My Documents\XDA6 My Documents\podcasts"

The script relies on you being on a network on which a mail server is available. That way sendmail is able to work its magic and deliver the email for you. All you need to do is change the value of $mailto to the email address you want the message to be sent to.

The revised script:

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I use Juice to automatically download podcast files (MP3s) into C:\Documents and Settings\ac\My Documents\XDA6 My Documents\. ActiveSync then automatically uploads these files onto my PDA when I connect it to the PC. The result is that I always have lots of new podcasts to listen to on my PDA.

All well and good but I have limited space on my storage card, so I need to keep deleting the files from my PC, or they get loaded onto my PDA - just deleting them from the PDA isn't enough because they just reappear next time the PDA syncs with the PC.

What I need is for the old files to be deleted automatically, so that they don't accumulate.

To do this I created (or more correctly, modified) a script that deletes files based on their modification date. I then created a Windows schedule to run this script every day.

Here are the details.

[NOTE: See also the new, improved version: Tuesday, 20 December.]

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