I found couple of articles on the interwebs about installing cheap pegboard on the bottom or back of a desk to keep cable- and device-clutter to a minimum, so I decided to hack together my own solution inspired by these examples.

Materials:

• Pegboard - 24″ x 48″ section
• Steel eyes - Qty. 4 (for my table, YMMV)
• Wooden dowels (if you need them) - small enough to fit through the eyes

Tools:

• Saw
• Sandpaper
• Drill
• Pliers (if you have a hardwood table)

You could probably get by with less that this, but these are the tools I had and used.

The first step in this procedure would be to cut the pegboard down to a proper size that’ll fit your table. I was lucky enough to be able to find a precut section of pegboard that fit snugly underneath my 48″ x 60″ hardwood table (which serves as our desk).

Next you need to take your pegboard and put it up under the desk to measure where you’ll make your cuts. The idea is to cut small slots for the eyes to fit through, then slide the dowels through to hold the pegboard up under the table. This way it’s securely mounted, yet not permanently so, allowing you to take it down to mount new devices or cables to it.

Mark your slots and now it’s time to cut ‘em.

I just used a drill to create the slots by drilling a series of holes along the slot, then moved the drill from side to side to connect the holes forming the slot. _I know_, this is inadvisable for the sake of your tools, but the MDF pegboard is relatively soft and the cuts we need to make are few.

After cutting the slots, I held up the slotted pegboard under the table to mark the locations to screw in the eyes. This might be a two-person process, unless you have more than two arms. Once that’s done you’ll want to pre-drill some holes if you’re working with hardwood. With a softer wood like pine you could probably hand-tighten the eyes. I grabbed my drill and a drill bit, put a small piece of electrical tape on it to mark the depth, and started drilling away. In short order, I had all the eyes installed under the table. As you can see in the picture, my table’s got support rails installed underneath. A perfect feature to mount on.

I then cut my dowel pieces into small sections with a saw and sanded them down nicely. This part’s easy.

Once I had the dowels cut, I mounted the pegboard. I’ve since discovered also that I could just turn the eyes 90° to the slots to support the board, but either way works just fine. Below are some picures of my devices I mounted underneath. I installed a power strip, cable modem, router, and an external hard drive with some 8″ tie wraps. That procedure took me about an hour to get it all installed cleanly. But our carpet is now rat’s-nest free!

>”Windows cannot access the specified device, path, or file. You may not have the appropriate permissions to access the item.”

And stupid me, I assume it’s a permissions error (that’s what it looks like, right?), but it turns out it’s a security feature that Windows XP SP2 uses to protect the end user from a file they’ve copied from another location. Since I
copied said .exe file from a network share on the network, Server 2003 thought it was a dangerous file, so I couldn’t
get to it anymore. If you want even to execute the file, you have to right-click and go to the file properties and
select “Unblock” in order to stop the OS from stopping you. Kinda silly… I thought I would have seen this issue before.

I just recently finished up everything in The Orange Box. First I tackled Portal (one of the best games ever in its own right). Then I played through the original Half-Life 2 again. I had played it once on the PC a while ago, but my PC was so shoddy that it wasn’t very exciting. I then beat Episodes 1 and 2 over the weekend. HL2: Episode One was something of a disappointment. It has some gameplay elements that add to the experience of HL2, but overall, I don’t really enjoy fighting only zombies in the dark. Episode Two was a total delight to play, a tremendous improvement over both previous games, in my opinion. The hunters in Episode Two have the potential to be something more annoying than exciting (a la the Flood in Halo…), but they only show up occasionally and actually provide awesome battles. The AI is pretty incredible, they’ll chase you around and if you hide in a certain room of a building they can’t get to, they’ll go outside and cap you through the window. Valve has also proven to be the master of building gigantic set-pieces and immersing you in the action; sometimes you may have control over the scene, others are interactive “cut-scenes” that you’re watching from the ground. Episode Two’s environments also show off the Source engine in ways the first two games couldn’t. Because the setting is mainly the White Forest between City 17 and the research facility you’re trying to reach, and you cross miles of landscape in a bitchin’ ride, Ep. 2 takes the opportunity to wow you with some sick visuals.

Up next: Call of Duty 4.

Frank Darabont’s adaptation of Stephen King’s novella The Mist is finally a reality. Word is that Darabont’s been trying to make this movie for years (he had planned on making this his directorial debut, even before The Shawshank Redemption). I’m glad to see it’s actually happening, because the movie looks awesome, if something of a departure from his usual style. Shawshank, The Majestic, and The Green Mile (two of which were also King stories) all had strong similarities. They shared some spiritual qualities and sort of coming-of-age, philosophy-changing moments in the lives of the characters. The Mist looks much more gritty and in your face in the style of 24 or Battlestar Galactica.

The Mist tells a story of a fictional town in Maine which, after a storm, is overtaken by a mysterious “mist.” Concealed within the cloud of mist are strange and terrifying monsters that begin attacking the citizens of the town. The plot centers around a group of people trapped by the mist inside a supermarket, and the psychological breakdown of the survivors as they end up destroying one another in their attempts to stay alive.

My father’s company, like most, ran into this issue a couple of years ago. So my brother, who was doing the network management at the time, developed a PostScript monitoring service to convert PostScript files to PDFs; a program he called psMonitor. After some coding and setup, anyone in the office could print to a PostScript file in a specific directory and have it automatically spit out a PDF file. Saved the company nearly $3,000 instantly. The savings in a larger firm could be even more astounding. The full version of Acrobat is still crucial for proper PDF editing and markup, but most of us don’t need that. We just need a simple way to convert files.

What follows here is my guide on how to set up your own psMonitor service so that you too may disown Acrobat!

Before we get started, let’s cover what you’ll need to get this set up.

Requirements:

• GhostScript 8.60
• .NET Framework 2.0
• psMonitor v1.1 (config file) (readme)
• A server on which to set up a network share for sharing your psMonitor print space

Part 1: Install GhostScript

GhostScript is a GPL-licensed interpreter based on Adobe’s PostScript and PDF formats. This is what will be doing the grunt work of converting your input PostScript file into the output PDF document.

After downloading GhostScript, run the installer and the WinZip self-extractor should run itself.

Then just click Install to install GhostScript to its default location.

Part 2: Modify GhostScript

This is really the only “hackerish” step in the whole process. You’ll need to find the gssetgs.bat file in the \lib\ directory underneath GhostScript’s install location. Next, locate this line in the file:

if %GSC%/==/ set GSC=gswin32c

and replace the “gswin32c” with the full path to gswin32c.exe, which should be located in the \bin\ directory of the GhostScript installation. (Note: the path can only be in 8.3 format, no spaces; e.g. C:\Progra~1\…). So it probably will look like this (with all defaults):

if %GSC%/==/ set GSC=C:\Progra~1\gs\gs8.60\bin\gswin32c

Part 3: Install the .NET Framework

Run the .NET installer that you’ve already downloaded to install the Framework. Though you almost certainly already have .NET installed if you’re using a recently-updated Windows XP/2003 machine.

Part 4: Install and Configure psMonitor

Copy the psMonitor.exe and psMonitor.exe.config files to a safe place on your computer (such as C:\WINDOWS). The configuration file can be edited to your liking, it’s in a simple XML format. The sample configuration inside this file is one that I use in our office. I’ve got a folder on the server where the psMonitor folders reside, C:\pdfmon. This is shared on the network as \\servername\pdfmon and added to all machines as a network drive (via a login script).

psMonitor Configuration

Part 5: Install psMonitor as a Windows service

Installing psMonitor as a service will allow a specific folder to be monitored and polled at regular intervals for any .ps (PostScript) files in the input folder, automatically convert them to PDFs, and move them to the output folder. To install as a service, open the command prompt and navigate to the installation path of the .NET Framework (usually C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\(Build version), remember that you want 2.0). When you’ve navigated to the .NET path, run this command (replacing the path with the “safe place” from earlier):

InstallUtil "C:\WINDOWS\psMonitor.exe"

psMonitor Service Installation

Now when you browse to the Services snap-in you should see psMonitor set up as a Windows service. You should now start the service and edit the properties to run it automatically at startup.

Part 6: Setting up a PostScript File Printer

To have any of this be effective, you’ll need to have a special printer added to print to a PostScript file. Go to the Printers dialog and select Add Printer, then Local printer. Under “Use the following port:” select FILE:

You’ll then be asked to select a driver. I’d recommend using a driver for a standard printer you already have, so I use the HP LaserJet 5000 Series driver, since we have a couple of those.

Name the printer something that makes sense, like so:

And that’s it! Try printing something like a Word document to your new printer by selecting to print to it. When prompted for where to save the file you’re printing to, select the \\servername\pdfmon\in directory. After a few seconds (if the psMonitor service is running), you should receive your input PostScript file and your output PDF file in the “out” folder!

Please feel free to leave questions in the comments and I’ll address them as soon as I can. Enjoy!

It’s the binder clip dock! Bet you never thought of this. I’d hate to have bought some $30 plastic piece of crap from the Apple Store…

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