These are programs I have written over the years which you might find useful.

While the cloud is a great thing, if you are using multiple computers, you may find you end up with lots of conflicted files. Conflicted file names can be different depending on your cloud provider and also the cloud version of software. Example of duplicate files names from Onedrive could be: FileName-ComputerName where ComputerName is the name of your computer. Say you have a Word File called “Book”. If you have been editing it on two or more computers and your computer name was Hal123, then you may end up with two files one called Book and one called Book-Hal123. If you have even more computers sharing the same cloud space, it is even possible to get file names like Book-Hal123-ComputerName2 etc. For Google drive conflicted files are often expressed as Filename (n) where n can be any number depending on how many times the file has been conflicted. However, more recent versions of Google drive also create filenames with the word “conflicted” inside the brackets such as (Conflicted n). These two programs work together to help you sort out your duplicate files:

1. FixDuplicateFile.vbs
2. ProcessDuplicates.vbs

These programs are used one after the other to completely sort out all the annoying duplicate files that have appeared on your hard disk due to file sharing issues between computers that are accessing the same cloud space.

Anyone who has played Mah-Jong knows how difficult it is to score the game. This Excel workbook automates the process entirely and stops the user from entering impossible Mah-jong hands. It is largely based on British Mah-Jong Association scoring rules although it is also possible to score using the stricter Chinese system. If you haven't ever played Mah-jong it is well worth buying a set and giving it a go.

The GE In Cell analyser produces separate tiff files for every field and channel captured by the instrument. In High Content Analysis users often what to pick example fields from a well which reflects a certain treatment condition of the experiment. Furthermore, a user may want to produce examples images from control and treated conditions to show a visual example of the dynamic range of a particular assay. Therefore, it is important that any pixel mapping used by image analysis software is consistently applied across all the example images. The software produced by GE to deal with these challenges back in 2011 was limited. However, there is an open source software available called Image J which has very powerful image handling functions. It has been possible for us to write some extensions to Image J which allow users to load well images from an InCell Experiment and create a 3 dimensional hyperstack that allows one to quickly apply a consistent pixel map to all the images within the stack.

In the first few years of the 21^st century, I was working on a molecular biology project to create a probe that could detect protein changes in living cells in real time. The project went by the acronymn LADDERS (Live Antigen Detection Duel Epitope Reporter System) but that is another story. To help me work up various cloning strategies, I wrote a useful Word addin that allows you to open DNA sequence files and do basic molecular biology manipulations. The program even allows you to do a virtual cloning experiment including checking for the conservation of reading frame.

Do you find yourself having to type the same old email to your company's front desk telling them of a visitor you are expecting? Do you also find yourself hunting through past emails to find the standard one you send to your visitor explaining how to get to your place of business and what to do once they arrive? This program automates the whole process. With one simple click the program will send the appropriate message to your company's front desk, puts the date and time of the meeting with your visitor in your Outlook calendar and finally, sends the appropriate instruction email to your visitor saving you a great deal of hassle.

Before Microsoft released Windows 10, it was possible to set your desktop to cycle through your personal photos. With the release of Windows 10, while it is still possible to set your wallpaper to your pictures folder, the operating system no longer looks in any subfolders. Therefore, if you’re like most people, and you organise your photos into subfolders, none of them will be displayed on your desktop. This program fixes this limitation allowing you to set Windows so that it looks through all your photos no matter which subfolder they are in. It does this by creating a folder in your public directory called Picture links (full path c:\users\public\DesktopPhotoEdit\PictureLinks. Inside this directory it places shortcuts to all your photo no matter what subfolder inside the picture folder they are located. By placing all the links into a single folder it effectively “flattens” the folder structure so that all the photos are now accessible to Window 10. The program also allows you, with a simple keyboard shortcut, to go directly from your desktop wallpaper photo to the photo file so you can edit or delete it. This is great because it means you can now use your desktop wallpaper to help sort through your photos. When you get a photo you don't like, you simply push <CTRL>+<ALT>+<Q> and you are taken directly to the photo where you can delete or edit it. I fix my photos which contain red eyes using this method.