I use Juice to automatically download the podcasts I subscribe to into:

C:\Documents and Settings\\My Documents\XDA My Documents\podcasts\

ActiveSync then picks these up and copies them to my PDA (an XDA running Pocket PC).

The problem is that it copies them into memory on my PDA, rather than onto my storage card, where there's lots more space.

Getting ActiveSync to copy to the Storage Card involves tweaking the Windows Registry on both the desktop and in Pocket PC on my PDA. I run the XDA-Developers Edition of Pocket PC on my XDA. This allows you to edit Registry settings - just like you can on a desktop using regedit. As far as I remember (it's a long time since I installed the XDA-Developers OS) you can't do this on plain old ordinary Pocket PC.

WORDS OF WARNING
a) The XDA-Developers Edition has associated risks and, as far as I know, prevents you upgrading Pocket PC. For me this wasn't an issue as my XDA Mark 1 wasn't fit for upgrading.
b) Tweaking Registry settings should always be done with extreme care. Make sure you have backed up your systems (desktop + PDA) before changing anything.

PROCEDURE
1. On your PC, use regedit and go to:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows CE Services\Partners
2. This folder will contain a subfolder called something like 01492942 (or another hex number). In fact will probably contain several such folders. Find the one that contains a string value called NoSubFolderIn
3. Double click NoSubFolderIn and change:
\My Documents\
to:
\Storage Card\My Documents\
4. Expand the current Registry folder and go to Services\Synchronization
5. Double click DevicesSyncFolder and change:
\My Documents\
to:
\Storage Card\My Documents\
1. On your PDA, use Registry Editor (on XDA-Developers Edition), or similar, and go to:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows CE Services
2. Edit NoSubFolderIn and change its value from:
\My Documents\
to:
\Storage Card\My Documents\
2. Edit FileSyncPath, making the same change.

That's it.
I make no guarantees.
But it worked for me.

Now my new podcasts go straight to my PDA whenever I connect to the PC. All I have to do is delete the old ones now and then to make space for new ones.

The project I'm currently working on involves a foreign-language version of our main application. My colleague George passed on a useful tip to help you see what characters your keyboard outputs.

Go to Start > Run and enter:
osk

The On-screen keyboard dialog box is displayed. This is particularly useful when you have your locale set to something unfamiliar because it allows you to easily see what character is produced by each key on the keyboard.

Having said that, it doesn't always work. In my standard UK locale it tells me that I can get a Euro symbol by pressing Ctrl+Alt+4. I don't, I get nothing.

But it's handy to know about.

Problem
=========
I was using Windows Remote Desktop over SSH and my mouse stopped working. The mouse clicks weren't detected remotely. Logging out of the Remote Desktop session and back in again didn't fix the problem. The only thing that seemed like it would help was a restart. However, how do you restart the remote PC without mouse clicks? It's difficult, because the normal Shut Down option in the Start menu is transformed into a Disconnect option in a Remote Desktop session, which just cuts your remote connect. You can't right-click the Windows toolbar to get the Task Manager window, and you can't Ctrl-Alt-Delete because this is picked up by your local PC rather than the remote PC.

Solution
==========
Use Windows XP's shutdown command. This is very similar to the UNIX shutdown command. Note: Windows 2000 doesn't have a shutdown command.

Go to Start > Run.
In the Run dialog box, enter:
shutdown -r
to restart Windows (or -s to stop Windows).

You get a 30-second countdown, during which time, if you change your mind, you can abort the shutdown by going back to the Run dialog box and entering:
shutdown -a

If you want a quicker restart you can add a time flag to the end of the command, e.g. for 1 second rather than 30:
shutdown -r -t 1

To find out more, open a command console window and type:
shutdown /?

Note: This command doesn't reboot the PC, it just restarts Windows, but this is often enough to solve your problem – for example, in my case it got me my mouse clicks back again.

Following on from my previous posting, I've found a smarter way to test context-sensitive help topics, using a Windows batch file. This way involves only one batch file, rather than two (as described previously).

Put the following batch file in your help directory. In my case this directory contains various subdirectories, one for each help project. The one I'm currently working on is called imuser, so this is the default project directory in the batch file, and the help file within this subdirectory is imuser.chm, so again this is the default. Change the two lines near the top of the batch file to change these defaults.

Once in place, all you do is double click the batch file in Windows Explorer, or double-click a shortcut to this batch file on your desktop, or in your Favorites, and a console window opens prompting you for the path, file name and map ID you want to use. You can hit Enter twice if you want to accept the defaults, but you must enter a map ID.

The help file is opened using keyHH.exe, which is a free download from Keyworks Software.

The batch file:

Read the rest of this entry »

Occasionally, you might want to run a batch file and leave the command console window open, so that you can enter other commands in the directory where it left off.

You can do this as follows.

Note: In this example, I'm using a batch file to open a context-sensitive help topic, using the keyHH.exe program.

1. Create your batch file as normal.

e.g.

@echo off
REM Change to the imuser directory
REM within the current directory (i.e. the directory
REM in which this batch file lives)
cd %cd%\imuser

REM Use keyHH.exe to open a help topic
REM using its map ID
@echo on
keyHH.exe -myHelp -#mapid 1001 "imuser.chm>$global_ContextWindow"

Notes:
- I'd forgotten all about using REM for comments and switching echo on and off. It takes me way back to the 1980s when I started programming by writing programs in Mallard BASIC.
- cd %cd%\imuser changes the current directory to the imuser subdirectory within the directory in which you place the batch file.

2. Save the batch file, giving it an appropriate name (with a .bat file name extension) and putting it in an appropriate directory. In this example, I'm calling the file open-context-topic.bat.

For convenience, I want to have a file in the D:\CVS_local_copy\helpFiles\src directory that I can double-click to open a help topic in the child directory imuser.

3. Create another batch file. You'll use this one to open a non-closing console window from which you'll call the first batch file.

e.g.

@echo off
REM Open a console window (using -k so that it gets left open)
REM and call the batch file for opening a context-sensitive
REM help topic.

@echo on
cmd /k "open-context-topic.bat"

4. Save this batch file in the same directory as the first one (or somewhere else if you want, but you'll need to add a path to the file name, which makes it less transportable).

You can now open Windows Explorer, browse to the directory where you saved the batch files, double-click the second batch file and the command in the first file will execute and leave the console window open so that you can use it.

In my case I use this to test help topics, so I copy and paste the previous command, changing the map ID number to the one for the topic I want to test. I can then leave the window open and just use the up cursor key to get the previous command each time, edit to change the map ID as required, and press Enter. It's a big time saver.

To make the batch file more accessible, you can drag a shortcut to the second batch file onto the Windows Explorer Links toolbar, the desktop, your Favorites, etc.