Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2015 March 11

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March 11

Autofill Win7 username

How can I make it so that Win7 will autofill the admin username when the system starts up? Thanks, Dismas|^(talk) 02:55, 11 March 2015 (UTC)

Use Autologon. --  Gadget850 ^talk 03:07, 11 March 2015 (UTC)

That would not make my employer happy from a security standpoint. I don't want anything to automatically log in, I just want the username filled in. Dismas|^(talk) 03:27, 11 March 2015 (UTC)

Note that showing a valid username is generally regarded as poor security practice, as it means attackers don't need to guess both a username and password. However, with physical access to the computer, this is slighly moot. By default, Win7 shows the username of the last logged in user as the default. This can be changed in the registry [1]. The username is probably stored in the registry somewhere; you could write log-off script that sets it back to the admin's username if needed. LongHairedFop (talk) 16:38, 11 March 2015 (UTC)

If you are logging on to a corporate domain, then I would not be surprised if the administrator set group policies to prevent the name from being shown. --  Gadget850 ^talk 16:44, 11 March 2015 (UTC)

I wish logon panels would list the restrictions that were in place when signing up, like "Username will be your email address, and password must be 8 characters long, have a mix of uppercase, lowercase, and numbers." With clues like that, I am far more likely to recall what UN and PW I used on that site. StuRat (talk) 17:29, 11 March 2015 (UTC)

For clarification, I set up laptops for users at my company. The laptops are for their personal use (not shared) and I would prefer it if the user's UN autofills when the systems reboot. If not for the user's convenience then for mine while I'm setting the laptop up and going through many reboots and logins. The usernames are all extremely easy to guess since it's the same as the first part of their email address. I thought that there might be a setting somewhere within Windows that would autofill the last logged in user's UN or, as is the case here, the only user's UN. Dismas|^(talk) 14:08, 12 March 2015 (UTC)

If there's no option to do that, you could probably write a script to display the name a plain text, then just copy it into the login panel. StuRat (talk) 18:10, 12 March 2015 (UTC)

It appears that Windows is set to use the Logon screen rather than the Welcome screen. Logon requires you to type the name; Welcome shows a list of accounts. To enable Welcome:

• ⊞ Win+R
• gpedit.msc ↵ Enter
• Browse to Local Computer Policy → Computer Configuration → Administrative Templates → System → Logon
• Double-click Always Use Classic Logon
• Select Disabled
• OK
• Close

--  Gadget850 ^talk 18:35, 12 March 2015 (UTC)

The Great Wikiblizzard, or the NSA chilling effect

Moved from WP:RDM. Nyttend (talk) 16:19, 11 March 2015 (UTC)

So I just read this piece by JimboWales, and a colleague of his, about the WMF suing the NSA over their snooping through everyone's net activities through so-called upstream surveillance. If it's true that Wikipedia alone has 500 million unique visitors, then it seems like this would be kind of unwieldy. So how does it work? Do they have some programme that assembles—maybe using net crawlers—bits and pieces of info about users based on associated IPs from linked devices—like my phone will have a different IP from my computer most of the time, but I'll log onto FB and Wikipedia from the same device—and automatically constructs a profile based on all that? If so, is there believed to be a profile for every unique net user? And if this programme exists, does it raise a red flag of some sort when some element they dislike appears? Or is it something else? I'm curious. It all sounds rather scary, but I'd like to know the details we at least think we know so I know what I'm supposed to be scared of. The Wikipedia article is not very informative and we have no article on upstream surveillance. Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie | ^{Say Shalom!} 20 Adar 5775 01:36, 11 March 2015 (UTC)

For reading, start at ECHELON and Carnivore_(software), and there are lots of links at the bottom of those to other related articles. From what I recall (OR) reading, yes, various sources are collated to identify individuals across many sources. RudolfRed (talk) 17:39, 11 March 2015 (UTC)

Presumably they would look for terrorism related keywords, but also more general things, like speaking a language that is also spoken by many terrorists, communicating with people in areas where there is terrorism, etc. Also, lots of data is just stockpiled, so they can look through it later, if somebody comes up as a suspect. Only when the computers identify a communication as potentially terrorism-related, would a human look at it. StuRat (talk) 17:41, 11 March 2015 (UTC)

If it is cheaper and more effective, they'll just hire one of us to snitch on anything we find suspicious. Nimur (talk) 21:49, 11 March 2015 (UTC)

Where to find free animation frames ?

I'm looking for individual animation frames, preferably PNG files with transparent backgrounds, which logically loop back around to the first frame (like a bird doing one flap of the wings or the Earth doing one rotation). When I Google that I seem to find them already in an animation or a single animation strip. Is there a way to get Google to find what I want ? (This is for my own personal use, so the copyright status isn't critical, but I might want to share them with others some day, so free use images would be ideal.) StuRat (talk) 18:01, 11 March 2015 (UTC)

Those strips are "sprite sheets", and are a very common way to handle multiple frames of animation in a single resource (both in environments like games and on the web). To use a sprite sheet, you don't need to break up the animation into n different files, you just load the spritesheet once and then manipulate the background-position (like we did a few days ago) to pick which frame of animation is visible. -- Finlay McWalterᚠTalk 18:10, 11 March 2015 (UTC)

Yes, and I'm interested in doing that, too, but now I am working on multiple frame animations. Specifically, I want to experiment with different methods of "tweening", such as fading one frame out and the next in. If there's free software to automatically break up a sprite strip into individual frames, I'd be interested in that, too. StuRat (talk) 18:32, 11 March 2015 (UTC)

Many of these are GIF animations (see GIF#Animated_GIF). The imagemagick command line "convert" tool can convert them into individual frames:

convert animation.gif frame.png

...and it'll generate frame-0.png through frame-N.png

If you don't get complete images (eg if you see only the part of the image that was moving) - then the GIF may have been optimized to reduce the file size. In that case, you can use GIMP to load the GIF file - and then use Filters/Animation/Unoptimize and save it back out as a GIF again - then ImageMagick will do what you need. There is an imagemagick command to turn the individual frames back into a GIF - or, again, GIMP can do it...use "Open as Layers" to open all of the PNG files as layers, then use the Filter/Animation/Optimise function and export the animation as a GIF again. There is almost nothing that can't be done with some combination of GIMP and ImageMagick - and they're both free tools. Add mencoder and mplayer and you're usually set to do movie stuff too. SteveBaker (talk) 19:57, 11 March 2015 (UTC)

Oh - and to find suitable GIF animations - just use Google Image search and enter "Animated GIF" and you'll be scrolling through fine examples of the technique for days to come! SteveBaker (talk) 19:59, 11 March 2015 (UTC)

I considered that approach, but the problem there is I can't see the individual frames until after I do a lot of work. I'd like to know the number of frames and see them first, so I can decide which animation(s) I want. Also, those would be GIF images, not PNGs, so no transparent backgrounds, and limited to 256 colors per frame. I've already created animated GIFs myself (see bottom of my home page), but now I'm interested in PNGs. And yes, I realize I can convert them to PNGs, but that's more work than I want to do for every frame. StuRat (talk) 20:17, 11 March 2015 (UTC)

The GIF89a format does support transparency (and the 87a specification doesn't support animation, so if you have an animated GIF it will be 89a), but it still has the palette limitation. Tevildo (talk) 22:33, 11 March 2015 (UTC)

Well, it supports on/off transparency - not partial transparency like (for example) PNG. SteveBaker (talk) 16:46, 13 March 2015 (UTC)

email

how do i add my email address to my wikipedia account 2602:306:BC7F:A5A0:94A3:5CD9:9CC:4BC9 (talk) 22:18, 11 March 2015 (UTC)

When you're logged in, go to Preferences > User Profile > Change email address. Tevildo (talk) 22:26, 11 March 2015 (UTC)

I left a welcome message with info on creating an account. --  Gadget850 ^talk 22:31, 11 March 2015 (UTC)