Switching the switching of Keys!

code, technology 2014-11-03
I recently lamented about switching two keys on my new Lenovo Yoga. Big problem: In my office, I attach that notebook to a docking station and to that docking station I attach a keyboard. On that keyboard, all keys are precisely the way I want them to be. Therefore, I do not want to switch the Insert and End keys when I am docked. I ended up writing a little batch script based on this nice google code wiki entry for the registry update and this stackexchange answer to elevate the batch script: 
@ECHO OFF
NET FILE 1>NUL 2>NUL
if '%ERRORLEVEL%' == '0' goto run 
powershell "saps -filepath %0 -verb runas" >nul 2>&1
goto eof
:run
REG QUERY "HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Keyboard Layout" ^
 /v "Scancode Map" >nul 2>&1 
IF '%ERRORLEVEL%' == '0' goto remove
<nul set /p ="> adding scancode map "
REG ADD "HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Keyboard Layout" ^
 /v "Scancode Map" /t REG_BINARY /f ^
 /d 00000000000000000300000052E04FE04FE052E000000000 >nul 2>&1 
IF '%ERRORLEVEL%' == '0' goto success
goto fail 
:remove
<nul set /p ="> removing scancode map "
REG DELETE "HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Keyboard Layout" ^
 /v "Scancode Map" /f >nul 2>&1 
IF '%ERRORLEVEL%' == '0' goto success
goto fail
:fail 
echo failed.
pause
goto eof
:success
echo succeeded.
pause
Sadly, it always requires a reboot for the changes to take effect.

Python to Batch!

code 2014-01-13
Nikolai asked me how to open a Python interpreter prompt from the console with a certain module already imported. For the record, the Python command line switches tell us that python -i -m module is the way to start the prompt and load module.py. That made me wonder whether I can stuff it all into one batch file, and I came up with the following test.bat: 
REM = '''
@COPY %0.bat %0.py
@python %0.py
@DEL %0.py 
@goto :eof ::'''
del REM
for k in range(70):
    print(k)
That script will ignore the first line because it is a comment, then copy itself to test.py, then launch python with this argument. Afterwards, test.py is deleted and the script terminates without looking at any of the following lines. Note that :: is yet another way to comment in Batch. Python, however, will see a script where the variable REM is defined as a multi-line string and deleted right after that. After this little stub, you can put any python code you want. Well. I thought it was funky.
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