The only one who may
not like Friday is the one who has to work on Saturday. I’m not used to working
on Saturday and only fuss can spoil my Friday night. And it was fuss that I
felt as soon as I’d set foot into my flat. Don’t think that there were lots of people.
Rather! There was only my daughter, but she was getting ready for a party!!!
The light was on
everywhere, on the floor in the hall there was a hair dryer with all kinds of
combs and other dodgy things, in the nursery S60 were roaring “Death In Vegas”
at full blast, something in the bathroom was soaking, an iron was warming on
the kitchen table, all stove burners were on and something was boiling on them
while the daughter herself was sitting at the computer, with another comb stuck
in her hair.
“Hi!” – I shouted.
“Your hands around my
throat” – the “Vegas” answered.
I felt like running out
into the landing and killing the power supply at one go...
...If I had called my
friends in time and our plan to go to play billiards hadn’t been ruined, then..
“Hi, Dad!” I heard a
voice behind my back, turned around and was petrified. Have you ever tried to
look a person in the eyes when these eyes are totally different?
“What’s wrong with
your eye?”
“Which one? The
painted or the other one?”
“I see.”
“If you’re hungry,
salads will be ready soon and you can help yourself a bit”
“What do you mean:
help yourself a bit?”
“I’ll take the rest with me. The girls told me to cook salads”
I needed to hide
somewhere! The only thing I could do is to lock myself up in my room and turn
the TV on.
“Dad, will you help me
with burning a video CD?”
“What do you mean:
help you? You know how to burn CDs”
“But it’s too large –
almost 2 gigabytes. It needs to be written on 2 CDs and I don’t know how to do
it.”
I had no thought of
teaching my daughter in such conditions, but I’d nowhere to go.
Having seated myself
at the computer and on legal grounds turned the music off, I started working my
salads off.
“Actually, it’s a very
simple task. You can split a movie into parts by Total Commander. But there
might be problems with putting these parts together.
“Daddy, you’re so
clever! What problems you may have?”
“Not me, but you! Or
the one who is in charge of computers at your party.”
“Rick is. And it was
he who asked me to bring this movie. He’s always good at everything. You just
help me burn the film, and he’ll puzzle everything out.”
“I doubt it. I’ve seen
these know-alls. To know how to solve a problem you have to face it once at
least.”
“And what kind of
problem it may be?”
“The question is if he
has Total Commander on his computer. If he has, then it won’t be difficult to
reassemble the movie. If he doesn’t have Total Commander, then it will be hard
for me to explain to him, and especially to you, how to do this. The only
option is to write a detailed instruction down on a sheet of paper or into a
text file.
“Daddy, you’re great!
Of course, do it! And I’ll go into the kitchen to get the salads done”.
“That’s a heck of a
lesson.”- I thought. “You teach me here and I’ll go do other things...”
The music started
booming again, but I had nowhere to go and got down to my work. But in order
not to return to this question, I decided to make up not a brief but a detailed
instruction for my daughter and her friend. That’s what came out.
File splitting and combining
File splitting may be
necessary in cases when the size of a storage medium (a floppy disk, CD...) is
smaller than the size of a file. We will carry out this operation by Total
Commander. It’s a good idea to move the file into a different folder (so that a
novice user will see the result of the operation) and open it both in the left
and the right windows (otherwise the parts will be copied to the folder opened
in the opposite window). Select the file (or just place the cursor on it) and
choose “Split File” in the “File” menu (fig. 1). Then choose the size of the
parts (in our case – matrixes of 700 Mb each) and click “Ok”. In the folder you
will see the files of the parts (their extensions will be .001, .002, ...) and
a .crc-file containing the information about the source file (its name, size
and checksum).
It’s better to copy all
the three files to the matrixes. Free space is more likely to be on a disk with
the last part, so you may write the crc-file just there.
File combining
After copying all the
files to a hard drive of another computer, to combine them with the help of
Total Commander you just need to press Enter on the .crc file or choose
“Combine” in the “File” menu. In doing so the file will be combined in a folder
opened in the opposite window.
Failing Total
Commander on your computer, you can combine the file out of its parts by using
the copy function in command line or create a bat-file (a batch file which will
contain the same copy command.)
Copy command settings
The copy command will
be as follows:
copy /b movie.001 +
movie.002 movie.avi
(The key /b means
binary copy).
And it is this line
that is obligatory in a bat-file.
The bat-file can be
run directly from the explorer.
Bat-file creation
You can create a
bat-file in Total Commander by pressing the buttons “Shift” + F4” or in a
simple Notepad. When naming the file, you must change its extension into .bat. But the most comfortable way to create batch file is tool called Dr.Batcher.
This file will consist
of only one line with a copy command (see above).
I reread the text once
again. All details seemed to have been mentioned, but somehow I thought it
would be right to write the finished bat-file to the second matrix along with the
instruction. That would be more effective. Friday night is not the best time
for study. Especially, at parties.
I left the computer to
burn the CD and went to tell my daughter about the result of my work. Having
heard the welcome news, she flashed a glance at me with the
already-equally-painted eyes and said, shouting the hair dryer down:
“Thanks, Dad! Maybe
you’ll burn for me some music too?”
“No way, you can deal
with it by yourself, and I’ll go eat your salads”.
The salads were
delicious, and the mood suited the Friday night again.
Roger Vadey,
