January 16, 2019
By Joe Winett
IN THIS ISSUE
- Font Explorer Updated
- Replicator Performance Boosted
- Unicode for Directory Printer
- Thank you, Earthlings
Happy New Year to you and yours and your neighbors and their neighbors, and all ships at sea, and to the space station 'nauts, and to anyone who's been abducted by space aliens.
If you've been abducted by space aliens and they have Internet access, then there's no guessing what year you think it is, perhaps it's not 2019 for you, yet. Wait, do I have that backwards? No. Although, if they have Internet access then perhaps they can keep your calendar in sync with ours. Happy New Year. I hope you're not being harvested as livestock.
Font Explorer Updated
Karen's Font Explorer application displays information about each font installed on your system. It can also display samples of the font you select, plus print a catalog of some or all of them.
The first customer who licensed a copy of Karen's Power Tools CD from me after the restart of KarenWare.com in 2017 had already purchased a CDs from Karen in 2007 and 2010. I explained his license is forever, but he wanted to support my efforts.
Thanks, Don!
Don had a suggestion that Font Explorer should print in 3-columns so it wouldn't require so much paper to print out all of his 600 fonts. Great suggestion!
Done.
Karen's Font Explorer the Font Info Printer for Windows v2.2 Released December 30, 2018 is available for download on our website from:
https://www.karenware.com/powertools/karens-font-explorer
Replicator Performance Boosted
The latest update of Karen's backup utility for Windows brings better performance!
Replicator now replicates each file by calling Win32's CopyFileExW kernel function once instead of calling a sequence of functions to: Open File, Read 64 kilobytes, Write 64 kilobytes (rinse and repeat until file is copies), then Close File.
I backup my files to an external USB 3.0 hard drive which is encrypted using Microsoft's BitLocker functionality. Throughput of file copying on these jobs improved by 1575% for me. Your mileage may vary, but I expect copying will be at least somewhat faster for all.
Additionally, Replicator is now 200% faster while scanning directories. Rather than updating the screen to display the full pathnames of each and every source/destination pair being compared, and the names of every subfolder as they're scanned, it now only updates the display once per second.
Karen's Replicator the Backup Utility for Windows v3.7.3 Released January 14, 2019 is available for download on our website from:
https://www.karenware.com/powertools/karens-replicator-backup-utility
Unicode for Directory Printer
You might have noticed that Directory Printer is unable to deal properly with folder and file names that contain extended Unicode characters. For example, folders with Chinese characters in the name cannot be traversed because those characters are replaced by ASCII ? characters and then Directory Printer cannot open them for scanning (because they don't exist with question marks in their name).
Since the work to upgrade the current Visual Basic 6 application code to work with Unicode would be so very time intensive, I've decided not to do it at all... with Visual Basic 6 and have instead embarked on the complete rewrite using Microsoft's current Visual Studio tools for .NET in the C# language.
Whew. What a sentence.
Basically (pun intended) all work on version 5.xx of Directory Printer has been suspended unless some huge bug is found while I'm finishing version 10.
Why not skip directly to 10? Microsoft did.
Thank you, Earthlings
Your support of KarenWare.com is sincerely appreciated.
Click for Larger MapI had fun making the overlay for this map.
I went back and forth over whether to add Cheers! for the United Kingdom, but then couldn't decide if I should put the same on Australia and New Zealand. An interwebs search taught me that "cheers" isn't necessarily said down under except by British immigrants, or so someone claimed. That left me searching for some Aussie and Kiwi slang. I found Ta!
I tried to come up with some Canadian slang, too. Beauty! might have worked. I probably should have slapped a Merci! up there, too.
This has been my only occupation since I took on the project with the exception of a a few brief consulting works and the revenue from hosting two other web sites. Regardless of the words, I mean what Elvis said: Thankyaverymush from the bottom of my heart.
Don't forget to wave and say, "Hi!"
Love,
Joe
Buying a CD (or licensing a CD download) is the easiest way to support the KarenWare.com web site, Karen's Power Tools, and this newsletter.
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