MoonPoint Support Weblog

Dryer not drying

I put a bunch of sheets, pillowcases, and other laundry in the dryer around midday and set the dryer to dry for an hour, but when I opened the dryer to remove the items in the evening, the items were still wet, though my wife told me she had restarted the dryer twice during the day. A few months ago when we had a similar problem with clothes not drying even after several cycles in the dryer, when I looked in the vent outside, I saw a clump of lint was blocking the vent. When I removed it, the dryer then performed as expected. I had looked in the vent a month ago, but had not seen any lint blocking the opening, but I went out again with a flashlight, since it was nighttime, and peered into the opening. Though the dryer was running, I could not detect much air coming out of the duct. With the flashlight, I could see what appeared to be a clump of lint near a bend in the tube leading to the vent opening. I had a hard time getting my arm far enough into the duct to pull out the clump of lint, but I was eventually able to get it out. When I did so, I suddenly felt a great deal of hot air coming out of the vent. So if your dryer isn't drying as well as you would expect, check the lint filter and the outside vent. Fixing the problem might be as simple as removing lint lodged in the vent. If there is no blockage visible, you might have to pull the dryer further away from a wall and remove any ducting/tube leading from the dryer to the outside to check it, but there may be a no-cost solution to the problem. I didn't think the problem with our dryer could be a faulty moisture sensor, since I had set the dryer for a timed drying period, which normally would be enough to dry a load of laundry. I've also ordered a flexible drain snake (drain clog remover) one can use for cleaning sinks to make it easier to remove lint. I'm hoping I can feed it into the vent opening and pull out lint, if a similar clog occurs.

[/home] permanent link

Sat, Oct 05, 2024 10:51 pm

Resizing an image with CSS

If you want to resize an image on a webpage, e.g., to have it display as a smaller image on a webpage than it would based on the image's dimensions, you can edit the image with a graphics editing application to create a smaller version of the image or you can use Cascading Stylesheets (CSS). If you wished to apply the reduction in size to just one image on the page, you could apply a style directly to the IMG tag for that image. E.g., if image1 is 663 pixels wide by 307 pixels high, and you wanted to have the image displayed as 75% of that size, you could use <img src="image1.jpg" alt="Image 1" style="transform: scale(0.75)"> to have it display as an image 75% of the actual dimensions of the image. E.g.:

Image 1 at full scale

Image 1 at 75% scale

Note: The image above is a photo of Robert H. Goddard with an A-series rocket circa 1935

Automatically resizing an image for mobile devices

[/network/web/html/css] permanent link

Thu, Oct 03, 2024 10:32 pm

Starting the Windows Media Player (WMP) from a command prompt

If you wish to start the Windows Media Player (WMP) application from a command-line interface (CLI), such as a command prompt window, you can do so by entering the command

"%ProgramFiles(x86)%\Windows Media 
Player\wmplayer.exe"

at a command prompt window (be sure to enclose the command within double quotes since there are spaces in the directory path). You might wish to do so if you are logged into one user account, but wish to open a movie or music file that is not accesible from the currently logged in user account. If you wished to run the program from an administrator account, you can open a command prompt window as an administrator or you can open a unprivileged command prompt window from the currently logged in account and then use the runas /user command e.g.,

runas /user:username 
"%ProgramFiles(x86)%\Windows Media Player\wmplayer.exe"

where username is the account name for the account from which you wish to run the program. E.g.,

runas /user:jane "%ProgramFiles(x86)%\Windows 
Media Player\wmplayer.exe"

to run the Windows Media Player with Jane's account privileges. If you need to run the command from a Windows domain account, you can use

runas /user:domainname\username
"%ProgramFiles(x86)%\Windows Media Player\wmplayer.exe"

where domainname is the name of the domain and username is the name of the domain user account. Once the Windows Media Player app is open, you can then hit the Ctrl-O keys (the Ctrl and the letter "O" key) simultaneously to open a window where you can then browse for audiovisual files in directories to which the other user account has access.

[/os/windows/software/audio-video/WMP] permanent link

Wed, Sep 25, 2024 10:17 pm

Viewing network connections on a Microsoft Windows system by protocol

If you just wish to see TCP ports in use on a Microsoft Windows system, you can issue the netstat -a -p TCP command at a command prompt. The -a parameter specifies all connections and listening ports should be displayed while the -p parameter can be used to select a protocol from TCP, UDP, TCPv6, or UDPv6. If used with the -s option to display per-protocol statistics, the protocol argument may be any of: IP, IPv6, ICMP, ICMPv6, TCP, TCPv6, UDP, or UDPv6. If you only wish to view IPv6 TCP ports in use, you can use netstat -a -p TCPv6. If you only wish to see currently established connections, you can pipe the output of the netstat command to the find command. E.g., netstat -a -p TCP | find "ESTABLISHED". Or, if you wished to see all of the TCP ports on which the system was listening for a connection, you could use netstat -a -p TCP | find "LISTENING". If you wanted to see connections to a particular port, e.g., 22, for Secure Shell (SSH) connections, you could use

netstat -a | find ":ssh"

, which would show the IP addresses of the remote systems connected via SSH, or netstat -a | find ":https" for HTTPS connections to web sites. If you wished to see host names rather than IP addresses, you could add the -f option, which displays a Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN) instead of an IP address for a remote system. E.g., netstat -a -f | find ":https". Since SSH, HTTP, and HTTPS use TCP rather than UDP transmissions, you don't need to add the -p parameter.

[/os/windows/network] permanent link

Tue, Sep 24, 2024 8:53 pm

Extracting files from a .jar file with the jar command

If you have a JAR ("Java archive") file and wish to extract the files contained within it from a command-line interface (CLI) on a Microsoft Windows system, you can do so by opening a command prompt window and using the jar xf filename.jar command, where filename.jar is the relevant .jar file, if you have the Java Development Kit (JDK) installed on the system — the JDK software can be downloaded for free from Oracle's Java Downloads page.

Minecraft uses .jar files for mods and if you wish to view the models (.json files), textures (.png files) within a JAR file used by Minecraft, you can use the jar xf filename.jar command to see those. If you copy the .jar file to a directory where you wish to extract its contents and then run the command from the directory in which the .jar file is located, you should see a directory named assets appear beneath which you can find blockstates, lang, models, and textures subdirectories. The .json files files, such as those you may see in a models/block subdirectory are JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) files, which you can view or edit in a text editor, such as the Windows Notepad application. The .png files, which you may see in a textures subdirectory are Portable Network Graphics (PNG) files, which you can view or edit in graphics applications such as Microsoft Paint on Microsoft Windows systems. You can also use a tool such as Blockbench to work with the JSON model files and PNG images.

[/os/windows/software/games/minecraft] permanent link

Mon, Sep 23, 2024 7:54 pm

Changing the name of a Cisco switch

To change the name of a Cisco network switch, you can use the command hostname newHostname where newHostname is the new name you wish to apply to the switch. To make the change permanent so the new name is still in place after a reboot, you can follow the command with the write memory command.

Switch>
Switch>enable
Password:
Switch#configure terminal
Enter configuration commands, one per line.  End with CNTL/Z.
Switch(config)#hostname Styx
Styx(config)#end
Styx#
*Sep 23 01:14:23.917: %SYS-5-CONFIG_I: Configured from console by console
Styx#write memory
Building configuration...
[OK]
Styx#

[/hardware/network/switch/cisco] permanent link

Sun, Sep 22, 2024 9:50 pm

Changing the default gateway address on a Cisco switch

For a Cisco network switch, to change the default gateway address, i.e., to specify the IP address of a router that the switch will use, enter privileged EXEC mode with the enable command, then enter configuration mode with the command configure terminal and then set the default gateway address with the command ip default-gateway gatewayIPAddress where gatewayIPAddress is the address for the router you wish the switch to use. Then exit configuration mode with the end command. To make the change permanent, so that it will persist after a reboot of the switch, enter the command write memory.

Switch>enable
Password:
Switch#configure terminal
Enter configuration commands, one per line.  End with CNTL/Z.
Switch(config)#ip default-gateway 192.168.1.1
Switch(config)#end
Sep 23 01:26:53.415: %SYS-5-CONFIG_I: Configured from console by console
Switch#write memory
Building configuration...
[OK]
Switch#

You can view the default gateway address with the command show ip default-gateway.

Switch>show ip default-gateway
192.168.1.1
Switch>

[/hardware/network/switch/cisco] permanent link

Mon, Sep 09, 2024 3:07 pm

SolarWinds TFTP Server for Microsoft Windows Systems

If you need a system running a Microsoft Windows operating system to function as a Trivial File Transfer Protocol (TFTP) server, one free solution is the SolarWinds TFTP server program available from the company's website at TFTP Server. After installation of the software, if you open the application, you will see that the TFTP service is started and listening for data on User Datagram Protocol (UDP) port 69.

SolarWinds TFTP Server

If you open a command prompt window and issue the command netstat -anp udp and pipe the output into the find, you should also see the system is listening on all network interfaces, i.e., 0.0.0.0, on UDP port 69.

C:\Users\Public\Downloads>netstat -anp udp | find "0.0.0.0:69"
  UDP    0.0.0.0:69             *:*

C:\Users\Public\Downloads>

The installation program also installs a TFTP service, which is set to run automatically when Windows boots; you can see information on the service if you open Services and scroll through the list of services on the system — you can open a Services window by typing services.msc at a command prompt window and hitting Enter.

[ More Info ]

[/network/tftp] permanent link

Sun, Sep 08, 2024 8:34 pm

Deleting all lines that don't begin with specific text in vim

In the vim text editor, if I want to remove every line in a file that does not contain the word "FALL" in capital letters, I can use :v/FALL/d, i.e., type the colon key and then v, which works like the grep command grep -v to select only lines in a file that don't contain a specified text string. The particular text on which you wish vim to searh is preceded and followed by the slash delimiter with a d at the end to specify you wish those lines not containing the text, e.g., FALL in this case, to be deleted. If I want to delete only those lines that begin with FALL, I can use :v/^FALL/d as the caret specifies that the text should occur at the beginning of lines (a dollar sign, $, would indicate I wanted to select only lines where the text was found at the end of the line). Note: you can also use :g!/^FALL/d to achieve the same end — without the exclamation mark after the global command, all lines containing FALL would be deleted, but as the exclamation mark represents "not", all lines not containing FALL at the beginning of the line are deleted.

[/editors/vi] permanent link

Sat, Sep 07, 2024 9:58 pm

Locating DHCP servers on a LAN from a Microsoft Windows system

If you need to determine the IP addresses of systems on a local area network (LAN) that are functioning as Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) servers, one tool that you can use on systems running a Microsoft Windows operating system is dhcptest, developed by Vladimir Panteleev, aka CyberShadow, a Moldovan developer. He provides a compiled version of the program for Windows systems at dhcptest — there are 32-bit and 64-bit versions of the program there.

When you open the program, type d to have the program send a DHCP discover packet, which should result in responses from DHCP servers on the LAN. You can type Ctrl-C or q to quit the program.