Garage Tunes

I don't spend an inordinate of time in the garage, but it's nice to have some music when working on projects out there. Unfortunately the only garage-suitable music playing device I could round up was an ancient boom box with radio, cassette and CD player. I could use an mp3 player, but I'd rather not for safety reasons. The thought of not being able to hear a power saw - or my own screams as I remove a digit - above a Hendrix guitar solo is disconcerting. Then it occurred to me to try to stream tunes from our network attached storage device (NAS) and its built-in Firefly music server.

The NAS is basically a small computer with embedded Intel Atom microprocessor, two mirrored hard drives, and embedded Linux BusyBox operating system. The music server is compatible with Apple iTunes, Windows Media Player 12 and other media players.

Any PC in the house can attach to the music server over the local area network and play songs, albums and playlists. The music can be searched and sorted, and appears to be local to the PC.

A quick survey of extra computers and other network devices brought to light an old PDA that hasn't been used for years. It's a Toshiba E740 with built-in 11 megabit per second 802.11b. By today’s standards it’s old and slow. It runs early versions of Windows CE, Internet Explorer, and Windows Media Player. It was quite slow even for its day.

But it's wireless and it did connect to the network. Unforunately locating the music shared folder was troublesome, and getting Windows Media Player to locate the music server was impossible.

Fortunately there still is a lot of software available even for older operating systems, and I was able to locate MortPlayer, a free PocketPC music player. After a painless installation MortPlayer quickly found the NAS and the music shared folder, but not the music server. I attached a pair of A/C powered PC speakers to the headphone jack on the PDA and voilà music to my ears.

With MortPlayer I have to navigate through the album within artist directory structure on the NAS and play one album at a time. It would be nice if it would play an artist's entire collection shuffled, but I'm not complaining, it's free and it works. As for playlists, MortPlayer does not play m3u playlists, but it does play Windows Media Player 12 playlists and I have a few of them on the server.

So that’s where it ends for now. Until I put a PC with iTunes or Windows 7 in the garage, a free music player on an old but reliable PDA with PC speakers will serve up my Garage Tunes.

How to "Bookmark" a PDF Read-Only Document

Have you ever had to close a lengthy PDF document you've been reading and then struggle try to find your place again after reopening it?

Maybe you would like to create a link to a specific page that has a table or other reference material you may want to view repeatedly.

Well here's a method for opening a PDF read-only document to a specific page from a command line. It can also be used in a shortcut, but we'll start with the command line.

Start/Run

The following command line - as run successfully using Start/Run - uses Adobe Reader to open a specific PDF document to page 24.

AcroRd32.exe /A "page=61=OpenActions" "C:\Documents and Settings\Ed\Desktop\motherboard_manual_ga-ma78gm-us2h_e.pdf"

You can copy and paste this command to open your document, but you will need to change the page number and the name and path of the document you want to open. The open and closed quotes for both parameters are required.

Each time you want to reopen the document press Start/Run - or the Windows Key + R - and change the number after "page=" to open the document to a specific page.

This can unfortunately be difficult to manage. For instance, after you have run this command several times, and possibly changed the number each time to reflect the current page, you will have created a long list of commands to reflect the different page numbers. The list will become longer if you also use this method to open other documents.

What's worse is if you run a program to clear out extraneous debris - as I do occasionally - and the registry key that tracks the Run command gets cleared out. In that case there's a solution; create a shortcut.

Shortcut

The target for the shortcut must be - as in the Run command - the Adobe Reader program itself, not the document.

First, right-click where you want to place the shortcut. Next, browse to the Adobe Reader program or type in its path and name. Mine is located here: C:\Program Files\Adobe\Reader 9.0\Reader, and the program name is AcroRd32.exe. It may be different on your system, but if you already have a shortcut to Adobe Reader, you only need to copy and paste it to the location of your choice and modify it to suit your needs. In my case I had to recreate it because it was not on the desktop or start menu.

Here is how the Target command line looks in my shortcut after it was modified to open the document of my choice to a specific page:

"C:\Program Files\Adobe\Reader 9.0\Reader\AcroRd32.exe" /A "page=61=OpenActions" "C:\Documents and Settings\Ed\Desktop\motherboard_manual_ga-ma78gm-us2h_e.pdf"

As you can see it's nearly identical to the Start/Run command. The only exception is the fully qualified name of Adobe Reader in quotes.

After the shortcut is created you will recognize it's icon. It's the bright red Adobe icon that ends up on your desktop each time you upgrade Adobe Reader, not the white document icon with the letters "PDF" at the top. You can change the icon back to the familiar PDF icon by way of the shortcut property sheet. There are several icons in AcroRd32.dll. Here's the path on my computer: %ProgramFiles%\Adobe\Reader 9.0\Reader.

If you are reading through the document and want the shortcut to reflect the current page, you should remember to modify the shortcut Target "page=" parameter before closing the PDF document. Otherwise you'll be taken back to the same page you were before.