Tagged: Personal

Cleaning iPhone 5 Holes

My iPhone 5 stopped charging the other day.  My employer just upgraded me from the 4 not too long ago, and I knew they wouldn’t be happy with me telling them my new phone wasn’t working.  I peeked into the charging cable hole and saw roughly 5 tones of pocket lint within.  After rooting around a bit I found the perfect device with which to get it all out.

IMG_0744

GUM Soft Pick.  Normally I would never, ever support these things.  They’re a waste of material, and the ocean is probably littered with them already.  I hate – HATE – single use shit like this.  But we had a couple laying around from a dentist visit.  I snipped off the pointiest bit of one and used the remainder to dig around in my phone (which I’d turned off of course).  The rubberyness of the pick grabbed the lint and drug it out no problem.

HP OfficeJet Pro Plus 8600 time date problems

I got this new printer/fax/scanner/toaster the other day.  It’s a cheap home version of an office multifunction copier.  So far it’s nifty enough for the price.  One giant complaint I found online is people being unable to accurately set the date/time on it, which effects time stamps for emails and faxes.  After fiddling I believe I’ve figured it out.  It is, perhaps unsurprisingly, completely unintuitive.

printerAbove is the time setup in the web config.  You can hit this with it on wireless – no need to have your computer physically plugged into the printer. Set the Current Device Time to actual GMT using the Date field and stupid drop downs for Time.   No, not the current time in your zone…. GMT.  Check the box for Use the same time zone set on this computer and Apply it. This should make the device subtract or add the correct amount of hours from the GMT setting to correctly time stamp correspondence sent from it.  When you return to this page the Current Time will continue to show GMT, not your zone’s time.  I know, I know, that’s stupid too.   An easy test to confirm things are set up correctly is to go into the scan/email set up and send a test page.

Mapping drive with a system account

I needed to do this to test Crashplan.  I keep my photos archived on an external drive hooked to, and shared off of, my router.  Since Crashplan’s client runs as a service under the Service account, this was the solution to get it to see these shares.

psexec from the sysinternals suite is required.

Open a command prompt as administrator.

Path to psexec’s location and enter psexec -s cmd.exe.

Mount the drive via its UNC: net use DRIVELETTER: \\server\\folder /persistent:yes

The share will probably show as disconnected.  Click it – it isn’t.  It should also show up for all users of the machine it’s mapped on.

 

(Killing the share requires the same steps, only with net use DRIVELETTER: /delete

Windows 7 Search Files And Programs

Rebuilt my laptop thanks to lazily allowing a rootkit to hit it and discovered that the Windows 7 Search Files and Programs function wouldn’t work.  No good, as this it is the default way I launch everything on my machine (no desktop icons FTW).  Turns out deleting one registry key does the trick:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\FolderTypes\{EF87B4CB-F2CE-4785-8658-4CA6C63E38C6}\TopViews\{00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000}

It’s user specific, obviously.

Garmin Nuvi 1200 QWERTY

To enable QWERTY your Nuvi 1200, plug it into your computer, head to Keyboards, open the appropriate file in a text editor (in my case, en_US.kbd), find line:

<group name=”QWERTY” priority=”1″ wide_screen_only=”true”>

and change it to

<group name=”QWERTY” priority=”1″ wide_screen_only=”false”>

Multiple Pidgin Profiles

  1. go to start-run, and enter “cmd” – this will open the command windows
  2. in the command windows browse to “c:\program files\pidgin”
  3. now enter in the command window “set PIDGIN_MULTI_INST=1″
  4. create a second profile by entering this into the command window “pidgin -mc <path of where you want to keep that new profile>”
  5. another instance of pidgin is opened with its own profile settings
  6. enjoy your two instances of pidgin

Return to Chrome

I used Chrome occasionally in the past.  I liked its speed but, at the time, was put off by its lack of customization.  I couldn’t surf without FireFox and its AdBlocking, XMarking, LastPassing, NoScripting powers.   Visiting the web without them was a jarring experience, akin to watching “real” television – like commercials, I’d gone so long without intrusive ads, popups, hijacks and javascript silliness that I forgot they’re out there.  And oh boy are they.

Fast forward a bit.  XMarks announces it’s going under.  Sadness ensues.  Switch to FireFox sync.  Fast forward a bit more.  FireFox begins releasing its beta builds of FF4.  Sync is built in.  4 seems delicious – and then I tried to manage my bookmarks.  Slow.  Painfully, mind numbingly slow.  Inoperable, in fact.  It seems that FF4 uses SQLite for its bookmark containment, and everything went into the shitter as of SQLite 3.7.x.

Meanwhile LastPass purchased XMarks (probably for a song, having waited until the 11th hour to do so) and Chrome has since opened up, finally supporting 3rd party plug ins.  Time to try again!

So far, so good.  Word of warning, however.  If you configure data sync in Chrome (Options > Personal Stuff > Sync) and you install XMarks, the two services will begin a bloody battle, duplicating and triplifrying your bookmarks.  From what I’ve sussed both of them insert a unique bit of unseen markup to each bookmark, effectively making them unique again and again and again.  Like this:

Xmarks: Hey!  I found a bookmark!  I’ll sync it and slip a date string in it!

GSyng: Hey! I found a bookmark with a funny date string in it!  It must be new – I’ll sync it and put my own bit of something in it!

Xmarks: Hey!  I found a bookmark that’s startlingly similar to the one I just synced, but it has a new little bit of something!  It must be different – I’ll add it and update its date.

GSync: Holy cow!  There’s a familiar looking bookmark – but that funny date string is different.  I should totally add that!

…and so on and so forth.  Long story short, only use one bookmark sync method lest you wind up like me, writing a script to identify and strip duplicates from your 5000 item large bookmarks list.