How To Uninstall U3 on Vista

I bought a SanDisk 8GB Cruzer micro today. It’s quite pretty, and I like the sliding design, but it came with U3, a portable application platform. Sounds good, you say, until you realize that it’s a closed system, which makes it nigh impossible for casual developers to create portable apps for the platform. Also, it’s got annoying pop-ups. It had to be nuked.

 

This post is written in rambly prose, but I’ve bolded the main points.

 

The U3 Launchpad came with an uninstall utility. But it didn’t work, because whenever I tried it Windows simply told me that “Launchpad Removal Program has stopped working”. I tried this a couple of times, both with the uninstaller on the U3 Launchpad itself as well as uninstallers U3Uninstall.exe and launchpadremoval.exe from the SanDisk website and MyDigitalLife (if you need them, go do a search for the filenames). Same problem.

 

So I disabled the Launchpad from auto-starting (right-click the U3 icon in the system tray), removed the drive, and then plugged in the drive again. This time U3Uninstall.exe and launchpadremoval.exe agreed to run, but now they told me that “this program only supports one U3 drive removal” even though I only had one disk plugged in.

 

Turns out that the uninstaller recognizes all disk drives on the system as U3. Dumb, I know. I had to go to Device Manager > Disk Drives and disable all the other drives (my memory card readers). You’ll have to leave the U3 thumbdrive enabled, of course.

Run the uninstall utility again. Make sure you have admin privileges!

 

Extract Lineart in 8 Simple Steps

I got a new phone today! In other news, because I finished all my imminently due homework and haven’t slacked much the whole weekend, here’s a tutorial (?) on how to extract lineart onto a layer of its own in Photoshop. Version used here is CS3 – but it works with even 5 or 6, I think.

You will need: Photoshop/GIMP/image editor of your choice, and a scanned image with lineart in either pencil or pen. Pen gives you much nicer results though.
Time: Under 2 minutes.

Step 1

Open your image. As you can see there’s some, um, debris on the right side so I’m going to delete it.

Step 2

Press Ctrl/Cmd + L to open up the Levels dialog as shown above. Play around with the sliders until most of the gray junk is cleaned off the image, like in the next step.

I find it most effective to drag the right slider towards the left, and the leftmost slider to the right. The middle slider adjusts the overall brightness of your image.

Step 3

You may also find it helpful to zoom in while you’re adjusting (keyboard shortcuts Ctrl/Cmd + + and – still work even though you’re in the dialog) to make sure finer details are not lost.

Step 4

After this is done, open up your Channels tab (if it’s not visible, go hunting in the Window menu). While holding down Ctrl/Cmd click on the RGB Channel, which produces a selection delineated by the marching ants.

Step 5

Press Ctrl/Cmd + I or use “Inverse” in the Select menu. In the screenshot above I haven’t actually done this, so the marching ants still look the same as in the previous step.

Step 6

After that’s done, create a new layer but don’t deselect!

Step 7

Press Alt+Backspace or use the Fill command in the Edit menu. Make sure your foreground color is set to the color you’d like your lines to be – I was too lazy to find a nice shade of brown, so I used black.

Step 8

If you hide the Background layer you should now see your lineart presented on its own in a separate layer.

Final Result

And you’re done! Sort of. My image still has a lot of junk here and there that is very obvious if you zoom in, so next I’m going to have to zoom in and do cleanup with the Eraser tool. You can stop here if you’d like – I’m just feeling a bit industrious right now.

A word about the type of art you begin with – pen is the smart choice, because as you can see in the photograph below the lines are already very clear on paper so when you scan it in it should be easier. Another plus point is that ink is less reflective than graphite, giving you lines with more contrast in the scanned image.

Howto: Create a Log File

Oh boy, I really don’t feel like doing work today, but I’m aiming to finish all my holiday homework by the end of the first week of June (impossible, really) so, in the interests of procrastination, I wrote a thingy that will hopefully help my friends when they one day decide they want to keep diaries on their computers, but not online and without a local install of some blog management software (I hardly use my local WP install anymore orz)

Right. How to make a log file. What’s a log file? It’s just a plain text file that appends the current date and time to a new line whenever you open it. Surprisingly handy for journal keeping especially if you key it to a keyboard shortcut, which I covered here, they don’t take up much space and resources too.

Step 1

Open up Notepad and type .LOG (make sure to include the dot at the front) on the first line. Hit Enter/Return for a line break. You can type descriptive text after that to keep multiple logfiles organized or something.

Step 2

Save the file. Text format will do.

Step 3

Close and reopen Notepad. Voila, logfile.

And, um, a shot of my personal logfile. Just for interest.

Howto: Create a Keyboard Shortcut (Win)

Something I don’t see people using as often as they should is keyboard shortcuts. My classmates especially seem to have some adversity to them. (“Oh ew, why do you press the keys so fast? It’s so confusing”) Here’s a quick tutorial thingy to help you create one that can open a file or application.

I’m going to be keying my log file because I want to write in it often and I don’t want to type in “D:\Documents and Settings\username\My Documents\Stuff\journal.txt” in the Run box each time I want to open it, nor do I want to click through multiple layers of folders.

Step 1

Locate the file or program you want to key, and create a shortcut by right clicking and selecting Create Shortcut. The shortcut will appear in the same folder as the file/program is in.

Step 2

Right click the shortcut and choose Properties. In the properties box, edit the shortcut field by pressing a key. Windows will fill in Ctrl-Alt for you. In this case, I’ve chosen “J” because it’s the first letter of “journal”.

Step 3

However, this shortcut that you’ve just created and keyed has to be on either the Desktop or Start Menu to work. Stupid, I know. But anyway, I prefer Start Menu because it’s a lot neater that way. So navigate to your user’s Start Menu directory:

C:\Documents and Settings\user\Start Menu
(replace C:\ with your Windows installation drive and user with your actual username)

And cut-and-paste your new shortcut into there. You can also make a new folder for these shortcuts. Try out your new shortcut – it should work. (that sounds dumb)