Blog: General

While trying to SHARE a Calendar in Outlook a user received: “Calendar sharing is not available with the following entries because of permission settings on your network”.  [more]

If the user typed the recipient’s email address in or used the address from your cached addresses.  It will not work and you will get this error every time. 
What they need to do is click the “TO…” button and select the intended recipient(s) from the global address book. 

Frink is a java program that runs everywhere - Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, uh, except the iPhone. Basically Frink is a calculating tool and programming language.  Here are a few of the features the I like:

• Tracks units of measure through all calculations.
• Recognizes thousands of unit types and can convert between them.
• Arbitrary precision math - huge floating point numbers, retains rational numbers with no loss of precision, works with complex numbers.
• Does date and time math.
• Can run under a web server and can generate HTML 5 code.
• Knows monetary exchange rates, translates text between a dozen languages, reads and writes local files, web and ftp files, does graphics, object-oriented programming...

Frink is updated very often.[more]  It has been updated over 600 times since December 2001. The web site is at http://futureboy.us/frinkdocs.

There are several ways to run Frink.  Using that Java Web Start stuff is just too much overhead for me.  The way I run it on Windows is to just download the frink.jar file, and run a batch file to invoke it.  The batch file just has this in it:
cmd /c start javaw -jar c:\u\frink.jar

I'm a big fan of using dd to do byte for byte copies of disks and partitions.  However, I've noticed the performance of dd in OSX is usually pretty poor.  Most people recommend toying around with the 'bs' option (for byte size) to find the optimal copy "chunk" size.  I've always had the best results using bs=512k, but even that didn't seem to help when I was recently trying to copy the contents of an old hard disk to a new one.  Both disks were connected to the internal SATA controller, but I was only getting a 15 MB/s copy rate. 

When running the command, I used the device specifications as enumerated by 'diskutil list' (e.g., dd if=/dev/disk0 of=/dev/disk1 bs=512k).  However, after some research, I found that you can place an 'r' in front of the disk# specification to access the "raw" disk and significantly improve performance.  So, I tried "dd if=/dev/rdisk0 of=/dev/rdisk1 bs=512k" and I started getting a 90+ MB/s copy rate. 

We recently helped a user who reported that some of her emails were blank in Outlook. She said it was mainly forwards and replies that were blank. After looking at her computer, I found that all plain text emails were “blank”, while all HTML emails showed the text correctly. The emails that were forwards and replies to her that were blank were from mobile devices, and therefore sent as plain text. After some digging, I found that she had set the plain text  font color to white. The messages appeared to be blank because the email was displaying white text on a white background.

To change this setting to File > Options > Mail > Stationery and Fonts. When you click the Font buttons, you can change the color of the font. Make sure the font color is not white or blank. [more]

This is an addendum to a previous post on searching in windows explorer.  You can also search in all sorts of places, not just the file system

Control panel - sort of an expanded fuzzy search and finds items related to your term.

Under Add/Remove programs, installed updates: You can search for a KB number to see if it’s installed.  You have to start with a word and it does not seem to use wildcards.  Also you cannot specify fields, like program:, version:, etc.[more]

Keep this in mind when you are scrolling through a long list of printers, list of gadgets, etc.

New gotcha:  Outlook:// links no longer work.  It looks like officially these are no longer supported.  It is still recognized by Outlook, so a simple workaround there is to just start up Outlook and pass it the URI.
 
This will still work for folders in your mailbox, outlook://Inbox will go to your inbox.  But this will not work for public folders.
There is a discussion here: https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/outlook/thread/da5404a8-ce24-4795-9b25-794362301c75 that says the official word from Microsoft is "there is no solution".  It seems the problem is caused by the fact that Outlook can now access more than one Exchange server at a time, so the SMTP address of the user is now included in the path to the Public folders.  So it will work by including your e-mail address, like this:

outlook /recycle /select "outlook://Public Folders - john.smith@example.com/All Public Folders/Contacts"

Starting with Microsoft Outlook 2010, a new feature called “Suggested Contacts” automatically keeps track of everyone you send a message to, but isn’t in your Outlook contacts.  By default, when you sync Contacts with an iPhone, both “Contacts” and “Suggested Contacts” are copied over.

To Turn off the Suggested Contacts feature: in Outlook, click File > Options > Contacts, and uncheck “Automatically create Outlook contacts...”  Note: you will still need to remove any existing “Suggested Contacts” for them to be removed your iPhone contacts.

A day or so after returning home from an audit trip I noticed my system seemed to be extremely slow when performing everyday tasks.  For example, I noticed 100% CPU utilization that seemed to be tied to offline files synching up.  I fiddled with it off and on and then realized what had happened when Carl sent an email explaining a little research he’d done.

He explained what the Maximum frequency indicator in the resource monitor meant.  If it’s 100% or higher, the system is running close to its top speed. However, if it’s running lower, it is probably something like speed step cutting back on resources to save power. [more]

I looked at mine and the maximum frequency was showing about 30%.  That’s when I remembered changing to power saver mode for battery savings when I was in an exit meeting at the bank prior to coming home.  I didn’t have access to a power plug and I didn’t want to run out of juice during the meeting.  Then when I got home, I didn’t think of it until this came up.

I changed back to my normal power mode and the maximum frequency jumped above 100% and things began running normally.

With regular power settings (maximum CPU, etc.):

However, if I use the predefined "Power Saver" power mode:

OneNote is a great application because it allows you to collect all types of digital information – text, images, audio, video and organize it all in a fashion of tabbed notebooks. And then, after all the info is collected, OneNote allows you to search through tabbed sections of an entire notebook or all the notebooks you have open. "Search" is a powerful feature of OneNote.

Until recently I was disappointed with "Search" in 2010. You could still search all the places I described, but in OneNote versions prior to 2010, when you searched, the search results pane would open and you would be able to cycle through all the search results by clicking on Next and Previous icons in order to see each of the occurrences. In 2010 I thought the Next and Previous options were gone, at least they weren’t visible in my OneNote.

I started thinking maybe I had missed a settings option. So I started researching. I learned the search features are different, but I am happy some of the old benefits are still available. Here is how it works now. [more]

You still click in the search box and type what you want to find (you get to set the default scope of the search as well as select it each time if you want). When you do this, OneNote opens a pop-up box to show you the quick results of your search. If you see what you need in the pop-up box, you can click on it and see the page. However, if you click outside the pop-up box to view more content on a page, the pop-up box closes. That was frustrating because I thought there was no way to see all the individual search results.

There are more options. When the pop-up box appears, you can elect to "Open the Search Results Pane" (click a link at the bottom of the pop-up box or type "Alt-O"). In previous versions of OneNote, the Search Results Pane would open automatically which I liked. With the Search Results Pane open you will see all the pages listed where the searched text appears and they remain available as long as you keep the Search Result Pane open. You can click on any page and see the first occurrence of the found text. Then I learned when you press "Return" you will jump to the next occurrence. By repeatedly pressing ‘Return’ you will be able to see all the search results. Not the old way, but in time I may like it better.

A bonus OneNote feature is the character recognition. When you paste an image that contains text, OneNote gives you the option of making the text in the image searchable. In testing the search features I saw OneNote was searching the text in images, even though I had not previously made the image searchable. Very cool.

After carrying an iPhone for about 4 years, I recently made the leap to Android…with some trepidation. My iPhones had always worked with few hiccups.

The reason for the switch, you ask?

First, Apple hasn’t gotten a clue yet that their iPhone screen size compares poorly to many Android smartphones.

Secondly, I hate iTunes. I’d never had an Apple product of any kind until my first iPhone. And, with it, the necessary installation of iTunes. Most of my 4,000 song music library are WMA files ripped from my own CDs. iTunes doesn’t play WMA files but it will gladly convert them to MP3 files and, in so doing, create duplicate files on your hard drive. Since my music library already consumed almost 20GBs of HD space, duplicate music files are not insignificant. But, wasted HD space wasn’t the worst of the process. In the conversion, the metadata on many of the files did not convert correctly...album info, artist info, etc. was fouled up and album art was, too. I don’t know how many hours I wasted trying to clean up the mess – when everything was perfect in Windows Media Player before. And, of course, Windows Media Player saw the new (duplicate) MP3 files and added them to the WMP library. Lovely. And, iTunes invariably charges more for music than Amazon. And, you get their stupid proprietary music file format. And, you better hope you have a backup because, according to many friends, you’re out of luck if your HD dies. Did I say I HATE iTunes?

Lastly, it has always gotten under my skin that Apple refuses to include memory card slots in their devices. Forcing you to spend $100 for an incremental increase in storage capacity. Shameful!

Well, I bought the Samsung Galaxy Note 2. I could go on and on about the ginormous screen and cool S Pen. The quad core processor and 2 GBs of RAM make for a blazing fast response. But, you can read all about it here: http://www.samsung.com/us/the-next-big-thing-galaxy-note-ii/?cid=ppc-

As to the reasons for my conversion:

1. The aforementioned 5.5” HD Super AMOLED display is massive compared to my old iPhone 4 (and even the only slightly larger iPhone 5)
2. No more iTunes. I copied my music library by dragging and dropping it into the Music folder on my Note 2, which is recognized on my Windows 7 system with a cheap, non-proprietary USB cable. Boom…done!
3. I doubled the phone’s 16GB memory capacity with a $10 microSD card.

I did lose 2 apps (of dozens) in the process: A disc golf scorecard app and the T. Rowe Price app. Every other app on my iPhone was available in the Google Play store. I haven’t even gone looking in the other Android stores.

Don’t be afraid to free yourself from the Apple shackles! Life is good on the other side.