Let’s say you have a tendency to leave Facebook or Gmail open on your computer, and your friends have a tendency of texting you at 3 am. Getting woken up to a loud ‘ding’ is never fun.

Wouldn’t it be nice if your computer automatically muted itself when you go to bed? And maybe again in case you stay up late and unmute it because you’re playing Diablo 3.

I used a one-line autohotkey script and named it mute.ahk:

SoundSet, 1, , mute  ; mute the microphone

Next, right click on that file and export it to mute.exe. You could probably skip this step and directly call the ahk file, but I wanted something that would still work if my AHK installation was borked somehow.

Next up, we’re going to use the Windows task scheduler. It’s a little confusing at first, but easy enough if you need to do something simple. Just type ‘Task Scheduler’ on the start menu to find it. Once it starts, let’s create a basic task; on the pane on the right, click this:

Fill out the details – I called mine “mute at 3am” and set it to daily at 3 am. For the program/action, select the file you compiled into an exe. Review your changes, press finish, and you’re done.

In theory, you could create a script to unmute your machine when you get up – the code would be the following:

SoundSet, -1, , mute  ; unmute the microphone

Now go enjoy that uninterrupted sleep.

Back in the day, I wrote up a list of useful Firefox extensions. Let’s look at what I’m using these days.
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As a sequel to my previous post, I’ve always wanted to use the metadata embedded in a file (which is usually correct on most downloaded music) to fix the filenames of an arbitrary number of files. Well, I took a little time today and figured it out.

First, I prefer working with context-sensitive methods via Windows Explorer, although there’s no reason you couldn’t build a wrapper that edited the filename of every mp3 on your hard drive. So I look for Windows Explorer, and listen to a keyboard shortcut or extra mouse button press. It loops through the filenames of the items on the clipboard and performs an action on each one.

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I took it upon myself to root my phone and run a packet capture to figure out why the Android app seemed so slow on my phone. Here is what happens when you start it. All data transfers are in unencrypted JSON unless otherwise noted. I was connected via 4G at the time, and data transfer at the actual convention will likely be much, much slower.

To capture this data, I used shark for root and viewed the resulting data with Wireshark.

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I’ve gotten back into playing Diablo 2, and I accidentally hit the Windows key every now and then, which minimizes the game. Here’s the code to disable that key via AutoHotkey while Diablo 2 is open and active:

#IfWinActive Diablo II
{
	~LWin Up::Return
	~RWin Up::Return
}