Add Removable Device Icons to your desktop

Desktop Media is a small free application for Windows which adds drive icons to your desktop automatically. It will add USB drives, local hard drives, cd/dvd drives and network drives. For removable devices the icon only appears when the media is present, so if there is no cd in the drive you won’t see the icon. It also allows you to hide certain drives so you can show only the ones you wish to see. You can also save the position of the icons.

This feature is present in most (all?) linux distros and Mac Os X, and is one thing i did wish was available for Windows, and now it is! 😀

Manually downloading Folding@Home core’s

Lately i’ve had some trouble with Folding@Home not downloading the necessary cores automatically. I’ve had to resort to manually downloading them and hex-editing them to get the .exe core. I’ve now found a way to automate this process, using Cygwin.

1. Download cygwin from here
2. Install with default settings (if using Vista you need to “Run as administrator” and also choose to install “just for me” during the setup process.
3. Once installed run cygwin and let it set itself up.
4. Copy and paste this into a new text document:

tail -c +513 Core_%1.fah > Core%1.exe.bz
bunzip2 Core%1.exe.bz
mv Core%1.exe FahCore_%1.exe

5. Save it as folding.bat (you can give it a different name if you like, it’s not important) in your cygwin home directory (will be something like c:\cygwin\home\<username>\)
6. Type the following into the cygwin window:

chmod 775 folding.bat

7. Download the folding@home core from here
8. Place the downloaded file into your cygwin home directory
9. Type the following into the cygwin window:

./folding.bat xx

(where xx is the number of the core eg. Core_11.fah would be 11

10. you should now have a file named FahCore_xx.exe (where xx is the number of the core)
11. Place that file in your folding@home directory (eg. C:\program files\Folding@Home)
12. Folding@Home should now be able to use the core 🙂