Assign drive letters to flash disks at your discretion (and not your Windows'es)

Today, I've finally googled a cool tool USBDLM V3.4.1 — USB Drive Letter Manager that let's you assign drive letters to USB flash disk as you want. That means your Windows won't assign drive letters in the "first free" fashion.

Maybe you think the default operating system's behavior is enough, but actually not for people that use the „subst“ feature. Substed drives are somehow invisible for the Disk Manager and a flash disk can be mapped to the same letter. Just assume besides your physical C: drive you have D: and E: substed. Now plug in you USB flash disk and voila! — it's assigned the D: letter… And without USBDLM you need to open the Control Panel, go to Administrative tools, open the Disk Manager, and change the letter yourself. It's not that bad if you use the same flash disk all the time, because Windows remembers your setting. However, when you change flash disks frequently, it soon starts to be a tedious task to do.

Actually this handy tool can do a lot more, as is described on its web page:

• check if the letter is used by a network share of the currently logged on user and assign the next letter that is really available


• assign a letter from a list of new default letters


• assign letters for a specific USB drive by putting an INI file on the drive


• assign letters for specific USB port


• remove the drive letters of multi-slot card readers until a card is inserted


• assign a letter for drives that got no mount point at all


• show a balloon tip with the assigned drive letter(s)

By the way, USBDLM is compatible with Windows Vista.

Also, you can look here for other useful tip'n'tricks for USB drives from the software's author.

Maximum permitted level of paper towels

However it may seem odd for a first article in a blog to be about paper towels, it definitely may happen. For past two week I was wondering what the hell I should write to my newly established blog. All this after being persuaded by my colleagues to establish one. What is the random reader going to think about myself, when I start my blog with a completely off-topic article (in regard to my professional background which, actually, remains hidden from the random reader).

So, to get started, at least somehow, I decided to make the first step by sharing a totally local problem at my blog, which is gonna be purely technical otherwise.

After a rather long discussion about the quality of cleaning in our premises (see www.alsoft.cz), I decided trying to solve at least one particular problem - overfilling of paper-towel supply bins that causes frequent disruption of paper towel, which, consequently, leads to higher paper-towel consumption and superfluous litter production.

Whereas it is not possible to easily upgrade the firmware of the cleaner to pro-actively detect and prevent such situations, the problem has to be overcame by an external directive which will be subsequently evaluated for efficiency. The following series of pictures demonstrates the precautionary measure taken:

The paper-towel supply bin:


A demonstration of permitted load:


The precautionary measure taken:


And finally a detail of the warning sign:


To the interested reader who may encounter similar problems, I can supply a CorelDRAW source file of the warning sign (or high-res pictures).