If you are like me, you almost never delete anything. And, it doesn’t matter how big a hard disk I install into my army of computers (my current main PC has almost 2TB of space although only around 500GB is actually free right now) I still manage to more or less fill it up entirely.

Well I got an email from a tech colleague today who was raving about a tool he had found on one of my work server hard drives while planning the migration of some mailboxes from one Exchange Server to another. I always leave a copy of this program lying around because it is very useful in trying to work out where all the really big stuff is hogging the disk space that you have long forgotten about and probably don’t even need anymore. I was quite surprised he didn’t already know about it as it’s been around for donkey’s years but since he didn’t it got me thinking; I wonder how many other people may have missed it.

So, without further ado, meet “TreeSize Free”, little sibling of the larger (not free) Tree Size Pro from JAM Software. JAM have been writing useful tools since about 1997, but this is probably my favourite. Basically it lets you scan a Windows folder structure in it’s entirity to show you which folders are taking up all the space. Once it finishes you have a complete listing of your whole disk, which you can drill down into to find the culprit files. You can display this space usage in a number of ways, and the program makes it really easy to find then delete stuff you don’t need.

The free version is perfectly suited for these needs and is a self-contained EXE, so no installation required to run it, perfect for keeping on your USB flash stick.

If you’ve not used it before then get over to JAM Software and check it out.

http://www.jam-software.com/freeware/index.shtml

When I was a kid there couldn’t have been many things that would have been cooler to own than a real life lightsaber. Sadly the still didn’t get around to inventing them yet, (probably a good thing really), but back when Star Wars was released in 1977, home computers were only just beginning to appear in homes and were barely powerful enough play tic tac toe, let alone generate movie style special effects. Fast forward to 2009 and computers have got powerful enough that we can have a half decent go at making those special effects, à la Star Wars style, ourselves. Now that I have kids of my own, two of whom are big Star Wars fans, I thought it would be cool to get them in the garden acting out a short Star Wars demonstration and then add the special effects to it. Where would I start?

First, I shot some scenes with my digital cammcorder and imported the raw footage into my PC, editing it together using Adobe’s video editing suite, Premiere CS4. Once I was happy with the basic composition, I imported the finished clip into another excellent Adobe application, After Effects, also from the CS4 suite to add the special effects.

The first thing to tackle was the light saber glow effect itself. I’ve played around with doing this before entirely manually in Photoshop, but this time I found an excellent After Effects plugin on the Video Copilot website including a full tutorial that helps you get the look and feel right, but basically the method is the same and involves a process called rotoscoping, an animation technique where you trace over live-action video footage frame by frame. It’s very time consuming since you literally have to forward one frame, draw on the saber, forward another frame, draw on the saber, etc. The excellent Video Copilot plug in does make it as easy to do as possible but given that the clip below has around 18 seconds of actual lit lightsaber footage in it this still equates to around 450 individual video frames where the lightsaber blade needs to be drawn on.

Next was the blaster fire, for which I actually used the same plug in just setting the colour to red. This had to be drawn on also, although this was made easier using “tweening”, a computer aided animation technique where you set a start keyframe and an end keyframe, and the computer fills in all the frames in between.

After that was done, I needed some sound effects. I trawed the web looking for a suitable lightsaber hum sound, together with some that changed volume and pitch appropriate to waving the lightsaber around, and finally the blaster firing sound and lightsaber clash sounds. Once I found sounds I was happy with it was fairly easy to import them onto the timeline  and line them up with the footage so they were in sync.

For a finishing touch, some Star Wars music – the piece is from the beginning of the Darth Maul vs. Qui-Gon Jinn and Obiwan Kenobi dual from Star Wars Episode 1 – and finally I added a basic muzzle flash, and also one on the lightsaber itself in sync with the blaster fire hitting it just for a bit of added realism.

The resulting video is below. Forty seven seconds long of which only about eighteen or so seconds has actual special effects and in total took around 4-5 hours to complete, although much of that was learning the ropes on the After Effects suite. The kids really enjoyed it though. Ok, who am I trying to kid? I had a great time making it too. It’s not perfect but I’m happy with it for a first attempt. I hope to improve on it some time soon with a Darth Maul style dual ended lightsaber video, but that may be some way off yet

Anyone who has forgotten the admin password for a Windows system will tell you that its a pain to get back into. Unless you have a bit of know-how, some might say impossible.

One way of doing it for example would be to use the free program NTFS4DOS, which allows you to access the files and folders of NTFS partitions from a DOS boot disk (without loading up Windows itself). This means you can access the SAM file without logging in, copy it to another working system and use a brute-force attempt to crack the local admin password. This can take a long time however, typically at least an hour or two, and depending on the strength of the password may take considerably longer.

Perhaps a much better way to do this would be to edit to the password directly in the SAM file and change it to one you know. That way you avoid the brute-force attack. Let me share with you a very clever program that somebody has written called the Offline NT Password & Registry Editor which can do just that.

Simply go to the website below, download the CD ISO image and burn to a blank CD. Boot up your Windows PC with this CD in the drive and you’ll get into a Linux OS with the required bits and pieces included to read in the SAM from your Windows partition, and through a number of questions that you’ll be hand-held through, you can reset the local admin password in a matter of a couple of minutes (less once you are familiar with the procedure).

This has saved me a lot of work plenty of times, and in fact I now carry the ISO around with me on the USB flash stick on my key ring.

One thing to note is that you must shut down the PC cleanly before you use this utility, otherwise it can’t write back to the SAM file succefully. If you get an error saying it failed to do this, simply reboot into windows and then click the shutdown option on the login screen before trying again.

Here’s the link… enjoy.

http://home.eunet.no/%7Epnordahl/ntpasswd/