It appears from people coming to my other VNC SC post that others are using this software too or at least looking for information on it. Since my post last December I have used VNC SC to support family members, friends, and my pastor with various PC issues.

I have found that the encryption works great with WinXP and lower clients. When encryption is used with Vista machines the support link seems to have problems (drops the connection). I haven’t been able to determine what is happening yet. So far I have just switched to the un-encrypted for Vista because the support wasn’t dealing with sensitive data. I may try release 1.00 instead of RC23 to see if Vista works better with encryption.

Link to info to set up VNC SC

Every once in a while I need to resize photos. I learned very quickly that I need to keep the same ratios of the original photo to avoid distorting the picture. Sometimes keeping the same ratio doesn’t really accomplish what I want so I went looking for a better way.
Here is what I found. A few month back I ran across and article that talked about a different way to resize photos. The article and whitepaper talked about identifying the important features of a picture and trying to preserve them while stretching or shrinking a picture.
I forgot about the article until today when I ran across a software project that is trying to implement the new technique. They are providing a GIMP http://liquidrescale . wikidot . com/ ->plug-in that works with Layers and Layer masks to identify specific features of the photo that want to be retained.
My results were not immediately amazing but I do see some difference in using this method over other methods. I have include a set of picture that give examples of what I did with the Liquid Rescale plug-in after only working with it for 10 minutes. It seems to have potential.

click to see examples of what the plug-in does

I’ve been working with a remote support tool VNC SC that seems very promising. I customized the icons and config files but ran into trouble trying to get the encryption to work with it.
After some searching on UltraVNC’s forum I finally found something that helped. I’ve include the important parts here in case anyone else is having the problem.

1. Download MSRC4Plugin118.zip from http://home.comcast.net/~msrc4plugin/.
2. Download UltraVNC from http://www.uvnc.com/ and choose “viewer only” as install option.
3. Copy file MSRC4Plugin_NoReg.dsm from MSRC4Plugin118.zip to directory where UltraVNC Viewer was installed (default is C:\program
   files\ultravnc).
4. Start UltraVNC Viewer, select MSRC4Plugin_NoReg.dsm in the dropdown list and check “Use DSM Plugin". Click the
   config button and then Click the “Gen Key” button, close the viewer. A file named new_rc4.key should be created in the directory where UltraVNC Viewer is installed. Rename this file to rc4.key.
5. Download the custom.zip from http://sc.uvnc.com/index.php?section=13 (How to create my own version?). Extract it to a directory and copy MSRC4Plugin_NoReg.dsm and rc4.key to this directory. Rename MSRC4Plugin_NoReg.dsm to MSRC4Plugin.dsm. Follow the instructions to customize your version and upload it using http://sc.uvnc.com/index.php?section=19 (creator).
6. Launch the viewer with commandline vncviewer -dsmplugin MSRC4Plugin_NoReg.dsm -listen (not possible yet to start in listen mode from gui).
7. The remote server client and the local viewer should now be able to talk.

Link to forum post

The initial benefits of this tool will be home use but I easily see it playing a purpose for some special home user support needs at work and it could lead to VNC replacing a more costly tool currently used at work for internal support.

Link to VNC SC